Status: Complete
The Science and Spiritual Healing III: Bridging Worlds and Filling Gaps conference was held in Kona, Hawaii on November 29 – December 3, 2001. This was the third in a series of conferences examining scientific research on spiritual healing practices and related areas. The first conference was held at Harvard in 1997 and the second at Wake Forest University in 2000.
This invitational conference focused on:
- investigations of subtle healing fields and psi phenomena in Asia (especially China and Japan)
- the role of neuroscience including the following questions:
- What is the relationship between psychophysiology and spiritual experience?
- How do correlations with brain states relate to healing?
- Can we find ways to train healers and can we cultivate these abilities to improve the self-healing process?
- nonlocal consciousness in the context of information access rather than therapy
- intuitive diagnosis
- measuring subtle energy fields.
The meeting enhanced the dialogue between scientists from Asia and the West on research design and measurement of subtle fields in healing. Discussion focused on the need to control subtle aspects of the research space and to attend to the psychology of the healers and the healing relationship. It was concluded that measuring whole systems could enhance results.
This series of meetings advanced the development of a new field involving the scientific study of biofields, subtle energies, and distant healing—building bridges between consciousness and the physical world.
We would like to acknowledge the following for supporting this project: North Hawaii Community Hospital, the Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity, Five Mountains Hawaii, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Richard Pavek, Laurance Rockefeller and the Samueli Center for Information Biology.
Key Collaborator(s): Wayne B. Jonas, MD, Mitchell W. Krucoff, MD, Ronald Chez
