Healing and Consciousness:
What is the Relationship?

Presentation Summary

• Defining Healing: Those physical, mental, social, and spiritual processes of recovery, repair, renewal, and transformation that increase wholeness and often (though not invariably) order and coherence. Healing is an emergent process of the whole system, and may or may not involve curing.

1. Salutogenesis. The process whereby recovery and repair occur. It is the parallel to pathogenesis which is the process whereby disease occurs.

2. There are two primary tactics to creating healing - support and stimulation.

• Consciousness: The capacity to react to, attend to, and be aware of self and others. Consciousness subsumes all categories of experience, including perception, cognition, intuition, instinct, will and emotion, at all levels, including those commonly termed "conscious," "subconscious," "superconscious," or "unconscious," "intention," and "attention," without presumption of specific psychological or physiological mechanisms.

1. Awareness - a small part of consciousness.

2. Unconsciousness, information filtering, and creation of perception.

•  Characteristics of consciousness are unusual.

1. Not bound by physical time and space parameters.

2. Not always logical or linear.

3. Not static - functional and plastic.

4. Not isolated - cultural and environment modifies it.

5. Not only the brain - receptors and reactions in the body also.

• Consciousness is the information management tool of a person. A certain type and amount of mass and energy are required for it to function but the information is not dependent on changes in the quantity of mass or energy. We appear to use a variety of means to process and manage information - digital, analogue, and perhaps quantum.

• Healing and consciousness: What is the relationship between healing and consciousness?

1. Psychneuroimmunology

1. Stress and infection

2. Immune conditioning

3. Neurobiofeedback

2. Placebo effects [the meaning response]

1. The 80% rule

2. Pain and expectancy

3. Cultural context

3. Transpersonal consciousness and mind-matter interaction

• Healing and conscious interactions. Can they be investigated?

1. Shamanism and antiquity

2. Traditional healers

3. Mindfulness and meditation

4. Therapeutic interactions

5. Collective consciousness - group work and transcendental meditation

6. Cultural beliefs, expectations, and rituals

7. Sacred Space

• Time. Is there anything causal about consciousness?

1. We fill in the present

2. The boundaries of retro-causation - observation fixes events

3. The boundaries of forward-causation - creativity and teleology

• Consciousness and harm.

1. Magical thinking without science - the healer cults

2. Failure of faith and "blame-the-victim"

3. Neglect of cure and medical care

4. Nocebo and the Hawthorne effect

5. Intention, informed consent and burnout

6. Credibility, causation, and science

• The role of consciousness in the optimal healing environment [OHE]. An OHE is the people, behaviors, and treatments that optimize the stimulation and support of inherent healing capacity of the participants. What are the elements of consciousness that contribute to an OHE?

1. Expanded attention and the creation of "presence" and listening

2. Compassion and warmth

3. Confidence and credibility

4. Social and cultural meaning and ritual

5. Enhancement and delivery of "bioenergy" effects

• The interventional goals of healing - the re-establishment of balance and the reduction of suffering.

1. Disease, illness and suffering

2. Curing and healing

3. Maximizing the "human" factor in an age of technique, specialization, economics, and sophisticated technology

Biosketch

Wayne B. Jonas, M.D., is director of the Samueli Institute for Information Biology, and is Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. A Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians, Dr. Jonas was previously director of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health and the director of the Medical Research Fellowship at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He has served on numerous university, government and private foundation committees and currently serves on the White House Commission for Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. He is the author of Essentials of Complementary and Alternative Medicine.