“I’ve never seen a patient who needed major surgery refuse a general anesthetic because the anesthesiologist couldn’t explain precisely how it works.” 

I also thought of a continuing education symposium I’d attend at Harvard Medical School a year or two before Isaiah came. Dr. Larry Dossey, a longtime medical doctor in Dallas – a strapping, commanding man in his sixties who looked like he’d once played quarterback on his high school football team – had given a presentation on the power of prayer and intuition in medicine, a surprising and welcome topic at a rigorous, mainstream medical school. He likened the sorts of intuition he’d witnessed in medical contexts to the peculiar bond he shared with his twin brother – a “twin thing” many identical twin pairs experience, a way of knowing, or even sharing, what the other twin is going through, even when they are physically apart. The same thought or feeling or physical sensation seemed to happen simultaneously in two different brains or bodies. “As practitioners,” Dr. Dossey said, “we cannot ignore the nonlocality of consciousness.” He went on to explain that our consciousness is actually part of one field of consciousness that he calls One Mind.

Hands shot up all over the auditorium, people clambering to ask some version of the same question: How does it work?

He smiled. “In the medical field,” he said, “we often know that something works before we have a clue about how it works.” Many medications – aspirin, penicillin, general anesthetics – were found to be effective treatments for inflammation, pain, or infection before we could explain the mechanism by which they were effective. “And you know,” he added, chuckling, “I’ve never seen a patient who needed major surgery refuse a general anesthetic because the anesthesiologist couldn’t explain precisely how it works.” 

From “The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life” by Lisa Miller, PhD