Can the Mind Heal Disease?

Before I decided to enter the profession of Psychology, I was very interested in the field of medicine. As a matter of fact, I have continued my interest and have been a student of health and healing for many years. One of the things I discovered in my studies is that it is well known in the medical profession that a positive attitude is critical for recovery. It is so well known that part of the prognosis is based on the attitude of the patient!

The reason this is so important is that the Mind is a critical part of the healing process. It doesn’t really matter what is wrong with the patient as the following true story indicates.

A man’s elderly father was slowly dying from tuberculosis. This was in the days before antibiotics were available to treat the disease. The elderly gentleman was very religious.

One day, his son presented him with an odd ring. The setting of the ring, rather than a gem, held a simple piece of wood. The son told his father that he had met an old monk. The monk told him that this ring contained a piece of the cross on which Jesus was crucified and had incredible healing powers. The son had given the monk a donation and received the ring to give to his father.

The elderly man was elated and immediately put on the ring. The very next morning, the elderly man woke up completely free of TB; his lung damage was healed and there was no trace of the disease in his body! The old man lived another 15 years before finally passing away from old age in his 90s.

Now this is the interesting part, there was no monk. The son had found the piece of wood on a sidewalk and had it set in a ring. Knowing his father’s strong religious conviction, the son had created, what we call in Social Psychology, a cover story using elements that would appeal to his father.

So, because his father BELIEVED the story, a miracle occurred. A deadly pathogen was purged from his body and years of lung damaged disappeared, literally overnight! A simple piece of wood off the sidewalk activated the POWER of the MIND!

Our beliefs affect every aspect of our lives, including our health! The field of Quantum Physics has experimentally demonstrated this reality.

Can’t Never Could – The Franklin Mint

How hard do you work at something when you don’t know it’s not possible? The following story illustrates how lack of negative beliefs result in success.

Ever heard of the Franklin Mint? If you haven’t, you’ve never received any mail!

The man who started the Franklin Mint, Joseph Segel,  had an idea to make commemorative, oversize coins.  He got the idea after seeing the British Government Mint oversized coins.  If they could do it, so could he.

He hired a retired engineer from the U.S. Mint.  Together, they worked up a design for the first coin in the series. The retired engineer created the dies for the coins, based on his experience making U.S. coins. Of course, no coins in the U.S. inventory were as large as the ones the Franklin Mint wanted to produce.

Production was started but the dies became unusable  after just a few coins were produced.  This wasn’t right. The dies took time and money  to make. The engineer didn’t know what the problem was since he’d never worked with dies that large. However, knowing that the British Royal Mint had created these large coins for a long time, he knew there had to be an answer.

Time after time, the dies tore up. But slowly, new ideas improved the dies and the yields began to rise. With effort and innovation, the dies were improved to the point that the yield was very high before the dies had to be replaced.

Word of this got around and one day, the Franklin Mint had a group of visitors. They were from the British Mint. They wanted to know how the Franklin Mint got such a high yield from their dies because theirs tore up just like the first set created by the Franklin Mint.  They had never gotten the yield beyond what the original Franklin Mint dies produced.

In other words, the Franklin Mint did the impossible!

Years afterwards, Mr. Segel said that if he had know the British Mint had not solved the yield problem, he would have given up rather than spending the time and money to develop the better dies. Not knowing it “couldn’t” be done, allowed it to BE DONE!

What limiting beliefs are holding you back?

If You Don’t Know You Can’t, You CAN!

How potent are beliefs? Very!

They determine our success because if we don’t believe we can do something, we don’t even try or only try ineffectively.

Dr. Robert H. Schuller, who has promoted the Power of Positive thinking presented the following true story:

A college math student was late for class one day. He took his seat and noticed there were three equations on the chalk board.  He thought this must be the homework assignment so he wrote them down. Later, when he started to work on them, he found them to be the hardest equations he had ever seen. He worked and worked on them but was only able to solve one of them.  He was concerned about this but turned in the paper to the math professor.

A few days later, there was a knock at his door. He opened it to find the math professor who was all excited. The math professor asked him, “Do you know what you did?”

No, the student didn’t have a clue. Then the math professor told him he had solved one of the three, UNSOLVABLE equations!

The student was late and had not heard the professor tell the class these equations were impossible to solve.  He instead thought they were a normal homework assignment. He had solved one of the UNSOLVABLE equations! Why, because he didn’t know he “couldn’t”.

The student went on to become a famous mathematician. Being late to class got him in the history books!

If you put limits on yourself or allow others to put limits on yourself with negative thinking and negative beliefs, you will never  experience the Power that your Mind holds. Think about it.

The Mind CAN Affect Matter – A New Meaning to Thought Power!

In my work on the dynamics of smoking, I have found that a smoker exerts a strong mind over matter effect on the body to allow themselves to smoke which in turn makes it difficult to simply stop smoking. Smokers have created a Psychological Smoking Mechanism to mentally suppress the normal body defenses to hot polluted smoke entering their delicate lungs. How is this possible?

It is well established in psychology that attitudes and beliefs affect thoughts. Thoughts in turn, affect our behavior, our bodies and even our state of health. But what if thought was more powerful than just affecting behavior and our personal well-being? What if thought actually affected matter outside ourselves?

Sounds like science fiction doesn’t it? We tend to believe that our thoughts are our own and have no force outside ourselves but research in Quantum Physics suggests that this notion is not correct. We are electromagnetic beings and our thoughts radiate out from us like a broadcast signal impacting things inside us and around us. Although we would like to believe that our thoughts are “private”, research has shown that thought DOES affect matter outside of ourselves. This gives a whole new meaning to “watch what you think!”

A very exciting body of scientific research has demonstrated the effects of thoughts on water! In this article, we will explore a characteristic of water that is not usually considered. Water stores thought energy and this energy impacts whoever or whatever uses the water.

Water is Dull and Wet!

When most people think of water, they think of it as a dull, uninteresting liquid. I don’t know how many people over the years have told me that they don’t like to drink water. Yet, water is necessary for life. In fact, our bodies are made up of about 70 percent water. A person can go a long time without eating but not without water.

Rather than being dull, there appears to be a great deal more to water than a simple combination of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Water appears to be a storage device and can be programmed by thought.

Water Gets a New Publicist

Research on the effects of thought on water has been around for a long time. But no one outside of scientific circles knew about it. It wasn’t until 2004, when the public was introduced to the impact of thought on water with the release of a movie called What the BLEEP Do We Know!? This movie was an introduction to concepts of Quantum Physics and presented some very fascinating ideas. The movie also introduced the work of Masaru Emoto, a Japanese man who discovered a way to visibly demonstrate the effects of thought on water!

Why was Masaru Emoto so interested in water? He had suffered from foot pain and a friend at his office had given him some water that had been specifically programmed with thought energy to heal his pain. Mr. Emoto, rather skeptically used the water and the pain went away. He was intrigued and had to know more.

Mr. Emoto was not scientifically trained but he knew there had to be a way to demonstrate the impact of thought on water. One day, he had the inspiration that the quality of water could be determined by crystallization.

The Method

Although Mr. Emoto was not trained in science, he knew a coworker that did have this training. When he told the coworker he wanted to take pictures of water crystals, the man said based on his experience, it was not possible. However, Mr. Emoto was confident it could be done and determined to do it. He kept encouraging the doubting researcher and eventually convinced him it could be done.

After two months of struggle, the first water crystal picture was taken. Over time, the method was improved and many water crystal pictures have been taken some of which were shown in the movie, What the BLEEP Do We Know!?

What Did Emoto Find?

Masaru Emoto discovered that water subjected to positive thoughts formed beautiful crystals and water exposed to negative thoughts formed either no crystals or deformed ones. He concluded that the water was affected by thought.

His further research showed that different thoughts could be stored in water and have a positive effect on the human body just as he experienced with the removal of his foot pain. Of course, many people may think this ridiculous but research shows the properties of water ARE affected by thought and other forms of energy such as magnetic fields.

Scientific Research Demonstrates Emoto is Correct!

Lynne McTaggart wrote an excellent book called The Field. This book deals with research findings in Quantum Physics. A body of research presented in the book that clearly supports Mr. Emoto was conducted in the 1960’s by biologist Dr. Bernard Grad of McGill University in Montreal.

Dr. Grad wanted to see if people can actually transmit healing energy to others. Rather than using person to person contact, he decided to use plants. This was a control method to eliminate the placebo effect.

In the first part of his study, he decided to make plants ill by soaking their seeds in salty water which retards growth. He had two experimental conditions. In the first, the control, he just had a container of salt water. In the second, he had a person known for “psychic” healing lay hands on the salt water container. Afterwards, the seeds were divided into two groups and soaked in the plain salt water or the treated salt water.

The results were unexpected. The seeds soaked in the water treated by intense thought grew taller than the untreated batch. It was a tightly controlled experiment and the results demonstrated that whatever the “healer” did to the water, was reflected in the improved health of the plants!

What Happens with Negative Thoughts?

In his first study, Dr. Grad demonstrated the effects of positive thoughts on water which had a positive effect on the plants that used it. He hypothesized that if the effect in the first study was accurate, that the opposite would occur with negative thoughts.

Dr. Grad decided that the best source of negative thoughts was disturbed psychiatric patients. One patient in his experimental group was diagnosed with psychotic depression and was noticeable more depressed than the other patients. He had each patient hold containers of plain water and marked them to know which patient held which container. He also used untreated water as a control. When Dr. Grad used the water to sprout seeds, all the water samples held by the psychiatric patients produced poor growth but the water from the extremely depressed person suppressed growth!

Again, these were plants and not subject to the placebo effect. They were being affected by the water that had been simply held by psychiatric patients. In other words, the patients were doing nothing more than being themselves and the water was affected!

Test Equipment Confirms Change in Water

Dr. Grad had much more scientific resources available to him than Masaru Emoto. Using infrared spectroscopy, he discovered that the water treated by the healer had minor shifts in its molecular structure and decreased hydrogen bonding between the molecules. This is the same thing observed when water has been exposed to magnetic fields. Thought DID affect the water!

This fits in nicely with the beautiful crystals (Positive Thoughts) versus the deformed or no crystals (Negative Thoughts) found by Emoto.

Conclusion

Research demonstrates that thought affects water and water retains this change. The water in turn, affects whatever uses it. Since our bodies are about 70% water, it is likely that our thoughts, both positive and negative, affect this water which in turn reflects back to us.

It’s been well demonstrated in psychology that negative thoughts adversely affect health. Perhaps the effect on the water in our bodies is one way this happens.

The important lesson to learn from this research is that thoughts are powerful and affect us. It is important to make sure our thoughts are positive thoughts!

© Copyright 2009, R. Michael Stone