Miracles Of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness and Spritual Healing [Paperback]

This is a serious but relaxed work on psi and human potential. Targ discusses the un-glamorous experimental evidence for psi, and illustrates in reasonable detail why psi is to be understood rather than believed or treated as subject to faith. His view is non-religious, suggesting that we can know our divinity, and that it is not an exotic property, but a mundane one. He discusses government-funded work recently declassified. Most interesting are his impressions on the 20th century uses of psi and consequent clues about its actual nature.

Katra chronicles her development as a healer; she differentiates between psychic/energy healing and spiritual (but not religious) healing (based on the non-locality concept, and making oneself a transmitter). This is fascinating, and again, moves our understanding forward in ways that the usual, glowing, New Age testimonials generally do not.

Targ and Katra undertook the difficult task of co-authoring on the basis of common, but highly individual experiences with psi. Their experiences converged in healing Targ's illness, a significant basis for joint authorship, but did not necessarily a guarantee of editorial success.

Overall, the excellent content could have been more accessible with a different title, better organization and better development of Katra's material. The title, while attractive to New Age audiences, undermines the book; the word 'miracle' has been cheapened lately, now suggesting magic. The authors work hard to explain that psi and healing are not magical. Targ might have done better to rethink references to his old hobby, performing magic tricks. It brought to mind The Amazing Randi (sp?), that self-proclaimed psi debunker/magician. This confused matters a bit.

Finally, the work is not quite synthesized yet, in other words, we are still reading two separate books in the same binding, although the serial chapter organization suggests otherwise. The separateness of Katra and Targ is striking throughout, in spite of organizational attempts to suggest their convergence/"non-locality". And sprinkling the two voices throughout the text as "I (Russell)" and "I (Jane)" distracts and fragments when the goal is integration. The same goes for Katra's chapter sub-headings. Her case studies and observations needed more fleshing out; they seemed less developed than Targ's sections. Why not arrange the work as three sets of chapters (or any other organizational device) instead of a single series? The authors' experiences are sufficiently distinct as to merit clearly separate treatment, with a third section devoted to more completely integrated reflections by both authors, spoken as one.

Andrea Hope