Customer Reviews

Miracles Of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness and Spritual Healing

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

We hear that the next big leap for humans will be to integrate science and spirit. This pioneering work is a worthwhile and original effort in that direction. It is flawed in some avoidable ways, some unavoidable in any pioneering endeavor.

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.

This book is a big disappointment. It's a rehash of psychic research that has been discussed before by better writers. The rub is that these two writers throw in claims about spirituality and healing. Targ claims he was miraculously cured of cancer, but dodges the question of whether he was sick or just misdiagnosed. That offends those of us who have the disease and are dealing with it, not exploiting it. Misdiagnosis is a common problem and "miracle cures" are often the result of proper re-testing. I want proof of miraculous healing, not a silly claim that a little jogging and a little prayer equals a miracle. The authors imply that only those who are not spiritual get sick and die. Katra says she's a healer, but her not very original new age ideas amount to trite advice to think positive. How spiritual is it to exploit sick people by holding out false hope and claims of miracles to sell a book? Look for God and truth elsewhere. One star because there is no lower rating.

Andrea Hope

Russel Targ and Jane Katra have compiled an excellent book that unites the experimental implications of non-local interaction with the practical applications of spiritual healing. Often we miss the point, believing that spiritual healing has failed if some great cure isn't instant, or believing that magical secret energies must come from a persons hands to heal, or that only certain people ordained by a being of light can be a spiritual healer. This book hopefully dispells those myths. Spiritual healing is for everyone because everyone is a part of this non-local sea of intelligence. Although it may take some practice to become great at it, it is a dormant ability in everyone.It is not about curing a disease, or "fighting" illness, but about resonating with a fellow human being, and serving as an open channel to the infinite for the greatest good.

This hybrid work covers the phenomenon of spiritual healing from both a scientific (Rusell's) and a personal/subjective (Katra's) experience. The scientific part of the book will not convince anyone who is still in denial about the existence of psi phenomena, as it doesn't discuss hard statistical data and parapsychological methodology. If that is what you are looking for, read Radin's "The Conscious Universe" instead. However, for the reader who has accepted the reality of psi phenomena, but wants to learn more, it gives a good introduction to the recent history of parapsychological research, and to what this research has taught us about the factors that affect psi performance.

For me however, the highlight of the book is Katra's part. Her deeply personal, moving account of healing people through spiritual means has an immensely uplifting quality, and it is because of that that I particularly recommended this book to people who are suffering from a chronic illness. This might help them to keep up hope, or to regain it if lost.

Listen very carefully to the cancer complainers, they talk about qualified 'medical professionals': Do they exist! These people should get the food additives out of their diets, and start wondering why their 'don't rock the boat' lemming physicians and scientism clerics don't protect them from their handlers- the drug companys that sell the additives that cause the illnesses that feed the physicians and push the drugs that make things worse but in mass provide enough placebo that people get better inspite of illness and reduced fortunes. Wake up! The 'march for breast cancer'etc.. are a bunch of nonsense . Message: don't worship physicians- do not at all assume that they know what they are talking about or are competent- this may robe you of placebo but we may finally get a treatments that are more than profit motivated fictions. If they weren't foolish or at least person that kind that believes exactly what they are told- how did they graduate from medical school. You would be better off getting medical advice from your pet's doctor. So remember that the people all the wrong instincts who do nothing but try to get the world to conform to their inferiority complexes- they aren't the one's to be paying attention to. Targ is doing something important in leveraging his reputation to help in the effort to steer us away from very destructive models and very very backwards assumptions.

Russell Targ shares his personal experiences with remote-viewing experiments at Stanford Research Institute, and includes fascinating photos and sketches that show the amazing accuracy remote viewers have frequently demonstrated. Jane Katya shares her personal experiences with healing touch, and how she came to work in the field of healing using Therapeutic Touch. Targ and Katya gracefully take the reader from their real-life stories to the current physical theories which can best explain non-local healing and viewing. This book is spell-binding, since it so carefully examines seemingly inexplicable phenomena from a very down-to-Earth point of view. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in enriching their lives through remote viewing and healing.

This is a very thought provoking gift. Whenever I've mentioned the book at dinner parties, I've ended up buying copies for interested friends to see for themselves. Up to 6 copies so far....

My name is Lily of the Valley Carnie and I am not only one of the leading practioners of esoteric healing methods but also an international author (Chi Gung: Chinese Healing, Energy, and Natural Magick), the world's first post-op transsexual Two-Spirit Shaman, and a Chi Gung master - with over 32 years experience in the field - and I would like to say that this book is not only wonderful but all of the things described in it, as unusual as they may seem, can indeed happen and do happen on a regular basis.

I know many of you want concrete eveidence and that's understandable in our left-brained analytical society, but the thing is, the healing methods and esoteric skills presented in this book are right-brained skills. Sure, perhaps many of them could be replicated in a lab, but that's not the point, regardless of what you believe, regardless of how open-minded you might be, there are those of us out here who do this stuff for real. We're the ones who are working with cancer patients and stroke victims and extreme trauma cases. In fact, I have successfully worked with each of those and anything and everything in between ranging from migraines and insomnia to infertility and more extreme cases like I mentioned. Can people transfer thoughts from one to another? Yes. Can one know about what's happening in distant places? Yes. Can healing, even from a distance take place? Yes. And how do I know? Because I work with those types of things daily. It is who I am and what I do. It is my life's work and has been since the age of 5 when I found out not only was I transsexual but also that I would become a healer using a variety of gifts.

So go ahead and read this book. The material is true. At least, the things that are stated as being able to happen can indeed happen. And if you doubt, well, so be it. That doesn't stop those of us who live this type of stuff from doing what we need to do and helping those who need help.

"There is no doubt," write the authors, "that we have contact with the future in a way that shows unequivocally that we misunderstand our relationship to the dimension of time." There it is -- the turning point for the entire ballet of this stunning book. Thank you, Russell Targ and Jane Katra for bringing between these covers the stories of your professional lives and the pas de deux of such different approaches -- cutting-edge physics research and spiritual healing. It is a brave and beautiful book. Message to those who would disparage this book: first educate yourselves a little bit about quantum physics. Then come back and read it again with all your heart.

Even though I consider myself to be an open minded person with a serious interest in healing, this book did not convince me to take its subject seriously. After the smoke cleared, there was nothing for me to hold on to besides a lot of mumbo jumbo and factual sleight of hand. When a man claims to have been miraculously healed of cancer, he should be able to document his claim with hard facts, including x-rays, medical tests, medical testimonials by qualified professionals familiar with the case and the like. Instead, these authors say only that they don't know if Targ's original diagnosis, later not confirmed, was accurate. They brush by the main point but can't avoid its impact for rational people. It is not a great jumping off point for a book that has such pretentions of spirituality, but sadly misses the mark in that ambition as well.