The Power of Prayer

[Guest guest]

THE POWER OF PRAYER

Loving Sai Ram and greetings from Prashantinilayam. Just recently, I happened to

accidentally hear an old broadcast of mine over Radio Sai in the series Musings

from Prashanti. I was quite absorbed by that talk – it was very much like

listening to someone else! I had completely forgotten all that I had said

earlier, and every word of that broadcast was very fresh for me. Indeed, often

I sat with great expectations – what’s going to come next!

I am not saying this in praise of myself – no way, for I do not ever believe

that I am the doer. Then why on earth am I making a plug for that talk? Simply

this: That talk had a lot of important things concerning Prayer, especially

Swami’s many observations on the subject. I felt that the entire topic was so

important, may be I should share it in print also. What I said over the radio

follows.

I wonder if you have ever heard the word NOETIC. It is spelt N, O, E, T, I, C,

and rhymes with the word poetic that we all are familiar with. This word Noetic

appears to have been coined recently, and I certainly could not find it in my

dictionary. Why am I talking about Noetic today? Thereby hangs a tale, which I

shall presently unfold.

My story starts one morning a couple of months ago. There I was seated for the

morning Darshan, and opposite me was an American, about forty plus I would say,

sporting a thick moustache. He was a doctor, I was told. Later I found out that

his name was Dr. Krucoff, and that he was a cardiac surgeon in the Veteran’s

Administration Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, a hospital that has close

links with Duke University there. Dr. Krucoff apparently had come many years

earlier to Puttaparthi at the time of one the cardiac conferences that were

held during the early days of Swami’s big hospital here. By the way, three

conferences were held then, and they all were attended by famous surgeons from

many parts of the world.

Dr. Kruchoff came to Puttaparthi this time with two objectives in view. The

first of course was to have Swami’s Darshan once more. But there was another

reason also. It appears that the BBC and the Discovery TV Channel had teamed up

to produce a film on a medical project that Dr. Krucoff was engaged in, and the

BBC TV crew had come to Puttaparthi along with Dr. Krucoff to do some location

shooting. Why?

This exactly is where the word Noetic comes into the picture, along with another

word, MANTRA! Don’t worry, I shall explain everything soon. Let me start with

the word Noetic. This word is often used along with the word therapy; Noetic

therapy simply means a non-pharmacological method of reducing anxiety, stress,

pain, etc. As all of us are aware, a patient suffering from pain etc., is

normally administered drugs to give relief. However, drugs are not the only

solution. For ages, people have tried other methods for reducing stress,

anxiety, etc., all methods essentially employing some kind of a human approach

to the patient. What Dr. Krucoff is currently engaged in is to study

quantitatively, in strict scientific tradition, the effect of these alternate

therapies. The Project he is engaged in is called MANTRA, which is an acronym

for: MONITORING AND ACUTALIZATION OF NOETIC TRAINING.

Well, what exactly is this Mantra, and how did Dr. Krucoff get started on this?

Let me take up the second question first, and I shall deal with it by quoting

the learned doctor himself. But before that, I must mention that the quote is

from an interview that Dr. Krucoff gave to Bonnie Horrigan, and is printed in

the May 1999 issue of the journal

Alternate

Therapies. Incidentally, closely associated with Dr. Krucoff is Suzanne Crater,

and prior to starting on the Mantra project they both were involved in dealing

with patients with advanced heart disease, patients who were often close to

death. These two, quite casually perhaps, used then to talk to patients in a

philosophical manner, besides of course administering all the standard medical

treatment. Over a period of time they discovered, much to their surprise, that

the mortality rate which till then was about 33 % came down to 3 %! Was this an

accident, a coincidence, or was there something more to it? Meanwhile, Dr.

Krucoff became associated with a group of American doctors involved in planning

the Super Speciality Hospital in Puttaparthi. At this point, I shall let Dr.

Krucoff speak for himself:

This hospital is a 300 bed, 2 digital catheterisation, 5 operating theatres,

state-of-the-art, free-care facility that was built by Sri Sathya Sai Baba in a

very rural area where, until recently, there was no electricity and most people

had never seen a toilet, much less a cath lab. We were involved in the original

design. At the end of the first year of operation, the hospital hosted a

symposium to review its activities. The day before the symposium we went round

the hospital and found ourselves immersed in something we had never seen

before.

In US hospitals, everyone basically fights off depression. Patients don’t want

to be in a hospital, and their families are worried about them. Cardiovascular

disease is almost always shrouded in a life and death atmosphere, and in the

western world, death is taken as a bad thing. But the patients in the Institute

in Puttaparthi - patients who could hardly breathe, and were waiting for

catheterisation or surgery or who had just had surgery – were beaming. As we

went from bed to bed, they just beamed. It was a very different kind of

atmosphere than we had ever walked through in a hospital setting. And the

reason everyone was beaming was clear – this was God’s Hospital!

After this visit to Puttaparthi in the early nineties, Dr. Krucoff was convinced

that healing had other dimensions to it than mere procedures and medicines. And

slowly the MANTRA project took shape.

Four types of Noetic treatment was considered for use in the MANTRA Project, as

a supplement to all medical treatment normally administered. They were: Stress

relaxation, imagery, touch therapy, and prayer. Imagery means talking

soothingly to the patient about a place liked by the patient, thus relaxing him

or her. Relaxation by touch seems to be an adaptation of various oriental

techniques, the details of which do not concern us now. It might however be

mentioned, that bedside therapy such as stress relaxation, imagery and touch

therapy were accompanied by helping the patient to adopt what is called soft

abdominal breathing.

OK, all this is about

bedside Noetic therapy. Incidentally volunteers were trained who could assist in

such bedside therapy. What about prayer, the fourth technique? Here, there were

no bedside helpers. In this case, it was what might be referred to as distant

therapy. This technique is really interesting. Each patient’s name, illness,

and procedure were supplied by e mail and phone to eight groups in different

places, and belonging to different faiths, and all these groups prayed

intensively for the patient. The groups involved were: A church in North

Carolina, a Baptist Congregation again in North Carolina, a Jewish group in

Israel, a Buddhist Monastery in France, another Buddhist Monastery in Nepal, a

Catholic Monastery in Maryland and one more prayer group in North Carolina. The

details are not very important. The point simply is that different groups in

different places were requested to pray intensely for the well being of

specific patients.

What about the results? The full details are available in the paper published in

the American Medical Journal, which, by the way, is a peer journal of the

American Medical Community. In brief the results were as follows: In all, 127

patients were chosen for this trial study. 27 of these formed the reference

sample, that is they were not administered any supplementary Noetic therapy.

28, received additional stress relaxation therapy, 24 received the benefit of

touch therapy, 24 the benefit of imagery therapy and 24 were prayed for, shall

I say. I must here add that Dr. Krucoff has been very careful in taking all the

precautions necessary in any kind of statistical study, which incidentally is

quite common in agricultural science and in pharmacology, to mention two

examples.

What about the actual findings? Well, in general it was found that there was

about 25 to 30 % reduction in adverse outcomes in the case of patients who got

extra Noetic treatment as compared with patients who did not. In particular,

the best results appeared to be for patients assigned to off-site prayer. Of

course, Dr. Krucoff is careful to stress that these results are (a) quite

preliminary, (b) merely suggestive and © that further and more detailed

studies are required to confirm the present positive indications.

The results have aroused widespread interest, especially the prayer part. The

TIME magazine has done a cover story, there has been a TV story on the ABC

network, there have been magazine interviews and so on, and as I mentioned

earlier, the BBC and the Discovery channel are collaborating on producing a

full documentary, for which purpose they came here with Dr. Krucoff. There are

of course people who have great reservation about this entire exercise. A

medical doctor named Gary Posner is quite critical and dismisses the whole

study with the caustic remark, “I suspect that fifty years from now, people

looking back at this kind of prayer research will shake their heads and call it

junk science.” Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Divinity in Duke University and

hailed by the TIME magazine as America’s most influential theologian comments,

“This study seems to say that what we really care about is not God but our

health. That makes God a function of our narcissistic needs. I don’t think God

wants to play these kinds of games.”

OK, so much for the Mantra Project, what it is all about, and what people think

about it. When Dr. Krucoff came here a few months ago, I knew nothing about

this project but recently I was given a file complete with copies of the

scientific paper, TIME magazine article, various web printouts and so on. Given

my own scientific background, I became quite interested in all this material and

studied the folder with keen interest. I then put the folder away and began to

reflect. The basic question in the minds of all these people seem to be: “Does

prayer really work or does it not?”

This is an age-old question; it has been asked any number of times, and it will

continue to be asked till the end of Time. The funny thing is that a clear

answer to this question exists; yet, the question gets asked again and again.

Why? Ah, there lies the basic problem with man!

God has given man a head as well as a Heart – I mean a spiritual Heart that is.

If it is the head that is asking the question, it would never be able to grasp

the answer no matter how many times the answer is repeated, and forever it

would be subjected to doubts. With the Heart, the situation is different.

Prayer is a communication addressed to God whose permanent residence is of

course the Heart, as Baba often reminds us. Thus the Heart readily understands

the language of the Heart – no surprise in that at all. In other words, the

Heart is easily able to comprehend when prayer works, and also how.

Many of you may be aware of the famous story of how Savithri actually brought

her dead husband back to life with prayer. Mind you, this is not mere cure but

bringing back from the dead. Skeptics may, however, dismiss that as mere

legend. OK, in that case, let me quote for you this piece from Kasturi’s book,

Sathyam, Sivam, Sundaram. About the value of prayer, Kasturi says:

Listen To the experience of Dr. V.D.Kulkarni of Chadchan in Bijapur District. He

writes on 2nd November, 1961:

A Muslim lady (aged 60) Badooma Kasim, suffering from pneumonia in both lungs

was admitted in my clinic last month. On the fourth day, I came home at about 8

P.M. after examining all patients and finding them progressing well. About

midnight, however, her son came running to me and I hastened to the clinic to

find that her heart was sinking. I administered coramine orally and by

injection, and waited for an hour by her bedside but found it ineffective. The

son started weeping in despair. I came home at 1 A.M., had a bath, did Puja to

the picture of Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, and prayed: “My efforts have all

become vain; I know no other course except to surrender to You. On You now is

the responsibility of making her come out alive.” I then quietly took to bed

but could not get sleep. Even before sunrise, I hurried to the clinic. I found

Badooma sitting up. “What happened last night? Had anyone come?” I asked her.

“Yes! On this bed, near my pillow, someone with a pile of hair sat. He placed

His hands under my ears and stroked the face softly. So, I could rise and sit

up.” I showed her the small photograph of Sri Sathya Sai Baba I had with me.

“Yes! This very person”, she said. How lucky is this Muslim woman! She got a

new lease of life through His Divine Touch.

>From just prayer for cure, let me move on to the revival of the dead. There is,

for example, the famous Walter Cowan incident about which most of you must

surely be aware. I have read a 30 page account of the entire Cowan episode

compiled by late Dr. Hislop. In brief, Walter Cowan who had come to Madras

along with his wife Elsie, passed away and Swami brought him back to life.

Walter Cowan’s revival back to life is also briefly described by Kasturi in

Sathyam, Sivam, Sundaram. The important point here is that Walter’s wife Elsie

did not even know that Walter was actually dead. And, without any prayer from

her side, Walter was brought back to life.

What does this show? It shows that when one has intense Love for God, then God

acts even without a prayer. Hislop describes an incident where he was

miraculously saved from an accident. Once evening while returning from

Brindavan to Bangalore city by a taxi, Hislop’s car was speeding towards a head

on collision with a car racing from the opposite direction. Hislop and party

were saved, even though they did not even think of praying to Swami. The

following morning Swami told Hislop that since he, that is Hislop, had

surrendered, it was Baba’s responsibility to save even without being asked.

At this point, I think I should quote from a very important conversation between

Hislop and Bhagavan, regarding the entire issue of prayer, Swami responding and

curing, and all that. Once, at an informal gathering, a devotee asked Baba,

“Swami, what is the secret of the cure that many afflicted persons experience

in your presence?” Baba replied, “My Love flows out to everyone for I see

everyone as Myself. If a person reciprocates My Love from the depth and purity

of his heart, My Love and his meet in unison and he is cured of his affliction.

When there is no reciprocity, there is no cure.” Hislop seems to have picked up

from there, and this is how the conversation between Hislop and Baba went on

from there.

Hislop: But I had thought that God knows each problem, that if it were

appropriate to remedy the trouble, God would do so without being asked.

Swami: No! It is your duty to ask God. Words must be said, and the words must

correspond to the thought. The thought must be put into a true word. It is true

that Divinity knows all. But He requires that the true word be said. The mother

may know that to maintain life, the child needs food. But the milk is given

only when the child cries for it.

Hislop: It is not clear when one should ask God and when one should not. For

example, there is a headache that doctors seem unable to cure. I do not ask

Swami to cure the headache. I do not pray for a cure. However, in a letter,

Swami wrote: “How is your health? Do not worry about that. Your God is always

with you, in you and around you.”

Swami: That is right. For you, the body identification is weakening. You have a

headache today, a stomach pain tomorrow. Let it go. Don’t worry about it. Once

Baba has told you not to worry, no need to ask Him about it. Don’t identify.

Hislop: Does Swami mean that for persons still fully identified with the body, a

continuous headache might be a proper subject for prayer?

Swami: Yes but why bother Swami with a mere headache?

The topic then changed to the subject of cancer, since Swami has, in a flash,

‘cancelled’ the cancer of many a devotee.

Swami: Cancer. It develops from a small pustule. There is inflammation, some

gas, and from this the cancer develops.

Hislop: Swami can cure even terminal cases of cancer?

Swami: Oh yes. A certain person, whom you know, is a good example of that. She

was filled with filled with cancer. The doctors gave up, removed tubes, sewed

up incisions, and gave her only a few days to live. Now she is strong and

healthy, and works all day.

Hislop: Does Swami effect such a cure only when the

Karma of the person is appropriate?

Swami: No, if Swami is pleased with that person, He heals that person at once.

Karma cannot come in the way.

Hislop: This is extremely important information, because when people fail to get

cured, they put it down to the fact that they still have some Karmic debt.

Swami: If the person has a pure heart and is faithfully following the teachings

of Swami, Swami’s Grace is automatic. No

Karma can come in the way.

Hislop: Swami, people make conflicting statements about the use of

vibhuti. Should a devotee of Swami use

vibhuti as the only treatment for sickness and injury?

Swami: Do not give any importance to minor sickness or injury. In more serious

matters, it is best that prayer be made to Swami. This is important; vibhuti

may or may not be used but there should be prayer.

Hislop: How about the help that is ordinarily available?

Swami: Some people have faith in doctors and some people have faith in Swami.

Hislop: But Swami, that exactly is the problem! People are afraid that if they

use anything other than vibhuti, they are demonstrating lack of faith in Swami.

 

Swami: Actually, both can proceed together. The doctor can be consulted and

vibhuti also can be used. But, regardless of the degree of faith, it is best to

pray to Swami for His Grace.

Hislop: Some devotees go the extreme. No matter how serious the disease or the

trouble, they declare they will use

vibhuti only and never go to a doctor.

Swami: If they wish to do that, they may. Swami’s preference is that that

ordinary means of help be given their due place.

There are so many other things I would like to say on the subject, but there is

no time for all that, at least today; may be some other time. I would, however,

like to place before you the following episode narrated by Ravi Mariwala. Ravi

is one of Swami’s students, meaning that he is a graduate of the Sri Sathya Sai

Institute of Higher Learning. He holds a Master’s degree in Business

Administration. The Super Speciality Hospital in Puttaparthi came into

existence just at the time he was graduating. Many boys, especially with MBA

degrees, volunteered to serve in the hospital, and Ravi was one of them. Ravi

Mariwala operates the Heart-Lung machine, the vital instrument in cardiac

surgery. Over now to Ravi:

A patient being operated for a congenital defect was unable to recover heart

function sufficiently, to come off the heart-lung machine and generate adequate

systemic pressure. We tried everything but nothing seemed to work. Everyone was

beginning to despair. We discussed the matter, rested the heart again, and

added some more drugs. We only failed once more. We were absolutely helpless.

It occurred to me that we had tried everything but prayer. Prayer for a person

not known to me? Would it work? I think that is why it did.

As I had been in the theatre for five hours already, I was briefly relieved by a

colleague. I came into the corridor outside the theatre and stood silently for a

minute, trying to recollect Sai’s face in my mind’s eye. I said a silent prayer

for the patient’s recovery.

Immediately thereafter, I returned to the theatre. The situation had changed

completely. The blood pressure had improved, and the heart had recovered!

Strangely, no one knew how or why; I did not say anything to anyone.

The incident passed. The patient’s recovery was smooth. On the Sunday that

followed, Swami came to me, created vibhuti, put it into my hands and lovingly

said, “This is for the prayer that you said for that patient.” He then

proceeded to describe the incident to others. Here was Swami rewarding me for

the miracle cure that He in His Mercy had effected!

I suppose I have said enough to convince you about the efficacy of prayer.

Before I conclude, I have to draw your attention to what Swami once said about

the relative perspectives of spirituality and science. He said:

All scientific investigations are based upon the intellect. All spiritual

explorations are based upon the Heart or Consciousness. In the spiritual field,

man alone is important and not the machines. Scientists put their faith in

machines. The spiritual seekers place their faith in Mantras. One is a

scientist and the other is a saint. The saint believes in Fullness or

Poornatva. The scientist is content with half the circle. Spirituality

represents the full circle. The beginning and the end met in full circle. When

this circle is divided by half, you have a half-circle resembling the letter C.

The C is science. It starts at one point and ends in another. Between these two

points, there are endless doubts!

So you see, as long as the efficacy of prayer is explored scientifically, doubts

will never cease, no matter how tight and rigid the experiment is!

I shall conclude with what Dr. Bhat often says. By the way, Dr. Bhat is eight

plus and still going strong in Swami’s hospital, with one heart attack behind

him! Dr. Bhat observes, “The surgeon merely cuts; it is God who actually

heals!” In all of Swami’s hospitals, this is the guiding principle.

JAI SAI RAM.

 

Volume - 2 Issue - 15

Radiosai Journal - PSN 2004

 

http://www.radiosai.org/Journals/Vol_02/15Aug01/03_Spiritual_Blossoms/03_Reflections/reflections.htm