Brain Surgeon Searches for the Soul

[Scepcop]

http://metgat.gaia.com/blog/2009/8/brai ... r-the-soul

In a recent Internet article, Philip Bender, an American teaching English to Chinese doctors, asked his students for their views on the afterlife. He found that, like Westerners, they had euphemisms for death, including, "closed their eyes," "left the world," "gone to the Western sky," and, for important people, "hung up," or "gone to see Chairman Mao." As to whether they actually believed in an afterlife, the responses were mixed. None of them appeared to have a conviction in this regard, but some of them expressed the traditional belief in spirits. Most were ambivalent or skeptical.

Surprisingly, a 2003 survey of 1,044 American doctors found that 76-percent believe in God, while 59-percent believe in some kind of afterlife. It is a curiosity that there are quite a few who believe in God but do not believe in an afterlife.

For doctors as well as for everyone, the question is whether brain and mind are one and the same thing. As a long-time neurosurgeon, Dr John L Turner of Hawaii, is very familiar with brain matter. However, in recent years he has come to the conclusion that brain and mind are not the same thing, as most professors in medical schools would have their students believe.


In his recently-published book, Medicine, Miracles, and Manifestations, (The Career Press, Inc.), Turner states that his search has basically been aimed at determining if we are merely "brief candles strutting and fretting on the stage of life, only to be extinguished when the play ends." And he wonders if death is as simple to understand as changing trains. Based on what he has learned so far, he is reasonably certain we live on in a never-ending universe. Concomitantly, in line with the bigger picture, he is interested in ways in which complementary medicine, or energy medicine, might contribute to the quality of this lifetime. "We need to better understand that we are one with that energy and one with all things," he offers.


Turner has been interested in psychic matters since his days in graduate school some 40 years ago. Beginning his practice of medicine and surgery on an island where he was the only neurosurgeon, the lack of peer pressure allowed his unhampered study of metaphysics, spiritual matters, and life after death. Now that he has limited his medical practice to consultations, he is finding time to learn more about subjects the general populace calls "paranormal." He is actively involved with a group studying Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and is learning about mediumship.


His interest is such matters began while pursuing a Ph.D. in physics. "Until then, my interest in the paranormal was limited to reading about astral projection in books by Oliver Fox and Sylvan Muldoon, and during my undergraduate days, I would spend time trying to ‘roll out' of my body," Turner explains. "It never worked and eventually I abandoned the effort. Later, during graduate school in the department of physics at Ohio State University, I was given the book, The Sleeping Prophet, about Edgar Cayce. That completely changed the course of my life, pulled me into a search for other dimensions and the spiritual world."


After reading about Cayce, Turner made a sudden change from physics to medicine. However, the intense study and training in Western medicine left no time for him to think about more spiritual forms of healing. After moving to the "Big Island" of Hawaii in 1982, Turner focused on mainstream medicine. "Any search for the dimension from which Edgar Cayce culled his information had to be put on hold," he says. "I had a full practice and family matters to tend to."


A case in which a malignant brain tumor disappeared after seven Buddhists monks intervened rekindled his interest in spiritual matters. "I couldn't believe my eyes!" Turner writes in the book. "There was no trace of the lesion that had glared menacingly from the screen before and after the surgery."


In another case - brain surgery in which Turner seemed to have exhausted all options - he decided to try prayer. It apparently worked as the surgery was successful. But even when unsuccessful in saving a patient, Turner came to see spiritual implications. He studied reports of near-death experiences and "began to realize that we have a spirit that does not extinguish at death, but lives on to begin a new journey." He again experimented with out-of-body travel, or "astral projection," then remote viewing, and meditative chanting. Through Buddhist chanting, he found that he could disassociate his mind from his body and become aware of remote events. Then he discovered Jorei, a form of healing energy channeled from the spirit world, a procedure espoused by Mokichi Okada of Tokyo, Japan. Initially, Turner found Jorei "a difficult pill to swallow," but the more he studied and observed it, the more he began to realize that there was something to it.


As Turner thinks back on it, energy medicine started to become part of his practice around 1995. "Before that, I didn't employ energy healing methods, even though I became increasingly aware of them," he recalls. I didn't really begin to put it all together until I had read the books, Into the Light by Dr. William Campbell Douglass and The Secret Life of Plants, which set things up for the philosophy of Mokichi Okada and what he called the Medical Art of Japan.


"Although there may have been some unseen - to me - raised eyebrows, I was never criticized or subjected to ridicule," Turner says of his blending of Western and Eastern medicine. "The entire hospital staff was able to see the results, as Mokichi Okada had predicted, saying that it would begin in Hawaii. This was significant because he never visited Hawaii."


Turner doubts that he would have had such freedom on the Mainland USA. "I spoke with a Mainland surgeon today," he offered. "She said that at one hospital, after talking about her experience with remote viewing in surgery, the conversation was reported and her staff privileges were removed. I remember a doctor in Ashville, North Carolina saying that some lawyers, at the behest of drug companies, were threatening to pull physicians' medical licenses if they practiced non-traditional medicine, as it was not in keeping with ‘the standard of care' in the area. So here, on this island, where no neurosurgeon ventured before, due to lack of equipment and income limitations, I had no opposition at all, but rather, encouragement to do what I felt best for the patient."


Dr. Turner's interest in EVP and Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) is fairly recent and was encouraged by Martin Simmonds, a resident England, who helped Turner construct his website (http://johnlturner.com/index.php). Not long after they talked about EVP and ITC, Simmonds complained of abdominal pain and died from cancer shortly thereafter. In some recent experiments, Turner seems to have made EVP contact with his old friend.


Does Turner see any hope for energy medicine being accepted by Western physicians? "Unfortunately," he shrugs, "many physicians stand fast to their allopathic (conventional) training and refuse to budge even in the face of verifiable evidence of the efficacy of incorporating universal energy techniques into bag of tools." However, he believes that in time, when selfishness takes a back seat to love, they will "see the light."