By Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut and Founder, Institute of Noetic Sciences

In late August 2001, three weeks short of my 71stbirthday, I received a biopsy report.  It was malignant prostate cancer with relatively aggressive cancer cells.  The urologist recommended surgery.  That was certainly alarming, and didn’t add to my sense of well being.  Fortunately, my rational mind prevailed, and my long acquaintance with complementary and alternative healing methods came to the fore. I began to investigate alternative modalities, both in the US and abroad.  Then a most surprising, delightful, and thoroughly wonderful event occurred.  I attended an Institute of Noetic Sciences board of directors meeting in mid-March, 2002.  I was asked if the group could hold a healing ceremony for me.  I was not only delighted at the suggestion, but deeply touched by their sincerity and concern. Such events had been my life’s work for the past thirty years, but I had never been the recipient of a concerted healing effort.

And, a wonderful experience in turned out to be! I reclined in the center of the institute’s small amphitheater, with approximately fifty devoted friends and colleagues surrounding me. Led by one of the directors, they began intoning the “

Om” chant.  The feeling in the room became progressively more electric, as successive groups of friends surrounded me, provided a healing touch for a few minutes, then stopped aside to let others take their place.  All the while the chanting continued as minds coherently focused on healing, kind, and loving thoughts.  As the minutes passed, the coherent energy in the room intensified, and was coursing through my body in a most strange but comforting way, like waves rolling up and caressing a beach. The sensation of wave after wave through my body continued for about four days before subsiding.  I was feeling terrific, with a warm and satisfying feeling in the pelvic area.  A feeling of intense well being is great, but what would objective scientific measurement have to say about all this? I opted for a sonogram in New York to assess what, if anything, had happened in the healing session.  A well-qualified radiologist performed the examination.The doctor’s words startled me when he finished, “There are no active cancer cells in your prostate.” My skeptical, scientific mind harbored doubts. My experienced “noetic” mind, having witnessed many healings before, brought on a smile.  My emotional self was dumbfounded, but overjoyed.Naturally, I wanted to discuss this with my urologist who had made the original diagnosis.  As I expected, he was disbelieving.  When I insisted that I trusted the results, and believed that I was cancer free, he suggested that may be the original biopsy was a lab error.  He could not manage to accept that the cancer appeared to be in remission without standard therapies.  Important answers to scientific questions still remain elusive.  How do intention, love, caring, and prayer manifest physically, either locally or nonlocally, in the body?  What are the physics, and biophysics associated with this process?  How can science describe this, and advance our understanding of healing and how the mind affects health? Until these puzzles are better solved, it is unlikely that mainstream science and medicine will depart from their traditional practice of treating symptoms, not causes, with chemicals, surgery, and damaging radiation.  When experiences like my own are more fully understood and utilized, medical science will have entered a new and far more useful paradigm.