A GoodTherapy.org Featured Column written by John Rhead, Ph.D.

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A few years ago I was sitting down to begin one of my weekly therapy groups when I had a slight epiphany. I realized many other therapists in all sorts of places were going to be doing the same thing that day, and I felt a sense of connection with them as we all did our best to bring healing to ourselves and our clients. About a year ago, while meditating and praying outdoors at dawn, I had a similar experience. This time it was more explicitly spiritual, as I had the awareness that all around the word there were many others joining me in that very moment, doing our best to invoke and/or join The Divine in the healing of our planet. I shared these experiences with the members of two groups of which I have long been a member—The American Academy of Psychotherapists, a group which believes that the healing and growth of the client is inextricably intertwined with the healing and growth of the therapist, and the Earthtribe, a group that integrates ancient nature-based spirituality with modern psychotherapy. Both groups emphasize direct experience over cognitive understanding. In the descriptions of my experiences as I shared them with these two groups I coined the term “The Unseen Sangha.”

Now Larry Dossey has brought to my attention a body of scientific research that directly addresses the nature of The Unseen Sangha (TUS? Short for ‘tis us?). He is the editor of Explore, an alternative medicine journal, the author of several books having to do with nonlocal (i.e. not confined in time and space or to the brain of a single individual) consciousness. His most recent editorial (Dossey, 2008) explores the ways in which individual minds can join together to access information not available to any one of them alone and not a simple mathematical combination of their individual guesses or opinions. He takes his inspiration from a new book, The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Suroweicki. The book describes some amazing experiments demonstrating this “wisdom of crowds,” including its use in finding the precise location of a lost nuclear submarine—a virtual needle in an ocean. It also describes apparent spontaneous examples of this wisdom, such as occurred immediately after the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Within minutes the stock prices of the four major companies involved in the manufacture and launch of Challenger began to drop. The price of the one that would prove weeks later to be responsible for the failed o-ring dropped much faster than the others, so fast that trading had to be halted, even though there was not even speculation at that point as to the cause of the disaster.

Dossey’s editorial prompts me to speculate about the nature of The Unseen Sangha. If we consciously seek to connect with other healers, whether currently living or not, might we not have a way to access wisdom that could make us more effective? Might such a process be at the root of what we call “clinical intuition?” Doesn’t it seem to make sense to open ourselves to such wisdom before each therapy session, and perhaps repeatedly during it, just in case there is something available to aid us in providing a healing presence? Of course we might do the same thing unconsciously, and if fact Dossey makes the point that most nonlocal awareness seems to take place unconsciously. However, a conscious choice to make oneself available to such wise input would seem to hedge one’s bet.

Dossey, Larry (2008) “Nonlocal Knowing: The Emerging View of Who We Are” Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, Vol. 4, No. 1, pages 1-9.

©Copyright 2008 John Rhead, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact John and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile.