How many cancers have you cured from your body this week?

Not so long ago that question would have been regarded as nonsense. These days we cannot be so sure. Indeed, there is mounting evidence that one's attitude towards oneself, and the intentions one has for one's own life, play a significant rôle with respect to health or disease. And that evidence is opening up, not only the question of how our thoughts can affect our state of health, but how our thoughts and actions can affect other people's states of health.

But this is an ancient idea - one found in, for example, the New Testament - and today we have heard two accounts - the healing of the woman with an issue of blood and the restoration of the sight of blind Bartimaeus - which refer to people's mental state affecting their physical state. But these accounts are generally regarded as stories concerning miracles - events for which there is no natural explanation. Consequently, attitudes towards the accounts have been polarised into either total acceptance - what is called 'faith' - or total scepticism.

Historically, the position of Unitarianism - with its emphasis upon rationality - has largely been that of scepticism. A large number of Unitarians, when considering the Gospel scriptures, have therefore concentrated their attention on the teachings of Jesus and cast aside the accounts of his healing the sick as being fictional stories written about Jesus by superstitious people. In other words, the view of many Unitarians has been 'It can't happen, therefore it didn't happen'. This attitude is still quite prevalent within Unitarianism, and it is quite possible to go to many Unitarian services without ever hearing accounts of Jesus' healings.

People who think of themselves as rational subscribe to the idea that if something does not have a natural explanation then it is best to have nothing to do with it. What that means is that spiritual healings must be categorised as 'chance', 'coincidence', 'placebo effect', 'spontaneous remission', or 'hocus-pocus'. Because of this, the fact that a person has been healed of, for instance, cancer is not considered important if that healing has been effected by, say, someone praying, but is considered important only if the person has received that kind of treatment - such as radiotherapy or chemotherapy - which can be explained by our culture's understanding of the way the world works.

Let me try to illustrate why this attitude prevails. Suppose a doctor diagnoses cancer in a patient and, from his experience of treating cancer, recommends a certain course of treatment. And suppose that the patient elects not to follow the recommended treatment, and opts instead for the care of a spiritual healer. And suppose that the cancer disappears from the patient's body. What is the effect upon the doctor?

The doctor has built his career upon a reputation for good judgments. But if it can be said that the patient has been healed by spiritual means then people might say that the doctor's judgment was not for the best - especially if his recommended course of treatment would have involved a great deal of suffering, as do many chemotherapy treatments. The doctor therefore faces the stark choice between risking his professional reputation and classing the patient's recovery as, say, 'spontaneous remission'. You can see immediately what most doctors will do - whatever their private opinions on what has happened.

But let us expand the scenario we have imagined. Suppose that the spiritual healer is a hippy character who has no fixed abode but rather wanders about the countryside with a bunch of other off-beat characters. And suppose that a woman who has been sick for twelve years, and who has been treated by many doctors, is cured by this oddball character. How are the doctors going to feel? Even though the hippy succeeded where they failed, is it not likely that they would rather he was out of the way?

This was, presumably, the position of the doctors who had tried to treat the woman for an issue of blood. What might these doctors do? Jesus said, both to the woman with the issue of blood and to blind Bartimaeus 'thy faith hath made thee whole', and one course open to the doctors would be to challenge Jesus to produce the mechanism whereby religious faith acted to effect the healing.

But Jesus cannot do this because what the doctors are seeking is something which makes sense within their understanding of how the world works - what would usually be called their 'worldview'. And since Jesus' worldview is utterly different from the doctors' worldview, all Jesus can say, as he did on some occasions, is 'Look at what actually happens'. But the doctors cannot do even this for fear of losing their reputations. And the outcome is a stand-off.

The same kind of stand-off occurs with any phenomenon for which there is no natural explanation. But what is a 'natural explanation'? A natural explanation is one that fits with the existing worldview. So if we were to ask if there is a natural explanation for the healings that Jesus performed, what we are really asking is if there is an explanation which fits with our worldview. According to the worldview that has prevailed within the last few centuries, there has been no explanation for the healings. That does not mean, however, that the healings did not happen, for there might be another explanation: that the worldview is wrong, and that there could exist a worldview in which such things as spiritual healing can find explanation.

This is the importance of the work from which I took our Second Reading. In her book The Field, Lynne McTaggart is speaking about how the prevailing worldview is being challenged in a way which will render spiritual healing - and a host of other, so-called 'paranormal', phenomena - explicable. And what she has to say has rather more impact than what has been said in the past, and I want to try to explain to you why.

During the last one-hundred-and-fifty years or so there have been a great deal of investigations into so-called 'paranormal' phenomena - such things as spiritual healing, telepathy, psychokinesis, communications with the dead, etc. Some of these investigations have been conducted under very strict laboratory conditions - for example, the sort of experiments we heard about in our Second Reading where the germination of seeds was affected by the actions of a psychic healer. As a result of these investigations there has grown up a huge body of data which suggests that psychic or spiritual factors can play a part in processes that were previously thought to be entirely physical. Now, at first, one would think that there would come a point at which this body of data grew so vast that these so-called 'paranormal' phenomena would have to be accepted as 'real'. That is the way in which most people think, and, indeed, it is what happens in a court of law.

But it is not true with something like spiritual healing. And the reason is simply this: spiritual healing cannot find an explanation within the current worldview. It doesn't matter how many experiments show that spiritual healing occurs, the phenomenon will not be accepted because it flatly contradicts the prevailing understanding of how the world works.

And here is the significance of what Lynne McTaggart is saying in her book: that what is beginning to happen is that the old worldview (in which spiritual healing is not possible) is being replaced by a new worldview (in which it is possible). This change is occurring quite independently of the experiments into so-called 'paranormal' phenomena, but has been grasped by those involved in such research because they can see that it will provide a basis from which they can derive explanations for their results.

Do you know that science has achieved all its magnificent successes by regarding scientists as unimportant? That sounds a strange thing to say, but it is true - because the central tenet of science is that the particular scientist doing the experiment has no effect upon the outcome of the experiment. In other words, what one scientist has done can, if his results are good, be replicated by any other scientist. So, the scientist him- or herself has no importance - what matters is only the great laws of nature working themselves out in an impersonal way.

Now this attitude has had a peculiar effect upon ordinary people - one that is so common that it is not usually noticed. It has meant that ordinary people are coerced into seeing themselves as insignificant. For example, the human race is said to be on a planet orbiting an average star at the edge of an unremarkable of galaxy of stars which is one among one-hundred-billion galaxies in the universe. And the conclusion that the human race is really quite unremarkable comes about because science has discovered the implications of the great laws of nature by regarding particular people as unimportant.

However, that conclusion is only good providing that science's assumption that a scientist doing an experiment has no effect upon the outcome of the experiment. And it is that assumption which has been challenged by important scientific work carried out during the twentieth century. Specifically, that work has suggested that the consciousness of the scientist doing the experiment may influence the results.

But if the results of scientific experiments are influenced by the consciousness of the scientist doing the experiment then everything that any person does can be influenced by the consciousness of that person. Indeed, what happens to any individual is likely to be influenced by what they are thinking. Clearly, then, a person's state of health could be influenced by their thoughts. So, for example, a person who is given to thinking generally happy, loving thoughts might well enjoy a better state of health than one who is given to thinking miserable, antagonistic thoughts - although it's obviously not that simple, for all of us know people who are happy and loving yet saddled with disease, and we also probably know a miserable old devil who is in excellent health.

But it's not what the person is on the surface, it's what they are deep inside. It's the long-buried, private thoughts and fears that have been instilled in them since childhood that give them their tendencies towards health or disease. And since that is the case, we are all enjoined to do as much as we possibly can to come to terms with our inner being such that our outer life reflects, not just an inner calm, but an inner knowledge of ourselves - of what we have been since childhood, of the fears that have become rooted deeply within us, of the ways in which our consciousness has been conditioned by the things that have happened to us through life.

And the question is: How do we come to this inner knowledge of ourselves? We do it by learning to focus our attention on who and what we are. In a 'scientific' way of speaking, that is expressed by talking about 'the coherence of consciousness'. If that sounds a bit high-falutin', we can use instead religious language. And the religious word we would use for 'coherence of consciousness' is 'holiness'.

That's what 'holiness' means: it means 'the state of being whole', or, as a scientist might say, 'the state of being coherent'. The reason that a 'holy man' is called 'holy' is because his thoughts are coherent - because he has worked at meditation and prayer in order to bring his thoughts into coherence. In doing that the holy person will have discovered two things: first, that they are one with God, and, secondly, that they can help their fellows through allowing the coherence of their consciousness to bring order to another.

Now we see - in principle - how it might be that Jesus brought about the healing of the woman with the issue of blood and restored the sight of blind Bartimaeus: Jesus' holiness, the coherence of his consciousness, allowed him to bring order to the consciousness of those who were sick. And notice how this explanation is consistent with other elements of the story of the woman with the issue of blood - for the explanation implies that Jesus would have detected something going out of him to a person in the crowd that surrounded him. But notice also how the explanation implies that the effectiveness of the healing depends upon the readiness of the 'patient' to receive healing - what Jesus called the 'faith that made thee whole'. In that idea you can see why it is that so many are healed by spiritual means only to regress later: the deep fears from long ago start acting again and, as it were, 'bring the sickness back'.

Not so long ago spiritual healing would have been universally regarded as mumbo-jumbo. Today, it is not so regarded because our understanding of how the world works - our worldview - is changing. The change is profound - nothing less that a completely new understanding, a new understanding of what we are, and what the world is, and what is the nature of our relationship with the world around us - including our own bodies. The new worldview is emerging within science, but it is going to have such an almighty impact upon us all that it will lead to nothing less than a new breed of people - a loftier race than e'er the world hath known.