THE UNCOMMON TOUCH

A Canadian writer on religion, Harpur (God Help Us, Life After Death, etc.) here challenges doctors and other health care professionals ``to look beyond conventional approaches to a much wider paradigm or model of healing''—a paradigm he does not actually present. Harpur also challenges the reader to look inward and become a channel for his or her own healing. He writes of the laying-on of hands and religious rites such as prayer, visualization, meditation, and ``the cultivation of the inner, spiritual qualities of hope, faith, love, forgiveness, courage, purpose, and meaning.'' His absolute bedrock conviction is that ``all healing is self- healing'' and the human organism is self-renewing: ``Our total organism wants and wills health.'' Before becoming a journalist, Harpur was an Anglican parish priest and practiced laying-on of hands. Here he seriously seeks a medical use for the healing phenomenon. First he exposes frauds and charlatans (Oral Roberts, Peter Popoff), although he admits that these fakers sometimes channel real cures. He reviews the Judaic and Gospel traditions and finds in them healing on many levels, from the individual to the cosmic. He profiles the blind healer Godfrey Mowatt, portraying him as a well-rounded, socially engaged person before revealing the full scope of Mowatt's thought, which holds that inner healing precedes the physical and often comes about by the ``healee'' becoming a channel for healing others. Among scientific ideas, he relates Wilhelm Reich's orgone theory of bioenergies, which so intrigued Canadian biologist Bernard Grad that he then set out to verify the spiritual side of healing. Harpur also eyes psychiatric healing, touch therapy, and traditional healing in China, concluding that ``the Ultimate Ground of the universe is with you.'' An earnest proclamation that the life force can renew when asked.