Brain teaser: George Macpherson occupies his mind

‘There is so much that we don’t know about science and religion.’

We are different, my brain and I. Only recently did I learn this. You could say that this is a mentally disturbing realisation, but so is every new departure. 

Having this new knowledge, I now have to learn how to use it. One could compare it with getting a new smartphone. That is a major disruptive event: I have no idea what this shiny pocket device could do for me, especially at a time of life when my brain is slowing down.

My brain and I already know a lot about each other, but I didn’t know that we are actually separate. My brain contains memory, creative ability, opinion, and suggestions. It receives the sounds, sights, events and smells that surround me, and comes to its own conclusions. If allowed, it will suggest what my behaviour should be. When I became a Friend some fifty years ago, my brain had stopped believing in the creeds I had been taught to recite at home in the vicarage. My brain persuaded me to have more faith in science, logic and national law. What I didn’t know was that I don’t have to agree with my brain, and that there’s a simple way of changing its conclusions.

I knew from the age of about twelve that I could activate change in my mind by telling it out loud to alter my expectations. A farmer’s wife had taught me a simple way to wake up easily at 4am: say, out loud, just before switching off the light at bedtime: ‘I shall be as fresh as a daisy in the morning.’ She said I didn’t have to believe it, but suggested I try it. I did, and it worked. I have learned that I can challenge my brain on other matters, too. It works for control of appetite: ‘I’m not hungry’, followed by some other activity like making a cup of tea. If weight is a problem, try it! I didn’t believe it would work but have found that it does. Could all that be proved scientifically? Let me know what you think. 

Communicating out loud with the amazing computers of our brain has always been practised. Scientists are now confirming that we don’t have to always obey its suggestions, but can disagree and change them.

There is yet something else that we still have not scientifically understood. Sometimes, even when we don’t realise what our brain is suggesting, we can be affected by it. Consider how many people have known from an early age that they want to be doctors, nurses, physios, surgeons, psychiatrists, or other ‘healing’ professionals. Could it be that their brains know that they have a higher than usual ability to help people recover from illness? My own doctor, a very young man, seemed to have always known he had been born with something of this nature. I asked him one day, knowing the daily pressure he was under from hundreds of patients: ‘Do you like being a doctor?’ He told me that since childhood that’s all he had ever wanted to be, and he loved the work. It was great to hear such happiness and public spirit.

Some nations have known for centuries that some of us do have healing power, and their peoples still use it in their own way. When I worked in Botswana a few decades ago, I worked on the edge of the Kalahari Dessert, which is inhabited by the San people, genetically distinct from other locals. I was there as an agricultural and livestock government officer for the Okavango area. My district was about the size of Wales, and, because of the Tsetse Fly, which spreads sickness, humans only live around the edge of a huge natural game reserve. At the time, we invaders called the San people ‘Bushmen’, but they called themselves the ‘Proper People’. Plainly that did not include me or the black Africans who had come to their land hundreds of years earlier!

‘What I didn’t know was that I don’t have to agree with my brain.’

I learned that the Proper People used a most unusual medicine, as well as herbs and roots. It was, and probably still is, delivered by some part of human presence. A group of friends and relatives would get together, visit the sick person, and form a small circle around them, dancing and singing for quite long periods. It worked! Perhaps not always, but well enough for the technique to survive and continue to be successful. This treatment also improves social relationships: during a rest or meal, people would exchange news and ideas. But would it work for us Europeans?

It makes me wonder whether this is a subject that modern science is still only on the edge of. There might be a whole sphere of knowledge that has, up to now, only been known as ‘magic’, ‘witchcraft’ or ‘a miracle’. But through history most of us have recognised that some people can treat and cure the physically or mentally suffering. Here in Europe we have often classed such healers as saints or wizards, depending on their attitude or behaviours, although in my own experience, during my youth, simply ‘healers’.

In 1955, when I was a farm student in Cornwall, and living with my parents in the vicarage, there was a ‘healer’ living in Wadebridge. He was known to be a very effective healer, and people came from all around the world for his touch. Apparently he made no religious claims and used to explain that ‘it just happens’. We didn’t doubt him.

If it worked for him and hundreds of his patients, is it because he had a built-in ability of this kind? And do we all have it without knowing how to use it? 

I have a friend who is a very devout Christian. She believes with confidence in what she calls ‘spiritual healing’. She also plays the cello – as I do – and we practise most weeks at my house. She knows that I have various physical problems following two (so far successful) powerful hormone and radiographic treatments. She offered to call the Holy Spirit to help heal me. It was an offer too good to miss, so after each practice session she stands behind me and, without touching me, calls on the Holy Spirit to heal me. Neither of us speaks a further word for several minutes, and it feels like the silence of a Quaker Meeting for Worship. And yes, I do feel better now than I did months ago; some parts of my body are working better than before. My young French doctor will confirm this. He and I help each other with French and English each time I make my three-monthly visit to renew my pills. I don’t know his reaction to the concept of spiritual healing, but church and Meeting membership is increasing as people seek love, hope and happiness. There is so much that we don’t know about science and religion; we still have so much to catch up and learn about. 

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Comments

Thank you, George Macpherson, for your beautiful recollections and reflections. I learn best from the lived physical and spiritual experience of others, yielding me the best perspective from which to choose between positive and negative. May you continue to discover what is true for you and share it. Daniel Clarke Flynn                                                           https://www.woodbrooke.org.uk/people/daniel-clarke-flynn/
https://www.woodbrooke.org.uk/courses/life-reflections/ 

By Daniel Clarke Flynn on 30th May 2026 - 9:11

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