What Does "Higher Power" Mean?

One of the more interesting books around—especially for people who read such blogs as this one—is Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. The book is by Rupert Sheldrake and is subtitled “And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.” The amazon.com link to the paperback is here. I read the book in fascination. I consider Sheldrake to be one of our time’s most original thinkers about biology. He is also a creative experimenter and a genuine scientist. In certain narrow circles of scientific orthodoxy, to be sure, he is a heretic. But never mind them. What the book demonstrates is that dogs as well as other animals appear to have what for them—for us too, for that matter—are “higher powers.” Telepathic abilities are classed as paranormal at least. Animals also evidently have powers of orientation in the wild inexplicable by ordinary sensory capacities. They seem to have a kind of sight that, traditionally, we call “second sight.” Yes, they’re at home in border zones much as some people are. And, as with us as well, the talent isn’t uniformly present. Nor are these capacities limited to mammals; birds display such powers too.

I start here with animals to make a point. We have a reflexive way of assuming that higher powers, when they manifest, must come directly from God—and if not from God then still from some higher, conscious entity. I’ve pondered this matter for quite a long time and have another take on the matter. But let’s begin with some sorting.

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By “higher powers” I mean phenomena like miraculous healing, ecstatic states, and prophetic visions. In these cases God does the healing, God manifests in the ecstatic states (or the mystic experiences union with God), and God sends the prophetic vision. To be sure, in all of these instances, the phenomenon itself transcends ordinary experience; it is therefore logical enough to use a word that signifies the Transcendent writ large as its cause. But when people speak of God this way, they have something more concrete in mind. They imagine an Agency, distinct and separate, acting deliberately in this specific case whereas, in all other cases, God acts in a more nebulous and indirect way. This must be what people mean. If God sends me a prophetic message but lets you read tea leaves, the only way to understand the distinction is that God intervenes in reality deliberately in some but not in other cases.

People don’t usually invoke divine action to explain telepathy. It is a paranormal power but mild in effect and common enough to be assigned to a lower agency, say to a “talent” or to a “gift.” But notice that even here, using the word “gift” suggests a divine dispensation given to some, not to others. By contrast, people rarely assign a run of bad luck to God. But why not? If in one case God rewards us for being good, in others he might punish us for our careless acts of stupidity. Finally, when in legalese we speak of an “act of God,” what we mean then is simply “accident”; the lawyers don’t intend to suggest that floods, lightning strikes, or tornadoes are literally acts of God.

I think I’ve outlined the issues sufficiently here to show that referring strange, unusual phenomena to God serves no rational or meaningfully explanatory purpose. I strongly lean toward the view that God cannot be pulled down to our level and assigned roles in our ordinary experience. Technically this is known as negative theology: man should not presume. Furthermore, the use of God as a mechanism of explanation amounts to little more than saying, “It happened because it happened.”

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Let’s look at these phenomena from another perspective. Let’s look at miraculous healings. Healers are often involved. They often speak of a flow of energy or of a power that aids them—and they report feeling this whatever in themselves. The consequence, namely healing, is assigned to a “higher” power only because the healing is extraordinary. It is also highly desirable. We give the desirable a “high” value. But what exactly happens in a healing? Some kind of rearrangement of matter takes place. Cancerous cells are destroyed, their remains carried away as waste. Chronic chemical, hormonal balances are restored because the organs that produced or failed to produce them are realigned in proper ways. Something physical happens or no healing could possibly take place. This process requires two factors, it seems to me. One is some kind of knowledge about the right arrangements of the biochemistry and bone structure involved. The other is some kind of energy that removes obstructions and speeds up a process that, in ordinary healing, takes its own sweet time. Let’s examine these factors.

The knowledge may be present in the body already, but the body’s mechanisms may be too weak to implement the healing. In that case the healing stream overcomes weakness, energizes natural processes, possibly catalyzes reactions, and thus leads to rapid recovery of a status quo ante. An alternative possibility is that the healing current itself carries both knowledge and energy. That concept needs special parsing.

When we speak of “energy” in these cases, the justification for using the word is the reported experience both of healers and those who are healed. But the energy involved is not the sort we usually experience—thus mechanical pushes and pulls, gravitational attraction, electrical current, heat, or, more generally, radiation. The very reason why such healings are “miraculous” is because something very different is present. Or is it?

Here things become complicated because, ultimately, we don’t really understand what life really is. We think it is ordinary energy manifesting in material structures. But let us suppose that life itself is just as transcendent a phenomenon as the healing current itself. We don’t think so because we’re all too used to its normal manifestations. One possible explanation of miraculous healings is that they are a temporary intensification of life energy, something that always flows through our bodies but in a relatively thinned-out form. It may be possible to tap into it in such a manner that it flows much more abundantly, and when it does, it will manifest its ordering powers rapidly, setting this right where, in our body, it encounters disturbances in what should be the healthy pattern.

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I began this post with a reference to Sheldrake. I’ll also end it on that note. Sheldrake’s theories of morphic fields suggest a way of thinking about miraculous cures along the lines I’ve just sketched in above. I’ll discuss that application of the morphic field theory in a future post and continue this outline then. For now, as the medievalists used to say, satis.