If This Be Magic

	Book review on If This Be Magic by Playfair, Guy Lyon (1986) Reviewed by Turner, David L., 1986
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With acknowledgements to "The Friend", Drayton House, 30 Gordon Street, London WC1 H OBQ.

At the end of Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale a statue of Hermione, who was thought to have died, comes to life and her husband, Leontes, says, "O! she's warm. If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating." However, soon Leontes realises that his wife had never died and that no magic was involved. It is this scene that gives Guy Lyon Playfair the title "If This Be Magic" for his new book on hypnosis and healing. The book describes well documented events that will seem to be impossible - magical - to many readers but which I believe will eventually be incorporated in the new model of the world for which manyare seeking. When they are so incorporated, they will likewise cease to be magic. That new paradigm will reconcile the truths of the physicists with the truths of the psychologists, the parapsychologists, the faith healers and those who have faith in a spiritual basis for the universe.

Playfair became interested in faith healing when he was working as a journalist in Brazil and he recorded his experiences in an earlier book. In his latest work he still avoids committing himself to any theory but he feels that the facts are beginning toform some kind of pattern. Perhaps before long that pattern will be sufficiently clear to form the basis of a theory.

The book starts with a striking case of healing in 1951, brought about by hypnosis, that was well documented in the British Medical Journal at the time. It caused the BMA to issue a report a few years later, which stated that hypnotism is "a proper subject for enquiry" and that the BMA is "satisfied ... that hypnotism is of value." Since then rather little has happened and, according to the author, the great majority of doctors are still taught nothing about it; which seems a great pity if the half of what the book describes is true.

From hypnosis the author moves easily into his second section entitled "Mind". Here he discusses telepathy, the action of one mind on another. He then considers the action of mind on things - psychokinesis or PK although he has already introduced this concept in the chapters on hypnotic healing, where mind had effect over human tissue. Playfair takes tableturning as an example of PK and quotes both historic accounts and his personal experience of a sometimes spectacular phenomenon. But he would be the first to agree that interest in table-turning and other poltergeist phenomena are only of value in indicating that mind can have power over matter.

He then returns to what is clearly his major interest - healing. This final section quotes Paracelsus who, writing in the fifteenth century, said, "Magic is a teacher of medicine far preferable to all written books." He defined it as "the greatest wisdom" which did not require any exotic rituals, but "only requires a strong faith in the omnipotent power of all good, that can accomplish everything if it acts through a human mind that is in harmony with it." This could only be obtained by "making oneself able to feel and see the things of the spirit." Faith was needed: "Not a mere belief in something that may or may not be true... (but) a power that comes from the source of all good." Not "belief based on mere opinions and creeds" but true faith which is spiritual consciousness.

The author then begins to draw the book together. Not by proposing theories, but at least by listing those features that seem to be common. Preeminent is faith. An absolute certainty that healing will occur is what matters, and this certainty on the part of the healer seems more important than that of the person requiring healing. Paradoxically, the actual truth of the belief is unimportant - so long as its falsity does not prick the bubble of faith. The healer holds the person to be healed in mind - prays for him wills that his body shall repair itself. The author quotes plenty of examples but does not have very much to say about the actual technique except to refer the reader to Dr Lawrence LeShan who has published a series of books all concerned with "faith healing" to a greater or lesser extent.

LeShan deserves fuller mention in a review of Playfair's book. He is an American psychologist who had been working with the mental problems of terminally ill cancer patients. Soon he realised that the attitude of his patients to their illness had a profound effect upon their recovery. Those wil the most positive, fighting attitude would confound their physicians - and LeShan - by unexpected remission. As a result he began to enquire into the whole area of the relationship between science and the spiritual life. He published the result of his research in his book called The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist (published in Britain as Clairvoyant Reality). He explained how he started with a conventional scientific belief but, by going to the original papers concerned with extra-sensory perception, he soon realised that the explanation of his patients' remissions might lie in this area. He continued his research by interviewing many faith healers and clairvoyants both in the States and in Britain and finally began to put his findings to the test by training himself and others to become healers. His further books, How to Meditate and You can Fight for your Life go along way towards passing on his skills to the general reader.

His most recent book, Holistic Health, is subtitled "How to Understand and Use the Revolution in Medicine". His whole philosophy of healing is epitomised in the title of his second chapter: "The Mechanic and the Gardener." If something is wrong with a motorcar it is the mechanic's job to find out what it is and correct it, usually by some physical operation on the car. Occasionally he needs to change the car's environment by telling the driver to supply more oil or when to push in the choke. But if a plant seems unhealthy the gardener's first approach should be to consider the environment - food, water, light -and only rarely will he resort to pruning a sickly plant. LeShan believes that humans should be treated in the same way. The doctor should certainly do his best to diagnose what is wrong and he should put right any obvious faults such as misplaced bones ordeficiencies in the diet; but he should be very reluctant to interfere directly when the fault has been caused by the body's own misfunctioning - whether in allowing cells to reproduce excessively as in cancer or in not producing sufficient antibodies to combat an invasion by a foreign organism.

I believe these books are important to the medical profession and its patients because they point to the new direction that medicine is beginning, oh so hesitantly, to take. But they should be of even greater interest to those readers who are searching for a fuller understanding of God's purpose. Neither author makes more than a passing reference to God or to Christ but both are convinced that there is no need to go back to biblical times to hear of miracles; they are happening all around us and, with a little application, we should be able to work them for ourselves.

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