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The inner mind has a number of other capabilities that most people ignore, or are unaware of. One of these capabilities is that of bringing about spontaneous healing. I have been both an interested bystander and a party to dozens of incidents of this type but, due to sheer dramatic impact, the following incident stands clear in my memory.
In the mid 1950's I happened to be aboard a passenger ship, the "Bloemfontein Castle", in the port of Durban, South Africa. We were seven weeks out from London and, ships being floating communities, everyone knew something of everyone else's business. It was due to this that, late one night, his friends brought Brian D. - a young steward - to me for help after an appalling accident.
In the Steward's Pantry there was a 15 gallon urn, an antiquated, copper cylinder, with a glass sight-tube up one side, that was used for filling the passenger's tea-pots. On top of the sight-tube was a steam whistle that shrieked when the water was boiling. The whole contraption was balanced on three brass feet. Normally these feet were bolted down to the metal shelf on which the urn stood. This projected out from the wall so that the spigot used to draw off the water was at shoulder level. On the day of the accident, the pantry had been painted throughout and the urn had been unbolted from its shelf. The sections of the drama began to come together when the urn was replaced on the shelf, but not bolted down. It was duly refilled from the tap above it, and set to boil.
Brian waited until it boiled then, with his right hand, lifted a large teapot to the spigot which he then tried to open with his left hand. Instead of the spigot swivelling towards him, it acted as a lever, tipping the urn forward to pour its contents over the top and down onto the lad below.
My first notification of these events were when his friends brought him into my cabin, yelling for me to do something for him. They had wrapped a large white tablecloth around the lad and all I could see was his terrified face. He was in great pain, repeatedly screaming, "My arm, my arm." I sent someone for an ambulance then began to talk right into his face.
"Brian! Listen to me. Listen to me, and the pain will go away."
For some minutes I continued to tell him that his arm was cooling down, the pain was fading away, he was feeling better, he was calming down, the arm was healing itself and getting better. The pain was fading and he was going to be OK. Eventually an ambulance arrived to take him to hospital.
Early next morning I had visitors. A chap in plain-clothes who didn't bother to identify himself, two uniformed police officers, and a doctor from the hospital. The doctor was polite in his questions and was plainly curious. The other person wasn't very polite at all. I rapidly got the impression that he was eager to arrest someone for practising medicine without a licence. All I could tell them was that I had talked to the lad and reassured him that his arm was healing and that he was getting better.
The doctor then invited me to go back to the hospital with him to see Brian. He was a sorry sight. His left hand was much swollen and had turned a nasty greenish-blue colour. In several places the skin had split and peeled back. Across his chest was a large 'island' of scalded flesh, with a number of mini islands radiating out from it. The thing that fascinated the medical staff was that the damage stopped in clear lines of demarcation at his shoulder and wrist. Between those two points, Brian's arm was a healthy pink; with absolutely no sign of harm.
The incident brought home to me the power of the mind/body relationship. It also taught me not to make deductions from assumptions. At the bedside I saw that I had fallen into the trap of making assumptions. The previous evening, Brian and his friends had kept telling me that his arm had been scalded, and I had therefore directed all of his attention to healing his arm. The end result was that only his arm had been healed. This is a warning to be very careful about what we wish for ourselves. The inner mind tends to take things quite literally. We can end up with exactly what we asked for, but not what we intended. Many years later, I met someone who knew Brian. This chap told me that Brian's chest was badly scarred and that he never regained the full use of his left hand. The arm, though, had never given him any problems.