William A. Tiller, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor, Stanford University

“In 1970, I was Department Chair at Stanford and I got myself seriously committed to being involved in psychoenergetic science in parallel with my conventional science.
I've written four books in that area.

“The issue is really one of information medicine, which is somewhat down the road from energy medicine, which is still down the road a little from chemical medicine. Chemical medicine is what we've had in the past, but we realized that – the simple metaphor is – if you put bacteria in a glass of water and throw some silver colloidal particles in there, it'll kill the bacteria. People thought that was due to the contact and that led to chemical medicine.

“But, if you, in fact, have the same experimental setup except you put the silver in as an electrode in a fluorescent tube and focus light on the jar, then you still kill the bacteria. That leads to energy medicine. Furthermore, we have found that, if in the same room you have the jar with the bacteria in the water and you plug in an intention-imprinted electrical device – then, in short order, you can kill the bacteria. That's really information that's been exchanged. And that leads to information medicine.

“There are many energies involved in light. There is, of course, electromagnetic light, which everyone knows about. The coarsest level of the human body is all about electromagnetic energy. So you can use light in the way it's used in energy medicine, especially on acupuncture points, to systemically provide healing in the body.

“Or you can go to a higher level... magnetoelectric energy. That has an aspect of light as well. And at all of these higher dimensional levels there is a light which is the communicator between the aspects of substance at that level of being.

“So, when Eric talks about Reconnective Healing, then really what is happening is that many kinds of energy and light are flowing through the healer and into the healee. In other words, what we're talking about is bringing it beyond just what has been classically known as energy healing into a broader spectrum of energy, light and information.

“I have come to the view that we are always radiating and receiving from each other on many, many bands, and the only band that our present science knows about is the electromagnetic one. The higher dimensional bands are not yet quantitatively available to us because the instruments we have are designed primarily on the electric atom molecule level of reality, and therefore confined to radiations that go slower or equal to the velocity of electromagnetic light.

“But, in the reference frame that I use to understand the experiments that I've been dealing with for 35 years, and that other people have been doing as well, many of these [energies], I feel, travel faster than the velocity of light and therefore cannot be accessed by the conventional instruments.

“What Eric does, which we don’t understand at all, intrigues us enough that we want to investigate it further,” says Mark O’Connell, MD, internal medicine specialist and Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education at the University of Miami School of Medicine.

“I am a very traditional doc,” O’Connell says. “I teach internal medicine. I’m on the faculty of a medical school. I’m one of the Deans. I’m definitely not out there on the fringe. And this definitely rattled my construct of how the body works — how disease works.

“What I personally witnessed with my own patients definitely got me wondering,” he says. “Where does all this fit? There is definitely a mind-body connection — nobody can deny that, whether you are an integrative medicine person or a traditional western medicine practitioner. The mind and the body are one. And anybody who denies that is not paying attention."

O’Connell recalls observing firsthand one of Pearl’s healing sessions with a patient who had serious chronic medical problems which were going to require surgery. O’Connell says that as he watched Pearl “waving his hands around over her," he witnessed a dramatic improvement in her condition.

Intrigued, O’Connell says he then selected a few other chronically ill patients and asked them if they, too, would like to try a session with Pearl. In exchange, he asked each of them if they would be willing to answer some questions after their session, and he asked them not to discuss with others what they experienced. O’Connell says they returned with surprisingly similar reports and dramatic improvements. One of his patients with great difficulty walking, walked around easily after a few sessions with Pearl, O'Connell says. Still another, a child with cerebral palsy who couldn't walk into O’Connell’s clinic without leg braces and help from his mom, was able to run out after Pearl's session, carrying his brace.

“Many members of our faculty have seen Eric’s work,” O’Connell says. “And almost everybody is intrigued by what they’ve seen."

Gary Schwartz, Ph.D.

“Eric is genuinely just trying to understand it," says Gary Schwartz, PhD, Director of Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry, Psychology, and Surgery; and Director, Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health, University of Arizona. The University’s Human Energy Systems Laboratory, which he previously directed, conducted a series of four carefully designed, controlled scientific experiments with Pearl to determine whether the energy he described was something basic science in the laboratory could prove.

"One of the things that is very clear to me about Eric," Schwartz says, “is the fact that he would volunteer his time and perform experiments under controlled conditions in the laboratory and devote all his time shows his personal interest — nobody’s making him do this.” The conclusion of these experiments was that the energy was indeed real, detectable, measurable — and quite remarkable, Schwartz says.

As the subject of highly specialized testing at The University of Arizona’s Human Energy Systems Laboratory, the energy associated with Reconnective Healing has indeed been substantiated by controlled scientific experiments, according to Gary E. R. Schwartz, Ph.D., and Linda G.S. Russek, Ph.D., the lab’s former directors. The Human Energy Systems Laboratory used mainstream scientific methods to address questions in the areas of mind-body medicine, energy medicine, and spiritual medicine. The focus of this laboratory was to reveal what is true and what is false, as they paraphrase in the forward of Pearl’s book.

Schwartz is a professor of medicine, neurology, psychiatry, psychology, and surgery who received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1971 and served as an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard until 1976. He then served as professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale University and as director of the Yale Psychophysiology Center and co-director of Yale Behavioral Medicine Clinic. “I am very impressed with Dr. Pearl’s credentials and his seriousness of purpose,” Schwartz says. “Eric is very genuine. I’m impressed with his gifts and his interest in science. He really would like to understand what is going on. And although he has beliefs like we all do, he is willing to put those beliefs to experimental test.”

The Human Energy Systems Laboratory conducted a series of four controlled experiments with Pearl, Schwartz says. Pearl and two of his students served as senders while volunteers acted as receivers in the studies. The first test showed that blindfolded subjects could detect the energy up to 83 percent of the time. The second showed that the energy functions like an electromagnetic signal, Schwartz reported. The third showed that the sender’s heart wave, measured by electrocardiogram (EKG) imprints itself on the receiver’s brainwave, measured by electroencephalogram (EEG), particularly when the sender intends to send the energy. Most significant in this third experiment, Schwartz says, is that whether or not the receiver was consciously aware of the energy, the EKG imprinted just the same, so there is unconscious energy detection that can be recorded electromagnetically. The fourth experiment recorded the brainwaves and eye movements of 30 subjects under three different conditions. The lab is still analyzing data from the fourth experiment, Schwartz says.

John Day, M.D.

Several years ago, John Day, MD, board-certified general and vascular surgeon, decided to put down his scalpel and practice Reconnective Healing instead. Day graduated from Tulane Medical School in 1977 and completed his surgical residency in Baltimore at University of Maryland before joining the large Boulder, Colorado, surgical practice where he spent the next 25 years.

Through his own career-long series of questions and discoveries, including an intense personal study of Eastern and other holistic healing systems with world-renowned authorities including the Dalai Lama’s personal physician, Day decided the current mentality of Western medicine is not as conducive to healing as what he felt he could accomplish by other means. “I made this decision because I knew it would take me into higher levels of understanding. It would help me heal myself and others more completely, he says.”

Day says his peers’ typical response to more holistic approaches to healing is, “Where are the studies? What is the proof?”

“It threatens them,” he says. “Their construct is too inflexible to let them even look at it. It’s against all of their ego training — the things they invested their energy and money in — and they feel like they would invalidate themselves if they would do this, but it would only make them greater healers, in my opinion. Reconnective Healing will only enhance what they offer their patients, even if they choose to stay in more traditional medical practices.”