“There are basically two forms of therapeutic experience, and both have become dangerously distorted in common practice. The first is you to to a room with an expert in more or less objective disciplines related to the problem. There, talking or medication or surgery takes place.

The second is that, with a very different kind of expert (who is also highly trained and not easily deceived by their own ideas or those of others) you travel inside yourself, into a world you have rarely if ever encountered. There, you meet and interact with embodiments of forces in peculiar and astonishing ways. And this accomplishes the ‘miracle’ that medicine ‘without medicine as we understand it’ has been and can be.

Neither method is certain. Both depend on many variables. But the latter is not intrusive, is nearly costless, nontoxic, deeply involves human intimacy, and commonly demonstrates what may as well be magical efficacy. Surely we should not discard it, yet few of us have ever experienced anything like it… except, perhaps, deep within ourselves, during a serious illness… when strange ‘dreams’ stormed and roiled as we struggled to survive…”

— an anonymous informant