252. BERNADETTE DORAN ON ENERGY HEALING
Interview with energy healing researcher and practitioner examines the Bengston Method of energy healing.
It is interesting that Bengston method is mentioned again. Recently, William Bengston’s highly successful skeptical healers (including himself), as well as his negative attitude towards any “spiritual” component of healing, gave me something to wonder about. We all know about the “sheep-goat effect”, don’t we? We know that skeptics are routinely having negative results in psi experiments. So, Bengston’s results seem to be against the decades of studies. Quite strange.
But, after reading his “Breakthrough: Clues to Healing with Intention”, published in Edge Science Number 2, January – March 2010, pp. 5 – 9, I think that his description of his astonishing results as “skeptical” and “non-spiritual” is unintentionally misleading. In fact, what he does – as, implicitly, what he says – are not so contradictory to the spiritual traditions as he probably likes to think.
Let’s look at the description of his healing attempt with mice, as described in the article:
For an hour a day I placed my hands around the cage of
six mice, wondering how in the world I had come to this. Here
I was, a skeptical researcher suddenly saddled with the task of
treating a cancer that is always fatal.
Since neither David nor I had any precedent in what we
were doing, we naively suspected that if the treatment was to
have any success then either the mice wouldn’t develop tumors
or the tumors would be slow to grow. To our initial consternation,
neither scenario occurred. Within a few days, palpable
tumors developed on the mice, and I was discouraged to say
the least. My initial reaction was to cancel the experiment,
put the mice out of their suffering, and call it a day. David
urged otherwise, especially since he had gone to a great deal of
trouble to set up the experiment. And so I continued the daily
treatments even as the tumors grew larger.
Any remaining hope I had disappeared as the tumors developed
blackened areas on them. I saw this as the beginning
of the end. Then, the blackened areas ulcerated and the tumors
split open. Again I urged that we do the ethical thing and end
the experiment. But the biology chair noticed that the mice
still had smooth coats and their eyes remained clear, and he
wondered why they were acting as though perfectly healthy.
Then, in the final stages, the mice tumors simply imploded
without any discharge or infection of any sort; it was a full
lifespan cure. We were stunned. Here was a skeptical healer
and a presumably non-believing group of mice that had gone
through a novel pattern of remission to full cure in a mouse
model without precedent of a cure.
As we clearly see, Bengston had a strong and sincere compassion towards suffering mice – compassion strong enough that he was ready to end his experiment and accept a failure. Such a decision is a hard one for any scientist. While, if being asked, scientists will agree that unsuccessful experiments and mistaken theories are also important, since their failures help the progress of science in general, that is obviously not what they desire. They want the be able and triumphant experimenters and theoreticians. They want to be praised, to achieve status and fame because of their work.
Bengston, however, was ready to give up all of his desires to end the torment of poor mice. His will to help them was stronger than the contradictory and confused mix of his skeptical intellectualizations, demands of the experimental work taught to him by his tutors and peer-pressure influence from his colleagues.
His will – his true will – was to release the mice from their misery. The more his will was prevailing over his desires, the stronger healing intention arose – with the healing getting more and more intense.
Bengston himself wrote in the article:
Healing is effective to the extent that the ego is removed.
Well, this is exactly what was taught by mystics, magicians and spiritual philosophers since the times immemorial.
What differs Bengston’s method from the others is the absence of ceremonial and mythic elements. As Bengston wrote,
I also think that ritual (all
ritual, really) destroys the thing that it is trying to reproduce.
In healing, ritual blocks the “flow” of healing. People get very
mad at me when I say this. And so in speculative hindsight, I
unintentionally may have loaded the deck in my experiments
by working only with non-believing clean slates.
His position here appears to be incompatible with nearly all spiritual healing schools. But I have an unusual interpretation which can make it compatible with them, even in a rather paradoxical way.
I think that the deliberate and demonstrative absence of ritual is itself a form of ritual – a ritual of the mental pacifying and control for non-spiritual people. The purpose of magickal ceremony is an achievement of an exalted (read, altered) state of consciousness with the invoking of archetypal imagery and narrative in a deliberately self-suggestive way. It is likely to work as long as the person accept the spiritual culture and open for mental influence. Both these conditions is not present in the case of devout skeptics: they deride and ridicule the culture and symbolism of the spiritual, and they will quickly get anxious and enraged if presented with the perspective of temporary turning-off of their critical and rational intelligence, which is necessary for the performance of the ceremony. One can, and should, analyze the events critically and rationally later, after the act of magick has been performed; but during the ceremony you should give up your inner resistance for the awe and beauty of the ritual. And giving up resistance is not the skeptics’ style of doing things – especially if they have to do something which they deride.
So, if given the task of an obviously spiritual healing, skeptics probably won’t perform well. Their anxiety and mental discomfort would be strong enough to counteract the compassion to the patient and (unconscious) will to heal.
But, in the symbolic environment will be science-like and, therefore, mentally acceptable to them – all is “procedural”, no ceremonies and metaphors – they may relax enough to let the compassion prevail over the debunking attitude, and the healing intent manifest itself. So, the presumably “non-spiritual” setting of healing works as a covert magickal ceremony, allowing the skeptics to achieve the state of mind necessary for the work: the state of reducing the mental noise of superficial wishes and fears to the level low enough to open the way to the fulfillment of the deep healing intention.
I also think that the absence of someone to pity and heal – or, to speak more generally, of the actual strong necessity for a psychic manifestation – is the reason why skeptics usually have negative results in common parapsychological experiments like Ganzfeld. There is no strong need, and therefore there is no counter-balance to the skeptic’s desire to affirm his or her belief in the non-existence of psi.
Well, this is my opinion on the strange results of Bengston’s method. What is your position?