Spiritual Healing

 

Soon after I started blogging in 2009, my intention became showing that it was possible to make comprehensible to some degree the Creative Force/Oneness equated with the word 'God' through reflection about my own experiences and studying documented testimonials by others about phenomena equated with such words as 'paranormal' or 'miraculous.'   One of the recurring subjects of this blog has been spiritual healing and in the December 16th article, I shared some excerpts from the book The Touch of Grace (1986) by Elizabeth Fuller.  

 

Photo from The Touch of Grace:

 "Tony DiBernardi, healed of lung cancer, shows his X-rays to Grace."

Elizabeth's husband John G. Fuller (1913-1990) was the author of several books encompassing metaphysical subjects, including a book about a spiritual healer: Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife (1974).

The first chapter of Arigo recounts the expedition by Dr. Andrija (‘Henry’) K. Puharich and his associate Henry Belk to the small clinic in Congohas do Campo — a village some eighty kilometers distant of the nearest large city, Belo Horizonte.  Puharich met the Brazilian healer Arigo in the summer of 1963.  Fuller wrote that Arigo was "in his early forties" and "so burly, normal and friendly that the Americans were taken slightly aback . . . he spoke Portuguese in a rough, peasant accent.”   Puharich and Belk found Arigo’s voice changing to one with a thick German accent upon observing him conduct his medical practice.  Puharich told Fuller, “It was the first time in my life when I’ve seen a scene like this.  Where, one minute from the time a patient steps up, until the time he leaves, he either receives a prescription or an actual operation, and walks out without any pain or disablement.”  Fuller reported:
 

By eleven that morning, Arigo had treated some two hundred patients. A  dozen or so he sent away, summarily, gruffly telling them that any ordinary doctor could handle their complaints.  Others he scolded or chided.  There had already been about ten eye and ear surgery cases.  Each operation averaged only half a minute.

 
There was no anesthesia and no sterile precautions.  Based on Puharich’s observation, there was no evidence of hypnosis of patients yet Fuller related that Arigo himself seemed to be in a trance state.
 

This, Puharich and Belk later surmised, might account for the strange explanation they had heard in their earlier inquiries about Arigo, before they left Rio.  It was alleged that Arigo claimed he incorporated the spirit of a deceased German doctor, whom he identified as Dr. Adolpho Fritz.  It was Dr. Fritz, Arigo claimed, who did the operating and the prescribing of the complex pharmaceutical agents he wrote so swiftly.  It was Dr. Fritz, a German physician who had died in 1918, who provided the instantaneous diagnoses.
 
The exotic and ephemeral concept of some sort of benign possession by a deceased German physician was too incredible to even consider at this time.

 
Within days, Puharich offered himself as a patient to Arigo for treatment of “a large and rather annoying but benign tumor on the inside of his right elbow, known as a lipoma” that had been checked by his own doctor during the preceding two years.  The lipoma was painlessly extracted with the Brazilian version of a Swiss army knife in a matter of seconds by Arigo while an 8mm camera was rolling.

 

Photo from Arigo:

Inside Arigo's "clinic" during Puharich and Belk's visit "Arigo is writing prescriptions with the same pen he used for twenty years."

Fuller wrote in the book, “There were reports that other ‘spirits’ entered into establishing Arigo’s prowess as a miracle healer.”  These included deceased surgeons and doctors of various nationalities, along with thirteenth-century monk Fre Fabiano de Christo.
 
There are many parallels between this case of the Brazilian healer known as 'Arigo' (1918-1971) and that of the contemporary Brazilian healer John of God (Joao de Deus).  Both trance-channeling cases have been extensively filmed and documented with many books available about the latter, including Spiritual Alliances: Discovering the Roots of Health at the Casa de Dom Inácio (2002) by Emma Bragdon, John of God: The Brazilian Healer Who's Touched the Lives of Millions (2007) by Heather Cumming and Karen Leffler, and The Miracle Man: The Life Story of Joao De Deus (2001) by Robert Pellegrino-Estrich.   This year, an article about John of God was published in O, The Oprah Magazine. 
 

Comparatively few healers are trance channelers. Healers Ambrose and Olga Worrall chronicled their experiences in The Miracle Healers (1965)/alternate title The Gift of Healing: A Personal Story of Spiritual Therapy. Here is an excerpt from the book.

 

Spiritual healing is a natural phenomenon.  It occurs strictly in accordance with natural laws.
 
There is evidence that spiritual healing power is demonstrated through people of many religions, and through some who have no religious affiliations.
 
Spiritual healing forces appear to be subject to spiritual, physical, and psychical laws.   There seems to be an intelligence of high order behind healing manifestations.   I believe that the healing power has its origin and source of supply in the Supreme spiritual power that governs and controls all things, material and immaterial, and that this type of healing is accomplished through both spiritual beings and beings in the flesh.  Some would say through angels and mortals.

 

When the Worralls married, each knew nothing about each other’s psychic experiences.  Both Ambrose (1899-1972) and Olga (1906-1985) described seeing spirits that others couldn’t see while growing up.  He was raised on the northwest coast of England and she in a residential district of Cleveland, Ohio.  The book reveals that an early indication of healing ability was presented when Ambrose found himself engrossed in reading a newspaper account of a local soccer player named Campbell in the same room where his sister Barbara was sitting.  Barbara’s head was twisted to one side in a paralytic position after an injury and doctors had said the condition was permanent.  Ambrose attempted to articulate what compelled him to become a healing facilitator for his sister.  He described the force “pulling me out of this chair, and across the room, drawing me to my sister’s chair.”

 

Here my hands, of their own volition, went out and touched the sides of Barbara’s neck.  This was my only actual physical contact with my sister. It lasted no longer than five or six seconds.  But my sister’s neck straightened.  Her paralysis was suddenly—and completely—gone.  She was able to move her neck freely, without pain or difficulty.

 

Ambrose was first recognized as a ‘sensitive’ (someone subject to psychic or spiritual influences) by a YMCA official who directed him to demonstrate his abilities and thereby encouraged him to understand these occurrences.  One early experience was hearing himself say, “The next time I go up a ladder, I will fall down.”  He didn’t consider the occurrence as significant until he fell off the ladder, leading him to observe “we do not understand time, physically or metaphysically.”
 

A healer who comprehensively documented his spiritual healing and became known throughout the world was Harry Edwards (1893-1976) of England.  After first writing biographies of mediums Jack Webber and Arnold Clare, Henry James (Harry) Edwards wrote The Science of Spirit Healing (1945).  Edwards wrote a variety of further books about ‘spiritual’/‘psychic’ healing during his lifetime.  In his initial book on healing, he reasoned: “That consequent on the emission of a thought appeal by a human instrument, a discarnate mind is able to receive the request, and is then able to apply the correct quality of force to the particular disharmony in the body of the patient.”

 Photo from Spirit Healing (1960) by Harry Edwards:

"Doctors observe the freeing of the joints of a spastic child."

Integral to what he described as “spirit healing,” Edwards found it evidential that “man possesses a spirit counterpart of himself—which is termed the spirit body.”  In his final book, Life in Spirit (1976), Edwards again attempted to articulate the healing process he was able to facilitate.

I do know that when healing, and my consciousness is attuned to the source of healing, I receive intuitively directive thought concerned with diagnosis of the patient’s complaint—often removed from the site of the trouble.  I also receive advice and directives to pass on to patients, especially those unhappy people with upset minds.  Indeed, my life’s work could not have taken place were it not for the faculty of attunement, in which my thoughts are received by the intelligences in tune with me, and it follows that my mind is likewise able to receive thought directives.

My series of twelve articles in 2012 about Theosophical Society President-Founder Henry Steele Olcott and Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky included only a few statements about his 'mesmeric healing' activities in India and Ceylon while touring to promote interest in the Society.  In the Second Series of Old Diary Leaves (1900), Olcott chronicled how he established himself as a healer and explained his rationale for concluding that mesmeric healing is attributable to "the transmission of vital aura to the patient, and its operation under varying conditions within his system."  Here is the passage from Chapter XXIV about how these events originated in 1882.

An incident occurred on the 29th of August, at China Garden, a quarter of Galle, which has become in Ceylon historic.  After my lecture, the subscription paper was laid out on a table and the people came up in turn to subscribe.  A man named Cornelis Appu was introduced to me by Mr. Jayasakere, the Branch President, and he subscribed the sum of half a rupee, apologizing for the pettiness of the amount because of his having been totally paralyzed in one arm and partially in one leg for eight years, and therefore unable to earn his livelihood by his trade.  Now at Colombo, on my arrival from Bombay, the High Priest had told me that the Roman Catholics had made their arrangements to convert the house-well of a Catholic, near Kelanie, into a healing-shrine, after the fashion of Lourdes.  One man was reported to have been miraculously cured already, but on investigation it proved a humbug.  I told the High Priest that this was a serious matter and he should attend to it.  If the hypnotic suggestion once got started, there would soon be real cures and there might be a rush of ignorant Buddhists into Catholicism.  "What can I do?" he said.  "Well you must set to work, you or some other well-known monk, and cure people in the name of Lord Buddha."  "But we can't do it; we know nothing about those things," he replied.  "Nevertheless it must be done," I said.  When this half-paralyzed man of Galle was speaking of his ailment, something seemed to say to me: "Here's your chance for the holy well!"  I had known all about Mesmerism and Mesmeric Healing for thirty years, though I had never practiced them, save to make a few necessary experiments at the beginning, but now, moved by a feeling of sympathy (without which the healer has no healing power to radically cure), I made some passes over his arm, and said I hoped he might feel the better for it.  He then left.  That evening I was chatting with my Galle colleagues at my quarters on the seashore, when the paralytic hobbled in and excused his interruption by saying that he felt so much better that he had come to thank me.  This unexpected good news encouraged me to go farther, so I treated his arm for a quarter of an hour and bade him return in the morning.  I should mention here that nobody in Ceylon knew that I possessed or had ever exercised the power of healing the sick, nor, I fancy, that anybody had it, so the theory of hypnotic suggestion, or collective hallucination, will scarcely hold in this case—certainly not at this stage of it.

He came in the morning, eager to worship me as something superhuman, so much better did he feel.  I treated him again, and the next day and the next; reaching the point of the fourth day where he could whirl his bad arm around his head, open and shut his hand, and clutch and handle objects as well as ever.  Within the next four days he was able to sign his name with the cured hand, to a statement of his case, for publication; this being the first time in nine years that he had held a pen.  I had also been treating his side and leg, and in a day or two more he could jump with both feet, hop on the paralyzed one, kick equally high against the wall with both, and run freely.  As a match to loose straw, the news spread throughout the town and district.  Cornelis brought a paralyzed friend, whom I cured; then others came, by twos and threes first, then by dozens, and within a week or so my house was besieged by sick persons from dawn until late at night, all clamoring for the laying on of my hands.  They became so importunate at last that I was at my wits' end how to dispose of them.  Of course, with the rapid growth of confidence in myself, my magnetic power multiplied itself enormously, and what I had needed days to accomplish with a patient, at the commencement, could now be done within a half hour.

The orientation concerning personal 'power' was due to a lack of better understanding.  My first blog article in 2012 "Transcendental Communication from 'Abduhl Latif'" described a 1929 book comprised of twelve lecture transcripts about health by Abdul Latif (1162-1231) speaking through entranced medium Eileen Garrett.  Here is the beginning portion from "Abduhl Latif's First Address."

A great blessing be upon your heads.  My friends, it is good to see and to speak to you again, and to find that you have given me a moment of your time in which to help you to understand more fully the working of our poor bodies in contact with our psychical selves.  You should know the fact of health is within yourself.  If after all I, or any other soul, should come here and promise to give you great health, it would not be so if you did not co-operate with me, and so to-day I want to give you a little introductory thesis as to the things of which I will speak and we may be able to  thresh out together, and to thrown light upon some of those cases upon which, indeed, there is so little real understanding given at the moment.  I want to say to you that in the case of all of our nerve troubles, whilst we do live in this world of speed and haste we cannot, however much we try, always keep the sympathetical and sensory of the nervous system as strict as it is possible.  The great fault to-day is the matter and manner of our foodstuffs, and the greater fault again, behind all that, is the fact that we do not teach our children the manner of right thinking.

It may seem rather a large statement for me to make when I say, that nine-tenths of your recognized medical profession are not curing diseases to-day by virtue of their knowledge or materia medica, but by the suggestion, which is the soul, in the form of drugs.

Also in this discourse Latif is quoted: "Many of your people will speak to you of the soul going to be destroyed . . . it is no part of the great scheme that, having once lived, a life should ever be destroyed."  He explained further:

It does not matter how low man may become in his own estimation, or that of his fellow men, there is always a moment of time in eternity when he shall turn round and take hold of his ultimate happiness, and so I am a universalist, also an individualist.

Latif concluded this session by saying:

It has been a privilege to talk with you, and I thank you.  I look forward to many talks, when we may be able to understand not only ourselves, but all those other human souls who are in brotherhood with you.  When we understand the brotherhood  and our relationship one to the other, then we can begin to understand the great scheme of things.  I thank you, and I leave you with the blessing of the Great Infinite always about you.

Some other books offering perspectives of spiritual healing are Vibrational Healing through the Chakras with Light, Color, Sound, Crystals, and Aromatherapy (2006) by Joy Gardner, Healing Spirits: True Stories from 14 Spiritual Healers (2001) by Judith Joslow-Rodewald and Patricia West-Barker, The Realms of Healing (Third Edition 1986) by Stanley Krippner and Alberto Villoldo, In Search of Brazil's Quantum Surgeon: The Dr. Fritz Phenomenon (1998) by Masao Maki, One Foot in the Stars (1999) by Matthew Manning, and "Dr. Fritz" The Phenomenon of the Millennium (2002) by William Moreira.

Previous blog articles about spiritual healing include "Gladys Osborne Leonard's Steps to Trance Mediumship (Trance Channeling) and Healing", "Vibrational Healing — My Notes of a 1996 PRS Lecture by Joy Gardner-Gordon" and "Remembering Gene Egidio (1933-2009)". 

  Photo from In Search of Brazil's Quantum Surgeon: The Dr. Fritz Phenomenon: "The moment when computer engineer Rubens channels the spirit of Dr. Fritz."