Illness can offer opportunities to tap into unseen powers beyond the physical world.
When we reach out, the world of the spirit becomes ours.
—Allan Hamilton, MD
When I was a child, I experienced a number of Passover Seders, which celebrate the Old Testament account of Moses and his role in helping free the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. The story typically includes numerous supernatural elements, including the claim that God miraculously parted the Red Sea, thereby allowing the Jews to flee and drowning the pursuing Egyptian army.
Though I sympathize with the bondage of the Jews, as I do for any peoples cruelly enslaved against their will, I find it impossible to believe that a gigantic body of water was intentionally and mysteriously separated by an invisible force. As far as I know, there is no historical evidence that such a thing happened, nor is there scientific evidence that such a thing is possible. (I have recently heard, though, that some scientists have speculated about how, under very special wind circumstances, relatively shallow water covering a high ridge in a sea floor might be temporarily blown aside.)
I presumed that beliefs about spiritual healing were like beliefs about the parting of the Red Sea. I had been educated to believe that spiritual healing was either a myth, a lie, or the result of mind-body placebo effects.
However, the truth is that if the deceased and higher spiritual beings actually exist then it becomes possible, in theory, that they might be able to play a guiding, if not healing, role in the treatment of physical and mental diseases. And I might add, its opposite is equally possible. In South America, legitimate mental health practitioners consider psychiatric disease to be spirit possession, and they’ve had success curing people after exorcizing the evil spirits. I know that some might consider this type of diagnosis a stretch, but there is supporting evidence.
So, if Susy, Shirley, Marcia, Elizabeth, and Princess Diana still exist as explored in part II, then not only could Einstein still exist but so could gifted deceased surgeons, nurses, and other healing professionals. And, if they are eager to help us find lost documents, as in Marcia’s case, just think of the motivation to help sick loved ones.
In light of the observations reported in part II, it no longer becomes such a stretch to justify the hypothesis that spirit guides could potentially play a role in healing, either in assisting healthcare professionals on earth or working directly with all of us in the context of self-healing.
For both scientific and personal reasons, I was led to face this possibility head on. In this chapter, I describe two real, life-transforming examples. As I share them, try to imagine what it would have been like if you had been in my shoes, (1) seeing a distinguished psychologist push an ice pick through his cheek painlessly and with no subsequent evidence of a wound or (2) experiencing your severe back pain virtually disappear after inviting alleged spirits to help remove your pain. I invite you to wonder what it would be like if you had witnessed and experienced such startling events. What conclusions would you have reached?
Be forewarned, what you are about to read contains claims and information that are unavoidably bizarre and challenging to the conventional Western mind. I share them because they really happened and because they place in context the overarching question of whether Spirit can and is willing to play a role in healing and how we can document it scientifically.
A Demonstration of Deliberately Caused Bodily
Damage and Rapid Sufi Healing
In the winter of 2002, I was giving an address at an International Qigong Association meeting in San Francisco, and I met a distinguished clinical psychologist who shared a seemingly unbelievable story about himself.
To place his story in context, let me provide a bit of his background. His name is Howard Hall. He holds two doctoral degrees: a PhD in experimental psychology from Princeton University and a PsyD in clinical psychology from Rutgers University. Dr. Hall is a tenured senior faculty member at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he practices behavioral medicine with families, especially children suffering with chronic diseases. He has a background in behavior therapy, hypnosis, and biofeedback. His wife is also a healthcare professional.
Dr. Hall is also a deeply spiritual person, a student and adherent of the philosophy and practice of Sufism. This offshoot of the Islamic faith adheres to a series of mystical beliefs and practices. Sufism is to Islam as Hasidim is to Judaism. Most people are familiar with the Sufi whirling dervishes, which is actually a form of active meditation.
One of the controversial practices of a Sufi school in Iraq called Tariqa Casnazaniyyah (roughly translated: “the way of the secret that is known to no one") is referred to as Deliberately Caused Bodily Damage or DCBD. According to Dr. Hall, this refers to feats where dervishes intentionally cause serious damage to their bodies, yet with complete control over bleeding and infection, and unusually fast wound healing.
It is claimed that this practice includes but is not limited to hammering daggers into the skull, insertion of steel spikes and skewers in the body, chewing and swallowing glass and razor blades, and subjecting oneself to fire and to venomous snakes. It is further claimed that it involves control over bleeding and pain, wounds healing within four to ten seconds, and no harm to the body.
The practitioners believe that these effects are made possible because of the active assistance of their deceased Sufi ancestors in combination with Allah—their name for the Sacred. Skeptics presume that the practitioners must be faking the apparent insults to their bodies. There is little question that fakers exist but, as with firewalking or yogi siddhas or Christian miracles, fakers shouldn’t dissuade one from considering legitimate demonstrations of the same.
Until I met Dr. Hall, and subsequently participated in an exploratory demonstration investigation of the phenomenon myself, I too presumed that the claims of DCBD were probably bogus. As it turned out, my presumption was wrong; some claims are literally as real as steel knives.
This practice is not unique to Sufism. The Sun Dance of Native Americans may include skewers through the skin, and Hindu devotees sometimes pierce their bodies with needles, hooks, and skewers. Indian mediums are known to beat themselves with swords, and in Sri Lanka, people sometimes hang from hooks through their bodies. However, certain members of the Tariqa Casnazaniyyah school apparently carry the practice of DCBD to the extreme.
For numerous ethical as well as practical reasons, this practice has not been systematically studied in research laboratories in the West. (Paramann Programme Laboratories in Amman, Jordan, has conducted DCBD research with these dervishes.) The most obvious reason involves potential risks to human subjects—let alone possible legal risks to universities as well. Who would volunteer to collaborate in such studies? Since it involves spirits protecting someone from severe bodily injury, though, it falls within my research interests.
A precursor to my investigation was research by Eric Peper, PhD, and his colleagues, who studied a sixty-three-year-old Japanese yogi with thirty-seven years of experience and practice with spirit protection. The yogi would pierce his tongue with a metal skewer but reported no pain, and purportedly showed no evidence of bleeding or physical injury such as scaring or inflammation.
Dr. Peper and colleagues recorded EEG brainwaves before, during, and after the tongue piercing. They reported that during piercing, the yogi showed increases in low-frequency EEG activity, primarily sub-delta, delta, and theta, a pattern of brain waves suggesting that the yogi had somehow turned off his brain to external as well as internal stimuli.
However, we do not know how the yogi’s brain was turned off to the stimuli. Did he do this all by himself—that is, with his mind alone? Or did he receive assistance from ancestors as well as connecting with the Sacred? Yogic masters typically believe in the power of ancestors—the living assistance of deceased yogic masters—as well as in connecting with the Source itself. Yoga literally means “union.”
Dr. Hall had heard of this mystical practice and wanted to witness the claims himself—little did he know he’d end up volunteering for a personal DCBD test. In November 1998, he traveled from Cleveland to Baghdad and took extensive videos and photos of seemingly impossible acts of self-inflicted bodily damage. After Dr. Hall had witnessed and videotaped an Iraqi sheik perform a full range of DCBD feats, the sheik suggested that Dr. Hall try it for himself. Since Dr. Hall regularly meditated and prayed in the Sufi tradition, he was open to this spirit-assisted healing. Following the sheik’s invitation, but with significant trepidation, he allowed himself to enter the prayerful state and requested the assistance of the Sufi ancestors and the Source.
A metal skewer was then passed through Dr. Hall’s cheek. To his astonishment, he felt virtually no pain. Moreover, when the skewer was removed, he showed virtually no bleeding and the wound healed in less than a minute, leaving no evidence of inflammation or scaring.
Though reluctant to press his luck, Dr. Hall realized the importance of replicating this apparent effect in a research laboratory. When National Geographic wanted to film a documentary on DCBD for television, I was invited to participate in an exploratory investigation of Dr. Hall while they videotaped him passing a metal skewer through his own cheek without damage to it. This investigation involved Dr. Hall testing himself while we measured the effects.
We decided to record nineteen channels of EEG brain waves before, during, and after Dr. Hall pierced his cheek. In addition, we decided to use a gas discharge visualization (GDV) electrophotography device developed by Dr. Konstantin Korotov, a physics professor at Saint Petersburg University in Russia. The GDV camera was designed to measure biophysical energy fields around the body. We made a set of GDV recordings before and after the skewering period.
The tools we used in my laboratory—EEG and the GDV device—have been approved for use by numerous university IRB committees, including the University of Arizona. But this was not a University of Arizona research project. I agreed to allow Dr. Hall’s personal demonstration to be filmed in my laboratory because (1) this exploratory demonstration investigation was being performed for a public documentary filmed and funded by National Geographic (they used standard human consent and release forms); (2) the subject was Dr. Hall, a university scientist and clinical professor himself; (3) Dr. Hall had requested that this consensual self-science demonstration be conducted in my laboratory; and (4) we were using previously approved biophysical recording instruments.
Lab personnel present at the investigation included an EEG technician, a research nurse, a research medium, and an observer-only PhD psychologist in addition to Dr. Hall and me. And we hoped there would be those present from the other side who didn’t sign in in advance.
To ensure that no trickery was potentially involved, I purchased a metal ice pick from a local Tucson department store and kept it in my possession until it was time for Dr. Hall to skewer himself. I can confirm that my ice pick was indeed used by Dr. Hall during this experiment.
After pre-skewer GDV electrophotos were taken, Dr. Hall closed his eyes, and meditated and prayed for almost ninety minutes. EEGs were continuously recorded during this period. Dr. Hall signaled us when he was ready to attempt to insert the ice pick. I had never tried to pass an ice pick through my cheek, or anyone else’s for that matter; apparently, it is not as easy to do as one would expect. Dr. Hall pushed and pushed for approximately a minute before the ice pick finally passed through his cheek. After it was in place, he kept his eyes closed for a five-minute period during which time we recorded his EEGs.
Upon completion of the five-minute postinsertion EEG period, we invited Dr. Hall to remove the ice pick. He did this relatively effortlessly without any verbal or physical reaction to the possible pain.
The research nurse and I immediately examined his cheek. A single drop of blood appeared approximately twenty seconds after the ice pick had been removed. The drop was blotted with cotton. After approximately sixty seconds, the wound was examined for evidence of inflammation or tearing. Neither the nurse nor I could see any evidence of a wound, period.
We then took post-skewering GDV measurements and interviewed Dr. Hall. He told us that he had been surprised and concerned that the ice pick was so difficult to pierce through his cheek. However, he claimed that he felt virtually no pain during the insertion or postinsertion period. I knew that if Dr. Hall had been lying, or deceiving himself, evidence of stress and pain would be apparent in his EEG readings. In a follow-up conversation, after Dr. Hall had returned to Cleveland, he said he experienced no evidence of inflammation, scaring, or infection in the days and weeks following the experiment.
We later performed analyses of three five-minute periods of the EEGs: the first five minutes of the meditation and prayer, the last five minutes of the meditation and prayer, and the five minutes when the ice pick was in his cheek. The meditation and prayer were unremarkable; he showed a prototypic eyes-closed relaxed brain, with evidence of lower frequencies—theta and delta—in the frontal regions of the brain.
However, the EEG frequencies during the ice pick period were notable. There was no evidence of the increased EEG frequency activity that one would expect if Dr. Hall had been in pain or stressed; moreover, there was no evidence of increased scalp muscle tension either. Instead, his brain showed lower EEG frequency activity—more theta and delta activity. His brain looked similar to the yogi’s in Dr. Peper’s experiment, who was presumably doing his version of connecting with Spirit.
When we analyzed the GDV measurements, the pre-skewering patterns were also unremarkable. The energy field indices displayed on the screen were relatively uniform across Dr. Hall’s head and shoulders. However, the post-skewering patterns were notable. There was a dramatic absence of a measurable energy field on the left side of Dr. Hall’s face in the region where the skewer had been inserted. This specific pattern of findings could not be explained as an artifact of the recording procedure.
Though Dr. Hall claimed that he had not been self-hypnotized, he had been in a relaxed state. Clearly, something had happened here.
It is evident that Dr. Hall believes in the philosophy of Sufism; could this set of findings be entirely due to mind-brain-body effects? In theory, yes. Dr. Hall’s DCBD test on himself does not address the question of how DCBD occurs; it only demonstrates that it can occur under special conditions.
However, was it possible that Spirit was somehow involved in producing this striking recording, indicative of its assistance during the experiment? I invite you to try and imagine what you would have thought and felt if you had witnessed all of this personally. Moreover, I encourage you to imagine what you would have thought and felt if you had been in my shoes and had interviewed the research medium and the PhD psychologist who happened also to be a gifted medium, both present during the experiment.
They each claimed that they had seen numerous deceased spirits appear in the laboratory during the meditation and prayer and skewering periods. In fact, though I found this especially difficult to accept, each of them claimed that Mohammad himself had showed up as well. (This would be equivalent to Jesus making an appearance at a Christian revival.)
Since neither the research medium nor the psychologist was blind to the purpose of the experiment, it is obvious and essential that we treat their reported sightings with caution; it is possible that their experiences were clouded by their expectations. Because this was an exploratory investigation performed by Dr. Hall on himself, not a systematically controlled experiment, I did not consider their observations worthy of video recording or reporting in detail.
On the other hand, both of them had been tested numerous times in the laboratory, under blind conditions, and each had revealed striking and repeated evidence of psychic sensing. Though their sightings of spirits during this experiment are not definitive, they deserve our serious consideration—especially in light of the remarkable GDV measurements.
The important take-home point is that the combined results point to the need for future blind experiments to determine if Spirit can show up in such sessions and play a protective and healing role. Though Dr. Hall does not see dead people, nor does he claim to have relationships with angels—both manifestations being tenets of Sufism—he believes that what he experienced, and what we witnessed, was made possible by Spirit.
It is worth remembering that Dr. Hall is not a swami, a shaman, or a spiritual healer. He is a well-respected Princeton- and Rutgers-trained experimental and clinical psychologist who is a tenured professor at a major university. It is one thing to dismiss the claims and brain of a sixty-three-year-old Samrat yogi; it is another to dismiss the claims, training, and self-discipline of a highly educated and successful mainstream psychologist and scientist.
Although Dr. Hall did not know my personal life history in this regard, I had direct personal familiarity with spiritual healing and the purported therapeutic effects of ancestors and other spiritual beings. My personal proof-of-concept experience involved the rapid and dramatic removal of severe back pain, followed by the completely unexpected and immediate reestablishment of even more severe pain to prove a point.
Save for my closest colleagues and friends, up to now I have not shared this experience with anyone. I realized that with the decision to write this book, and ultimately this particular chapter, if there ever was a time and place to reveal this illuminating experience, it was here in this context. How can I expect anyone else to “walk their talk” if I do not do this myself?
As a general rule, findings from university laboratories, though important to science and knowledge, are typically not life-changing. However, evidence from the laboratory of one’s personal life can often alter the course of your life in surprising and even compelling ways.
What you are about to read did not involve EEGs or GDV measurements. There were no cameramen or research nurses present to monitor the situation. It was just me doing a headlong dash into new experiences, such as furniture moving, in this case. However, the event was no less real or important.
How Do I know This Isn’t the Placebo Effect?
About twenty-five years ago, when I was a professor at Yale, I did something that was really foolish. I had purchased a six-foot tall wooden grandfather clock and decided I would try to carry it down a small flight of stairs, by myself.
As I leaned over, holding the huge clock cabinet, I felt something snap in my back, followed by excruciating pain. I had great difficulty straightening up. A medical examination of my back suggested that I might have pulled a ligament and/or ruptured a disk. I was living in conservative Connecticut, affiliated with Yale’s medical school, which viewed chiropractors and massage therapists as voodoo doctors at the time. I was encouraged to take muscle relaxants and baths and to put as little strain on my back as possible. For the first week or so, I spent most of the time in bed.
For almost three months, I kept my chair-sitting time to an absolute minimum. I set my computer on boxes at my home office workstation so I could type standing up. The pain was gruesome at first. However, with time, it subsided, and I did not require back surgery.
Though my back recovered, it was left weakened and wounded. Every six months or so, like clockwork (no pun intended), my back would go out, and I would need to give it rest. Sometimes this would happen because I did something stupid, like lifting a box of books. Other times it would go out in the process of doing little things, like bending over to put a single book away on a lower bookshelf. I have learned over the years that the best medicine for treating my back is significant bed rest and lying down on a couch—essentially giving it and the rest of my body a vacation. Typically, a few days of reclining-focused rest is sufficient to enable me to resume normal functioning.
It was January 1, 2000. The new millennium had begun uneventfully; the anticipated worldwide computer crash had not occurred. However, I had just made what I called my millennium resolution—a resolution for the next one thousand years. It was simple, yet profound. I made the decision that I would choose to live the rest of my life as if survival of consciousness were true.
At that time I was in the process of finishing the first draft of The Afterlife Experiments, so this hypothesis was very much on my mind. Let me repeat: I made the decision that I would choose to live the rest of my life as if survival of consciousness were true. The key words are choose and as if. Here was my reasoning:
On the one hand, if survival of consciousness did not exist, then when I died, I would lose everything, including my awareness. Therefore, since I no longer existed, I would never know that my choice had been mistaken. I would never know that I had been wrong to live my life as if survival of consciousness were true.
On the other hand, if survival of conscious did exist, then when I died, I would continue to be aware, to think, have memories, make choices, and so forth. Therefore, since I still existed, I would then know that I had made the right choice. I would also know that my preparing for the future beyond the body had been prudent and worthwhile.
Remember, this was a thought experiment, the kind Einstein used to do when he was in the physical.
I was not drawing a scientific conclusion prematurely about the truth or fiction of life after death. What I was doing was mindfully considering the options and consciously choosing to make certain decisions with the understanding that survival of consciousness might be true. Little did I realize that I would be immediately tested to see if I would choose to act on my potentially long-term resolution. Here is what happened.
On January 2, 2000, I was bending down to put a book on a lower shelf, and my back went out. Just like that, and I was in severe pain. It had been at least nine months since my last back episode. However, I really wanted to go to my laboratory at the university, so I decided to take a shower. I gingerly climbed into the tub, turned on the water, and experienced the pain associated with standing still.
It then occurred to me that I had not implemented my millennium resolution. By this time I had received training in various healing techniques, including healing touch, Reiki, and Johrei, and I was familiar with the claims that experienced healers often invited Spirit assistance in the form of deceased people, angels, and divine energy. I had never thought to ask for Spirit assistance for myself (or anyone else, for that matter).
There I was, standing in the shower, and I decided I would make the request, in my head.
I said to myself, “If anyone in Spirit can help my back, I would greatly appreciate it.” I sent my request to various deceased beings that I knew of, including the deceased founder of Johrei and Sam—short for Shemuel, in Hebrew the name of God.
After about five minutes, as I got out of the shower and began drying myself, I was shocked to experience that my back pain had decreased a good 80 percent. On a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being no pain and 10 being severe pain, my back pain had gone from an 8 or 9 to a 1 or 2.
I could not believe it. My back pain had decreased dramatically within minutes. This had never happened before.
After I had finished shaving and was I was getting dressed, I began considering possible alternative explanations for the abrupt and dramatic reduction in my pain. As I was putting on my pants, I innocently thought the following question: How do I know that this is not a placebo response? Remember, I am a scientist and questioner and this is an obviously fundamental question.
What I heard next completely took me by surprise. As I write these words, I can vividly see myself back in that bedroom, and it is as if the experience happened yesterday.
I quietly yet clearly heard in my head, “Very simply, we will take our support away.”
Upon hearing the words “take our support away,” I immediately experienced the most severe back pain I could remember—at least as gruesome as the original pain from the clock-moving disaster. On a scale from 0 to 10, it was at least a 12.
I fell onto to the bed, crumbled in a fetal-like position, with my pants half on. I had never experienced anything like that pain. It was so severe that I could finish neither pulling up my pants nor taking them off. I was virtually immobilized with pain.
Meanwhile, my intellectual—and often playful—mind had the following thought, Now this could be a superplacebo effect!
I realized that I had either:
1. Experienced a double-placebo response where:
A. I had imagined that Spirit would help take away my pain, and then
B. I had imagined that Spirit said if it would remove its support, that my pain would come back, in spades; or
2. I now understood—in a new and deep way—the larger meaning of the idea that it could have been so much worse.
If you are a skeptic and/or a conventional psychologist, you will presume that what I experienced was either a rare chance event and/or some sort of double-placebo (mind-body) effect. Either way, the explanation would have nothing to do with Spirit per se.
However, what if Spirit was involved in my rapid pain relief, followed by the even more rapid return of pain symptoms?
What if Spirit is actually assisting all of us, to various degrees, all of the time but we don’t recognize it?
What if “it could have been so much worse” applies 24/7, because the normally invisible Spirit world is constantly providing us with background support and guidance?
What if it is in our power, if we so chose, to sincerely ask for additional Spirit assistance, and then actually receive it?
What if all of us have spirit guides, including access to Universal or Spiritual Healing Energies? (The latter leads to the acronym SHE, the Divine Feminine.)
Lying in bed, while doubled over in pain, I was not about to attempt solving this mystery at that time. However, I did realize that I was being given the opportunity to ponder this mystery and decided to give my back the reclining-focused time it seemingly needed.
I spent the next few days reading spiritually focused books I had never taken the time to explore, including The Autobiography of a Yogi as well as a book by the founder of Johrei, so that I would not lose awareness of the potential take-home spiritual message here.
When You Hear Hoofbeats, Don’t Look for Spirit First
There is a well-known phrase in emergency medicine that I believe applies equally well to science: when you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras. The reasoning is as follows:
In emergency medicine, where life-altering decisions often need to be made quickly, it is prudent to consider the most probable causes for a given situation first, and then move on to the less probable. In other words, if the given situation or symptom is, metaphorically, hoofbeats, then the correct phrase would read something to the effect, “When you hear hoofbeats, look for horses first.”
If the horse explanation was not supported by the facts, the emergency physician would then consider the next most probable response, which might be a pony or a mule. (Remember, this is a metaphor; the precise probabilities are not important here.) Clearly, it would not be time to look for a zebra explanation until horse, pony, mule, donkey, and maybe moose explanations had been sought and ruled out.
When we consider the two single-subject sets of observations reported in this chapter—Dr. Hall’s apparent DCBD that he demonstrated in the university laboratory and my apparent back-pain reduction and then recurrence in the personal laboratory of my private life—the explanation for the hoofbeats we heard would appropriately be the horse (the placebo/mind-body explanation) rather than the zebra (the spirit-assisted explanation).
However, when we take into account the information presented in part II of this book, there is reason to entertain the hypothesis that Spirit exists. Consequently, it is prudent that we include the zebra—spirit-assisted effects—in our list of possible explanations. And it’s now possible for science to test whether Spirit actually shows up in healing sessions. Spiritual healing can now be conducted under blind conditions, whether the person who is sick knows that they are receiving healings or not, as you will see in the next chapter.