My son, Brian, was born on September 24, 1980. A race took place between my wife’s giving birth and my defending my doctoral dissertation from Fordham University on an aspect of criminology. My wife and Brian won by one week. We were then living in Northport, Long Island, about forty miles east of New York City. Our daughter, Elizabeth, was born there three years later. I was teaching research methods, criminology, and the sociology of religion and science at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn as well as at a satellite campus in Brentwood. This required a lot of commuting. In 1979, I volunteered to teach exclusively at St. Joseph’s newest campus in Patchogue, about sixty miles east of New York City on the south shore of Long Island Sound. Eight years later we moved into the nearby village of Port Jefferson.
A historic shipbuilding seaport, Port Jefferson is a very privileged community, where a single power-plant pays 51 percent of the village’s taxes. That leaves plenty of money for an enriched educational system and excellent healthcare facilities. Extra perks include access to more than four miles of beach and free membership in a country club on a bluff overlooking the sound, with a PGA golf course and eight tennis courts. I proudly call myself a welfare recipient because I couldn’t afford my lifestyle anywhere else.
Most residents of Port Jefferson are hypersocial and hyperactive. I was on the school board for six years and the library board for ten. These activities, along with my academic duties, which came to include chairing the human relations department, easily filled the space left by my retirement from healing research. I had a new set of professional priorities and a growing family. When I looked back at that other life, driven by obsession, I felt the relief of someone who has escaped from a passion for which the price proved too high. I was no longer a modern King Canute struggling against the tide. It felt wonderful just to be normal.
As a salute to my former double life, I introduced a new course to the college curriculum called Sociology of the Paranormal, which I still teach. Instead of the weird dabblings in the occult that my students had expected, it was a sneaky course on methods and statistics applied to paranormal research. When my students complained, “We thought this was supposed to be fun!” I perversely replied, “This is fun, and if you’re dealing with offbeat hypotheses, you’d better get your methodological act straight.”
While keeping a low profile as an energy healer, I continued to treat relatives and a few friends. I cured my brother of tinnitis, which is noise in the ears without an external source. I also cured him of extremely painful diverticulitis, which is caused by small pouches forming on the wall of the intestines.
My kids had one thing in common—both were unusually healthy. Beyond that, they had been different in every way right from birth. Brian was a monster in size, in the 98th percentile, who developed into a quiet, easygoing star athlete. Elizabeth, who was very small, in the 2nd percentile, started elementary school with the highest score on standardized tests in the history of our district.
When Elizabeth was about five, an incident occurred that indicated she might be “different” in the same way as Ben and myself. I had just parked the car for Brian’s Little League game when Liz began to scream. She had caught her hand in the car doorjamb. As I took her crushed finger in my left hand, she stopped screaming. A few minutes later she begged, “Stop squeezing my finger!”
I showed her that I wasn’t squeezing. “See, there’s space between my fingers and yours. Your finger hurts because it’s healing.”
We stood there for about ten minutes. When I took my hand away, Liz moved her finger. Finding it normal, she announced, “Okay.”
The whole experience was such a spooky replay of Ben healing my girlfriend’s finger that it gave me goose bumps. I particularly remember feeling something unusual in the energy between us—a sensation of specialness that would later be reinforced.
This was also the period in which I treated Laurie, the sociology student with breast and lymphatic cancer whom I wrote about earlier. When anyone asked me about payment, I never knew how to respond. At first I would say, “Whatever you think,” then I requested $45 a treatment “if you can afford it.” Recently I cured a man of neck cancer in return for a homegrown zucchini! My healing work has never been about the money. I have always wanted to give this knowledge away. I would love to find that everybody can do what I do.
In another case during this same time-out period, I broke one of my ethical guidelines and lived to regret it.
Though Marie wasn’t a good student, she was a lively, articulate young woman whom everyone liked. Because she was flunking, she decided to join the army to get GI credits to continue her education later, when she felt she’d be more mature. Before leaving campus, she dropped by my office in a highly disturbed state of mind. As she explained, “The army gave me a physical and they found I have this fucking brain cancer. They said I’m going to die.” With great force of will she added, “I’m not going to die! I’m going to beat this thing.”
Marie didn’t know anything about my healing work, but I admired her spunk. After she left, I was arrogant enough to treat her about a dozen times at a distance without her consent. Because we were no longer in touch, I had no information about how she had fared.
From time to time over the next few years, I wondered about Marie. One day a colleague, who sometimes tracked down students to see how they were doing, gave me Marie’s phone number. We met downtown for dinner. When I asked Marie about her health, she told me, “What happened was quite amazing. I had a spontaneous remission shortly after I saw you. The doctors couldn’t find any cancer at all.”
“That’s terrific!”
“Yes, but they didn’t believe the results so they gave me radiation anyway. Now I’m sterile, but at least that’s better than being dead.”
I felt stricken. Even if Marie had known about my treatment, she might have opted for the radiation, but she would at least have done so with knowledge. After this experience, I elevated asking for permission to heal from an ethical guideline into an ironclad rule.
One of my toughest cases was Georgina, a severely depressed nurse in her mid-forties who had been on medication for twenty years and was essentially nonfunctioning. She had no job. She had no interests. She had no friends or family besides her sister, Helen, one of my colleagues who was a clinical psychologist. When I met Georgina she didn’t even talk, and of course Helen had already shopped her to every doctor and therapist she could think of.
I treated Georgina for an hour once a week for about ten weeks, with absolutely no effect. When she did start to come to life, I tried to get her to cycle, but she was incapable of thinking in terms of independent wants and needs. In fact, the more she improved, the more upset she became because then she realized that health brings responsibilities. Georgina had to be retrained just like someone who has emerged from a twenty-year coma. Six years later, Helen was able to report, “Georgina has become a real person!”
Another colleague introduced me, tragically, to the Pauline Effect. As a college administrator, Pauline had always been supportive of my mice experiments, even to the point of attempting to get foundation money for me. When I heard she had cancer, I went to her office, quietly shut the door, and explained that I wasn’t just a mouse specialist. I had also cured dozens of people with cancer. I told her I’d be honored to treat her, but the choice had to be hers alone.
Though Pauline possessed an imposing personality, she stepped back with what I can only describe as a nervous giggle. It was clear she didn’t know what to do with my suggestion. Rather than taking this path less traveled, she opted to go the traditional route, which soon led to her death.
The same thing occurred more recently with Julia, a professor from California. When we met, she had just published a double-blind study on the effectiveness of prayer in a conventional medical journal—a real breakthrough for her and for the field. We had discussed joint research possibilities, but when she didn’t get back to me on schedule, I wrote it off as another case of initial excitement that had dissipated. Later I learned Julia had been diagnosed with brain cancer. She too had gone the traditional route, and she too had died. It was a very aggressive form of cancer, which I had successfully treated a number of times, leaving me to wonder: What, no phone call? No request for help? Even more mystifying, Julia’s father had previously been cured of cancer by an energy healer, and Julia taught my work on hands-on healing in medical school as an official part of the curriculum!
These two cases showed me the difference between intellectual acceptance of energy healing and a willingness to defy the strong cultural bias against it when the chips are down.
One general truth I have learned through hands-on healing is how out of touch many people are with their bodies. Though I’m as guilty as the next person of taking my own good health for granted, I have a lot of physical control when I want it. As a kid I was a competitive athlete, especially in and around water. I could also wiggle one ear at a time to the envy of my friends, flare a single nostril, cross my long toe over its neighbor, fold my fingers back to my wrist, and beat drums with considerable coordination.
In college I played tournament ping-pong, and that’s the fastest ball game there is, with the ball whizzing at you 110 to 120 miles per hour. You can’t play that game consciously because you can’t see the ball—it’s too fast—yet somehow, after years of practice, you can hit it.
Professional athletes in peak condition often speak with wonder about being in the zone, as if describing a grace period outside time and space in which they can accomplish the seemingly impossible. Occasionally when I’m playing tennis, the ball looks so huge as it sails across the net that I feel I can do anything I want with it. Healing is sometimes like that. When you’re in the zone, in the flow, or whatever you want to call it, it’s as if you’re outside yourself watching yourself; however, just like a professional athlete, you have to do the work first to achieve that mysterious alchemy of concentration while letting go.
I’m sometimes asked how effective I am at healing myself. Until a few years ago, I didn’t even know what a headache was. One day when I suddenly felt a strange pain in my head, I thought, Oh, this is what that word means. Then I made it go away.
I didn’t seriously take up tennis until I moved to Port Jefferson. Then I soon got into trouble because I was trying to play on swimmer’s legs. A butterfly competitor strengthens the up-and-down thigh muscles, whereas a tennis player pulls them in a different direction because of constantly moving from side to side. I was a fish trying to be a mammal, and the conflict was ripping my knees apart. When I consulted a couple of orthopedic surgeons, they advised scraping out my knees and giving me an operation—not a very tempting offer.
On a hunch I pulled aside Elizabeth, who was then about thirteen, and instructed her, “Fix my knees.”
“How?”
In another echo of my experience with Ben, I replied, “Just put your hands on them.”
“But what am I to do?”
“Quit asking questions. Just do what your hands tell you.”
Liz started moving her hands around without any confidence at all. Suddenly she said, “Wait! I should put them here. Is this right?” That wasn’t the place I had been complaining about, but when she homed in I could feel astonishing things coming out of her hands. It took about three treatments for me to be completely cured, and I haven’t had any knee trouble since.
Throughout this whole process, Elizabeth claimed not to feel anything, but she’s the most naturally gifted healer of anyone I have ever known, including Ben and myself. As a little kid, she would come up behind me and take me by the shoulders with these disproportionately strong hands only inches long. I would feel the healing coming out of them and just go, “Wow!” We don’t talk about this in our family. If Liz wants to follow the healing route, it has to be something she chooses on her own.
On another occasion, I was hanging out with a friend in Southampton, eating pistachios by the pound, when suddenly I doubled over in pain and my stomach started to expand. As I drove home, I became so bloated I had to take off my belt. That night I alternated between shivers and fever, but instead of going to a doctor, I kept thinking, how long can this last? Eventually I passed out from the excruciating pain. When I came to, I drove to the hospital and literally crawled into the emergency room. I was diagnosed with gallstones, for which the doctor recommended immediate surgery. I decided instead to make the gallstones go away. Back home, I enlisted Liz’s help. Once again, the pain disappeared, and I have been symptom free ever since.
I should confess that my retirement from mice research during this layoff wasn’t 100 percent. Helen, the clinical psychologist whose sister I treated for depression, tried in dozens of places to get grant money for me. If she had succeeded I most certainly would have continued, because it was banging my head against a wall of rejection rather than the research that had exhausted me.
I also became involved in one more mice experiment—the fifth—with Dave Krinsley serving as healer. Dave had been lured from Queens College in New York to Arizona State University, which was trying to make its geology department internationally famous. A biophysicist friend of his, also at ASU, had received a large grant from the National Science Foundation to study the electrical conductivity of tumors. That friend was growing a cancer lab with all sorts of mammals, from mice to chimpanzees. Since he and Dave had a number of research interests in common, he told Dave we could do one of our mice experiments using his facilities. After I flew to Arizona to help set it up, Dave did the treatment.
It was a disaster! Our one hundred mice remitted, but so did the mice in the friend’s tumor study. So did the gerbils. So did the hamsters, all the way up the food chain. What we learned from this was that mass matters—the larger the animal, the longer it takes to remit. We also learned when to keep our healing hands to ourselves!
During this time-out period, Dave and I conducted a number of experiments in remote viewing, with obvious implications for distant healing, though I didn’t make the connection at the time. The term “remote viewing” was introduced in the mid-1970s by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff of the Stanford Research Institute. It refers to the process in which an agent (the sender) goes to a secretly selected place and views a target, which a percipient (or receiver) attempts to draw according to the images that appear in his own mind.
Sometime in the late 1970s I had read Mind-Reach, Targ’s and Puthoff ’s bestseller,[1] detailing remote-viewing experiments in which the receivers’ drawings seemed close to photographic representations of the targets viewed by the senders. Despite Targ and Puthoff ’s adherence to scientific protocols, I thought this stuff sounded too good to be true. So did Dave, proving how tough even those of us with “weird” in our curriculum vitae can be in assessing the claims of others.
Despite our skepticism, Dave and I decided to test the theory. Since he as usual claimed to have no psychic ability, I was to be the East Coast sender, while he would be the Phoenix receiver. We agreed to do the experiment on a specific summer day at 2p.m. eastern daylight saving time, which would be 11a.m. in Phoenix, since Arizona doesn’t do daylight saving. So that Dave couldn’t guess the target through familiarity with my habits, I asked someone he didn’t know to pick one for me. She chose Crocheron Park, a place I had never been before, suggesting that I arrive fifteen minutes early, then wander around until two o’clock. Whatever I happened to be looking at would be the target.
I did as suggested. At zero hour I found myself staring at a gazebo. Because this predated the Internet, I was to draw the target and mail it to Dave the same day. Dave, who was supposed to be sitting in his office receiving, would follow the same protocol so that our drawings would crisscross in the mail. Since I can’t draw a straight line even with a ruler, and Dave is just as artistically impaired, we seemed like a good match.
Using a yellow legal pad, I quickly and crudely sketched the gazebo, then took it to the post office.
Two days later Dave phoned, all excited. “Did you get my drawing?”
Since I hadn’t yet opened my mail, I rifled through the pile on my desk until I found what looked like the right envelope and ripped it open. As I stared at the drawing of a gazebo on a sheet from a yellow legal pad, I experienced a disconnect. “Oh man, we’ve broken the protocol,” I said. “I’ve got my own drawing back.”
I picked up the envelope. It was addressed to me in Dave’s handwriting. “Wait a minute!” I reexamined the drawing. It was Dave’s all right, but so much like mine, line for line, including the coincidental use of a yellow legal pad, that I could have superimposed one on top of the other. By then I had also discovered Dave’s second page. It read, “You got to the target early. You wandered around following a path that wound like this [another accurate drawing]. The sky looked like this [a third accurate drawing].” Typically, Dave signed off, “I don’t think this worked. I didn’t really get anything.”
This test had an even more provocative postscript. According to the notation on Dave’s drawing, he had confused the hour. Instead of sitting in his Phoenix office receiving at 11a.m., which is 2p.m. New York EDT, he was receiving in his office at 2p.m., which is 5p.m. New York EDT. I know what I was doing at five o’clock, and I wasn’t in the park drenched in sunlight staring at the gazebo. Though I had stayed for a while because it was such a nice day, I’d left for the post office when clouds began rolling in. We can get very violent thunderstorms in the summer, and I was at home listening to music when this one struck. I disconnected the record player and all our other electrical gadgets as we’re supposed to do. By five o’clock I couldn’t even stand near the window because of the catastrophic rains and wind shaking the glass. That’s when Dave was “seeing” the beautiful blue sky I had been looking at three hours earlier.
According to Targ and Puthoff, remote viewing is supposed to grow easier with practice. Not between Dave and me. We peaked on our first try, though one of our failures proved more insightful than if it had played out by the book. Once again I had a friend pick a target—an unmanned electrical plant, about twenty yards by twenty yards, fenced off from the road. On a rainy Saturday, I drove there at the designated time. I stood under my umbrella staring at it while listening to the electrical buzz, then painfully drew it and mailed it to David.
By then he and I had loosened the protocols so we could talk on the phone as long as we had both posted our envelopes. Uncharacteristically, he called me that evening full of confidence. “I know that I got it!” he exclaimed. “It’s a motel.”
“You’re wrong,” I told him. “Not even close.”
Dave wouldn’t back down. Finally our ranting grew so loud my wife came into the room to find out what the fuss was about.
I told her, “My target was that electrical plant past the waterfront restaurants, but Dave keeps insisting it’s a motel. He’s even arguing about it.”
“But there’s a motel right across the road,” she said.
“No, there isn’t.” Now I was arguing with her. To prove my point to both of them, I got back in the car and drove to the electrical plant. Damned if there wasn’t a motel right across the road! It had been behind me all the time I had been staring at the electrical plant. Being a task-oriented male with tunnel vision, I had done exactly what I was supposed to do without noticing anything else.
When Dave’s drawing arrived, he had sketched the motel exactly as I had found it with the bushes, the walkway, the roof—everything. Since he couldn’t have been reading my mind, it was as if he had actually seen the target in some creepy way with his own eyes.
After that we had some partial hits and a few complete misses—at least, that’s how it appeared, though if I had been alone in the house when Dave saw the motel, I would still be insisting he was totally wrong then as well.
I mention these remote-viewing experiments with Dave because I know that, even for people who accept hands-on energy healing, distant healing requires yet another leap of faith. I understand that because it still astonishes me. That’s why I held out against the idea of remote viewing, despite the Targ-Puthoff evidence. Without a personal test, the scientist in me was just as unwilling as any other garden-variety skeptic to make the connection between distant healing, with which I was familiar, and remote viewing, with which I was not. In hindsight, it’s probably an example of my left brain being unwilling to acknowledge, without its own kind of proof, what my right brain already knows.
In remote viewing, as in distant healing, “something” is happening between two people across time and space that allows information or energy to be exchanged in mysterious and intelligent ways, which so far defy the analysis of conventional science.