I have paid only casual attention to other energy healers because most of their supporting evidence—as presented in books and seminars—is anecdotal, whereas my own obsession is with the underlying fundamentals of healing.
Many of these healers trace their lineage back to a single revered teacher. Reiki (Japanese for “life-force”) was founded by Mikao Usui, who reportedly received his healing powers in 1922 after three weeks of fasting and meditation on Japan’s Mount Kurama. Reiki healers, possibly numbering in the millions worldwide, channel universal energy, which is said to be infinite and intelligent. They channel this energy through their palms, which are placed on or near their clients to stimulate the client’s own self-healing. Some Reiki masters say they can not only heal at a distance, but also backward and forward in time.
Therapeutic Touch (TT) is a Western-based healing system that has been taught to an estimated seventy thousand professional caregivers and is offered to patients in some North American hospitals. It evolved from experiments that Dolores Krieger, a professor of nursing at New York University, did with psychic Oskar Estebany, demonstrating that hands-on healing significantly increased hemoglobin in the blood of sick people, suggesting an immunological response.[1] As with Reiki, TT practitioners hold or move their hands a few inches from their patients, with the intent of activating their immune systems.
In the West, the most popular hands-on healing tradition is founded in the miracles of Jesus Christ, as written in the New Testament in John 14:12. After restoring sight and curing the lame, Jesus told his followers: “He that believeth in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do.”[2]
Among early Christian cults, healing was an ordinary part of preaching, often utilizing oil and water. European kings such as England’s Edward the Confessor, who claimed to rule by divine right, exercised the royal touch to heal their subjects. Even Napoleon was said to have tried his own skills, to little avail.
Today, faith healing remains a popular part of the Christian Evangelical movement. It’s also endorsed, with caution, by the Roman Catholic Church, which expects miracles from those traveling the path to sainthood. I have sometimes thought how convenient it would be for me to reclassify myself as a faith healer, especially when I’m asked in a doubting voice, “If you can do what you say you can, why haven’t you won a Nobel Prize?”
The practice of hands-on healing as a medical rather than a religious or a magical rite goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Hippocrates (circa 460 BCE) was known as the father of Western medicine because of his reliance on keen observation and the principle of cause and effect. He summed up his extensive healing experience this way: “It has often appeared, while I have been soothing my patients, as if there were some strange property in my hands to pull and draw away from the afflicted parts aches and diverse impurities.”
In the sixteenth century, Dr. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim—known historically as Paracelsus—spoke of a magnetic, healing, solar force that swept in waves throughout the universe. “Munia,” as he called it, radiated around the human body in a luminous shield and could be transmitted at a distance. Despite the many healings attributed to him, Paracelsus was derided by his peers and negatively immortalized in the epithet “bombastic,” based on his birth name Bombastus.
Inspired by Paracelsus, Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) was also credited with many startling cures, such as ridding a Munich scientist of paralysis, and a professor of blindness, simply by passing his hands over them. When his disciples discovered hypnotism through experimenting with his techniques, Mesmer’s cures were dismissed as the power of suggestion. In the spirit of scientific Enlightenment, Mesmer’s name came into derogatory usage through the word “mesmerize,” with its connotation of undue influence.
After European medicine moved into the laboratory, a universal energy, often with magnetic properties, was rediscovered many times.
In 1791, Italian anatomy professor Luigi Galvani, an early experimenter in electricity, wrote of a life-force similar to electricity and magnetism, which seemed to radiate from the sun. It had an affinity for metal, water, and wood. It permeated everything, pulsated through the human body by means of the breath, and streamed from the fingertips.
In the nineteenth century, German scientist and industrialist Karl von Reichenbach risked his reputation as the discoverer of creosote and several other chemicals when he declared evidence for a new universal energy, which he called “od” after the Viking thunder god Odin. Od was in free circulation throughout the universe, and it permeated everything. It radiated in a luminous glow from the human body and was vital to health. It was concentrated in iron, sulfur, magnets, and crystals, and conducted by metal, silk, and water. Though confirmed by researchers in Britain, France, and Calcutta, od was eventually dismissed by orthodox science as a blemish on von Reichenbach’s otherwise outstanding reputation.
In 1903, French physicist René Blondlot claimed to have discovered a vital force, both biological and universal, which he called “N-rays.” This finding was also confirmed experimentally by other French researchers, who noted its many similarities to od. Like his forerunners, Blondlot was ridiculed by his peers.
In 1936, Otto Rahn, a bacteriologist at Cornell University, noted a biochemical radiation from living cells that played a significant role in growth, cell division, and wound healing. As he stated, “It may be surprising that radiations have not been recognized and proven conclusively before this. The reason may be sought in their very low intensity. The best detector is still the living organism.”[3]
Around the same time, biologist Harold Burr of Yale demonstrated that all living systems—from trees, to mice, to men—are molded and controlled by invisible electrodynamic force fields that can be measured and mapped with standard voltmeters. He called them “fields of life,” or “L-fields,” and believed their voltage could be used to diagnose physical and mental conditions before symptoms developed. Burr validated this theory by comparing the L-fields of mice injected with cancer to control groups of healthy mice.
Burr’s colleague, Dr. L. J. Ravitz, extended these finding to demonstrate that emotion was energy in motion. He described this energy as electrical and found a connection between low-energy states and diseases such as cancer, asthma, arthritis, and ulcers.
In the seventies, Fritz-Albert Popp, a German physicist, discovered that all living organisms constantly send out tiny currents of light, which he called “biophoton emissions.” These were stable in their intensity unless the organism was sick. Cancer patients, for example, emitted fewer photons, as if their batteries were going dead. He also found that organisms used these light emissions as a form of communication.
After Konstantin Korotkov, a Russian physicist, developed sophisticated equipment for measuring Popp’s bioenergy fields, Russian doctors began using his tests to diagnose illnesses such as cancer. When Korotkov measured the coronas of healers while they transmited energy, he discovered remarkable changes in the intensity of their emissions, consistent with what Ben and I discovered while working with a crudely constructed Kirlian device.
Just like religion, science has its martyrs. The most conspicuous of these in the field of energy healing was Wilhelm Reich, born in 1897 in Galicia, now the Ukraine.
Though trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst, Reich discovered through his clinical practice that neuroses were caused by emotional blocks that create muscular rigidity. In his view, cure could be achieved through body manipulations designed to remove those blocks by releasing streams of energy, rather than through years of couch talk.
After Reich was expelled by Freud from the International Psychoanalytical Society because of his heretical views, he was driven out of practice in Vienna, Berlin, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. On relocating to New York in 1939, he began working as a self-taught microbiologist. Within living cells, he believed he observed the same streaming energy he had discovered in the bodies of his patients. During pleasure, cells expand; under stress, they contract. When comparing the blood cells of cancer patients with those of healthy donors, he found constrictions that he judged to be the result of long-term stress. Deprived of emotional stimulation, the cells had run down like batteries, leaving the whole organism vulnerable to disease.
Based on these observations, Reich developed a blood test for diagnosing cancer before the appearance of tumors, anticipating the Pap smear by more than a dozen years. While other microbiologists were still obsessed with finding a virus or some other toxin as the cause of cancer, Reich had hit upon immunological breakdown.
Reich then embarked upon the most controversial phase of his unorthodox career. As the result of both his microscopic and clinical findings, he claimed to have isolated an energy in free circulation that he called “orgone.” Massless and weightless, orgone radiated from the sun and entered our bodies through the breath. Since Reich’s experiments with mice showed that orgone was reflected by metal and absorbed by organic substances like wool and wood, he constructed a metal-lined wood box that he called an “orgone accumulator.”
After successfully treating a number of so-called “hopeless” cancer patients with his orgone therapy, Reich founded the Orgone Institute Research Laboratories, which offered the rental of his orgone boxes at minimal cost. His medical critics, once merely scornful, were now outraged. With the encouragement of the American Psychiatric Association, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began an investigation of Reich for cancer quackery. When Reich—with an arrogance fed by a developing paranoia—failed to defend himself in court with appropriate diligence, his books and papers were burned under federal supervision, and he was given a two-year sentence. He died in prison in 1957 at age sixty, a broken man.
Today, Reich’s innovative approach to cancer, emphasizing immunological breakdown, is a medically respectable one. His massage techniques and theories of energy healing have inspired thousands of practitioners, many of whom have never heard his name. Yet in mainstream history, he’s still dismissed as a crackpot. When I mention his name to therapists, some actually recoil.
One exception to this is my Society for Scientific Exploration friend, psychiatrist Richard Blasband, who unabashedly calls himself a Reichian. Over the decades, Dick has researched a number of Reich’s theories, including an offbeat one of special interest to me because of my association with Ben. According to Reich, orgone energy can be manipulated to force clouds to form or to disperse, thereby affecting the weather. For this he invented a cloudbuster made of collapsible metal tubes. In demonstrations during the fifties, Reich managed to convince skeptical journalists on more than one occasion that he had ended the drought around Rangeley, Maine, where he was then living.
Blasband constructed a cloudbuster in an attempt to replicate Reich’s results. After a few positive tests, he took his Yale mentor to a demonstration on Long Island Sound.
“Pick a cloud,” he instructed, just as Ben had once told me.
After Dick performed a series of successful cloud busts, his mentor told him, “Blasband, don’t ever do that again. Don’t ever talk to me about this again, and don’t ever tell anyone else about this!”
Remembering my own dismay as I watched Ben dissolve clouds, I knew exactly how the professor felt. I also knew how Dick felt, since my own successful experiments so often crashed against this same wall of unrelenting disbelief.
After the crucifixion of Wilhelm Reich, it took a courageous researcher to dare to follow the same path. Dr. Bernard Grad of McGill University was such a man. And just as Grad openly took his inspiration from Reich, so I took mine from Grad.
When I encountered Grad’s research in an undergrad course in my senior year at university, I was struck by the rigor, precision, and simplicity with which he approached complex, anomalous problems, producing results that were irrefutable. So many people talk anecdotally or in the abstract about energy healing, but Grad was a real scientist, designing experiments with clear findings that could be reproduced. He was the single most important influence on my research, and whenever I felt backed into a corner, his pioneering spirit eased my sense of isolation. He became a mythic figure: the Great Grad.
We didn’t have any personal contact until 1999 when Dr. Edward Mann, a Canadian sociologist whom I had met at an SSE meeting, gave me Grad’s phone number. After I dialed it with some trepidation, a gravelly voice said, “This is Grad.”
I replied, “This is Bengston,” thus launching a series of stimulating conversations.
When I sent Grad a draft of my paper “The Effect of the ‘Laying On of Hands’ on Transplanted Breast Cancer in Mice,” he had both a strong intellectual and visceral response. Though healing cancer-injected mice in a cage had seemed exotic to me, it was the standard model that he, as an oncology researcher, had used with a number of healers without achieving positive results.
When he read about my success, he began grilling me by phone. I would get a call at one in the morning: “This is Grad. Are you sure you used the code H2712 mammary cancer?”
“Very sure.”
Click.
Twenty minutes later: “This is Grad. Did you ever use male mice?”
“Yes.”
“But you can’t use male mice. You can’t keep them in a cage together.”
“Sorry, Bernie, but nobody told me.”
Another call: “They couldn’t have been male mice. They’d kill each other.”
“We’ve done it with male and female mice. When they’re sick, they huddle together. When they’re well, they mostly ignore each other.”
Fifteen minutes later: “What was the composition of the cages?”
“Um ... I don’t know. They were mice cages.”
“Were they metal?”
“Well, the tops were. The sides were clear plastic.”
“You can’t heal through plastic!”
“Sorry, but I didn’t know that either.”
Fifth call, no exaggeration: “Are you sure they were plastic? I’ve never been able to get effects through plastic.”
“Bernie, they were plastic. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
In 2000, Grad and I met at the New York brownstone of the American Society of Psychical Research (ASPR), where he was a board member and where I had once taken Ben to be tested. Then in his early eighties, Bernie was a small man with a ready smile and a twinkle in his eye. He’s also one of the humblest people I have ever met. The two of us went into the ASPR’s library, shut the door, then began pacing manically around this big library table, exchanging information and arguing. Our connection was immediate, exhilarating, and amazing.
One of the things I argued against then, but have since conceded to Bernie, is that psychological conditions can affect the healer. A more practical lesson is that healing energy can be transferred to secondary substances such as cotton and water. This is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years, as demonstrated by the Christian concept of holy water.
A very recent example is God in a Bottle, given to me by a woman, Enid, who I helped treat for cancer of the big toe, diagnosed by doctors as requiring an amputation. Suzanne, one of the people I have been training to heal, brought this patient to me because she lacked the confidence to take full responsibility for such a serious case. Enid had also been treated by the well-known Brazilian healer, John of God, who had been giving seminars in the New York area. He had charged the bottle of water that she gave to me, which now sits in my refrigerator. Since Enid was still raving about him, I couldn’t understand why she didn’t just use the water instead of bringing it to me. In any event, the amputation was avoided, though it’s difficult to say whom or what to credit for her healing.
As I have already reported, in one of my UConn experiments I personally used only treated water to take one group of cancer-injected mice into remission. I also confess that I have recently encountered a demand for Bill in a Bottle.
Last January, Yury Kronn, a traditionally trained Russian physicist, invited me into his Oregon lab to experiment with an apparatus he claims infuses energy/information from any one system into another. I was to sit in the midst of his banks of electronic equipment holding a bottle of water, while he allegedly transferred some high-energy recording of me into the water. Though Yury is very secretive about this process, the wires he uses are so thick I can only imagine that the lights across Oregon dim when he turns on his equipment. Anyway, the resulting Bill in a Bottle is now being distributed to volunteers, with a suggested dosage of ten droplets of Bill to ten ounces of ordinary water. As always, I await the results.
In my own clinical work, I am far more attracted to hand-charged cotton as a potential carrier of healing energy, especially when distance makes one-on-one treatment impractical. In a fairly recent case, the effectiveness of the charged cotton was demonstrated by default.
Ruby, who was in her forties, had been diagnosed with ductal carcinoma, a form of breast cancer. Though I had successfully treated that condition many times, I thought Ruby’s case might be more challenging than usual because she had massive doses of radiation for cancer while still a child. Her doctors had predicted she would grow up with deformities, but instead she became a world-champion weight lifter. We’re not talking heavyweight here, since Ruby is only about 4 foot 9—perhaps one effect of the radiation.
Because Ruby lived six hundred miles away, I treated her hands-on for two days either in her home or mine, then gave her charged cotton so she could treat herself between visits. About a year after she was medically diagnosed as cured, I was at her home when she asked if I would charge more cotton for her just to be on the safe side. As soon as my fingers touched the piece she handed to me, I felt a palpable lump in my armpit, accompanied by pain. When I put down the cotton, the pain went away. I asked Ruby if she had a lump in her armpit, but she saidno.When the same thing happened a second time, I pressed her for more information. This time Ruby remembered she used to have a lump there. The cotton she had given to me to charge was old stuff she had slept with more than a year earlier.
I immediately trashed that cotton. Now I instruct everyone to discard theirs after about a week’s use. That time period is arbitrary, but then so is the duration, the frequency, and the number of my treatments. I have never had an opportunity to establish proper dosage in the lab under controlled conditions. With mice you can play around, but with people I always overtreat because I don’t know what’s happening, and I have to wait for test results to be sure that a cure has taken place. This is frustrating. Perhaps I could be treating six people in the time it now takes to do one.
Not long ago I found an urgent message on my answering machine from a friend to whom I had sent some charged cotton for the purpose of microscopic analysis. “You gotta call me back right away!” he insisted. “This is important.”
Since my friend is usually a reserved guy, I couldn’t imagine what had happened, so I returned his call on the spot. Though the microscopic analysis hadn’t turned up anything interesting, he had applied the charged cotton to himself. “My arthritis has completely gone!” he shouted into the phone. “I can walk and I can jog and I have clearer mental focus.”
At last report, he was looking for some raw-cotton long johns and pajamas for me to charge!
One case involving cotton came with a built-in control. A semi-feral cat that a woman, Irene, was handling raked her throat and chest, leaving multiple gashes about a foot long. After swabbing off the blood with water, she applied some charged cotton to her chest, but not to the minor, inch-long scratch on her palm. Within a couple of hours, the wounds on her chest had turned white, whereas the superficial scratch on her palm had acquired a red scab. A few days later, her throat and chest gashes had completely healed, leaving no marks. The wound on her palm took several weeks to heal, leaving a pink scar still visible a month later.
In a more dramatic case, Janis, who was in her twenties, had been diagnosed with ovarian torsion, which means twisted fallopian tubes, along with cysts, causing the ovarian tissue to die. An operation was scheduled, carrying with it the chance she would become infertile. After I treated her a few times, ending her pain, I gave her a bunch of charged cotton to treat herself.
When Janis went for her pre-op exam, her doctor was astonished:
“There are no growths!” He referred her to a specialist, who was just as puzzled. As he mused aloud while looking at her slides, “You’ve got growths in this photo, but they’re gone in the next one. You’ve got twisted tubes in this photo, but now they’re gone. This doesn’t make sense.”
According to Janis, she kept repeating, “I went to an energy healer,” but the specialist pretended not to to hear her.
I’m still confounded by the refusal of so many people in the medical profession to even look at evidence that suggests they may not have all the answers. At least Janis’s doctors canceled her operation.
In another recent case, I treated a young woman from Maine, whom I had never met, for breast cancer using cotton alone. Danielle was slated for a mastectomy, which she had been putting off. After a few treatments with the charged cotton, she was told, “The tumor isn’t as big as we thought.” Her operation was downgraded to a lumpectomy. A later biopsy showed the cancer had disappeared, along with the need for an operation.
As a footnote to this case, I discovered that I had successfully treated Danielle’s mother for breast cancer a few years before. It may be that the detachment required for healing exaggerates my natural instinct for compartmentalization, explaining why I sometimes have so little recall of my clinical work.
One welcome use I have discovered for cotton is its effectiveness in treating myself. I have a weakness in my corneas for which the first symptom is blurry vision, possibly leading to abrasion and detachment. On several occasions when a cornea detached, the pain has been brutal, like having a knife plunged into my eye. Trying to distract myself, the way I do when working hands-on with a patient, proved impossible. On impulse I applied a bunch of charged cotton. The relief was immediate.
On a different occasion, an ophthalmologist diagnosed me with a scratched cornea, for which he applied a big, bug-eyed bandage. He told me that healing would take a couple of weeks. After replacing the bandage with charged cotton, I went back to see him several days later.
He was baffled. “Your cornea has healed.”
“I tend to heal quickly.”
“No, you don’t understand. I can’t find any evidence that the accident happened.”
I have now become so sensitized to cotton that I can’t turn off my hand when in contact with it. It just goes on fire. To see what might be happening, a biologist friend from Washington State set up an experiment with George, a retired railway worker who claimed to see auras. Since George had leukemia, I was to send him batches of charged and uncharged cotton in identical envelopes. He picked the right stuff every time. We couldn’t deceive him. He described the envelopes with the charged cotton as “leaking chi.”
One of the coolest gifts I have ever received was a big bag of cotton given to me by Grad. It had been energized by Oskar Estebany for use in Grad’s pioneer healing experiments. Grad told me I had taken his research to the next level. That’s also the coolest compliment I have ever received. The Estebany cotton is more a museum piece than something I might use. I’m hoping to pass it on to another healer some day.