The Romeo Error

by Lyall Watson

  This is an attractive and far-reaching construction, based on a large amount of personal experience and as comprehensive as any theory advanced to explain survival, but it does not encompass all the known facts. It presupposes that every living individual must be the product of at least one other previous life, but on the evidence available to us we have no reason to assume that reincarnation is anything more than a rare and exceptional occurrence. Joan Grant's husband is the psychiatrist already discussed who uses hypnotic regression to former incarnations as a psychotherapeutic tool, and he admits that "among those in whom I thought a previous personality might be relevant, only a small proportion have been able to recall a single episode." In most respects, Grant's presumed supra-physical body corresponds directly to the nature and behavior of the newly discovered bioplasmic body. We know that bioplasma seems to survive the removal and destruction of the somatic system, but that it in turn decays in time, so it seems fair to assume that she could be wrong about her supra-physical never disintegrating. On physical and biological grounds it would appear to be more likely that the organizing field that carries the characteristics of individual memory and experience, perhaps of more than one life, would ultimately be dependent on energy and that this can best be provided by a living body.

  Grant says that a ghost is a "dissociated fragment of a personality which has . . . only a limited amount of energy and this will eventually run down, so a modern building is far more likely to be haunted than a medieval dungeon." This makes a great deal of sense, and if we add to this comment the observation that many apparitions seem to be rather simpleminded and seldom do anything more than repeat the same actions over and over again, we arrive at what seems to be the justifiable assumption that little or nothing can be added to or removed from a personality in its disembodied state. It is possible that discarnate bioplasmic fields can briefly touch living bodies, leaving them with the fleeting impression of having seen or felt a ghost, and by doing so become sufficiently recharged to continue for a while. It is also conceivable that they are doomed to continue in this way unless they come across a body in a sufficiently dissociated state for them to possess it, or a newly fertilized ovum in a sufficiently receptive state for them to be reincarnated, or until they become totally discharged by holy water or some other form of ritual exorcism.

  Taking this line of conjecture a stage further, it seems reasonable to assume that the revitalized charge should come from a living body of the same species, but that a desperate bioplasmic entity could manage to derive some succor from any other convenient warm-blooded mammal. There is room in this notion to account in passing for the persistent vampire tradition (demanding bioplasmas once belonging to unscrupulous people) and for werewolves (bioplasmas forced by the absence of man to feed on his best friend). It is also possible that our species is not the only one to produce detachable fields and that there may be reinforcement between disembodied human systems and recombination with other nonhuman bioplasmic flotsam and jetsam. This would help account for the amorphous and horribly mixed part-human apparitions that appear from time to time even outside Gothic horror stones.

  All these admittedly far-fetched suggestions leave us with a hypothetical situation in which disembodied bioplasmic fields mill around more or less aimlessly after clinical death and either attenuate and disappear or else find some other way of surviving for longer periods. We know from many anecdotal and a few controlled tests that it is possible for some sensitive people to hold an object and give vivid and apparently accurate pictures of its former owners. [292] This talent for what has been called psychometry seems to be very real, but it may be purely incidental to the bioplasmic phenomenon that makes survival possible. If charges of electrical energy can be stamped permanently into the wax of a phonograph record, if magnetic impulses can be trapped for later playback on a wire, then it is not unlikely that patterns of bioplasmic energy can be preserved in the crystals of gems or metal with which they have been in close contact. And if this is possible, it does not seem to be stretching the potentiality of nature too far to suggest that this same energy build up by a living body could become re-embodied if it finds a suitable living substrate in the right condition of receptivity not too long after its own clinical death.

  I feel that the duality of living bodies, the detachment of the component parts, the survival of one without the other, and the recombination of these parts following separation in time or space all emerge as distinct biological possibilities.

  Chapter Nine: MIRACLES and other realities

  We take miracles so much for granted these days that it might be difficult to recognize a new messiah. People are being raised from the dead every day by the new techniques of resuscitation. One patient who "died" more than ninety times in the coronary care unit of a New York hospital lives a normal active life today, yet nobody refers to his survival as a miracle. [288] Admittedly he wears an electronic pacemaker and this visible reminder of the role played in his treatment by technology provides us with a convenient material peg on which to hang our credulity. But there are those who still carry out similar feats without mechanical aids.

  On a recent visit to India, I saw a man perform almost every miracle ever credited to Christ. Satya Sai Baba is an unlikely messiah. Tall and slim with a bushy black Afro hairstyle, he moves slowly through the crowds that gather around his ashram near Bangalore, dressed in a long red silk robe, dispensing health and wealth almost indiscriminately. He turns rock into candy, changes flowers into jewels, produces showers of sacred ash from the air in quantities sufficient to fill huge drums, and heals by touch and at a distance. I did not have the opportunity of investigating him closely. but Howard Murphet has worked for some time with Sai Baba and is convinced that no sleight of hand or deception is involved. [195]

  Whatever the reality of his actions; it is fascinating to watch the reactions of his followers, who are seeing almost exactly what the multitudes must have witnessed on that mount in Palestine two thousand years ago. Hundreds of thousands of people who have seen Sai Baba believe that he is the earthly incarnation of a deity. Belief of that order comes easily in India, where reincarnation is seen as a fact of life, but what would the response to him be like in the West? I know that if Sai Baba made a well-publicized tour of the capital cities of Europe, or if a full-length film of his talents were transmitted at peak viewing time on American network television, he would excite less interest than a royal wedding. Instant cures of blindness and paralysis, dramatic reprieves from illness and death, are being made every week at Lourdes, Fatima, Madison Gardens, and the Albert Hall, but they no longer rate even a passing mention in the press.

  Every now and then the British or American Medical Association rouses itself and proclaims, "We can find no evidence that there is any type of illness cured by 'healing' alone which could not have been cured by medical treatment." [230] The professionals conveniently ignore the fact that most patients turn to the various kinds of treatment available on the fringe only when orthodox medicine has failed to help them, and they steadfastly insist that the nature of the disorder cured must have been incorrectly diagnosed, or wrongly attributed to an organic cause when it was really hysterical in origin. But the one thing that no physician dares do, for the evidence against him is now overwhelming, is to deny that healers without medical qualifications can and do effect cures.

  A French student of pharmacy at the end of the nineteenth century was surprised when a patient suffering from an apparently intractable disease took a new patent medicine on his advice and was promptly cured. [127] He was even more surprised when he analyzed the medicine and discovered that it was a harmless compound whose whole value was based upon "the involuntary eloquence with which he himself had advised the use of the remedy, and upon the patient's confidence in him and his word." Émile Coué came to the conclusion that his influence must have been of the kind that sometimes occurs under suggestion in hypnosis, but that the patient was in the end responsible for his own
cure. He decided that all medicines were probably similarly worthless and in 1910 set up a clinic in Nancy to teach treatment by what he called autosuggestion. It was he who turned the catchphrase "Every day, in every way, I get better and better," and for years his system enjoyed enormous popularity, but eventually it went the same way as that other contemporary fashion for phrenology.

  Today we know more about the prevalence of psychosomatic effects, and it is generally conceded that humans can with their own minds make themselves ill or well. The origin of many symptoms in the mind, which is an area few physicians know anything about, accounts for the common phenomenon of syndrome shift. Michael Balint quotes the horrifying example of a man who was treated in succession by thirty-four specialists and was still ill, "although it is beyond doubt that, for instance, the surgeon who operated on his anal fissure, the orthopaedist in charge of his crushed vertebra, or the neurologist diagnosing his jerks, had closed his case as finally dealt with, possibly even as successfully treated." [10] Every time one symptom was cured, another would appear to take its place. This pattern of shifting illness is one that must persist until the root cause is established or the patient finally succumbs and dies.

  At the University of California, Alberto Marinacci has taken in hand a number of patients suffering from paralysis that has no known organic cause. He appeals directly to the unconscious minds of these bodies by using biofeedback techniques to reveal dormant muscle functions. Some have already taken up their beds and started to walk. At the Veterans Center in Los Angeles. Maurice Sterman uses a similar conditioning technique to train victims of severe epilepsy to recognize the symptoms that herald the onset of a fit and to control and prevent them taking over. [279] Stephen Black concludes that of all "the ills mankind is heir to, at least half have always been psychosomatic." [20] This disposes of faith healers as little more than switches that turn people's power on or off, but it begins to look as though we could now be putting too much emphasis on the patient's mind, because evidence is coming in to show that healers can be people with exceptional and transferable power of their own.

  At McGill University in Montreal, Bernard Grad has been breaking entirely new ground with a series of beautifully designed tests. [92] He started by treating barley seeds with salt and then baking them in an oven for long endugh to injure the seeds and seriously jeopardize their ability to germinate. The barley was then planted out into pots and watered. Some pots were given untreated tap water, but others were fed on the same water only after it had been held for thirty minutes in a sealed glass flask, between the hands of a well-known healer. The experiment was arranged in a double-blind fashion so that the healer never saw the plants and the person caring for them never knew which bottles of water came from the healer and which directly from the tap. Two weeks later, when the intricate layout was unraveled, it was found that the barley seeds that had received the treated water showed a higher germination rate, taller growth, and a greater yield than those in less privileged pots.

  The key to this effect lies in the fact that water is com- posed of highly unstable molecules held together by chemical bonds only 10 per cent as strong as those in most other compounds. These links are rather fragile, and it seems that they become distorted in the hands of a healer. It is possible for a skilled molecular chemist, given nothing but two samples of pure water, to distinguish between them purely on the basis of these alterations in the nature of their atomic bonds. Science is indeed wonderful, but it loses some of its magic when we discover that there must be an equally sophisticated laboratory in action in every barley seed.

  Most of the body weight of living organisms is made up of water and all biochemical processes take place in an aqueous medium, so the healer could exercise his power entirely through his control over this basic ingredient. Justa Smith, of Rosary Hill College in New York, has taken the causal chain one link further by showing that a healer can influence organic molecules equally easily. [253] For her first test she chose to use the enzyme trypsin, which is produced by the pancreas to assist in the digestion of proteins once they reach the duodenum. Trypsin was isolated and kept in sealed flasks over the eleven-day period of the tests. Each day the Canadian healer Oscar Estebany held one of these flasks between his hands for seventy-five minutes and then the trypsin was given to another researcher who tested its potency by feeding it on raw protein. The results showed that the healer had "stimulated the enzyme dramatically," because it devoured the provided protein far more rapidly than trypsin kept in control flasks that were left untouched, or handled by subjects without known healing abilities.

  Smith was not unduly impressed by this result and decided that it was necessary to demonstrate not only that biochemical reactions could be influenced from outside but that they were affected in ways that would be beneficial for the body bearing them. In the next experiment she tested the "intelligence" and discrimination of the healing hands by giving them custody of the enzyme nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD). This enzyme is one of a pair that remove hydrogen from carbohydrates to prepare them for the action of other enzymes. In a pure solution without the necessary biochemical checks and balances, this action takes place very quickly, but in a living body it is vital that it should be more carefully controlled. After the NAD in the flasks had been exposed to healing influences, its action on carbohydrate in the tests was suitably controlled. The enzyme was appropriately retarded instead of being indiscriminately encouraged. If there was no discernment of this kind, healers could produce runaway cancer while trying simply to repair a minor wound.

  Still not totally satisfied with these results, the admirable Sister Smith made one final series of tests. This time the enzyme she chose was the combination amylase-amylose, which is involved in the breakdown of glycogen that is stored in the liver and muscles and released into the bloodstream as glucose when and as it is needed. If there is too much activity by these enzymes, the concentration of sugar in the blood soars and the organism becomes diabetic; if they underreact, blood sugar falls and the patient suffers equally badly. So for optimal effect on the normal person, there should he no change in the reactivity of these enzymes after being exposed to the effects of healing. There was none. Smith concluded that "human thought can generate a force that heals. And this force is marvelously selective in its effects on specific body processes." [253]

  Bernard Grad carried the work through the next essential step by demonstrating that biochemical changes like these could be induced in an intact animal. [93] He prepared three hundred mice by giving each of them an identical minor injury produced by nicking a small piece of skin off the back. Under normal circumstances, one would expect to find a range of healing times spread throughout the population, determined by the health, age, sex, and social position of each individual. What Grad discovered was that those mice held in the hands of a recognized healer for fifteen minutes each day all healed far more quickly than mice held for the same period under the same conditions by other experimenters. It seems that there really is something in, or coming out of, the hands of healers that sets them apart from other people.

  Thelma Moss at the University of California is using her high-frequency apparatus on the Israeli healer Yehuda Isk to try to localize this talent. [189] She says that everyone's hands produce pictures that show a glowing aura, but that "the healer's corona is qualitatively different," and when he is actually healing, there are dramatic changes in the pattern. In one test she compared the effect produced on a potted plant by the healer with that produced by someone who claimed to have no talent for gardening. The "green fingers" of the healer left glowing prints that flared wherever he touched the leaf, while the "brown fingers" of the other subject left a trail of dead areas in which the lights of the bioplasma had been entirely blacked out.

  There seems to be every reason to assume that the healers who are conspicuously and frequently successful all have this measurable physical ability. Harry Edwards in Britain, Fra Pio in Italy, Oral Roberts and Kath
ryn Kuhlman in the United States, all claim to be able to heal by the power of prayer. It may well be true that they act only as conduits for the healing force, but it seems certain that they hold at least part of the secret of success in their own hands.

  If the source of health and healing lies in the bioplasma and if every person's pattern is unique, one would expect the characteristics of this pattern to be useful in diagnosing different kinds of disease. This is apparently true. The British medium Bertha Harris is one of those who can see the aura with her naked eye. She tells of seeing recently that there was a double aura surrounding one of the eggs in her shopping basket. [182] "When I cracked it into the pan, there were two yolks and I noticed that the egg was fertile. Without the two yolks, the egg would not have had two auras, and if it had not been fertile, there would have been no aura at all." She is able in the same way to detect pregnancy even in its earliest stages and to see the presence of twin human embryos long before this is possible by normal medical means.

  Many sensitive people claim to be able to read the aura in this way, but their ability has seldom been put to an objective test. The neuropsychiatrist Shafica Karagulla is in the midst of a long-range program of research into this phenomenon in California and has already produced some fascinating results with a particularly good subject called Diane. [140] She apparently detects a "vital or energy body or field which sub-stands the dense physical body, interpenetrating it like a sparkling web of light beams." As Diane describes this pattern, it sounds rather like a television picture that has slipped out of focus so that everybody is surrounded by a ghost outline that extends an inch or two from its surface. She can also see right through the body and pick out the shape and pattern of most of the major organs. Her descriptions of these are those one would expect of a layman, but they are accurate and easily translate into medical terms.