by Lyall Watson
For her first tests, Karagulla selected patients with confirmed medical diagnoses and then asked Diane to describe what she saw in detail. "She described the actual physical condition which turned out to be entirely accurate in all cases." But Diane did not stop there; she also described the appearance of an energy body in which she could see spiral vortices. Diane's account of these tells of seven or eight spiral cones of light that exactly correspond with the traditional chakras of yoga. She says that if any of these cones seem distorted or are even missing altogether, she looks for some pathological disturbance in this area. Following this discovery, Karagulla decided that she needed first to map this energy body in healthy people in order to have a basis for comparison in the case of disease, but she found that it was difficult to locate completely healthy subjects. One man chosen for his apparently robust good health was said by Diane to have major disturbances throughout his body. He was advised to have a complete medical check, which found nothing amiss, but eighteen months later he developed the severe type of nervous degeneration known as Parkinson's disease.
Karagulla devised an experimental procedure to guard against the possibility of Diane picking up any information about a patient telepathically. They would both go into the outpatient's department of a large New York hospital and pick a patient at random by deciding beforehand to choose the one in the seventh seat from the door or the next one to sit in an empty chair. Diane would then start at the top of the head and work all the way down to the feet describing on tape exactly what she saw. Her diagnosis would then be checked against that patient's hospital record.
When Diane reported that the bones looked "crummy" and that the throat vortex was gray and lifeless, the patient turned out to have Paget's disease (a disorder of the skeleton usually detectable only by X ray) and a deficient thyroid gland. When she told of "irregular and jerky" patterns over the solar plexus and a "dark" pituitary, the hospital diagnosis was Cushing's syndrome (a disturbance of the adrenal glands which is often related to a malfunctioning pituitary). When Diane thought that the energy field around a head was "thicker" on one side, it turned out that the patient was an epileptic whose right temporal lobe had been surgically removed. When Diane described a blockage in the large intestine, this diagnosis was only later confirmed by X ray and the woman underwent surgery three days afterward for an obstruction in the colon. [140]
It is impossible to attribute these successful diagnoses to chance, and in those cases where neither the patient nor the doctor was yet aware of the condition, telepathy could have played no part. Diane, and others like her, can "see" patterns invisible to most of us without special equipment, and in every case these patterns seem to be directly connected to that energy body that yogi philosophers describe as the place of prana, that acupuncture manipulates through sensitive meridia, and that high-frequency apparatus reveals as bioplasma. And it seems that the physical condition of the body is not simply mirrored in this pattern, but is perhaps even preceded by changes at this energy level.
In the field of medical diagnosis, the most rapid assessments ever made are those credited to an uneducated ex-miner in Brazil. José de Freitas, better known by his nickname Arigó, died in 1971, but in his last fifteen years he alone treated more than two million people. [94] In a shabby building next door to a hotel in the little hill town of Congonhas do Campo, each day a thousand or more sick people would file slowly past Arigó as he sat at a table, glanced briefly at each of them, and wrote rapidly on scraps of paper. These scraps turned out to be detailed medical prescriptions in Portuguese or German and when fulfilled by a pharmacist, proved totally appropriate for the patient in question.
An investigation of Arigó was carried out in 1968 by the New York neurologist Andrija Puharich and a team including six doctors and eight scientists. They ran one thousand patients past him, and without touching any, and taking an average of less than one minute per patient, Arigó unhesitatingly delivered one thousand very specific diagnoses and for each, a suggestion of an appropriate treatment. [64] Puharich says, "We found we were able to verify 550 verdicts, because in those cases we ourselves were able to establish a pretty definite diagnosis of what the problem was. In the remaining 450 cases, for example in rare blood diseases, we could not be certain of our own diagnosis because we lacked available on-the-spot resources to enable us to do so. But of those of which we were certain, we did not find a single case in which Arigó was at fault."
Puharich also found that Arigó was phenomenally accurate in making out his prescriptions, despite the fact that each took him only a few seconds and he never looked at what he was writing. Many of these were complex, covering up to fifteen different drugs and giving medical and registered trade names, correct quantities, ratios, and recommended dosages. For about 5 per cent of the patients that passed him, Arigó was able to make an accurate diagnosis but would prescribe only the comment, "Sorry, I can do nothing for you," and Puharich's team confirmed that all of these were hopeless terminal cases.
When asked how he managed to do these things, Arigó simply said that a voice spoke to him in his right ear. He identified his invisible assistant as a German physician, a certain Dr. Fritz, who died in Estonia in 1918. He in turn is said to call when necessary for a second opinion on the spirits of a Japanese surgeon and a French specialist. Despite biographic details of these three obtained through Arigó, all attempts to trace them have so far failed. [86]
It was only in the last years of his life, following his release from prison where he served two sentences for practicing medicine without a license, that Arigó turned exclusively to diagnosis. Before his trial, he performed thousands of elaborate operations with table knives and scissors in totally unsterile conditions, while surrounded by mobs of children. His work has been described as like "doing surgery in the middle of London's Victoria Station, in the rush hour." Puharich tells of an operation he witnessed on a patient suffering from a disease of the lower intestine. "Arigó told the man to drop his pants. Then he picked up a knife, wiped it on his shirt, slit the man open, pulled the patient's abdominal muscles apart, brought out the intestines and coolly chopped off a section as you would slice a sausage. Arigó then held the two ends of the bowel, put them back and pulled the stomach walls together . . . he never used sutures. And to cap all, Arigó gave the chap a big punch in the belly and said, 'that's it.' " [64]
Operations like this have been filmed several times by independent teams, and blood samples later identified as belonging to the patient involved, so there is absolutely no question of those present hallucinating or being hypnotized into believing that they saw surgery. Nobody can hypnotize a camera. Summing up their study of Arigó, Puharich said, "He does it. I can't tell you how. His one-man output per week is equivalent to that of a fairly large hospital, and I suspect that its batting average is just as good. At the moment we are preparing our material in the hope that some medical journal will accept our evidence." That was in 1968, but the report still waits for professional publication. And, in the meantime, Arigó has died.
Fortunately, there are others. I have seen them.
The island of Luzon is the largest and most densely populated in the Philippine archipelago, famous for its fertile valleys where rice, tobacco, and sugarcane flourish, but now it has become important for another product. Sixty miles north of Manila and fifteen degrees from the equator is a small agricultural area that has produced a new and incredible crop of healers. Strangely, there is a connection between this outpost and Arigó's state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. In these two places there are flourishing chapters of the Spiritist Society started in 1857 by the French mystic Léon Denizarth Hippolyte Rivail, better known under his pen name of Allan Kardec. [141]
Kardec believed that salvation was not possible without charity. He taught that the greatest gift it was possible to bestow in charity was health, and that this could only be passed on by co-operation with spirits that lived in an invisible world where health was organized and contro
lled. In Brazil there are about two million Spiritists and several huge hospitals where emphasis is placed on the treatment of psychological disorders, but in the comparatively small community in the Philippines, they treat any kind of physical complaint.
Most of the Luzon healers belong to the Union Espiritista Cristiana de Filipinas, a loosely co-ordinated group of little country churches, where the talent of many has been released following personal contact with each other. Their training involves only prayer, humility, and a familiarity with those parts of the Christian Bible in which healing is mentioned -- they place particular importance on Psalm 119. Few of the healers have any schooling or know anything about medicine, or understand what they do, or how; but all of the thirty or more now practicing perform wonders with their bare hands.
In three separate visits to the Philippines, making a total of eight months of intensive research there, I saw over a thousand operations performed by twenty-two different healers. Each has a slightly different technique, but this operation is typical and is taken from a recording I made at the time:
"The patient is a middle-aged woman, barefoot and dressed in a faded floral skirt and white cotton shirt. I am told she has a persistent pain in the stomach. She lies down on the wooden table which I have just examined minutely. There is no possibility of anything being concealed on or under it. The healer's assistants roll up her shirt and tuck it into her brassiere. I watch like a hawk. Nothing suspicious. Her skirt is unbuttoned and pulled slightly away and a towel is placed over the garment to keep it dry. I am allowed to examine the towel and find it innocent, if none too clean. She lies still with her arms beneath her head, frightened perhaps but totally trusting. The healer comes in. He is dressed in cotton trousers and a lightweight. short-sleeve shirt. He grins disarmingly and turns slowly like a fashion model to show me that there is nothing up his sleeves. He places both his bare hands lightly on the woman's stomach and just holds them there while he closes his eyes. He is standing on her right side and lifts his left hand to put it on her forehead, keeping his right resting over her naveL He says something in the local dialect of Ilocano, which I am told is a prayer. Everything is now very quiet. The healing begins. He takes a piece of cotton wool from a roll which I have myself provided, dips it in a pink plastic bowl which I filled five minutes ago from the tap, and swabs over her abdomen, rubbing quite hard, three, four times. Now he starts a kneading motion, pushing the tips of all ten fingers into her skin so that water from the cotton collects there and runs down her side onto the table. The healer grips a fold of flesh between the thumbs and fingers of both hands and raises it slightly, then pushes down more firmly than before. He is now working just to the right of her navel and suddenly there is red color. It could be blood. At first it is watery, mixing with the moisture on her skin, but now it darkens and gurgles quite strongly up between his fingers. I can see no wound. Slowly he pulls his hands about ten centimeters apart and I can see what looks like connective tissue, thin, almost transparent, obviously elastic, red and bloody. There is a lot more red liquid now and it is starting to stain the towel. I am about one meter from the woman on her left side and I lean closer still. The healer kneads her abdomen a little more, the fingers of his left hand seem now to penetrate into the flesh up to the second joint and they are covered in red. He pulls his hands apart again and gestures to me with his eyebrows to look at the tissue more closely. The cotton wool has now been completely replaced by what looks like flesh. I put out my free left hand and touch it. It is warm and wet and coagulation is starting to form little liver-like chunks on the surface. I wipe some off with my fingers and it feels sticky. I smell it. I am certain it is blood. I can see deeper into the mess now. The healer is pushing into her abdomen and a lot of blood has collected into two pools in the hollow he has made. As his fingers move like someone scrabbling a hole in wet sand, I catch glimpses of white brighter mesentery down below. I can see a fan of capillaries attached to what looks like a part of the small intestine. My face is just a hand's breadth from the surface. He is pressing down very hard. Now he splays his right hand and between the first and second fingers a large round lump begins to grow. It rises as I watch. I can hardly believe it. In seconds it has grown to the size of a tennis ball, not quite spherical, still attached down below. The healer's assistant reaches over from his right and grips the ball with a pair of forceps. It is soft and elastic and comparatively bloodless. He pulls at it and it lifts a little way clear of the surface. The healer says something to him. Someone hands over a large pair of scissors and the assistant begins to snip away at the base of the ball. It seems to be connected now only by a band of tissue, but his hand is shaking. Finally it comes clear and he lifts it off. I put out my hand for it and he drops it into my cupped palm like a serving of blancmange. It is warm, and when I press it, only a little blood oozes out. It seems to be hard inside. I drop it into the pink basin and return to the action. The healer is still standing with his left hand in her body rummaging around a little, making squishy noises, looking up at the ceiling. Now he stops, pulls his hands together as though molding something in clay. Rubs his hands one over the other, spreading the blood up to his wrists and slowly flattening out his palms. They are both right on the surface now and there is less blood around. I can no longer see any of the subcutaneous tissue. Suddenly he stops what he is doing, lifts his hands up together, empty, and walks away to wash. The assistant on his right takes a wad of dry cotton and wipes it across her stomach, sweeping the blood away. There is no wound. He uses the towel now to dry her off completely and I rub my hand over her skin. It is hot, but there is nothing on it, not a mark of any kind. Someone speaks to her and she opens her eyes, pulls down her shirt, buttons her skirt, climbs slowly off the table, and an old man helps her walk away."
Afterward, I examined the ball of tissue again. It looked like a tumor and was smaller than it seemed to be when I first held it, although it had not been moved from the bowl at my side. I cut it open with a knife and found the inside partly filled with a mass of fibers laced through the tissue. An American girl who was watching the operation showed me three Polaroid photographs she had taken while the tumor was rising and being cut.
I have quoted at this length from my notes to try to give some idea of what the operations are like. The whole process lasts about ten minutes and is very matter-of-fact. There is little or no showmanship, no music or drums or incense, nothing to divert the attention from what is going on.
During the last three years there has been a great deal of publicity, both good and bad, concerning the Philippine healers. Tens of thousands of foreign patients have been attracted to Manila. Where there is such a demand, accompanied as it is by the offer of considerable sums of money from desperate people, there will be those who will do anything to meet that demand and obtain the proffered rewards. Healing has become a big business in Manila and, as such, it is inevitably beginning to suffer from commercial ills. There are charlatans posing as healers and healers cashing in by using fraudulent techniques to bolster their own talents when these fail under pressure.
None of this is surprising. But it is sad that the commotion should be allowed to obscure the fact that something very extraordinary still happens in the Philippines. There are still real healers at work and it is still possible to see them if you are prepared to take your time and not be discouraged by the raucous mercenary front in the city.
Tom Valentine, a journalist from Chicago, made his own careful investigation and concluded, "I was convinced that the operations in that house on that morning were not wrought by sleight of hand. We were not hypnotized, and I certainly wasn't allowing myself to be suggestible. . . . Psychic surgery is not impossible, not fakery, not hypnotic suggestion, not a hoax, not a miracle and is not limited to the Philippines." [279] He is right, but it is only on Luzon that anyone can see it a hundred times a day, every day.
In March 1973 and again in April 1975, George Meek led a team of scientists to the Philippines. These w
ere experts in medicine, psychiatry, biology, physics, chemistry, parapsychology and even conjuring, from seven different countries. They brought with them numbers of their own patients and quantities of sophisticated equipment. They saw many healers in action and although they were able to recognize and discard several fraudulent practices, they agreed that "the factual existence and daily practice of several types of psycho-energetic phenomena by several native healers was clearly established. The practice of materializing and de-materializing human blood, tissue and organs as well as non-human objects was found." [181] All members of the groups signed testimonies which declared that, in at least those operations done by healers they considered creditable, there was no fraud, there were no anaesthetics, no sterile precautions and no cases of infection or post-operative shock.
One of the team was himself the subject of an operation. Donald Westerbeke, a biochemist from San Francisco, suffered from loss of vision produced by a brain tumor which was diagnosed in the United States as inoperable. He had two sessions with Tony Agpaoa of Baguio City and his vision was immediately restored. On return to the States, his physicians could find no trace of the tumor. Olga Farhit, of Los Angeles, suffered from paralysis associated with a disease involving progressive deterioration of the bone marrow in her head and shoulders -- a condition determined by biopsy at Mount Sinai and the Cedars of Lebanon hospitals in 1965. Agopaoa removed a "tremendous mass of cartilage and blood," and on her return to Los Angeles, X rays and tissue samples were taken at St. Vincent's Hospital. Her surgeon commented, "I don't know what to say, but there's nothing left except scar tissue. It's like something went in and cleaned you out." [279]