The Romeo Error

by Lyall Watson

  The Luzon healers are particularly adept at dealing with diseased tissue, blood clots, and pus. I have seen them remove an appendix, excise growths from the breast, open cysts, shrink bladder stones, varicose veins and hemorrhoids, and even treat several types of cancer with excellent results. In all these cases, it seems that the cures are real and that most of them are permanent. Sigrun Seutemann, a physician and homeopath from Karlsruhe, has made seventeen trips to the Philippines, taking a total of over two thousand patients from Europe, and her case histories show dramatic proof of improvement. There is naturally still room for argument about whether the cures were effected physically by the healers or psychosomatically by the patients. The final verdict on the healer's medical prowess will have to wait for a long-term, large-scale, before-and-after study by a professional team; but in the meantime there is, for me at least, a more exciting aspect to this phenomenon.

  Every single one of the healers, every day of his life, demonstrates the repeated ability to apparently materialize and dematerialize living tissue. In the treatments I saw, I could never be certain that the body wall had been opened, but there was absolutely no doubt about the reality of the blood and tissue that appears on the surface. I took blood samples from a friend before, during, and after a simple operation on a cyst on her arm, and supervised their typing in a laboratory in Manila City. They were all the same blood. Hiroshi Motoyama had blood obtained during an operation on a Japanese woman typed by the medical school at Tokyo University and it matched that of a sample taken later from the patient by a hospital in Chiba. [191] But the gory mess in which the healers dabble so impressively does not always come from inside the patient's body.

  In one series of tests conducted by the Swiss psychiatrist Hans Naegeli, the blood samples taken during the operations failed to match any of the patients involved. Two of the three samples were identical and the third was not even human but apparently from a sheep -- despite the fact that the nearest sheep to the Philippines must be those in Australia. [201] Seutemann has watched more than six thousand operations, and she estimates that the body is opened in only a very small percentage and then only by the most developed of the healers, particularly Tony Agpaoa. She also feels that the tissue that apparently materializes on the surface of the body is nonhuman in about 98 per cent of all the operations.

  This does not mean that any kind of fraud need be involved. I have watched a number of operations under conditions so carefully controlled that there was no possibility of sleight-of-hand or of the tissue being prepared before the operation or being concealed in any way -- and yet it still appeared.

  On one occasion, a healer came to have a meal with me in my hotel in Manila. While we sat together, he was approached by an American lady I knew by sight. She had never met him, but wanted to know if he could possibly find the time to treat her before she returned to the States the following morning. He was reluctant to do anything at that late hour, but when I offered them the use of my room, he agreed to try. He agreed also to give me this chance to eliminate any suspicions I might have about the source of the tissue that customarily appears on the surface of the patient's body in his treatments.

  I took him immediately up to my room. He stripped and allowed me to make a thorough search of him and to lock his clothes in my cupboard. He wore only a pair of my own thin cotton shorts. The patient was similarly searched and agreed to be treated, lying on my hotel bed, with not even the usual towel as covering. I and a friend drew up chairs and sat and watched the entire proceedings from a distance of less than two feet.

  The healer used no water, no cotton wool, no oils -- nothing which could be prepared in any way to produce chemical reactions that would simulate blood or tissue. And yet despite all these precautions, after he had manipulated the surface of her abdomen for less than three minutes, a red liquid appeared on her skin which, on subsequent analysis, proved to be blood of a group appropriate to her own. A little later in the treatment, the healer also succeeded in producing a small quantity of tissue, about ten grams, which I collected and sealed in a specimen jar with the object of typing it when I could get to the laboratory the next day. But I never did get that analysis. Although the jar never left my pocket, the next morning it was still sealed, but it was empty. The sample had vanished as though it had not been completely materialized in the first place.

  For centuries there have been reports of mediums who could materialize things or produce ectoplasm, but these have been fleeting phenomena, notoriously difficult to investigate. But here in the Philippines we have materialization and subsequent dematerialization taking place hundreds of times every day, on demand and at will, in broad daylight.

  I find it difficult to believe that the fibrous tumor I held in my hand was actually removed from the patient's body. In some cases, X-ray photographs of patients taken on their return from the Philippines show that tumors, cancers and arthritic growths have indeed disappeared, but the possibility still exists that these structures could have been internally reabsorbed. I believe that most of the healing is self-controlled in this way and that the healer is responsible only for setting dormant physiological machinery in action. It seems likely that the vivid demonstration of blood and guts is specifically designed to provide the shock therapy necessary to initiate this process, and that the exact nature or origin of the matter seen on the surface of the body is in a very real sense, immaterial. On several occasions I have collected samples of tissue for analysis, only to have them vanish from sealed specimen jars after several hours almost as though they had not been fully materialized in the first place. This is a very distressing experience for any scientist grounded, as I am, in a physics that does not allow this kind of matter transformation without the expenditure of enormous quantities of energy.

  Some of the healers also produce psychokinetic effects with the same nonchalance. Juan Blance, of Pasig, does make real incisions in the bodies of his patients, but he does so without a knife and from a distance. He simply points his finger at the skin and a cut appears instantaneously -- about two centimeters long and a few millimeters deep. Naegeli comments: "At a distance of about twenty centimeters from the body, often using the right forefinger of a bystander or his own forefinger, he points at a spot on the body where he wishes to make an incision. A cut appears, it seems almost instantaneously. It is a clean cut, with a few drops of blood, not a steady flow. The subcutaneous tissue can be seen and the patient can feel the cut." [261] I found that the cut appears in the same way even if a sheet of plastic foil is placed between Blance and the patient.

  On one occasion I allowed him to cut me in this way and though a thin hairline cut appeared on my skin and began to ooze blood, the double layer of polythene lying over my chest was completely undamaged. I still bear a faint white scar as evidence of the reality of the wound produced entirely without normal physical contact.

  José Mercardo, of Bagag in the Pangasinan lowlands, uses a similar ability to give what he calls spirit injections. He lines his patients up against one wall of his clinic and walks down the row with nothing in his hands, making motions with his finger like a small boy "zapping" friends with an invisible raygun. Each of the patients feels a pinprick on that part of the body being pointed at, and most ooze a spot of blood from the "puncture."

  One day I joined the line. When he pointed his finger at my bicep, I felt a sharp localized pain. When I rolled up my sleeve, there was a tiny puncture wound of the kind one would expect to have been produced by a needle, and a drop of blood. The shirt seemed to be totally undamaged.

  As a western scientist, one thinks first of mechanical solutions. I toyed briefly with the notion of a concealed laser beam, but soon discounted this on the grounds that this man could not have concealed, would not have been able to afford, and could never have manipulated a laser in this way. I thought of equipment capable of firing minute projectiles of water, ice or even blood, and then discontinued this line of enquiry for similar reasons.

  I c
ame back the following morning with very simple equipment designed to test some of the possibilities inherent in the situation. I placed a fold sheet of polythene, four layers thick, over my bicep and held it in place with a rubber band beneath my cotton shirt. Then I joined the line again.

  Mercardo made his customary gesture in my direction from a distance of about five feet. I felt nothing and told him so, asking if he would try again. He repeated the process from three feet away. This time I felt the prick and when I removed the pad, I found the usual puncture and a drop of blood, which I collected on a microscope slide for analysis. Five minutes later I squeezed out a second drop for the sake of comparison.

  I found also that the sheet of polytbene had been pierced in the area directly over the wound as though a cold needle had been run right through all four layers. An inch away from this point, probably in the area corresponding to Mercardo's first 'injection,' there was another puncture in the material, but this time passing through only two of the four layers as though his strength from a distance of five feet was not sufficient to penetrate my experimental barrier. This made some kind of sense, but the problem was that it was the innermost two layers, those closest to my skin, that had been punctured.

  When the blood samples were typed in a Manila laboratory later that same day under my personal supervision, the second one proved to belong to a group the same as my own, but the first was totally foreign to me. It wasn't even human; the red corpuscles had nuclei.

  The presence of the holes in the polythene layers nearest my skin seemed to cancel out the possibility of the healer being able to project some kind of energetic ray. The existence of non-human blood made it seem equally unlikely that I alone was involved in the phenomenon, and yet the presence of a very real puncture wound through which my own blood did ultimately ooze, made the whole thing very personal. We know that it is possible for the body to produce hysterical stigmata in this way. I have seen a fakir in Madras make the hands of a member of the audience bleed by hypnosis; and Stephen Black has a patient who was able to produce an appropriate puncture mark and swelling, when simply reminded of an injection given twenty years previously. [20] But Mercardo's injections are not of this kind, because when I wore a sheet of transparent plastic wrapped around my arm, the hole appeared in this, too, directly over the pinprick wound on my skin. It is difficult to imagine hysterical polythene.

  Since my experience, others have tried to identify the phenomenon by using capacitor plates and other electronic apparatus, but without success. On occasion the apparatus fails to work, but more often the response fails to appear in the presence of instrumentation that would etablish its reality beyond all reasonable doubt. After all my time in the Philippines, I am satisfied that the elusiveness of the phenomena has nothing to do with deliberate fraud or an unwillingness to perform in the presence of scientific equipment for fear of being found out. The fault seems to lie in the instruments themselves and in the experimental attitude which they engender.

  Our tools are designed to cope with objective everyday reality, because this is the only one our system recognizes. They are not designed to deal with mental and psychic factors or the kinds of interaction which can occur between two or more minds. And I believe that in unorthodox healing we are dealing with events in this area, with an order that is based on another level of reality.

  Meek ends his pilot study with the words "At this time there is no one theory or combination of scientific theories which can adequately explain the phenomenon." [181] This is true, but I think that we are getting close to some understanding. The key lies in a comment made by someone who is naturally able to see human auras. She watched Tony Agpaoa of Baguio City at work and said that while he was healing, she could see bright beams of light beneath his hands, blue from one and yellow from the other. It is inconceivable that a group of poor country healers could all afford, or be able to surreptitiously manipulate, a laser apparatus sophisticated enough to be concealed in their bodies, so it seems more reasonable to assume that bioplasma is intimately involved in the phenomena of psychic surgery.

  Motoyama has tested Agpaoa in his laboratory in Tokyo and found that his physiology changes dramatically while he is exercising his healing powers. [190] His brain waves produce a predominant alpha rhythm, galvanic skin response increases, and his plethysmograph recordings (blood pressure) show a rhythm which fluctuates in a way that suggests that the parasympathetic nervous system is involved. This is the system that communicates directly with those areas that are marked by the points known to yoga as chakras, the energy centers that seem to be directly associated with the acupuncture meridia. Everything points to the conclusion that Agpaoa and possibly other healers like him are able to assume a state that gives them access to their own unconscious processes, and that it is in this condition that they can control the action of an energy that could be the one called bioplasma.

  The healers do not know what they are doing, and I cannot pretend that we are much the wiser for describing an extraordinary process in terms of something else we know next to nothing about, but I believe that what we have here is a tiny handhold on a new and other kind of reality. For a scientist like myself, the experience available in the Philippines is shattering. One's first reaction is to throw up all kinds of protective barriers and to say, "No! This is impossible. It cannot happen and therefore it does not exist." But it does happen and anyone can see it. No special equipment and no acts of faith are required, just a ticket to Manila. Psychic surgery is the first universally available, non-narcotic method of "stopping the world." It is, in Carlos Castaneda's words, a way "to break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned." [44]

  Reality is only a description, and if there are other realities, there must be other descriptions. George Meek felt as I did after seeing the healers at work and tried to explain the scientific dilemma in which he found himself. "Twentieth Century Man is so physically and materialistically oriented that he is totally incapable of thinking of himself in terms of his own individual etheric, astral, mental, and causal or spiritual bodies. Even a very well educated patient is totally incapable of visualizing himself and all living matter as a complex interlocking series of scintillating and pulsating energy fields." [181] I would say that the problem is especially acute for an educated person, because he has been exposed for that much longer to the specific interpretations of reality that we in the West have learned to make in common, and to accept as exclusive fact.

  The most dramatic and obvious aspect of the Luzon healing process is the manifestation of living tissue. The reason for this phenomenon may lie in the fact that it is so impressive. I have seen several spiritualist healing sessions in London that involved only prayer and the laying on of hands and must admit that after the first few minutes I was bored, although it is quite conceivable that there was as much real healing taking place as at any clinic in the Philippines. Perhaps the only difference is in the window dress- ing and that all cures are psychosomatic and self-administered, but that those in Luzon succeed particularly well simply because they stimulate patients by the dramatic expedient of providing all the necessary and expected "blood and guts." And yet there is evidence that shows that something concrete and measurable passes from the healer to his plants or his patients.

  We do not have all the facts we need to understand exactly what is taking place, but I think that the balance already comes down in favor of the assumption that there is more to a living body than meets the casual eye. The visual evidence of high-frequency apparatus: the efficacy of acupuncture; the description of the aura as seen by sensitive people and the corroboration of this description in Eastern philosophy; the diagnostic ability of those who lack medical training and the usual electronic aids; the prevalence and accuracy of out-of-body experiences; the reality of telepathy and its relationship to the energy described as bioplasma; the proof of psychokinesis under controlled conditions;
and now the repeatable macroscopic materialization of living tissue -- all these point directly to the conclusion that the body must operate on at least one other level beyond that we know, and have minutely described, as the physical or somatic system.

  Mystics have long held this to be true and have, on purely subjective evidence, developed elaborate models of seven different levels and seven states of consciousness. [38] These may well be accurate and meaningful, and it is vital that introspective exploration of this kind should continue, but I believe it to be equally important that research keep pace on the more materialistic front. Our language and our thoughts are steeped in the grammar of technology and we must use this vocabulary if we want to communicate effectively with large numbers of people. It is said that science is limited to the discovery of local laws and is incapable of reaching finality on cosmic issues, but I suspect that these limitations are ones of procedure and attitude and are not inherent in the method itself. The lines of research covered in these chapters all stem from what I believe to be scientific pursuits, some more imaginative than others, but even the most fanciful benefits by being couched in the language of our time. When we deal with subjects of such fundamental importance to everyone as life and death, it is vital to do so as simply and as directly as possible.