Every now and then, Erica would be insistent, and at times, I would relent. But I found her books unbearable. They appeared to be the product of Soviet propaganda without the charm. The few passages I read were often suffocating in their certainty and earnestness. Every sentence seemed to constitute a forced insight or breathless command, with all subtlety vacuumed away. I couldn’t stand it. On occasion, I would read excerpts that seemed surprisingly well written, but I could never escape the sense that the author had simply mastered the vocabulary of nuance in the service of deceiving troubled, educated, wealthy people out of their funds. Thankfully, Erica never demanded my active participation—never, that is, until Vanja.
14
The Great Harmonic Alignment
Erica absorbed the literature of mysticism with intensity and stoicism and applied her significant intellect to mastering the complexities of any particular practice she was studying. Even if these practices were complete nonsense, they still required a fair degree of mental agility just to follow the twisted trails that passed for logic and doctrine. And while she found satisfaction in this process, her emotional response was one of fulfillment for having tackled a list of chores, rather than the experience of unbridled enthusiasm.
This changed with Vanja, the healer from Serbia. I have not the slightest idea how Erica came to learn of Vanja, but when she did, she pushed for my participation with special vigor. I struggled with the competing considerations of staking out my own independence in the face of this puritanical onslaught or just caving in. I caved.
Thankfully, Erica did not ask me to read any tomes or engage in any study. In fact, Vanja was refreshing in his spare approach to energy transmission. There were no books. There was no doctrine. There were no thoughts, no insights, no written guides or verbal codes to selfimprovement. There was simply the Great Harmonic Alignment. And Erica was insistent that I take part.
Who was Vanja Vuković, and where did he come from? Promotional materials provided the background. It appears that during the chaotic breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Vuković family, like so many other residents of Belgrade, would huddle in their basements at the first sounds of aerial bombardment. Vanja Vuković, a frail teenager, could barely tolerate the noise outside and the cramped conditions of the shelter in his family basement, where thirty of his extended family members pushed up against each other in a dusty and air-choked room. Vanja’s first instinct was to panic, but he came to realize that, if he placed his hands over his ears and hummed lightly, he could ward off feelings of despair and danger.
The key was to hum at just the right pitch and volume, not to drown out the noise of the war but to align the humming with the violent cacophony outside. Once the alignment took hold, Vanja experienced profound serenity. Over the extended course of the bombing campaign, Vanja realized that he had to modulate his humming to match the varying tonalities of rocket fire and artillery, but once the match was achieved, he reached a plateau of bliss and harmony every time.
When hostilities ceased, Vanja had occasion to apply his gift to members of his immediate family. His father, a gentle, overweight plumber, suffered from gastroenterological discomfort that had resisted all medical intervention. Vanja asked his father to play a game with him. Hum with me, Papa. I’ll start, and you try to hum along with me, at the same volume and the same note. You’ll feel better. The two of them looked and sounded foolish sitting at their kitchen table, Vanja with his hands over his ears, and his father looking on sadly, more willing to entertain his son than to improve his own state.
But miraculously, the following day, the pain left Vanja’s father. Having suffered terribly for years from this insidious ailment, Vanja’s father was shaken with relief. His disability had become his companion. He had organized his life around its demands and limits. And now, suddenly, he was free. Of course, he did not suddenly become possessed of boundless energy and penetrating insights. He was still Draza Vuković, funny and gentle, but now . . . no longer sad, no longer slouched in exhaustion from pain and discomfort.
And he knew that his son had cured him. There was none of the fumbling contemplation about possible alternate causes. You know, these things can run their course. Or Maybe it was all a mirage anyway and the psychosomatic link was finally severed. No. None of that. There was no mirage for the past ten years. There was pain, aggravated by particular movements in specific directions. And now, that pain was gone.
It was to Draza’s enormous credit, and a testament to his fundamentally decent nature, that he did not immediately seek to exploit his son’s gift. Instead, Draza and Vanja started slowly, first with immediate family members, then with cousins and friends. Not everyone had such identifiable deficits as abdominal pain, but everyone had some disorder to address.
And Vanja found that he could help them, even in group sessions. Over the course of the next few months, he refined his technique. He would stand slightly elevated on a pedestal in front of his congregants, place his hands over his ears, and begin to hum slowly, first in an ascending fashion; then upon reaching the apex, he would descend. He would instruct the gathering to take in a deep breath, then slowly exhale, humming a single note, not too high, not too low. They were to sustain the note for as long as possible, as quietly as possible, but loudly enough to be audible.
In this way, if everyone chose and sustained one reasonably pitched note, Vanja’s cascading intonations would eventually align with each and every person’s vibration, even if only for a brief moment.
In the beginning, small groups would gather in the Vuković living room, all of them present because of Draza’s insistence. They loved Draza, and they pitied him. What could it hurt to spend a few minutes with Draza and his peculiar son? The early participants did everything they could not to laugh out loud once the Vanja/Draza show began. Walking out the door after the sessions and out of earshot from the Vuković household, they would exchange hilarious comparisons about what they had gone through. Was that Vanja’s voice, or was it a small animal shrieking in pain?
But invariably, the participants experienced improvement in critical areas of their lives, whether this involved the lessening of physical pain or the lifting of emotional burdens. And word spread. Rapidly. Within months of the first sessions, Vanja had become a minor celebrity in Belgrade, and it was not long before throngs of people amassed at the Vuković doorstep, clamoring for an audience with the young healer. Their modest home was inadequate to the task, so Draza rented church halls and small playhouses and began to charge a small fee per person to help pay for rental costs. But even these small amounts brought a substantial amount of money into the Vuković household, more than Draza had ever dreamed possible.
Draza and Vanja commenced a campaign of brinkmanship. They would rent out ever-larger locales, advancing significant funds to cover the rent, daring themselves to fail by securing a venue too large for their budget and for their expected income. But no matter how large the venue, they always sold out, with many being turned away. And it was not long before Vanja’s practice experienced exponential growth. The small country of Serbia could no longer contain the Vanja phenomenon, and soon, Vanja and Draza traveled extensively, first throughout Europe, then to Asia. Everywhere they went, hordes of aspirants beat paths to their venues.
And now, Vanja was coming to North America, and his first stop was New York. My scrutiny of Erica had settled into a comfortable autopilot, but with her insistence that I join her for the New York Great Harmonic Alignment, I found my doubts and irritation rising. I was bemused at the venue chosen by Vanja: the Hotel Pennsylvania near Madison Square Garden, a dusty building, jammed into a noisy and drab area of town. I found this inconsistent with the lofty goals announced by the Great Harmonic Alignment.
And what was the precise mechanism employed by Vanja to transmit healing energy? The little time that I had spent reviewing some of Erica’s other pursuits left me baffled, but at least there was a systematic body of knowledge that sought to explain how
healing and transformative change could occur. Whether it be the seven chakras of the Hindu metaphysical tradition or the transcendent essence of Ein Sof in the Kabbalah, you could study and learn, and then, you could accept or discard.
Vanja presumably neither endorsed nor rejected other modes of healing. As far as I could tell, he simply ignored them. Here I am, he proclaimed. I heal. End of story. How do I do it? Why does it work? How does it work? What is the explanation, the architecture of transmission? Vanja did not trouble himself with these inquiries.
Most of all, why did Vanja appeal to Erica? Why did she accept the notion that Vanja could heal others? Was it at least possible that some self-proclaimed healers would be too goofy for Erica to take seriously? I had never heard Erica be dismissive about any branch of mysticism. In fact, in both her practice and her quest for self-improvement, she consulted multiple healers from many fields.
I had difficulty wrapping my mind around this. How could you consult with more than one mystic? Were some healers better than others, and if so, who decided? What if two healers were in disagreement? Would you have a heal-off? Would you lock them in a steel cage, and the winner would be the one who transmitted the most energy? And who would decide this? Would there be a panel of judges, each certified in the measurement of healing energy? And what if these judges disagreed?
I felt that I was on firm ground in refusing to attend the New York GHA, but I agreed to go. In large part, this was due to Erica’s woeful plea that I attend. But perhaps the most important consideration was that the whole damn thing would take about ten minutes. I could spare ten minutes, especially if it helped to strengthen my bond with Erica. But, I reasoned with myself, this agreement was not to be interpreted as a slow acquiescence to Erica’s world. Rather, I viewed my acceptance, and hoped that it would be viewed by others, as constituting an admirable openmindedness. He’s a remarkable guy, that Will—not an adherent, mind you, but the sort of person who will not judge, who will participate from time to time, and who will be tolerant and accepting.
So we went. On one of those March days when the weather forgets its place on the calendar and drops to record temperatures. The taxi dropped us off at the side entrance of the hotel, and we walked up a narrow staircase to the mezzanine level, where a large crowd waited in a giant foyer outside one of the cavernous ballrooms where Vanja was scheduled to appear. As we waited, we heard hundreds of footsteps exiting the ballroom, making room for the next audience. When it was our turn, the doors opened, and we trundled into a gigantic room packed with folding chairs. There must have been thirty rows, each containing about thirty seats, and we methodically occupied each and every seat, with a few people standing in the back.
Erica and I found seats in the middle of the room near the left aisle, and I stood and surveyed the crowd. They were all well dressed and nicely groomed, with a gentle hum of bland conversational topics being discussed and nearly everyone checking their smartphones for email and texts. I had expected the cast of Hair, not an assembly of the professional class on a day off.
An attractive blonde woman in a business suit approached the podium, which was positioned to the right as we faced the stage. She tapped the microphone and seemed satisfied with the reverberating echo. We all took this as our cue to sit down, and for a few moments, the room was filled with the sound of scuffing chairs and clearing throats. She then looked up and spoke in a soft, lilting tone.
“I’d like to welcome all of you to the opening of the New York Great Harmonic Alignment,” she said brightly. “My name is Mindy Christensen. I’d like to make a few preliminary comments, and then, Vanja will join us. And for those of you who wish to attend the Sixth Annual Steel Scrap Conference, I have an important message: you’re in the wrong room!” A rippling of laughter moved across the hall. “Don’t laugh. At one of our morning alignments today, five lost souls realized shortly after Vanja began that we would not be discussing slag processing and dockside loading.” More laughter. “They were in the right hotel but the wrong conference room. Still, I’d like to think that they took something away from the alignment that might help them in the metals reclamation industry.”
The laughter died down. “So I’d like to go over a few ground rules, which are far and few between,” Mindy continued. “First and foremost, the entire alignment will take no more than ten minutes. When the session is concluded, I’d like to ask that you wait until Vanja himself has exited; then, all of you may file out of the room in an orderly fashion, with the back row leaving first, with the next row to follow, and so on. We have large audiences today, so your cooperation is appreciated.”
She rifled through some notes, looked up, and continued. “In just a few moments, Vanja will enter the room from the left side and walk up the aisle. He will stand in the center of the stage. He will raise his right arm, and that will be your cue to hum your designated note. He will then commence the alignment. When the alignment is over, he will lower his hand and leave the room.”
Mindy appeared agitated for a moment, then seemed to will herself to calm down. “The more you can sustain the note at an evenly pitched monotone, the more you will benefit. Remember, you are perfectly free to momentarily interrupt your humming to breathe in. Please, let’s not have any asphyxiation today! Find your comfort level, hum out, and breathe in.”
Then, her perky demeanor faded. “I have to ask that no one attempt to speak to Vanja, to engage him in any manner beyond the confines of the alignment. This is not so much a prohibition, as we are not really enamored of rules, but rather it is for the improvement of your own experience. Please don’t touch him as he enters or leaves the room. Please be respectful of not just his power but his delicate nature, for anyone who gives so much of himself will surely possess an enduring fragility, and I just know that you can all understand this.”
I felt a surge of anger in the room, a collective fury directed against the hypothetical oaf who would display such a contemptuous act of insensitivity. Then, the anger dissipated, and the lights dimmed. The room was gripped by a silence that I did not know was possible in such a large gathering. In the back, we heard the rather prosaic sound of a door opening, then light footsteps, and in walked Vanja along the left aisle of the room. He neither acknowledged nor ignored the gathering and walked softly but determinedly up to the center of the stage.
He stood before us, scanning the audience, looking uncomfortable with his arms held stiffly at his sides and his hands clumped together in tight fists. He hardly looked like a dominating presence but instead seemed like an overgrown child told to stand still, with a pugnacity that lay one millimeter beneath the surface. An uncharitable description of his clothes would suggest that he was wearing pajamas. He then raised his right hand, and at that, the silence of the room dissolved into the sounds of a thousand prank phone calls as the congregants wheezed, breathed, coughed, and hummed, achieving an elemental discordance. Then, the sounds became more organized, becoming a cacophonous symphony of a thousand single notes, all at different tonalities but each one maintained at a constant level by the participants. The audience was true to its word, and the hums, once commenced, did not vary, morphing into the kind of unstructured noise that never stays in the background but reaches out for no other purpose than to disrupt your life.
Then, Vanja hummed, with a frankly beautiful voice, although he was not singing so much as he was diving and soaring, leaping to catch, even for an instant, common ground with each and every hummed tone. And as he hummed, he scanned all of us. There were hundreds of people in the room. Did he linger on me when our eyes met? Perhaps his gift was making each of us feel that way, but the simple objective truth was, yes, he did linger on me. This was not a judgment call or an emotionally charged conclusion. It was a plain, unsettling fact.
I returned his gaze, and his eyes darted away, like one who could not prevail in a staring contest. Or perhaps he was just moving on in his journey to connect to all of the participants. He then abruptly stopped singing
, lowered his right hand, and quickly walked down the aisle and out of the room. The congregants collapsed into each other’s arms, and some fainted joyously. No one had yet moved to exit, and I took that opportunity to bolt out of the hall. I ran down the stairs, flung open the doors to West Thirty-Third Street, and was snapped backward by the cold. I pushed forward anyway, crossed the street, and found a bench outside a bar to collapse onto.
I lowered my head between my knees to combat an onrush of vertigo and to suck in as much oxygen as I could. I struggled to find the right words for what I had just seen. Up until now, everything Erica was becoming involved with, no matter how preposterous, had somehow been confined to the interior landscape of a troubled, exotic, yet functional individual. But this was different. This was sweeping, epic nonsense.
And where did all of these other people come from? How did Vanja pack an enormous ballroom with adherents, for multiple sessions throughout the day, no less? How come I never came across these types before? I knew, rationally, that New York was gigantic, that hidden in its folds were innumerable groups and movements, but I suppose they were tucked away and out of sight, allowing me to conclude that the residents of the city, with some notable exceptions, fell across a limited spectrum of thought and experience. That notion was shattered.
Then, I did the math. Thirty rows of thirty seats each equaled a seating capacity of nine hundred. Each individual paid $30, so for our one ten-minute session, Vanja earned a gross figure of $27,000. And that was for ten minutes. Allowing for the time the attendees took to enter and exit, Vanja could probably handle four sessions an hour, so that came to $108,000 every hour. Perhaps he was a hard worker, so let’s say he could handle eight hours a day. That would come to $864,000 per day. So in one five-day week he could earn $4,320,000. And if he did this for, say, forty weeks a year, he could make $172,800,000 annually.
The Reluctant Healer Page 8