Image by Gerd Altmann
In this Article:
- What are energy healing techniques?
- Can remote spiritual healing have scientific backing?
- Historical significance of spiritual healing in various cultures.
- Insights into the Bengston Energy Healing Method.
- How beliefs influence the effectiveness of healing.
Energy Healing: Cures from Near and Far for Mice and Men
by Alan Sanderson.
Spiritual healing, also known as energy healing, has been a religious activity for millennia. Christians will be familiar with it from the King James Bible, which describes healing as one of Jesus Christ’s main activities: “Thy faith hath made thee whole,” he said to a man, who was then healed (Luke 17:19).
Healing was one of the chief activities of the Cathars, the Albigensian Christians in southern France who were exterminated by the Inquisition in the thirteenth century. Although it is no longer a specifically Christian activity, it is practiced by Spiritist followers of Allan Kardec and by many other groups and individuals worldwide.
Spiritual Healing and Remote Healing
Spiritual healing challenges physicalism. It is one more example of an effective transfer of energy between individuals, outside everyday interaction—something foreign to physicalist belief.
When energy healing is done from a distance, it’s known as remote healing. And when it is done without the recipient’s knowledge, it is clearly more than a placebo effect (a treatment that works through psychological persuasion).
Although much impressive research on remote healing has been done on animals, plants, and even unicellular organisms, physicalism can only say, “It cannot happen.” This statement is simply untrue. It can and does happen.
Most healers are happy to attribute success to Source, Spirit, or God. It’s the effect that matters.
A Scientific Approach to Remote Healing
Perhaps the following account will help physicalists bridge the distance to remote healing with a bit more ease. It details a more scientific approach, focusing on the mechanism of distant brain-to-brain influence.
In November 2005, the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine published a paper titled “Evidence for Correlations between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients.” The researchers worked in Hawaii, where there is a long tradition of healing.
Scientific Study of Remote Healing
Jeanne Achterberg and five colleagues persuaded eleven local healers who specialized in distant healing to participate. Each healer was to choose an individual Hawaiian with whom they felt a special connection.
Each chosen recipient of healing was placed in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner for thirty-four minutes to record their brain responses. They were in an electromagnetically shielded control room, completely inaccessible to the healer.
During this period, the healer was sending healing, by instruction, at randomly spaced two-minute intervals. The researchers were testing to see if the healing would show on the fMRI recording.
The results demonstrated that the Hawaiian healers, working remotely, were able to affect the blood flow in the brains of the recipients, as indicated by the fMRI brain recordings. The parts affected were the anterior and middle cingulate area and the precuneus and frontal areas. The findings were highly significant statistically.
This carefully conducted scientific experiment in a strictly controlled situation demonstrated very clearly that distant intention promotes clear changes in the blood supply and therefore in the activity of the brain’s cortex in the intended recipient.
This finding gives strong support to the view that one brain can affect another at a distance, even without a connection through ordinary perception. It doesn’t explain how the effect is caused, but there is no doubt that it happens. The experiment gives impressive support to the scientifically minded, for whom observation rather than theory is of chief importance.
For the sake of accuracy, I’ll just add here that “distant brain-to-brain influence” assumes that the healers’ brains were the essential healing directors.
The Healing of Mice and Men
We now come to an account of healing in mice and humans that was highly effective.
Dr. William Bengston is a sociologist who, for thirty-five years, has been active in healing breast cancer in both humans and animals. His method is known as Bengston Energy Healing Method.
Bengston learned healing when he was twenty, through his friendship with an older man who had developed clairvoyant abilities. For some years they worked together to develop a healing technique that was effective for humans.
The technique enabled the minds of both healer and patient to be distracted from rational activities and included three treatment procedures: direct hands-on healing, transfer by a healing-treated cotton towel, and remote healing.
It was effective for many conditions, especially those that had developed rapidly. Quick-growing cancer and Alzheimer’s disease responded best of all. Cancer of the breast and many other areas could be cured in virtually every case. Injuries also responded well, but benign tumors and warts did not.
An important proviso was that treatment by radiotherapy or chemotherapy should not also be given to cancer patients. Those who received both healing and the routine medical treatments rarely survived. This could be because conventional treatments compromise the body’s defense mechanisms.
Bengston also insisted that any intending patient must first discuss the healing with his or her regular doctor.
Since Bengston is not medically qualified, his treatments cannot be termed medical, but medical or nonmedical, they work! He does not charge fees or seek customers.
Bengston also conducted a series of healing experiments using mice injected with cancer cells. The results were published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration and are so impressive that I set them out in detail here.
Bengston Energy Healing Method
There were four similar experiments with hands-on healing. They consisted of the healer placing their hands on the cage containing five or six mice, for an hour each day for about thirty days.
The treated mice achieved a cure rate of 86.9 percent, while the untreated mice on the same site, none of whom were expected to survive, had an amazing cure rate of 69.2 percent! It seems that the untreated mice must have received remote healing unintentionally.
The recovered mice lived for the usual span of two years. There were also two groups of untreated mice in a distant laboratory. None of them survived.
Before the experiments commenced, each healer underwent an unusual training. It consisted of drawing up an ordered list of twenty objects or objectives that they wanted in their lives. They had to work through the list so as to develop a strong emotional attachment to every item.
The list had to be repeated faster and faster, so that the items could be run through the mind in a matter of seconds. Only then could they take on the healing. The final step was to insert an additional item with an image of mouse healing.
Bengston supervised the training. I tried it myself (without Bengston’s help) and never reached the required stage. However, he succeeded with six or more students.
Something special must have happened through the healers’ preparation, since each of them subsequently became, like Bengston, left-handed, a strong indication that the right brain activity was modified by the training process. Or possibly he was working through them, and hence not working through me.
Bengston makes the point that all the trained healers were skeptical (there were no members of the Skeptics Society though!), and none of them had expressed any “faith” in the outcome. The fact that Bengston was able, with this method, to train effective new healers is plainly an important step.
I have been particularly impressed by Bengston’s work. His active research continues, and I hope that when medical doctors finally turn to noninvasive treatments for cancer, Bengston’s contribution through his work on both mice and humans will be fully acknowledged and he will receive the support he deserves.
Isn’t healing exciting? I’ve learned a lot. Clearly there is much more to learn.
Copyright ©2022. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission of the publisher,
Park Street Press, an imprint of Inner Traditions Intl.
Article Source:
Book: Psychiatry and the Spirit World
Psychiatry and the Spirit World: True Stories on the Survival of Consciousness after Death
by Alan Sanderson.
Dr. Sanderson shares his extensive research on the afterlife, the survival of consciousness after physical death, and paranormal phenomena related to the spirit world. He explains his practice of psychiatric spirit release, centered on the spiritual and psychic aspects of emotional disturbance, and shares case studies complete with full accounts of treatment sessions. He offers first-hand accounts of the survival of the spirit after death, from ancient times to the present day, and explores end-of-life experiences, out-of-body experiences, and reincarnation. He examines evidence for mediumship, clairvoyance, telepathy, and the psychic aspects of heart transplants. He also details cases of remote healing, further proving the existence of connections beyond the material world.
Presenting a wealth of evidence, as well as suggestions for new treatment possibilities for mental health problems, Dr. Sanderson offers a comprehensive examination of spirit existence and the survival of consciousness after death.
Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Alan Sanderson (1931-2022), M.D., M.R.C.P., M.R.C.Psych., was a consultant psychiatrist who qualified in medicine at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London in 1954. After his retirement in 1998, he began lecturing on the practice of spirit release at the College of Psychic Studies in London. In 1999 he cofounded the Foundation for Spirit Release, which attracted more than 100 members. After the Foundation ended in 2012, Dr. Sanderson continued researching and writing on the survival of consciousness after death until his own passing in 2022. Visit his Facebook page.Article Recap:
This article provides an in-depth exploration of energy healing techniques and the scientific backing of remote spiritual healing effects. It discusses the historical significance of spiritual healing across different cultures and its modern application in the medical field. Highlighting studies like the Bengston Energy Healing Method, the article argues for the effectiveness of noninvasive healing practices supported by both anecdotal evidence and scientific research.
