Going Within (24 page)

As I observed him I reflected on how solemn we expect metaphysicality to be. When someone has the capacity to bridge dimensions, somehow we expect to genuflect and speak with hushed reverence. Mauricio expected nothing of the kind; in fact, he scoffed at the suggestion and preferred an attitude of comic tomfoolery. Perhaps this aspect of his character accounted for his original long reluctance to act as a healing channel.

At about 2:00
A.M
., Mauricio suggested we all sleep for the night. He would be up for a while longer, but the rest of us should rest.

“I want to do a light healing before you sleep,” he said.

I led him into my bedroom, crawled into bed with my clothes on, and he stood over me.

“Protection for her,” he said to his guides of light. Whereupon he went into a series of brilliant illuminative flashes that made what had occurred earlier in the evening look like dark victory. My entire bedroom and the balcony outside lit up. I could see Mount Rainier etched in light outside the window. The light flashes emanating from him were constant now, with no pauses in between. It was awesome, incredible, beyond reason. Yet I felt myself becoming more and more peaceful, and when at last he went and I fell asleep, I slept more gently than I ever had in my life.

The next day Mauricio left, and as I was walking by the river I noticed how much more appreciation I seemed to have for everything around me that was alive. I felt areas of compassion that I had never touched before. I wanted to cry out of love for anyone in trouble or hurting. I wanted to do more to help people. I sat down on an old log and tried to meditate. Instead, I found myself quietly sobbing because as I looked at the wilderness around me I realized that love was what held everything together. I didn’t know where that love came from, but I knew it was in me and everything around me. It was one of those windows in time when I felt I was finally understanding.

I sat on the log marveling at the role “light” seemed to have played in an
emotional
experience. What was the connection? Was light the physical extension of love? Was light the manner in which we translated the God energy into reality?

I remembered all the people who, during their out-of-body experiences, saw the brilliant white light and said they “knew” it was God. Always accompanying that light was an overwhelming feeling of love. Therefore, if we find light do we find love? Was light the vibration of love that we could tolerate? Was there an even more brilliant light waiting for us in the vast dominion of cosmic understanding?

Perhaps this was how science and spirituality would meet. In the struggle of science to explain God and creation, perhaps the answer lay in the subatomic light particles that seemed to be dancing as a kind of glue, holding consciousness together. Were these subatomic light particles really particles of God energy? Could it be conceptually that simple? And in being that simple did we humans find it unacceptable because we preferred not to take the responsibility for understanding?

Some months later, I invited Mauricio to come from Brazil to perform and heal at a four-day seminar I was conducting on Memorial Day weekend in California. He said he had “lost his lights,” because he hadn’t been living up to his “destiny’s responsibility” to heal. I proposed that this would be an opportunity for him to correct his neglect. He agreed and made the trip.

As soon as he entered the room, where three hundred people waited for the surprise I had promised, he said he felt his “light friends” return. He gazed out at the small crowd and immediately proceeded
to reorganize where they sat. “I’ve never healed in a group so large,” he said to me quietly. “Their energy patterns need to be dispersed, else my own circuits will be overloaded.” He rearranged them into three groups and asked them not to send him energy of any kind. He had enough of his own!

Standing quietly before the group, he began to breathe deeply, meditate, breathe again, and finally, with his familiar pow outtake of air, he turned himself into a human lightning rod.

I got a kick out of the crowd’s reaction, remembering my own. They were astonished, incredulous, delighted, some of them suspicious, and yet each of them seemed to realize that something was actually occurring that was beyond our present acceptance and assessment of logical reality. His light display went on for about an hour. Some people claimed they were cured of various aches and pains; others sobbed at the release of what they had done to their own bodies and felt clear of that self-tension. Still others simply basked in the flashes of light, not knowing, understanding, or even caring about a logical explanation. If they
perceived
this to be a healing process it would be.

In short, the evening was a success, not only for the group, but for Mauricio and the return of his light friends.

The following morning, as people were leaving and making travel plans by phone, I heard two New York lawyers, who had been present at Mauricio’s
performance, talking to fellow members of their law firm, in New York. They described what had happened the night before. There was a silence. Then one of them said, “But I saw it with my own eyes.” The other one said, “But he never touched his body to push an electrical switch or anything.” More silence. I could imagine the incredulity on the other end of the phone; subtle accusations of hallucination or something similar. Soon the two lawyers hung up. They looked at each other, blushed back their embarrassment, and almost simultaneously said, “They didn’t believe me. They said I couldn’t have seen it.”

I stepped over to them. I put my hands on their shoulders, trying not to appear too patronizing. “Welcome to the club,” I said. “You’ll get used to it. And so will the ones who called you crazy.”

15

My Body as Ultimate Atoms of Awareness

Where there is no resistance there is no harm.

I
finally tried something that I had heard about for years. Because it involved my own physical body and because I actually experienced it as a legitimate event seemingly without fraud, it was the single most impactful incident in my attempt to understand the link between the physical and nonphysical worlds.

I will simply relate what happened.

I had seen many videotapes of psychic surgery operations brought back from Brazil and the Philippines. One had been given to me by a medical doctor who had personally undergone treatment and was cured of an eye disease. I had read many books about the lives of the psychic surgeons and had talked to others who claimed to have been healed by them.

I had also seen “magicians” on evening talk shows attempt to debunk the phenomenon with very well
done “psychic surgery” magic acts of their own. They used chicken gizzards and red-colored pellets to simulate blood. It was usually a kind of gory sleight-of-hand act without the elegance of, say, Siegfried & Roy. I watched the debunkers with impassive curiosity. They impressed me as individuals who were exploiting what they claimed to be the naïveté and insistence of “dumb people who want to believe in the tooth fairy.” Their fear and emotional violence interested me. Their “debunking of charlatans” seemed to suggest that they made their livings at it.

The videotapes that I saw were very different from the magicians’ performances because the surgery had been performed in clinics with other doctors and nurses present. The patients paid no money for the healing unless they offered to pay, and the emotional ambience of the environment was peaceful and indeed prayerful.

Still, I had made enough movies with remarkable special effects to doubt what I was seeing on tape. I needed to see it in person. And I wanted to keep an open mind.

In one particularly impressive film, however, I watched the Reverend Alex Orbito from Manila operate, one after another, on a long queue of people. He gently kneaded the skin of each patient until it opened up. He then inserted his hands into the body wherever there was sickness, withdrew clots of blood and internal matter of some kind, and withdrew his hands, whereupon the “incision” closed up. There was blood
on the patient but hardly a trace of a scar. The camera ran continuously—that is, without any cuts. He operated on about twenty people in twenty minutes. Each operation took approximately sixty seconds, and there were ailments of every description from ulcers to back pain, to goiter, cancer, brain tumors, eye diseases, and heart problems. The tape was remarkable, but I didn’t trust it.

A friend of mine told me that Alex Orbito was in America. I told my daughter, Sachi, who had been having back and neck pain. It was Sachi who first had the courage to go to Alex, and when she described the procedure, I decided it was important that I meet him.

It was funny to me that his next healing stop was Las Vegas, the scene of so many physically and spiritually powerful engagements for me.

Immediately after Sachi’s healing with Alex, her pain disappeared. But he warned her that if the pain stemmed from a karmic cause she would have to work that out herself by aligning herself with the God energy more faithfully than she had up till then.

I called Chris Griscom, the spiritual acupuncturist from Galisteo, and asked her to meet me in Vegas. We took a hotel room right off the Strip and waited to see the Reverend Alex Orbito, who was famous not only in the Philippines but all over the world.

Orbito was born on November 25, 1940, in one of the barrios of Cuyapo, Nueva Ecija, a province in the Philippines, about two hundred kilometers north-west
of Manila. His parents were poor. They tilled land belonging to their landlord.

Orbito was not aware of his healing power until he was fourteen, when he began to have dreams about a mysterious old man who said he was the boy’s spirit guide and gave him a personal mantra that enabled Alex to place himself in an altered state of consciousness at will. In these dreams the old man told Alex he was a great healer.

Alex paid no attention until one morning the paralyzed mother of a friend of his called, claiming that she had had a dream the night before that Alex had cured her of her paralysis. Immediately Alex realized he had had the same dream!

He went to the old woman. They recognized each other, though they had never met. Without a word he picked up a bottle of coconut oil beside her bed, massaged her legs as he had in his dream, said a deep but short prayer, and commanded her to walk.

Immediately she rose from her bed for the first time in ten years and walked.

From then on he realized he was a healer, possessing in his hands an energy he didn’t understand.

He didn’t want to be a healer, however. What he didn’t understand was frightening to him. Moreover, after the fame of his talent spread, people exploited his gift, many times sending for him, paying him nothing, and leaving him to return to his village by his own devices.

Eventually he became a reverend of the Union
Espiritista Christiana de Felipinas and stopped healing. Immediately he became ill. He went back to healing—his health was fine again. He noticed that whenever he quit healing people in need,
he
became sick. From then on he decided to devote his life to serving humanity through spiritual healing. He traveled throughout the Philippines, healing hundreds of people for practically nothing, and at last established a clinic of his own near his modest house in Quezon City.

Chris and I chatted before Orbito arrived. She had heard of him and said it would be an honor to have him work on her. I wasn’t so sure.

I opened the hotel room door and there stood a very young-looking, extremely thin man, impeccably dressed in an immaculate white shirt, tie, slacks, and a satin football jacket. He was with his wife and a woman friend of hers. The smile on his face put me at ease immediately. From the moment we all met I felt I had always known him.

Knowing and liking him was one thing. Having him perform “spiritual surgery” was another.

After some socializing in the living room we retired to the bedroom of my hotel suite. Alex looked at the bed and I knew that was where it would all happen.