Going Within (26 page)

Over the next few weeks I invited Orbito to my home in Malibu so I could observe more, and since it was Christmastime I put out the word that Alex would do a Christmas healing and people could contribute whatever they wanted to his healing center.

Nearly one hundred came on Christmas Day and the day after. There were friends, friends of friends, curious spiritual seekers, and some who were really ill.

Alex, his wife, and his assistant stayed in the guest rooms while I turned my yoga and workout room into a clinic.

We used my massage table for people to lie on and Alex sat on a chair behind it. His wife and assistant sat beside him, and I observed many of the “operations,” some of which I never thought I could stomach witnessing, but I did. And I watched closely.

People quietly meditated before they entered the room. Nearly all of them were trusting but as anxious and frightened as I had been. I understood the contradiction. I had been through it. They supported one another, and Alex led a prayer and “communal connection to God” before we began.

Among the operations I saw was one where I witnessed him take someone’s eye out of the socket with his fingers, clean behind it, and replace it. The patient felt no pain; she got up and left the table smiling, saying she felt only “pressure.”

He removed tumors from lungs and abdomens.

He extracted a tooth with his fingere and stopped the bleeding.

He took cysts and growths from every imaginable part of the body.

When patients had genital problems I always left the room. They told me later Alex had removed
hemorrhoids, uterine fibroids, and so on. He usually went into the body
through
the outside, rarely into the vagina or the anus.

He removed breast tumors and a goiter.

He took blood clots from the neck of an eighty-six-year-old friend who had problems with hardening arteries.

He went into the gums of someone else and healed her pyorrhea.

He took a tumor out of a brain.

Sometimes people wanted to observe others. Alex never liked more than a few at a time because he said skeptical energy drained him.

In the same holiday time period he went to Ojai to heal people there. More people from Los Angeles followed him. Many of them had come at my invitation.

I remember the first day in Ojai; Alex had set up a clinic room in the vestibule of a Unity church. Thirty people wanted to see someone else operated on before they would allow any healing on their own bodies. I volunteered, since so many were there because of me.

They quietly filed into the room. I lay on a table fully clothed. Alex was behind the table with his head in his hands, bowed in prayer. He prayed for a long time. I supposed it was because of the diversity of energies in the room (psychics and sensitives tune in to everyone else’s energy patterns, which sometimes has a negative impact on them).

Alex didn’t raise his head. Finally, with his head still bowed, he whispered to me. “Shirley,” he said hesitantly. “There is man in blue sweater against the wall who is negative, very negative. He doesn’t like me or what I do. Very difficult. You can ask him to leave please?”

I turned my head from the lying position and spotted the man he was talking about. It was the friend of a journalist whom I had invited. Rather than single him out, I said, “There is evidently someone here exuding a lot of skeptical negative energy. You know who you are. It would be better if you came back later when you felt more positive.” (I was learning to be diplomatic in my old age … finally.)

The man in the blue sweater, along with two other people, quietly left. No one blamed them. Alex prayed again and went into a slight trance. His expression changed and the “operation” on me proceeded. I didn’t watch Alex’s hands dive into my abdomen. Instead, I chose to look at the faces of the people watching. They were astonished, horrified, intrigued, shocked, stunned—how to describe how people look when they observe something that defies their sense of reality? One person exclaimed, “Oh no, Shirley, be careful!” She was so genuinely worried that from the table I reassured her. Others were astonished that I could talk while Alex had both hands up to his wrists inside my abdomen, where there were the usual slurpy sloshing noises. Blood was running quite freely down the sides of my body. I felt deep pressure
inside my abdomen and I had to admit this time there was slight pain. I knew it was coming from the disbelief in the room, so I closed my eyes and put my own mind into a consciousness of complete trust. The pain subsided.

It was then that I realized so clearly the importance of trust when working with spiritual healing, or anything spiritual for that matter. At the same time I flashed on the times in my life when I believed I would get well as opposed to believing the illness would last longer. I remembered regular doctors I had had. If I trusted them, I fared better. It seemed to be as much up to me as it was to the doctor. The healer and the healed working together. On reflection, my body always reacted to my expectations. Physicality follows mind.

It was psychic surgery that put me more in touch with that understanding than I had ever been.

I remembered what Alex had said: “People need proof that they are healed, so I give it to them. I don’t need to enter the body.” He went on, “I could do it with magnetic healing. I don’t need to extract anything in order for them to be healed. But Westerners especially feel they need that kind of
physical
proof to allow themselves to be healed spiritually, so I manifest the proof.”

I’ve thought so often of what he said. Was that how our traditional medicine worked also? Did we need something as drastic as surgery to believe that our bodies were rid of infection, even though we
were perfectly capable of healing ourselves internally with our own power?

And why did we put people dealing with alternative healing realities in laboratory conditions to obtain conclusions about which science had already programmed judgment? Scientific equipment is designed to satisfy the concept that something lives up to that which science already understands. But what about expanded reality? What about possible truth that we haven’t even conceived of yet?

Many people leave spiritual healing sessions
believing
they are cured because their bodies feel better. The sickness doesn’t return and they know that they are cured. But because traditional medicine doesn’t understand it, are those people to be told they are
not
really healed? Should they be persuaded that spiritual energy healed them only so that they could get sick again and be cured by drugs and knife surgery?

If we as human beings are made up of a collection of so-called “non-alive simple atoms” and yet see ourselves as alive and conscious, where did the change take place? When did it happen? Can one “see” consciousness? Can we measure it?

When Alex Orbito or any other healer is working with high consciousness, void of physical form, that consciousness is what the Bible would call God, and further, would describe the process as a miracle. But suppose it is simply consciousness of a high order acting as a healer through a physical person with the right vibrations such as Alex—would that
not
present
grounds for the consideration of expanded and unknown reality?

We seem to insist on being limited and lonely, forever churning on the treadmill of our own identities, incorrigibly resisting the idea that we may understand more than we allow ourselves to admit, because such an admittance would force us to see ourselves in a more expanded and capable light, which would also require us to take more responsibility for choosing what we perceive. Then we would come full circle in understanding that
we are what we perceive.
If we could alter our perceptions we could also alter the objective world around us. During my psychic surgery, I could feel, more than at any other time, that the act of my perception itself helped form the perceived event and was an integral part of it.

My perception of my own identity had been so limited that I was skeptical of an event that spoke to a more expanded reality. Perhaps I had felt more comfortable with my limited perception of myself because everything outside of that limitation seemed foreign, alien, and frightening to me and I would rather have gone with the devil I knew than the angel I was capable of knowing.

If my body is made up of molecules determined by my consciousness to take the human form and all of it is actually composed of immortal God-like energy, I can accept the concept that psychic surgery is performed through a spiritual connection with the Divine by separating the living atoms one from an
other with an energy that doesn’t violate, but simply and gently slips
through
the physical, much as a hand slips gently, without violation, through liquid.

I don’t need a scientist to tell me it’s true or false. I know it because it happened to me. And, as Einstein concluded at the end of his life, “Knowledge is experience. Anything else is just information.”

After Ojai, Chris Griscom asked Alex to heal at her Light Institute in Galisteo, New Mexico.

I invited a nationally respected surgeon I knew to view the procedure for himself. I will call him Dr. Theodore Bennett in order to protect his privacy. Ted was interested in my mystical/spiritual learning but obviously kept an objective and balanced eye on all of it.

Bennett met Orbito, heard the explanation of his healing, and began to ask more questions.

It was clear to Bennett from the outset that Orbito was describing a different kind of medical science. Orbito understood that most traditionally well-trained doctors had difficulty in understanding that there might be an invisible truth just as profound and effective as a visible truth. Yet, while there have been colossal advances in science and medicine in the last 150 years, there are many things that we cannot understand or explain by resorting to laboratory formulae.

Orbito said that he didn’t view medical science as a limited science, but more that he saw it simply as a systemized knowledge of laws and facts concerning the physical world, which we already understand. He rather hoped that those who taught the physical sciences would soon include and embrace the deep knowledge of the spiritual and metaphysical world in their training of others.

In fact, in his view, Orbito felt there were two grand divisions in science: that of the physical or material world with a scientific system of laws to govern and understand it, and that of a spiritual dimension that belonged to the invisible world, which also contained its own scientific system and laws to govern and understand it.

Up to now, he said, man has become proficient in the mastering of the visible and material sciences, but mastery of science and technology without an understanding of the spiritual force in nature would always lead to negative results—the creation of planet-threatening weaponry, of heavy industrialization at the cost of health and even lives; whereas embracing the sciences that deal with the impact of the “invisible” on our world would put mankind in touch with the power of spiritual energy so that it could work
with
technology. Orbito said it wasn’t his intention to replace traditional medical therapy, but more to enhance and complement it. He explained that further by saying that when an ailment falls into the material field, a medical therapy could be applied, but when
an ailment is within the province of the spiritual realm, such as so-called psychosomatic diseases, then spiritual healing could be used: healing itself involves both body and spirit, and one is not mutually exclusive of the other. Orbito told Bennett that in his view, all healing, be it medical or spiritual, is a therapeutic practice ordained by God as a means through which physical and spiritual equilibrium may be achieved. The art of healing then provides man with the means to correct any imbalance in someone’s physiological as well as spiritual constitution. In the end, though, he said that he believed that
spiritual therapy is the core of medical therapy.
That without the spiritual element, medicine loses its impact, its sacredness, and its meaning. Since human life is sacred, preserving it is a holy act.