Going Within (27 page)

He went on to explain that down through the ages healing was thought of as an act of the Divine. To underscore that truth, there was a time in history when healing was the major function of religious leaders. In fact, the Oath of Hippocrates was a physician’s prayer enunciating the sanctity of the art of healing. Similarly today, when physicians perform healing, they are indulging in a holy act, partaking of something Divine.

Medical therapy then should be gaining spiritual nobility, Orbito said. Instead, we have become so technologically oriented and drug seduced that the profession of healing has itself taken a turn toward destruction. The natural laws of man, nature, and
energy are being ignored; something must be done soon to include the participation of the patient and God in the healing process.

He concluded by saying that that was what he felt spiritual therapy was ordained to accomplish.

“A clash of doctrines is not a disaster—it is an opportunity,” said Alfred North Whitehead, the British mathematician and philosopher, and Orbito liked to quote him.

Bennett questioned Orbito about the debunkers, the scientific experimental observations, the power that he felt he had, and so on. Orbito said that he was only an instrument. “I am a human being like anyone else, but when I’m doing my healing, I am an instrument of God … without the aid of the Divine province, I cannot do anything.”

The most important thing I heard Alex say was, “The primary mission of spiritual healing is not the elimination of physical ailments, but to promote inner awareness, a sense of spiritual attachment, and a personal fellowship with God.”

Bennett listened respectfully, forming no judgments, and then proceeded to observe a series of operations. He stood beside Orbito and peered into people’s bodies, which he was used to viewing from a different vantage point in his own operating room. Here there was no anesthesia, no instruments, no pain, no postoperative shock, no more than ten minutes per operation, and, as far as he could see, no blood capsules, no chicken gizzards, and no sleight-of-hand.

Bennett had difficulty assessing what he had seen. “I saw it and I don’t understand it,” he said. “It is mind-boggling. I know we have a great deal more to learn. I simply don’t understand.”

Several other things happened while Bennett was witnessing the operations.

Alex opened up my abdomen and placed a large gauze pad inside. He then removed his hands and the wound closed up with the gauze remaining inside. He did a healing meditation over me for about three minutes, claiming the gauze was collecting negative vibrations, the absence of which would advance my energies. Then he opened up my upper chest and withdrew the gauze that had been placed in my abdomen! It was full of clotted blood. He withdrew his hands.

He claims that the left hand always controls the material plane and must be present
within
the patient at all times to prevent pain. The right hand controls the spiritual plane, which he uses for attracting the negative coagulation produced by stress and thought forms of negativity.

Bennett listened and tried to make it compute in his traditional understanding.

In the meantime, something happened I will never forget.

I was talking with Alex while he operated on another friend of mine whose abdomen was open. Suddenly Alex took my right hand in his right hand. He closed his eyes and concentrated intensely.
“Concentrate on God,” he said to me. “I will now show you what I experience while operating.”

I concentrated on love and light and everything else that God represents to me. Alex’s left hand remained in my friend’s abdomen. After a few minutes Orbito took my right hand and held it above my friend’s abdomen. “Now put your hand into his body,” he commanded gently. I thought I’d pass out.

“It is all right,” Alex said. “You have the Divine current running in your hand now. Please go ahead, you will learn something for your own understanding.”

I summoned up my courage, in much the same way you prepare to touch anything unfamiliar. I looked down at my friend. He shrugged his shoulders (he couldn’t feel anything anyway), and with Alex’s right hand guiding mine, I put my hand into his abdominal wall. It was a moment that will live with me always. My hand was inside his abdomen up to my wrist and I felt absolutely nothing physical! In fact, the feeling had a dreamlike quality to it. It was as though I had plunged my hand into a warm mist. It simply made no logical sense. I tried to comprehend what I was feeling. “This is how it is for me,” Orbito said. “I never feel anything physical. The body is only ‘thought.’ It is only what we imagine it to be. It has no density when the current of the Divine is running through it.”

As soon as I felt doubt, disbelief, and questions ripple intensely through my mind, Alex removed my hand. “Such thoughts will affect the patient,” he
warned. “That is why I pray and meditate for three hours every morning, so that my trust and connection is strong and unwavering.”

I removed my hand and looked at it. There was moisture covering it, but no blood. It was as though my hand had a mind and spirit of its own, unconnected to my brain. It had experienced something separate from me, as though it had been connected to Alex’s mind, not mine!

Alex claimed that whenever he sat down to meditate in order to operate and heal, he could feel the Divine force descend upon him, causing a cold sensation in his arms and fingers. They become energized with this magnetic force, which enables him to separate molecules of the flesh without using incising instruments.

Sometimes he uses no “surgery,” but rather heals only by touching.

Whatever was going on in Ted Bennett’s mind was as interesting to me as the phenomenon itself. “This makes me feel that the body itself is a trick,” he said. “A physical trick that we play on ourselves in order to experience life, or something. Or, is Orbito the trick?”

I could feel Ted’s confusion. Had I suggested he come to New Mexico to witness a sophisticated sleight-of-hand act? Had we both been fooled?

After a few days with Orbito, Bennett didn’t say much. We’d have meals together but I could feel him deliberately avoiding the subject. He seemed not only
to be sifting the information he was witnessing, but somehow he was evaluating what he thought of me for placing him in such an untenable position. Was he embarrassed, perhaps, because he felt
I
was deluded? I found that I didn’t know what to say. I felt Ted back away from discussing anything with me. He took walks alone in the desert. He had seen Orbito’s hands in people’s bodies. He had smelled and seen the blood. He had stood behind, in front of, and closely beside this “spiritual surgeon” from the Philippines. He had studied Orbito’s work with expert eyes, yet he could find nothing that evidenced fraud or fakery. In fact, Bennett had said that the human body, not the surgery, seemed to be the illusion.

“I’m very uncomfortable with what I’m seeing,” he said. “I can’t understand. I have spent my life training in medical science, yet what I am seeing seems to make a mockery of that.”

As a result of Bennett’s genuine philosophical quandary, I realized the significance of what I had done. I had invited him here and he had trusted me enough to come. Yet, I had called into play and exposed him, almost as a metaphysical lark, to invisible truths and forces of nature which, by their very existence, defied scientific explanation. I had almost playfully knocked the traditional pins out from under his support system. Confronted with something inexplicable in terms of present empirical knowledge, such an intelligent, caring, and rational person required a
personal patience in the face of his own confusion, to say nothing of the required appreciation of wider and deeper truths—truths that science might somehow suspect existed but couldn’t countenance yet in a responsible manner. The challenge for Ted, then, was to respect that there were finer perspectives in everything within which a more subtle science of understanding would someday be acknowledged. On top of all that, I had forced him to take responsibility for what he had seen. This, I believe, was the most stressful aspect of it all. If the psychic surgery wasn’t a trick, then what was it?

By the time Bennett left New Mexico, he hadn’t reached a solution in his own mind or within his own system of truth. I have not discussed it with him since. More than anything, I began to take more seriously my responsibility in exposing people to phenomena that completely upset their personal sense of reality. Spiritual technology is not a game. It isn’t a parlor adventure to entertain, or a divertissement. It is a serious and profound recognition that there are energies and forces at work in the universe that lie waiting to be accessed so that the human race can heal itself into a more spiritual state of truth and being.

I, in the meantime, cannot forget the feeling of my hand inside my friend’s abdomen with absolutely no trace of physicality other than the sensation of moistness.

Many times I also need to remind myself of Buddha’s
contention that life itself in the physical dimension is really an illusion. If that is true, then we can create this illusion to be anything we desire.
That
is the responsibility difficult to accept.

16

Childlike Pursuit

The grandest of things are achieved with a light heart: allow your soul to smile.

F
rom the time I was twelve years old I wanted to know how the universe worked and the role I played in it. The two questions were intertwined in my mind.

I had the notion that if I knew what made me, I would know more about what made the universe and vice versa. Therefore, the identity of the universe would help explain me. And the more I could find out about me, the more the universe would make sense.

The lofty dreams and questions common to many adolescents certainly don’t qualify them as mystics, but later—and the more I read of the musings of the physicists on the subject of the origins of the universe—the more
they
did indeed sound like mystics.

I wanted to know about what started it all and how it happened. So did they. I wanted to know, indeed believe, that there was a harmony at work.
They were seeking the same answer. Einstein said that “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Such a glorious riddle.

Why was it that we human beings could see, sense, and dream the truths of the great unknown out there without having to be told?

Were we remembering? Were we inextricably woven into it? Were we perhaps made up of the same “mind stuff”?

In the spirit of that question, I wanted to meet a person who had struck my heart and mind from the first moment I saw a picture of him, Professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University in England. To identify him as the brilliant professor of physics and mathematics who, among many other things, significantly enlarged our understanding of “black holes” is simply to belittle the meaning of his life in this world. His smile is more to the point of his real identity.

He was writing a book aptly titled
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.
I knew his editor, asked for a meeting with Hawking, and arranged to meet him in Cambridge.

It was a rainy English day. I had just finished shooting
Madame Sousatzka
in London and was looking forward with eager anticipation to the long-awaited meeting. The logistics of the journey to Cambridge, however, proved to be as complicated as the questions in my mind.

My car had been impounded because it blocked traffic in front of the house where I was staying. A totally unrelated traffic jam caused me to miss the train, and when, after a two-hour wait, I finally boarded another, I arrived in Cambridge to find that the cabdriver at the train station didn’t know the address I had been given. I was beginning to wonder if my meeting with Hawking was simply not meant to be.

All of that changed when I found him in a restaurant surrounded by his students at a buffet lunch.

I saw the wheelchair first, together with his attending nurse. I had been warned that his initial appearance would shock me because his frail body was almost entirely paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s disease and he could move only one finger on each hand and had great difficulty even breathing. What I hadn’t been prepared for was the radiance and sheer happiness of his face and most particularly his smile. I felt tears prick in my eyes, not of pity but of a great, welling love. I couldn’t understand why.

Since he couldn’t talk, as a result of his tracheotomy, he communicated with his two good fingers on a computer that was attached to his wheelchair. When he looked up and saw me, he spelled out on his computer, “You are very pretty, would you like a first course for lunch or do you want to go immediately to the entree!?” Clearly not a man to waste time or words but willing to gently fulfill polite social appropriateness.

I mumbled something about food not mattering to me as much as meeting him, whereupon he went on to spell out something else. Immediately the computer translated his written words to a robotical voice box that talked! “Please excuse my American accent!” it said. And indeed it had an American accent, because it had been invented and programmed two years previously by a computer expert from Sunnyvale, California.