Inner Awareness Why paranormal healing can t be scientifically explained By Jaime T.

Licauco Philippine Daily Inquirer 10:30 pm | Monday, April 1st, 2013 29 246 57 One question that has been bugging me for years is why no researcher or medical scientist has ever been able to explain adequately the phenomenon of paranormal healing in general, and psychic surgery in particular. If we talk only about the Philippine situation, the answer is simple. No local s cientist or researcher has ever studied in depth the phenomenon of psychic surge ry, not even the members of the Philippine Medical Association, because these pe ople have already concluded that psychic surgery or any paranormal healing modal ity, for that matter, is not true. Such healing, if there is one, can be explained either as spontaneous remission of illness, wrong diagnosis, merely psychological, sleight-of-hand or deliberate fraud. All attempts by Western researchers to prove the reality of psychic surgery have ended in failure or frustration. But why is this so? Because every time a scien tist tries to observe or measure a paranormal event, such as healing, the eviden ce disappears, and no logical conclusion can be drawn from it. Let me give you several examples. In the mid- 80s, a young Swiss researcher who had observed Philippine psychic surg eons decided to scientifically prove if the cotton that a healer magically inser ts in the body of a patient was really inside the body or not. He returned to th e Philippines, bringing with him a Geiger counter and a radioactive piece of cot ton. Then he observed the healer insert the cotton into the body of the patient. The cotton vanished from his hand. Trickery When the Swiss researcher turned on the Geiger counter to see if the radioactive cotton was indeed inside the patient s body, it registered nothing. So he conclud ed that Filipino faith healers were just using trickery. Earlier, another researcher, Dr. Lyall Watson, a biologist from South Africa (wh o had written such books as Supernature, The Romeo Error, Beyond Supernature ) was comp letely puzzled by the results of his six-month study of Philippine psychic surge ons. His first exposure to the phenomenon of psychic surgery was with the late Jose M ercado of Pangasinan, who gave spiritual injections to his patients from a dista nce of almost three feet. Dr. Watson joined the line, according to his own testimony which appeared both i n The Romeo Error and in the book by George Meek, Healers and the Healing Process, p ublished by the Theosophical Society in the US. When he (Mercado) pointed his finger at my bicep and made the squeezing motion of giving an injection, I felt a sharp pain. When I rolled up my sleeves, there wa s a tiny puncture wound and a drop of blood. His shirt, however, was totally undama ged. Dr. Watson came back the next day. This time, he placed four layers of plastic o

ver his bicep, held it in place with a rubber band beneath his shirt, and joined the line of patients again. Mercado made his customary gesture in my direction from a distance of about five feet. I felt nothing and told him so, asking if he could try again. He repeated the process from a distance of three feet. This time I felt the prick and when I removed the pad, I found the usual puncture and a drop of blood, which I collec ted on a microscope slide, for analysis. When he examined the four plastic sheets, he was surprised to discover that the two inner sheets nearest his skin bore the puncture marks, but none on the two o uter layers, showing that Mercado could not have done it through trickery. When the two blood samples were typed in a laboratory in Manila later that same d ay under my personal supervision, the second one proved to belong to a group app ropriate to my own, but the first was totally foreign to me. It was not even hum an; the red corpuscles had nuclei. Puzzling results This reminds me of the puzzling results of laboratory tests done on three blood samples taken by Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama of Japan from the same patient after one F ilipino healer had made an incision. He had the three blood samples analyzed by three separate laboratories in Chiba, Japan. The first blood type was the same as the patient s, but the third blood sample tur ned out to be the blood of sheep. Now, sheep are not indigenous to the Philippin es and not commonly found here. On another occasion, Dr. Watson asked a Filipino healer to strip completely nake d while performing healing on a foreign patient who also agreed to be treated co mpletely naked. Out of modesty, Dr. Watson lent the healer his shorts. The femal e patient did not even have a towel to cover herself. The healer, reported Dr. Watson, used no water, no cotton wool, no oils nothing which could be prepared in any way to produce chemical reactions that would simulate blood and tissue. Yet, despite all those precautions, a red pigment appeared (on the incision) which proved to be blood of a group appropriate to her own. A little later in the treatment, the healer produced a small quantity of tissue, about 10 grams, which I collected and sealed in a specimen jar for analysis in a laboratory the next day. But I never did get that analysis. The sample had vanished without a trace, altho ugh the jar was still sealed the next morning. I believe that Western materialist science will never be able to prove the exist ence of paranormal phenomena, especially psychic surgery, because it is using a paradigm or point of view appropriate for analyzing only physical reality. To understand paranormal phenomena we have to develop a new science, The Science of the Impossible. And the one that comes closest to this approach, to my mind, i s Quantum or Particle Physics. Next week: Quantum physics and paranormal phenomena Learn who you and your loved ones are in a past life. Attend the next Soulmates, Karma and Reincarnation seminar on April 20, from 1 to 7 p.m., and the next Basic ESP seminar on April 27-28, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at Rm. 308, Prince Plaza I, Legazpi St., Greenbelt, Makati City. Call 8107245, 8159890, 0908-3537885 or 0929

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