Going Within (25 page)

His wife and her friend took an empty plastic bowl
from a fresh paper bag, along with some gauze and alcohol. My stomach clutched.

Alex sat on a chair near the bed.

“I do not heal,” he said quietly. “God heals. He uses me only as an instrument and channeler for the healing force and energy. I balance the chakras so an individual can heal himself.” Again I was reminded of how important the chakras seemed to be.

Chris smiled. I wondered what would happen.

First of all, there was really nothing wrong with me. I was not sick. Nothing was bothering me. So I suddenly wondered why I was there, and why I had asked him to come! As soon as I wondered that, I felt something within me (my Higher Self?) say, “Because you need to trust the physical experience of a higher vibration.”

Fine, but I wasn’t about to go first. I gestured to Chris. She lay on the bed.

Alex bowed his head and went into a deep, silent prayer for about five minutes. When he lifted his face there was an intense yet beatific expression upon it. He had told us that another spiritual doctor worked through him and his energy would perform the surgery.

“Take off blouse,” Alex said. “I must work on heart.” Chris lifted her blouse off over her head. I was glad she was wearing a bra. I remembered I wasn’t.

Alex’s wife and assistant sat beside him.

As though by command Alex’s arms went up in
the air, found a direction of some kind, then gently plunged downward into Chris’s midsection, whereupon he deftly began to knead the skin of her torso above the waist, just as I had seen on the tape, until his hands seemed to separate the skin and suddenly both hands were
inside
her chest. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There was blood, and there was a sloshing sound as his hands searched around for something near her heart.

I looked closely at Chris. She groaned with pleasure, saying, “The heat of his hands, I feel this fabulous healing heat.”

To me it appeared his hands were actually inside her chest! Very gently, with his right hand he removed something that looked like a clot of blood. He placed it in the plastic bowl. His left hand remained in her chest.

Then, as though he had gotten directions from his healing source, he said, “Now your kidneys.” He removed his hands from Chris’s chest and the opening closed up as though he had simply withdrawn his hands from a dish of water. His wife wiped off the blood with gauze soaked in alcohol.

Immediately, his hands plunged into Chris’s abdomen. Again she remarked about the heat. This time his hands were wrist-deep in her abdomen. Blood and liquids were sloshing everywhere as he seemed to gently rock his hands back and forth inside of her! I went to the edge of the bed and looked down.

I gasped. I couldn’t help myself. His hands were
literally inside her abdomen up to his wrists! I slapped my own face to ensure I wasn’t dreaming. Then I began to pace around the room. I felt I was in some other kind of reality. I came close and leaned over Chris’s stomach again. His hands were actually
in
there! Both of them. And no, I wasn’t dreaming.

“What does it feel like?” I asked Chris.

“Well,” she said with a slight frown, “I feel it, but it’s more like a pressure feeling. There is no pain.”

Alex was oblivious to our conversation. It was as though he was
somewhere
and
someone
else.

Very quickly he removed more clots of blood from her abdomen, put them in the plastic bowl, and withdrew his hands. I watched carefully. Again it was as though his hands had been in water instead of a human body. It was so smooth, so unbelievably simple and easy. The deep, gaping opening closed. Again his wife washed away the blood with an alcohol-soaked gauze, and Chris simply got up from the bed. She was smiling. She was obviously fine.

“Please,” Alex said, gesturing to me.

“Oh God,” I thought. “I’m a dancer, a physical culturist. I like to be in control of my own body. I don’t like regular surgery, much less this kind.”

Reluctantly I lay on the bed.

“Pancreas,” Alex said immediately, as though he had been directed from some unknown source. His hands were poised above my chest. I looked over at Chris, then at him.

“Wait a minute,” I said, feeling like a chicken
hearted jerk. I couldn’t go through with it. Chris smiled and sat down on the bed. Then I reached for Alex’s wife’s hand. I needed reassurance.

Alex simply waited. Only it didn’t seem to be Alex.

I closed my eyes. I tried to meditate and make contact with my Higher Self. I couldn’t find it. I was too nervous. I was beside myself. I had arranged all of this and now I wished I hadn’t. Did nervousness mean it could hurt me because I didn’t have enough trust and faith? “Oh God,” I thought, “what the hell am I doing here?”

I closed my eyes again. Silently I pleaded, “Higher Self, come in, please. Come in please, Higher Self. I need to communicate.” I felt like Spock tuning in to the
Enterprise.

I waited. Alex waited. Chris waited. The wife and friend-assistant waited.

Then slowly, with my eyes closed, I went within myself. I put my fear out of my mind. Slowly my Higher Self swam into view. I’ll never forget it. There was my androgynous friend sitting on a rock with its chin on its knee like Rodin’s
The Thinker.
Only this time my personal “being” had wings. I laughed to myself. This was truly science fiction space opera.

Yet I was so relieved and happy to make contact. Then I saw that the smile my androgynous being gave me was definitely patronizing.

“Should I do this?” I asked. I couldn’t believe I asked such a question.

My Higher Self looked at me with disdain and
remarked, in a manner very unbefitting its Divine stature, “You’re a real jerk, you know that?
This
experience is what you have created for yourself so you’ll have proof that the body is nothing but dream thought.’ Now relax and proceed.”

I opened my eyes and looked at Alex and nodded. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’m ready.”

Before I got “I’m ready” out of my mouth, his hands gently descended on my pancreas area and before I knew it they were inside my body and he was removing what he called “negative energy clots.” I wanted to say it was what was left of the hot fudge sundae I had had the day before, but that kind of humor didn’t seem appropriate. I couldn’t bring myself to look down at the hands inside me. I kept my eyes closed.

“How does it look?” I asked Chris.

“It’s incredible,” she said. “I can see inside you. What do you feel?”

I wanted to say something funny but I found myself saying, “I feel like it’s a reality dream.”

“Sure,” Chris answered. “That’s what the physical body is—a dream that we have dreamed into believing is real so we can have the adventure of physical life.”

I wasn’t really in shape for that kind of metaphysical dialogue. Chris smiled.

Alex withdrew his hands from my pancreas area.

“Kidneys and colon,” he said. And before I could resist I lowered my slacks and his hands were gently
kneading the skin just below my navel. In about three seconds both his hands were inside my abdomen up to the wrists. This time I looked. It was just as it had been with Chris. I felt no pain—only pressure. There was a great deal of sloshing as blood and guts were rocked from side to side. (Words do not aptly describe this procedure.) He extracted more “negative stress clots” and soon withdrew first his right hand, then his left.

Again his wife cleaned the blood from my stomach with alcohol-soaked gauze. The friend took the plastic bowl from the bedside to the bathroom, dumped everything into the toilet, and returned. Alex bowed his head and seemed to come out of his trance. He stood up. “All right?” he asked cheerfully.

I nodded. I was speechless. He walked out of the room, as though to prepare for lunch. I got up from the bed and went into the bathroom. I sat on the tub and broke down and sobbed.

The rest of the day I spent alone, trying to adjust to what had happened. I was a body-oriented person who needed to be in touch with the mechanisms that made it work. My years of dancing and hard workouts had put me in command of my physical vehicle, yet this slender, sensitive, almost frail-looking “spiritual healer,” in an altered state of consciousness, had put his hands through my skin and, with no pain,
had extracted what he called “negative thought forms which coagulate in the blood” and put them in a plastic bowl from the drugstore. It didn’t make sense.

Was this what was meant by trusting that “the hand of God” not only can heal material matter but can pass through it without producing pain, just as though the body was nothing more than materialized thought, a fanciful plaything, a vehicle for adventure—indeed only a dream for experience. I decided this was not the time to sort that out and went back to practicalities.

Chris went back to Galisteo and I sat around the deserted pool area just thinking and mulling over everything.

My dreams that night were vivid and deep. When I woke the next day I felt absolutely wonderful: light and energetic, as though I had been unburdened of something I should not have been carrying.

“We must do more,” Alex had said. “I need to balance your chakra energies. Not good, too much, too soon.”

When I asked him how much money he charged he told me to contribute whatever I wanted; that he was building a healing center in the Philippines that would benefit many people who could afford very little.

I decided to have some more treatments and then decide what I would contribute!

More treatments came. In fact, the following day as I lay on the hotel bed, he did spiritual surgery on
my heart, third eye, ovaries, and throat. Then he asked me to turn over while he opened up the entire length of my spinal column and took out, “negative vibrations” causing pain in my back. Of course I couldn’t see how he opened my back, but I
could
feel the procedure internally. It wasn’t painful, it was “pressurized.” I could feel his hands deep inside my back, but there was no sharpness or sting of hurt.

When he had finished, I counted up what he had done: five “operations” in a time span of about three minutes.

He explained that the spiritual energy coming through his hands was as healing for people as the actual extraction of negativity. Therefore, people could benefit regardless of whether they had anything wrong.

Maybe it was my imagination, maybe not. I only know that after my few days with Alex my energy level increased considerably. I felt balanced and capable of sleeping more deeply.

After that I read all the books on Philippine spiritual healing I could find. Those written by Western doctors expressed astonishment and, in lieu of a logical explanation, skepticism. Those written by Filipinos and other Asians, particularly the series of books by Jaime T. Licauco, expressed more of an acceptance of realities beyond our comprehension. Again, the left-brained (logical) versus the right-brained (intuitive) diversity of reaction.

In my talks with Alex Orbito himself, he outlined the tests, observations, and scientific laboratory testing
he had been subjected to. I have since studied the corroborations of his claims. When I asked why he felt it was necessary for the scientific world to believe what he was doing was “real,” he replied, “Because they can benefit from the hand of God and healing ministry.”

Orbito had been invited to Sweden in 1974 to subject himself to Scandinavian scientists who, under laboratory conditions, examined him, searched him, asked him to heal with no clothes on, measured his heartbeat, brain waves, pulse, rate of perspiration, et cetera. Through Kirlian photography, they observed the extent of his aura and the energy coming out of his hands while he healed and operated.

Orbito said he was treated like a guinea pig and would never subject himself to those traumatic experiences again, because it was difficult to heal under circumstances of such skepticism and doubt. He said, as many doctors now also say, that to become well you need to believe that you can.

As for the accusations that Filipino surgeons use blood capsules and animal innards to create what appears to be physical proof of extraction, the evidence is confusing.

When tested in a laboratory, the blood is sometimes human blood and sometimes more of a watery plasma. The healers themselves say they don’t understand why. They explain only that it isn’t really necessary to break the skin and produce real blood or physical extractions to effect healing. They say
that the
patient
needs physical proof that he is being healed in order to become better. So they materialize and manifest blood for that purpose. They say that if a patient “sees” he was operated upon, the healing effect is more profound. So just as they “dematerialize” the epidermis in order to enter the body, they “materialize” blood and clots to effect healing. They say the body is only an illusion anyway, the
physical
being only the manifestation of one’s thought. I found the issue of physical “reality” to be the central question, not whether Alex was a fraud or not.

There was no doubt in my mind that his hands had entered my body. I had felt it and seen it, not only in myself but in others as I stood over them and observed. Had I been feeling my body itself as a physical illusion? All the spiritual masters claim that such a concept is the central issue in understanding the physical dimension in our lives; that the physical is fundamentally a coagulation of molecules that are a product of our consciousness. Consciousness then translates into projected thought and thought becomes physical reality.