Tami Simon interview with Bill Bengston

Here is a link to Tami Simon's interview with Bill on Sounds True. She asks many thoughtful questions, some of which seem to echo ones I raised in earlier postings in this blog.

I would like to add some more questions and comments:

For instance, I am curious to know if when Dr. Bengston is being tested he can generate measurable changes in his brain through the cycling technique alone or if the changes are always in response to need? If I understand correctly, REGs and geomagnetic probes don't seem to respond to cycling unless there is a cage of sick mice nearby. I guess the question is whether it's the cycling technique itself that generates the changes that are visible on the MRI or the healing response?

I am also curious to know if Dr. Bengston has ever tested anyone he taught to see if they can generate similar changes.

I would like to comment that in my experience with Bill my own healing ability increased noticeably through direct contact with him well before I learned cycling, and I recall being able to pass on this increase in ability to at least one other person through similar contact. Bill has also told me that the people he worked on were temporarily also able to do healings, although it wasn't clear how long the effect lasted and why it wore off. Since he apprenticed with Bennett Mayrick for a long time, years even, I wonder how much his on-going exposure to Mayrick's ability and the fact that they did many healings together affected Bill's own learning curve.

At the end of the June SSE lecture "Healing and the Mainstream" (part 5 on Youtube) someone asks Bill a question about "reiki vs fakey" -- i.e., an experiment using real and sham reiki healers. In response Bill cites an experiment of his own, in which volunteers who were not taught the cycling technique could also heal the mice just by mimicking his movements. He then went on to say something else, but was cut off, and I would be curious to know what that something else was, because it began with "and then" and Bill looked quite excited about it.

Re: the mechanism of distance healing that Bill and his physicist friends have been pondering and tossing around ideas about, has anyone tossed around any ideas about folding space and time? There seems to be a concept in Buddhism and maybe even Hinduism about every point in the universe being linked to every other point that I've heard has found an echo in quantum physics; it would be interesting to know if that has some relevance. Of course I don't have the physics or the math to parse any of this out, just a general gut feeling.

Re: Bill's suggestion that people form healing groups, I would like to add that organizing, running, and participating in the Toronto group that was the offshoot of the workshops we held here was one of the most pleasurable activities I ever engaged in. The group had heart, purpose and cohesion and we all learned a great deal together.

Congratulations on an interesting interview. I recommend reading the transcript as well, for clearer understanding of some of the more complicated elements of the discussion.

A small note of frustration

This is a comment on energy healing in general, on the great divide between "them" and "us" -- "them" being the folks who believe that "us" who do energy healing are totally out to lunch.

The day before yesterday I met a woman who had dislocated her thumb back in February after falling. The thumb was in a splint, and would continue to be in a splint until it would be operated on. After the operation she would continue to wear the splint and would undergo painful physio.

I treated the thumb on the spot for about five minutes and told her to come and see me on a strictly "as a favour" basis. I was mostly curious to see how much good I could do. By way of encouragement I told her of some past experiences I had had treating injuries with some very positive outcomes.

The treatment and our conversation were witnessed by another person who had also fallen, and dislocated her elbow, with subsequent surgery and a six-month nightmare of therapy and pain. This person insisted that surgery and pain were the only way to go.

The person with the injured thumb never came to see me. So the message here is "I would rather have my right hand immobilized and then operated on and undergo six months of pain and physio than give you a few hours of my time to see whether you can help it heal on its own. I am so attached to my belief system that all that exists is this 3-D reality that we can see and smell and taste that I would rather suffer pain and inconvenience than see it challenged."

I think energy healers of all stripes will resonate with this, having probably had the same sort of experience many, many times. I find it quite frustrating. And I am sure someone will now comment that I couldn't have helped this woman anyway, since treatment is a two-way street and we don't really heal anyone, just help them heal themselves.

On healing and sociological experiments

There are two pieces of information out there about the Bengston method that require some discussion. One is that Bill has been successfully treating animals and that he is just now beginning to apply the method to people. The other is that he is conducting a "sociological experiment" to see if people can be taught to duplicate the success of the "sceptical volunteers" who were able to heal cancerous mice in his laboratory experiments.

To clarify, the healings are said to have begun many years ago, in real time, in the real world, with real people, and then they were followed up in the lab by animal experiments.

As to the "sociological experiment" Bill is said to be conducting to see if the people he teaches can duplicate the successes of his "sceptical volunteers", it needs to be said that the experiment is now three years old. I kept loose tabs on the Toronto portion which lasted a year and a half, but then there were other workshops (in Long Island, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Oregon, California, and possibly other places) on which I have no information.

It seems to me that for something to be called an "experiment" someone needs to be tabulating the results, particularly if it is being conducted by someone described as a trained scientist. Now that three years and two months have passed since the first Toronto workshop, I would love to ask Bill how the experiment has progressed since then and about his views on the results.