More about Bennett Mayrick?

I just finished reading Leigh Fortson's Embrace, Release, Heal, a compilation of stories from cancer survivors who had been given death sentences by their doctors and managed to heal anyway with the help of alternative and integrative healers.

Chapter Five describes "Jeff", who had an aggressive form of multiple myeloma that after a series of horrific treatments left him in a wheelchair. With the cancer in his spine he was finally offered a last-ditch experimental treatment that would have most likely paralyzed him. When he refused he was told by his doctors to go home and put his affairs in order.

He then went for his last haircut and his hairdresser suggested to him that he consider visiting a spiritualist named Ben, who lived on a mesa. Ben said to Jeff, "You go home and decide if they can tell you that you’re going to die. If you determine that the answer is no, then come back and see me."

Jeff thought about it and decided that "no one else can tell you when you’re going to die."

Ben taught Jeff a meditation and visualization technique to clean up his spine. He told Jeff "You’ve got to be able to go outside your body and then come back into the parts that need work. You can go there, to the part that needs work, and make the changes."

In his visualizations Jeff saw his spine as a hallway. He first saw it as being "full of all kinds of horrible-looking liquid and nasty-looking fish, as if I were underwater." He worked on cleaning up the hallway for about half an hour, three or four times every day. Over time, he saw less and less gunk. Eventually "the liquid was all cleaned up".

The next time Jeff went to see his oncologist, the doctor told him there was something wrong with his labtests. He simply refused to believe that Jeff was free of cancer. A mere six weeks elapsed from the time Jeff was sent home to die to the time his cancer disappeared. Twenty years later he is still alive. He says that Ben taught him that:

‘Every day, every second, your body is recreating itself on a cellular level. That cell, at some point, determines whether it’s going to be a good cell or a bad cell. You just need to coach that cell into being a good cell.’

I have reason to believe that the Ben who treated Jeff in the early 1990s was the same Ben Bill Bengston met in the early 1970s. The chronology fits. Both Bens could cure cancer, both Bens lived in the desert, both Bens seemed to be the same age, and both Bens passed away about 8 years ago. I was very moved to find this story. The most exciting part for me was that here was a first-hand account, from a patient's perspective, that showed the evolution of Ben's healing abilities from twenty years before. In the 1970s he was not yet able to heal cancer patients who had been subjected to radiation and chemo. By the 1990s he seemed to have transcended that barrier. His technique seems to have also evolved so he was able able to teach the patient to heal himself. Embrace, Release, Heal is full of such positive stories, and well worth reading.

Postscript Sept. 18th: And now here is a related story from a talk Dr. Depak Chopra gave 20 years ago, in May 1991:

Recently I had a patient with a very dramatic outcome... [H]e was one day repairing an antenna on the roof and he picked up a wire, but it happened to be live and had 12,000 volts in it. He was immediately electrocuted. The mechanism of death for this is ventricular fibrillation which is an electrical event in the heart.

He fell from the roof 15 feet to the ground and as luck would have it he fell with the right impact at the right place with the right location of his chest with the right amount of angularity to restart another current and defibrillate. So it's as if God called him and then changed His mind.

And you ask him, "Bob, what happened?" He says, "I went into the gap." I say, "What was there in the gap?" He says, "It was sheer unbounded joy. It was absolute, total bliss." You ask him, "Were there any thoughts there?" "No. I didn't have a mind." "Did you have a body?" "No. I didn't have a body." "So what was there?" He said, "l was just aware. " You ask him, "What were you aware of?" "I was aware that I was aware. But it was pure wakefulness. I was grounded totally and completely in the experience of my own immortality."

So much so, that he now doesn't know what the meaning of fear is. In fact, not only was he lucky to have this experience, but like a true scientist, he started experimenting in this field of pure awareness. He would go into the gap. Now he knew how to slip into it, and from there he would put his attention on his leg which had completely burned. There was no muscle - nothing. His femur was exposed to the atmosphere. Over the course of 2 years, by diving into the gap, projecting his awareness from there, he has actually regrown a new lower extremity. Because he found that place from where everything was created. It's his own Self. It's his own Self.

It seems that what Ben taught Jeff was how to go into "the gap" and heal himself from there ...