In the coming days and weeks look for a broadening of focus in this blog to include a wider range of information on the use of bioenergy therapies in the treatment of cancer. While the Bengston Method remains the bioenergy healing modality most focused on cancer, and the only one proven in laboratory studies to work on cancer in mice, other methods have also claimed some successes, and can be safely used to provide support to patients receiving conventional cancer treatments. Having realized that there was a need to have all the information available for use in one place, I will now take the time to make as much of it accessible as I can, by and by.
There will still be regular updates on my experiences and thoughts on using the Bengston Method.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
Practical challenges -- part 3 -- and some partial successes
Some practical challenges, or maybe I should say frustrations ....
1) You begin to treat someone who has incurable cancer. Over a few weeks the condition begins to improve, at which point the doctor pricks up his ears and decides that the patient now has a fighting chance and should go for last ditch experimental chemotherapy. You can't say to the patient "don't go for experimental chemotherapy", but once the person starts getting chemo, you are pretty much done. You can't continue treatment during chemotherapy, and your effectiveness is limited afterwards by the damage that the chemo has caused. Altogether I'm not sure whether the patient will be better off.
2) We are now looking at three cases where the MRI shows soft, new tissue around or under the tumour. The doctors can't figure out what this tissue is. We think it has something to do with our treatment, but we don't know. It seems consistent with how Bill describes the treatment working, but there is no experimental evidence of any sort to back it up.
3) Someone is looking at cancer surgery a few months down the road. They know about what we do. They wait until the 11th hour and then ask us to treat it. Why wait that long? Because they don't believe that what we do will work, and they don't want to make a long-term commitment and then have the disappointment of failure. But just on the off-chance that it might work magically, they'll try it at the last minute. Failure is almost guaranteed ....
4) We ran out of time with two cases of breast cancer. The good news is that in both cases the original option was a mastectomy, and the actual surgery that happened was a lumpectomy. But once a diagnosis has been confirmed, doctors are highly reluctant to re-test. MRIs are expensive and biopsies are invasive, and cancer is not expected to diminish or to go away on its own. So it is entirely possible to encounter a hypothetical scenario in which a tissue biopsy after the mastectomy turns up no cancer. This would be very much a good news/bad news scenario. No cancer is good news, but .... We have a to find a way to work in concert with the medical establishment. (PS: In both cases we found out that we did affect the cancer. In one case the affected tissue was less extensive than what was shown in the original MRI; in the other the cancer was found to be a lot less aggressive than the biopsy indicated.)
1) You begin to treat someone who has incurable cancer. Over a few weeks the condition begins to improve, at which point the doctor pricks up his ears and decides that the patient now has a fighting chance and should go for last ditch experimental chemotherapy. You can't say to the patient "don't go for experimental chemotherapy", but once the person starts getting chemo, you are pretty much done. You can't continue treatment during chemotherapy, and your effectiveness is limited afterwards by the damage that the chemo has caused. Altogether I'm not sure whether the patient will be better off.
2) We are now looking at three cases where the MRI shows soft, new tissue around or under the tumour. The doctors can't figure out what this tissue is. We think it has something to do with our treatment, but we don't know. It seems consistent with how Bill describes the treatment working, but there is no experimental evidence of any sort to back it up.
3) Someone is looking at cancer surgery a few months down the road. They know about what we do. They wait until the 11th hour and then ask us to treat it. Why wait that long? Because they don't believe that what we do will work, and they don't want to make a long-term commitment and then have the disappointment of failure. But just on the off-chance that it might work magically, they'll try it at the last minute. Failure is almost guaranteed ....
4) We ran out of time with two cases of breast cancer. The good news is that in both cases the original option was a mastectomy, and the actual surgery that happened was a lumpectomy. But once a diagnosis has been confirmed, doctors are highly reluctant to re-test. MRIs are expensive and biopsies are invasive, and cancer is not expected to diminish or to go away on its own. So it is entirely possible to encounter a hypothetical scenario in which a tissue biopsy after the mastectomy turns up no cancer. This would be very much a good news/bad news scenario. No cancer is good news, but .... We have a to find a way to work in concert with the medical establishment. (PS: In both cases we found out that we did affect the cancer. In one case the affected tissue was less extensive than what was shown in the original MRI; in the other the cancer was found to be a lot less aggressive than the biopsy indicated.)
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Practical challenges -- part 2
My one beef with the Bengston bioenergy healing method is the very real possibility that you can take a workshop, learn this wonderful thing that purportedly can be used to heal cancer, and then be set loose, with no follow-up and no supervision, to play. And chances are you won't have a clue what you are doing.
Bill reminds me of the man who used to own the keelboat sailing club where I was a member many years ago. This man had grown up around boats and everything about sailing was as easy and natural to him as walking or eating a sandwich. He just assumed that everyone else was the same way. We could do things with his boats no other owner would dream of allowing people to do. We took them out in storms, in fog, in six to ten foot waves. Heck, we were doing a sailing marathon the night the tail end of Hurricane Andrew came through town. We certainly learned how to sail in all conditions, but quite often we nearly killed ourselves doing it, and I recall at least one occasion where we almost sank a boat. At any rate, the reason Bill reminds me of this man is that healing comes so naturally to him that he imagines that once you learn his technique, it will be just as easy for you.
I would, however, like to put forward, ever so tentatively, the idea that it is not the same thing to go forth and play with boats as it is to go forth and play with cancer. Cancer is a teensy bit more serious than that. So a little bit of supervision would be good thing. Here in Toronto we have our monthly practice groups, which Bill for a while attended by speaker phone. This follow-up was very valuable. Now there are a number of us who know the method well enough to offer help or advice, but we could still use some supervision. I know of another location where there seems to be a similar kind of follow-up, but in another city they have set up "healing teams", which to me sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind. In the early days Bill was happy to offer his time to help or give advice, but I can see that as the workshops proliferate, this would be logistically more and more difficult to do.
The problem is that each and every one of us practicing the method has to reinvent the wheel. Things happen, and we have no clue what they mean, because we have never seen them before. Whereas if there were a body of learning, or evidence, that we could turn to, such as a textbook, we could say "aha, this is what this means -- this type of tumour often gets bigger before it becomes consumed." Or, "aha, this type of labtest result has been seen with this kind of cancer before". But instead, we grope around in the dark with no idea of what's happening.
For instance, with our pancreatic cancer patient, who had a ten week remission that included the reversal of most of the life threatening symptoms of his cancer, and a return to near-normal kidney and liver function (which is huge), we found that while he was getting better, which presumably meant that the cancer was going away, the tumours did not diminish at all -- in fact, they grew. So how is it possible that his body was behaving as if the cancer were in remission while it was still there? A skeptical MD acquaintance of mine, who followed the case, interpreted it like this: "That is amazing! The body is encapsulating the malignancy to protect itself!" There is a distinct possibility that what we are doing is counteracting the malignancy of the cancer by prompting the body recognize the tumour as something foreign and harmful, and barricade it for self-protection, so it can then deal with it in its own good time. Do we know this for a fact? No. Has anyone studied it? No. Does it need to be studied? You bet. Because when the patient then goes for a CT-scan or an MRI, all that will show is that the tumour has gotten bigger. But we will not know how the tumour has changed in composition, and what kind of tissue there is around it. There will just be a huge panic because clearly the tumour is growing, followed by loud calls for allopathic interventions such as radiation and chemo, and how can you blame anyone for reacting like that? What manner of reassurance can we offer, with no body of evidence to explain what's happening?
That is why I say we are dealing with something experimental here. A lot more work needs to be done. I hope someone comes forward to offer Bill the wherewithal to do the (many) experiments that need to be carried out. It might be also helpful for people from the various centres where there have been workshops to hook up to compare notes. That is one of the reasons for having this blog -- to give some of our experiences, and to hear back from others who also do the work.
In the meantime, if you go out to play on a boat in a windstorm, be careful, wear a life jacket, and have a good sail.
Here are some relevant links: Practical Challenges, Part 1, How effective is Bengston bioenergy?, Case study #2, Case study #1
Bill reminds me of the man who used to own the keelboat sailing club where I was a member many years ago. This man had grown up around boats and everything about sailing was as easy and natural to him as walking or eating a sandwich. He just assumed that everyone else was the same way. We could do things with his boats no other owner would dream of allowing people to do. We took them out in storms, in fog, in six to ten foot waves. Heck, we were doing a sailing marathon the night the tail end of Hurricane Andrew came through town. We certainly learned how to sail in all conditions, but quite often we nearly killed ourselves doing it, and I recall at least one occasion where we almost sank a boat. At any rate, the reason Bill reminds me of this man is that healing comes so naturally to him that he imagines that once you learn his technique, it will be just as easy for you.
I would, however, like to put forward, ever so tentatively, the idea that it is not the same thing to go forth and play with boats as it is to go forth and play with cancer. Cancer is a teensy bit more serious than that. So a little bit of supervision would be good thing. Here in Toronto we have our monthly practice groups, which Bill for a while attended by speaker phone. This follow-up was very valuable. Now there are a number of us who know the method well enough to offer help or advice, but we could still use some supervision. I know of another location where there seems to be a similar kind of follow-up, but in another city they have set up "healing teams", which to me sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind. In the early days Bill was happy to offer his time to help or give advice, but I can see that as the workshops proliferate, this would be logistically more and more difficult to do.
The problem is that each and every one of us practicing the method has to reinvent the wheel. Things happen, and we have no clue what they mean, because we have never seen them before. Whereas if there were a body of learning, or evidence, that we could turn to, such as a textbook, we could say "aha, this is what this means -- this type of tumour often gets bigger before it becomes consumed." Or, "aha, this type of labtest result has been seen with this kind of cancer before". But instead, we grope around in the dark with no idea of what's happening.
For instance, with our pancreatic cancer patient, who had a ten week remission that included the reversal of most of the life threatening symptoms of his cancer, and a return to near-normal kidney and liver function (which is huge), we found that while he was getting better, which presumably meant that the cancer was going away, the tumours did not diminish at all -- in fact, they grew. So how is it possible that his body was behaving as if the cancer were in remission while it was still there? A skeptical MD acquaintance of mine, who followed the case, interpreted it like this: "That is amazing! The body is encapsulating the malignancy to protect itself!" There is a distinct possibility that what we are doing is counteracting the malignancy of the cancer by prompting the body recognize the tumour as something foreign and harmful, and barricade it for self-protection, so it can then deal with it in its own good time. Do we know this for a fact? No. Has anyone studied it? No. Does it need to be studied? You bet. Because when the patient then goes for a CT-scan or an MRI, all that will show is that the tumour has gotten bigger. But we will not know how the tumour has changed in composition, and what kind of tissue there is around it. There will just be a huge panic because clearly the tumour is growing, followed by loud calls for allopathic interventions such as radiation and chemo, and how can you blame anyone for reacting like that? What manner of reassurance can we offer, with no body of evidence to explain what's happening?
That is why I say we are dealing with something experimental here. A lot more work needs to be done. I hope someone comes forward to offer Bill the wherewithal to do the (many) experiments that need to be carried out. It might be also helpful for people from the various centres where there have been workshops to hook up to compare notes. That is one of the reasons for having this blog -- to give some of our experiences, and to hear back from others who also do the work.
In the meantime, if you go out to play on a boat in a windstorm, be careful, wear a life jacket, and have a good sail.
Here are some relevant links: Practical Challenges, Part 1, How effective is Bengston bioenergy?, Case study #2, Case study #1
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Dose response
We had some bad news yesterday. One of our clients has had some negative test results. This client has an aggressive cancer for which the only available treatment is palliative chemotherapy and radiation when the cancer gets bad enough to interfere with quality of life. So far our patient's quality life has been near-normal, but the test results gave us all a bit of a jolt.
This being a serious cancer, we were seeing the patient 4 to 5 times a week up until mid-December, when holidays and inclement weather began to cut into the frequency of the treatments. The November test results were still fine, so I have to assume that cutting down on the frequency of treatments was the reason for the deterioration.
This brings up the issue of "dose response". Just how much treatment do you need?
Although Bill says in the workshops that serious, metastasized cancers need a lot of treatment, up to even hours a day, one can still manage to come away thinking that this somehow ought to be fast and easy. At the beginning I was wildly optimistic about treatment time. Now I am more realistic, but I still don't know how much is enough.
Last summer I was treating someone for lymphoma once a week. I had a sense that the weekly session was the bare minimum, but the patient was not ready to commit to more. Sure enough when we skipped a week the lymphoma "acted up". The patient then terminated treatment because it "didn't work", even though test results showed that the lymphoma had gone from "grade 2" to "grade 1" (for some reason the improvement was dismissed as a fluke).
Bill has done experiments with mice on dose response. He has found that with weekly distance treatments 40% of the mice still survive. (Here is a link to a brief commentary on the study by one of the researchers, providing a few more details.) In Bill's initial experiments the mice received one hour of treatment a day for about 35 days. The speed of remission was found to be a function of metabolic rate: the larger the animal, the slower the remission. People are a lot bigger than mice. Once you start treating someone, chances are you'll be treating them for a long time.
Since I've been thinking of this method in terms of "standard of care", the sheer amount of treatment time needed seems to be an obstacle. With today's treatment methods, patients get hooked up to IV-lines dispensing chemo, and little manpower is needed to monitor them (I am assuming, rightly or wrongly, that one oncology nurse can monitor 3 or 4 patients -- please correct me if I'm wrong). Sometimes chemo is just a question of popping a little pill. In contrast, with Bill's method treaters would need to spend hours providing one-on-one care. On the upside, however, we might be dispensing with the need for the kind of care where hours are spent with multiple professionals dealing with a single patient, such as in surgery, or where expensive equipment is needed to provide treatment, such as with radiation. The biggest upside, of course, would be an improvement in the patient's quality of life instead of the dreadful side effects of radiation and chemo. But it's early days yet: so far I'm only dreaming.
This being a serious cancer, we were seeing the patient 4 to 5 times a week up until mid-December, when holidays and inclement weather began to cut into the frequency of the treatments. The November test results were still fine, so I have to assume that cutting down on the frequency of treatments was the reason for the deterioration.
This brings up the issue of "dose response". Just how much treatment do you need?
Although Bill says in the workshops that serious, metastasized cancers need a lot of treatment, up to even hours a day, one can still manage to come away thinking that this somehow ought to be fast and easy. At the beginning I was wildly optimistic about treatment time. Now I am more realistic, but I still don't know how much is enough.
Last summer I was treating someone for lymphoma once a week. I had a sense that the weekly session was the bare minimum, but the patient was not ready to commit to more. Sure enough when we skipped a week the lymphoma "acted up". The patient then terminated treatment because it "didn't work", even though test results showed that the lymphoma had gone from "grade 2" to "grade 1" (for some reason the improvement was dismissed as a fluke).
Bill has done experiments with mice on dose response. He has found that with weekly distance treatments 40% of the mice still survive. (Here is a link to a brief commentary on the study by one of the researchers, providing a few more details.) In Bill's initial experiments the mice received one hour of treatment a day for about 35 days. The speed of remission was found to be a function of metabolic rate: the larger the animal, the slower the remission. People are a lot bigger than mice. Once you start treating someone, chances are you'll be treating them for a long time.
Since I've been thinking of this method in terms of "standard of care", the sheer amount of treatment time needed seems to be an obstacle. With today's treatment methods, patients get hooked up to IV-lines dispensing chemo, and little manpower is needed to monitor them (I am assuming, rightly or wrongly, that one oncology nurse can monitor 3 or 4 patients -- please correct me if I'm wrong). Sometimes chemo is just a question of popping a little pill. In contrast, with Bill's method treaters would need to spend hours providing one-on-one care. On the upside, however, we might be dispensing with the need for the kind of care where hours are spent with multiple professionals dealing with a single patient, such as in surgery, or where expensive equipment is needed to provide treatment, such as with radiation. The biggest upside, of course, would be an improvement in the patient's quality of life instead of the dreadful side effects of radiation and chemo. But it's early days yet: so far I'm only dreaming.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
One more time, with feeling (some thoughts on "selling" Bill)
Today I found another ad for a Bill workshop on the internet, reproducing, in part, the text of one of my own original ads for the workshops and amending it to make it sound like we were curing people as successfully as Bill's skeptical trainees cured the mice in his experiments. Here is the text in question:
The last two sentences have been added to my original text. The last sentence is patently untrue, as it implies that trainees are able to heal humans with nearly 100% success rates. This has simply not been the case in our experience. Since I am the communication hub for over 100 people who took the workshops in Canada, and I am in regular contact with the 30 or so who come to practice sessions, if we were healing people with nearly 100% effectiveness, I'd be the one of the first to know. I wish it were that easy!
So one more time, with feeling: The teachability of the Bengston method has been tested in experiments with mice. Skeptical volunteers who were taught the method healed mice, not people. Their success rate over the course of 3 experiments was 85.7%. We are not yet seeing the same results with Bill's trainees curing cancer in people. Humans are far more complex than mice.
By all means, take the workshop. It's a fun workshop, it's a valuable workshop, but don't take it under the misconception that it is fully proven with people when it is not. We are still working on that part and you can choose to be a part of the experiment by participating in a workshop and practicing the method for yourself. If you see claims that teachability has been proven in treating human cancers, ask for details. It may be that I'm not aware of everything that's going on. Or it may be that the organizers have simply not bothered to cross their "t"s and dot their "i"s and are making claims they cannot possibly substantiate.
Being of a somewhat mischievous nature, I would suggest that you make the organizers work a little before you sign up. For instance, if they claim that the method heals all manner of human ailments, including severe psychiatric disease, ask them just what kind of ailments and psychiatric disease they are talking about, how many cases, and who exactly did the healing. If there have been multiple workshops, the organizers ought to be able to produce some results from the people who have taken the previous workshops or at least have some idea of how they are faring using the method. They should be able to stand behind the product they are selling. Asking questions is just being a good little consumer. And again, keep in mind, that I do recommend taking the seminar.
William Bengston is the first person in the history of cancer research to bring about full life-span cures of cancer in laboratory mice using energy healing. To date there have been 10 experiments at five universities including two medical schools. In the first four experiments 87.9% of laboratory mice injected with a form of cancer known to be 100% fatal recovered, lived their full lifespans, and showed immunity to reinjections of the cancer. In later experiments recoveries were closer to 100%. His method has been applied successfully to humans with a wide range of conditions. Dr. Bengston has taught his method extensively and successfully to trainee healers, all with similar success rates.
The last two sentences have been added to my original text. The last sentence is patently untrue, as it implies that trainees are able to heal humans with nearly 100% success rates. This has simply not been the case in our experience. Since I am the communication hub for over 100 people who took the workshops in Canada, and I am in regular contact with the 30 or so who come to practice sessions, if we were healing people with nearly 100% effectiveness, I'd be the one of the first to know. I wish it were that easy!
So one more time, with feeling: The teachability of the Bengston method has been tested in experiments with mice. Skeptical volunteers who were taught the method healed mice, not people. Their success rate over the course of 3 experiments was 85.7%. We are not yet seeing the same results with Bill's trainees curing cancer in people. Humans are far more complex than mice.
By all means, take the workshop. It's a fun workshop, it's a valuable workshop, but don't take it under the misconception that it is fully proven with people when it is not. We are still working on that part and you can choose to be a part of the experiment by participating in a workshop and practicing the method for yourself. If you see claims that teachability has been proven in treating human cancers, ask for details. It may be that I'm not aware of everything that's going on. Or it may be that the organizers have simply not bothered to cross their "t"s and dot their "i"s and are making claims they cannot possibly substantiate.
Being of a somewhat mischievous nature, I would suggest that you make the organizers work a little before you sign up. For instance, if they claim that the method heals all manner of human ailments, including severe psychiatric disease, ask them just what kind of ailments and psychiatric disease they are talking about, how many cases, and who exactly did the healing. If there have been multiple workshops, the organizers ought to be able to produce some results from the people who have taken the previous workshops or at least have some idea of how they are faring using the method. They should be able to stand behind the product they are selling. Asking questions is just being a good little consumer. And again, keep in mind, that I do recommend taking the seminar.
Monday, January 5, 2009
"Resonance" vs "technique"
The factual statements come from Bill's papers and talks. The speculation based on them is mine and is put forth for consideration and debate.
Bill Bengston has shown the ability in experiments to heal mice of cancer from up to 1000 miles away. He also says that he has cured mice of whose existence he was not aware, when it was the unstated intention of his research partners to include those mice in the experiment.
When Bill published his first mouse paper in 2000 he was very enthusiastic about having proven that skeptical volunteers could be taught the method. But by the time he published his "Resonance" paper in 2007, along with the companion "Methods" paper, outlining the technique through which he taught the skeptical volunteers, he was more restrained. Then followed "Can healing be taught?" in which he stated that he had in fact not proven to his own satisfaction that he had taught his skeptical volunteers how to heal.
The fly in the ointment (and also the great marvel of it all) is "resonance". In the original experiments it was found that not only did the treated group get better, but so did mice in the control group if someone involved in the healing part of the experiment so much as looked at them. The pattern was that when reports came in of a mouse in the control group having died, someone would look in on them to see what the surviving ones looked like. After that visit the control mice all began to exhibit the same symptoms as the treated mice and then proceeded to remit to full cure. In later experiments every single mouse was cured, except for the ones that were sent to a distant lab whose location was unknown to Bill.
In the minds of orthodox researchers this means that "nothing happened". The whole point of experimental design is to have a group that receives treatment and a control group that doesn't. What proves that the treatment works is that the first group gets better and the second one doesn't. If both groups get better, the experiment is considered a failure. In this case, however, that would lead to a false result because in fact all the mice should have died.
Bill addresses the problem in his "Resonance" paper, published in the spring 2007 issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. As I understand it, what happens is that all the treatment subjects get bonded, whichever group they happen to be in, so when one group gets treated, so does the other, by proxy. Every time a mouse gets treated, so do all the others, unless they get somehow pulled out of resonance by, say, being shipped out of town, or by being treated by a self-conscious biologist.
"Resonance" not only complicates experimental design, it also muddles the issue of teachability. Not only do the mice bond, so do the healers. The way Bill puts the difficulty is to say that so long as even one person learns the method, all the mice could still be healed, and it would be unclear which particular skeptical volunteer was responsible for doing the actual healing. But I would say that "resonance" taken to its logical conclusion means that it is unnecessary for any of the volunteers to learn anything at all. If Bill can heal mice from 1000 miles away, and heal nearby mice of whose existence he doesn't know, would it not be a piece of cake for him, quite unintentionally, to heal mice being treated by his students, just by desiring to see the experiment succeed? Just a question. And here is another: what kind of experimental design would you need to rule these factors out? How do you rule out the experimenter's mind as a factor, when that mind is known to have a range of 1000 miles?
(BTW those of us who took workshops with Bill would say we definitely learned something.)
"Resonance" in workshops and other interesting places
(Speculation alert!)
We have all experienced "resonance" at places like big family gatherings, historic events like the recent U.S. election, or football or hockey games where the home town team is winning big. We suddenly become bonded into a group whole where the group becomes more important than the "I". We feel as one. We shout as one. We do the wave. We leave the confines of this little shell that is our ego and become part of a much larger whole, and it feels damn good. It lasts for a little while, and then it's over. We go back to being our normal little selves and forget about the feeling, though I suspect some part of us continues to hanker for it.
When you go to an event such as a healing workshop or a mass-market self-help event like a Tony Robbins or a Journey seminar, chances are you will also find "resonance" at work. Many of these people are masters at preparing the field for it energetically. Some do it ahead of time, others unabashedly do it right on the spot. Recently I attended a Matrix Energetics evening with Richard Bartlett. Richard danced in, in a Hawaiian shirt and a fedora, to the tune of Elton John's "Benny and the Jets". When he reached the podium he sat down on a massage table and continued swaying and dancing as he charged the room. And you could feel it. It felt absolutely marvelous, an energy that made you want to sing and dance, going straight to your heart. Non-commercial folk like the monks of the Dalai Lama do it too, in a more sacred way. The last time I saw His Holiness, they turned Toronto's 50,000 seat Rogers Centre (formerly SkyDome) into what definitely felt like a small, quiet temple (but you had to get there early).
Bill is more discrete than Richard Bartlett. He doesn't dance in (although he might in some of his American venues -- you never know). He would probably be more partial to Bob Dylan than Elton John. But he does create resonance -- and likely he does it while teaching people his mental imaging technique. It's as if having everyone in the room concentrating on the same task gives him the switch he needs. It took me a while to catch on to what was happening. I, like everyone else, was so focused on the technique that nothing else entered my mind. But after a couple of workshops I had the luxury of just watching and feeling, and I began to notice what was going on around me. It is particularly noticeable on the second day, in the form of a wonderful sense of common purpose and camaraderie. By the time the day comes to an end, we are all reluctant to leave.
And now here come the questions. What part does Bill's mental imaging technique play in the creation of resonance? Which is more important to the teaching of healing, the technique or the resonance? Are they equally important? Could Bill teach people to heal through resonance just by having them do, say, vocal exercises in unison?
Next question: which is more important to the production of a healing effect: being able to reproduce the technique or being able to get into resonance? Are they both necessary? Does one aid in the creation of the other? (I do know of someone who rates themselves quite proficient at the technique but gives a very low rating to its healing effectiveness. That would suggest an inability to get into a resonant healing state, while still doing the technique as instructed, though perhaps not well enough.)
And another one: Is the mental imaging technique the thing that allows one to become "resonant" when one is doing healing all by one's little lonesome, without the benefit of others resonating along? (As I wrote this down I had an image of one resonating all by one's little lonesome as a bell that somehow starts reverberating by itself from the inside out.)
At any rate I suspect that anything you hear or read about "resonance" is pretty much the tip of the iceberg. We ain't heard or seen nothing yet, and we definitely don't have all the answers. And that "we" I suspect includes Bill himself.
My theory is that Bill, his friend Ben, Richard Bartlett, Erik Perl et al. are all "gateways". Something has come through to them; and through them, whatever it is, it can come through to the rest of us. IMHO what we are looking at is nothing less than the next stage of the evolution of the human mind. The trick is for all these gentlemen to remember that being a gateway is a gift rather than a personal achievement, and that one does not own the passage or the energy that comes through it. And that then to go on to market one's gift like a set of Ginsu knives is to invite a proverbial karmic kick in the shin. And likewise for the rest of us the trick is to remember, when we are in the presence of the gateway, to be grateful to the source where the energy comes from, whatever that Source may be.
Bill Bengston has shown the ability in experiments to heal mice of cancer from up to 1000 miles away. He also says that he has cured mice of whose existence he was not aware, when it was the unstated intention of his research partners to include those mice in the experiment.
When Bill published his first mouse paper in 2000 he was very enthusiastic about having proven that skeptical volunteers could be taught the method. But by the time he published his "Resonance" paper in 2007, along with the companion "Methods" paper, outlining the technique through which he taught the skeptical volunteers, he was more restrained. Then followed "Can healing be taught?" in which he stated that he had in fact not proven to his own satisfaction that he had taught his skeptical volunteers how to heal.
The fly in the ointment (and also the great marvel of it all) is "resonance". In the original experiments it was found that not only did the treated group get better, but so did mice in the control group if someone involved in the healing part of the experiment so much as looked at them. The pattern was that when reports came in of a mouse in the control group having died, someone would look in on them to see what the surviving ones looked like. After that visit the control mice all began to exhibit the same symptoms as the treated mice and then proceeded to remit to full cure. In later experiments every single mouse was cured, except for the ones that were sent to a distant lab whose location was unknown to Bill.
In the minds of orthodox researchers this means that "nothing happened". The whole point of experimental design is to have a group that receives treatment and a control group that doesn't. What proves that the treatment works is that the first group gets better and the second one doesn't. If both groups get better, the experiment is considered a failure. In this case, however, that would lead to a false result because in fact all the mice should have died.
Bill addresses the problem in his "Resonance" paper, published in the spring 2007 issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. As I understand it, what happens is that all the treatment subjects get bonded, whichever group they happen to be in, so when one group gets treated, so does the other, by proxy. Every time a mouse gets treated, so do all the others, unless they get somehow pulled out of resonance by, say, being shipped out of town, or by being treated by a self-conscious biologist.
"Resonance" not only complicates experimental design, it also muddles the issue of teachability. Not only do the mice bond, so do the healers. The way Bill puts the difficulty is to say that so long as even one person learns the method, all the mice could still be healed, and it would be unclear which particular skeptical volunteer was responsible for doing the actual healing. But I would say that "resonance" taken to its logical conclusion means that it is unnecessary for any of the volunteers to learn anything at all. If Bill can heal mice from 1000 miles away, and heal nearby mice of whose existence he doesn't know, would it not be a piece of cake for him, quite unintentionally, to heal mice being treated by his students, just by desiring to see the experiment succeed? Just a question. And here is another: what kind of experimental design would you need to rule these factors out? How do you rule out the experimenter's mind as a factor, when that mind is known to have a range of 1000 miles?
(BTW those of us who took workshops with Bill would say we definitely learned something.)
"Resonance" in workshops and other interesting places
(Speculation alert!)
We have all experienced "resonance" at places like big family gatherings, historic events like the recent U.S. election, or football or hockey games where the home town team is winning big. We suddenly become bonded into a group whole where the group becomes more important than the "I". We feel as one. We shout as one. We do the wave. We leave the confines of this little shell that is our ego and become part of a much larger whole, and it feels damn good. It lasts for a little while, and then it's over. We go back to being our normal little selves and forget about the feeling, though I suspect some part of us continues to hanker for it.
When you go to an event such as a healing workshop or a mass-market self-help event like a Tony Robbins or a Journey seminar, chances are you will also find "resonance" at work. Many of these people are masters at preparing the field for it energetically. Some do it ahead of time, others unabashedly do it right on the spot. Recently I attended a Matrix Energetics evening with Richard Bartlett. Richard danced in, in a Hawaiian shirt and a fedora, to the tune of Elton John's "Benny and the Jets". When he reached the podium he sat down on a massage table and continued swaying and dancing as he charged the room. And you could feel it. It felt absolutely marvelous, an energy that made you want to sing and dance, going straight to your heart. Non-commercial folk like the monks of the Dalai Lama do it too, in a more sacred way. The last time I saw His Holiness, they turned Toronto's 50,000 seat Rogers Centre (formerly SkyDome) into what definitely felt like a small, quiet temple (but you had to get there early).
Bill is more discrete than Richard Bartlett. He doesn't dance in (although he might in some of his American venues -- you never know). He would probably be more partial to Bob Dylan than Elton John. But he does create resonance -- and likely he does it while teaching people his mental imaging technique. It's as if having everyone in the room concentrating on the same task gives him the switch he needs. It took me a while to catch on to what was happening. I, like everyone else, was so focused on the technique that nothing else entered my mind. But after a couple of workshops I had the luxury of just watching and feeling, and I began to notice what was going on around me. It is particularly noticeable on the second day, in the form of a wonderful sense of common purpose and camaraderie. By the time the day comes to an end, we are all reluctant to leave.
And now here come the questions. What part does Bill's mental imaging technique play in the creation of resonance? Which is more important to the teaching of healing, the technique or the resonance? Are they equally important? Could Bill teach people to heal through resonance just by having them do, say, vocal exercises in unison?
Next question: which is more important to the production of a healing effect: being able to reproduce the technique or being able to get into resonance? Are they both necessary? Does one aid in the creation of the other? (I do know of someone who rates themselves quite proficient at the technique but gives a very low rating to its healing effectiveness. That would suggest an inability to get into a resonant healing state, while still doing the technique as instructed, though perhaps not well enough.)
And another one: Is the mental imaging technique the thing that allows one to become "resonant" when one is doing healing all by one's little lonesome, without the benefit of others resonating along? (As I wrote this down I had an image of one resonating all by one's little lonesome as a bell that somehow starts reverberating by itself from the inside out.)
At any rate I suspect that anything you hear or read about "resonance" is pretty much the tip of the iceberg. We ain't heard or seen nothing yet, and we definitely don't have all the answers. And that "we" I suspect includes Bill himself.
My theory is that Bill, his friend Ben, Richard Bartlett, Erik Perl et al. are all "gateways". Something has come through to them; and through them, whatever it is, it can come through to the rest of us. IMHO what we are looking at is nothing less than the next stage of the evolution of the human mind. The trick is for all these gentlemen to remember that being a gateway is a gift rather than a personal achievement, and that one does not own the passage or the energy that comes through it. And that then to go on to market one's gift like a set of Ginsu knives is to invite a proverbial karmic kick in the shin. And likewise for the rest of us the trick is to remember, when we are in the presence of the gateway, to be grateful to the source where the energy comes from, whatever that Source may be.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Love, bioenergy, and miracles
The problem with all the cases presented below is that none of them constitute proof of anything.
These are the strange ones, the cases where things happen that ought not be happening and for which there is (or so we believe anyway) no current scientific explanation.
The allopathic take on these cases would be "nothing was really wrong in the first place, therefore nothing really happened."
Case one, multiple tumours disappearing between the MRI and the follow-up pre-biopsy ultrasound. The multiple tumours were confirmed by MRI (and were believed to be a recurrence of a previous cancer that had been treated with surgery), but after treatment by us, could no longer be detected. There was one single treatment event.
Case two, the "get-well blanket". In this case the very elderly parent of someone I know was diagnosed with a virulent form of lung cancer. There had been severe weight loss, which prompted the medical team to look for some kind of cancer, which then was found through a CT-scan and then confirmed by an X-ray. A second opinion was sought, which corroborated the initial diagnosis. When I first heard about this situation, it was through a group of women who were knitting what they called a "get-well blanket" for the afflicted parent. Everyone was supposed to knit a few rows and put their good wishes and prayers into their efforts. I was asked to "do my stuff" on the blanket in addition to knitting a few rows. I did "my stuff" with no conviction that it would work. (This is called "healing by proxy". Experiments have shown that substances such as water, cotton and wood shavings hold healing energy and can be used instead of direct hands-on treatment. This blanket was acrylic, so I had no high hopes for it.) The parent went for surgery and the lung was excised, but the subsequent biopsy found no trace of cancer. After the surgery to remove the non-cancerous lung, the weight-loss that had caused the suspicion of cancer in the first place reversed. Was this a tragic medical error, or a medical miracle?
Case three, Bo, the miracle dog. Twice Bo was on his "death bed". Twice he was treated, twice he recovered (the first time after bleeding through the nose for two days). He is still fine. There was no diagnosis, but there were symptoms of severe illness (refusal to eat, severe weight loss, weakness, and the second time, inability to get up). There were two single hands-on treatments, five months apart, and no treatment of any other kind.
Case four, the incredible exploding suspected melanoma. Melanoma was suspected, a biopsy scheduled, three treatments given (in which the recipient felt energy and pain). After the third treatment the melanoma swelled, exploded, drained "ugly black stuff", then healed over. By the time the scheduled biopsy was to be done, there was nothing there to biopsy. The medical take on the "ugly black stuff" draining was that it was simply "not possible".
The common thread in all four cases was that there had been no biopsy to confirm the cancer. This would lead some people to say that there had been no cancer in the first place. But other people, including some physicists, have different thoughts on the subject. Anyone who has seen the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? will be familiar with the concept of quantum possibilities. Physicist Russell Targ (following William Braud) suggests that healers can go back in time to the "seed moment" of when a disease manifests and alter the pathway of the disease. The more "set in reality" the disease is, the more difficult it is to affect it. Richard Bartlett of Matrix Energetics speaks of the difficulty of going against "consensus reality" and his own reluctance to take on cancer because of the weight of "consensus reality" around it. A positive biopsy sets the cancer in stone and makes it more difficult to treat. But until such time as it is "set in stone", quantum possibilities continue to exist.
These are the strange ones, the cases where things happen that ought not be happening and for which there is (or so we believe anyway) no current scientific explanation.
The allopathic take on these cases would be "nothing was really wrong in the first place, therefore nothing really happened."
Case one, multiple tumours disappearing between the MRI and the follow-up pre-biopsy ultrasound. The multiple tumours were confirmed by MRI (and were believed to be a recurrence of a previous cancer that had been treated with surgery), but after treatment by us, could no longer be detected. There was one single treatment event.
Case two, the "get-well blanket". In this case the very elderly parent of someone I know was diagnosed with a virulent form of lung cancer. There had been severe weight loss, which prompted the medical team to look for some kind of cancer, which then was found through a CT-scan and then confirmed by an X-ray. A second opinion was sought, which corroborated the initial diagnosis. When I first heard about this situation, it was through a group of women who were knitting what they called a "get-well blanket" for the afflicted parent. Everyone was supposed to knit a few rows and put their good wishes and prayers into their efforts. I was asked to "do my stuff" on the blanket in addition to knitting a few rows. I did "my stuff" with no conviction that it would work. (This is called "healing by proxy". Experiments have shown that substances such as water, cotton and wood shavings hold healing energy and can be used instead of direct hands-on treatment. This blanket was acrylic, so I had no high hopes for it.) The parent went for surgery and the lung was excised, but the subsequent biopsy found no trace of cancer. After the surgery to remove the non-cancerous lung, the weight-loss that had caused the suspicion of cancer in the first place reversed. Was this a tragic medical error, or a medical miracle?
Case three, Bo, the miracle dog. Twice Bo was on his "death bed". Twice he was treated, twice he recovered (the first time after bleeding through the nose for two days). He is still fine. There was no diagnosis, but there were symptoms of severe illness (refusal to eat, severe weight loss, weakness, and the second time, inability to get up). There were two single hands-on treatments, five months apart, and no treatment of any other kind.
Case four, the incredible exploding suspected melanoma. Melanoma was suspected, a biopsy scheduled, three treatments given (in which the recipient felt energy and pain). After the third treatment the melanoma swelled, exploded, drained "ugly black stuff", then healed over. By the time the scheduled biopsy was to be done, there was nothing there to biopsy. The medical take on the "ugly black stuff" draining was that it was simply "not possible".
The common thread in all four cases was that there had been no biopsy to confirm the cancer. This would lead some people to say that there had been no cancer in the first place. But other people, including some physicists, have different thoughts on the subject. Anyone who has seen the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? will be familiar with the concept of quantum possibilities. Physicist Russell Targ (following William Braud) suggests that healers can go back in time to the "seed moment" of when a disease manifests and alter the pathway of the disease. The more "set in reality" the disease is, the more difficult it is to affect it. Richard Bartlett of Matrix Energetics speaks of the difficulty of going against "consensus reality" and his own reluctance to take on cancer because of the weight of "consensus reality" around it. A positive biopsy sets the cancer in stone and makes it more difficult to treat. But until such time as it is "set in stone", quantum possibilities continue to exist.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
