In a video entitled "Healed by a Non-Believer" Bill Bengston describes how his persistent back pain was cured by his mentor, Bennett Mayrick, who had just discovered his healing abilities. Dr. Bengston makes a point of repeating that neither he nor Bennett Mayrick were "believers" and in another video, "Open-Minded Skepticism," he even says that "believers" scare him.
By belief he does not necessarily mean religious belief, but more generally unquestioning belief in anything. As a skeptic he spent years studying and testing his mentor's healing ability and succeeded in reproducing it under laboratory conditions, proving that energy healing worked on cancer, and that it did not need to involve faith.
I am, on the one hand, quite pleased to see anomalous healing taken out of the context of evangelical Christian revivals, where charismatic preachers dramatically knock over stricken parishioners, commanding them to "Heal!" These often fake healings have come to be associated in the public mind with hucksters and charlatans selling false hope and fleecing the desperately ill. So it's good to have someone say that there can be such a thing as "faithless" healing, and that such healing can be demonstrated to work in the lab on mice, critters that as far as we know do not "believe" in anything.
Where does the healing come from?
But on the other hand I do have to ask, where does the healing come from? Dr. Bengston says it's the unconscious: "My body knows how to digest an apple... It knows how to heal." And truly, it is miraculous: you cut yourself, and your body sends T-cells and proteins to the injury site, and it somehow stops the bleeding, controls infectious agents, and rebuilds damaged blood vessels and skin. When you are doing anomalous healing, unconscious accesses unconscious, and healing information is transferred. No need for faith or belief, other than perhaps belief that such healing might be possible.
And yet paradoxically Dr. Bengston also speaks of "the Source" and says that when you do healing you "go to the Source" or "access Source energy", and even has a healing technique he calls "touching the Source". I note that many other healing modalities speak of "Source", "Spirit", "Universal Life Energy", and "All There Is" -- all the while somehow managing to omit the word "God". To me it's all a matter of semantics: one person's "Source" or "Universal Life Energy" is another person's "God", so why is it necessary to differentiate the one from the other? And what's even odder is the healer who unquestioningly accepts one but disparages the other, as in "Source Energy is good, but look at what a mess God has allowed the world to become!"
Is belief a hindrance to healing?
I don't know whether Dr. Bengston believes in the Source Energy that he says he accesses when he heals. It may be that as an empiricist and a pragmatist he has merely noted its existence and accepted its presence in his healing work without having to resort to belief, or for that matter questioning. His motto may be described as "do not proceed from a position of belief in something that you have not observed", but what do you do as as a skeptic if you have repeatedly seen and felt "Source Energy" work? Do you believe what you see?
He even goes so far as to say that in healing work belief can be a hindrance. Dr. Issam Nemeh, the Catholic faith-healer from Cleveland, seems to corroborate this by noting that non-believers such as atheists are often easier to heal than church-going Christians, but he then ascribes the phenomenon not to belief being an obstacle but to God reaching out to the unbeliever to give him a reason to believe.
There are several other elements in Dr. Bengston's story that speak to there being more at work here than "unconscious speaking to unconscious". For instance, he will briefly mention his mentor's spirit guides, "the Fellows", who have occasionally also communicated with him, but does not elaborate on who "the Fellows" may be, or where they come from. Technically they could be emanations of the healer's unconscious, but that is not discussed. Also, Dr. Bengston relates in his book that when Bennett Mayrick died, he visited Dr. Bengston in spirit, surrounded by "incredible love". Where did that visitation and that love emanate from? To quote Shakespeare, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (Hamlet), or can be explained by cage upon cage of mice cured of cancer.
"Faithless" healing is good if it can disassociate anomalous healing from the damage caused to its reputation by the shady practices of some televangelists, but do we need to chuck "God" out of the healing equation altogether? Many quantum physicists and biologists (such as Bruce Lipton) now recognize that we may have arrived to the place where God and science meet, requiring from us not only a new definition of science, but also a new definition of God (who is most likely not the bearded gent reaching out to Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling). This may be the place where healing (and other things we now call miracles) happen.
For another view, see Take Two Placebos and See Your Energy Healer in the Morning.
Sources
William Bengston, The Energy Cure, Sounds True 2010.
"Healed by a Non-Believer", Youtube video
"Open-Minded Skepticism", Youtube video
Maura Postons Zagran, Miracles Every Day: The Story of One Physician's Inspiring Faith and the Healing Power of Prayer, Random House 2010
Interview with Dr. Nemeh, Youtube video
Join the Conversation