FAITH HEALING

The Philippines appears to be the only country where faith healing flourishes. There are some 30-50 known faith healers and a thousand more are practising, unknown to many people and the gov­ernment authorities. Furthermore, it is only in this country that faith healers and psychic surgeons are given training as part of religious rituals by various spiritist churches. Origin of Faith healing

A recent theory purports that Filipino faith healers are descendants of the Kahuna, a tribe that used to heal in old Hawaii. Then shamans (priests who used magic to cure the sick, to divine the hidden, and to control events) were said to have the power to dematerialized tissues and bones and to rematerialized them in perfect order. The kahunas have long since vanished but the magical practices of these old Philippine tribes still exist. Two beliefs are common as to how faith healers receive their powers: First, the power is given by spirits. Eleuterio Terte, for example, became a faith healer in 1925 after two angelic children reportedly appeared to him when he was seriously ill. The two apparitions asked him to accept the healing power which would be given to him and would make him free from illness. When he agreed, he was cured the next morning. Since then, he has been healing people from all walks of life. Secondly, one can become a faith healer through serious preparation and training. There exists today in the Philippines, a spiritist group called the "Union Espiritista Christiana de Filipinas", which teaches its members how to communicate with the spirit world and become mediums who can heal, among other things. At the beginning of his training period, the would-be healer goes into a deep trance and then waits for the spirit to enter his body. Once the spirit is inside his body, the healer can begin to heal. Of those who become faith healers, very few are given the power to do material operation. It takes many years of study and practice before one becomes a medium operator (psychic surgeon), if at all.

Faith healers are not doctors but mediums or channels of the spirit. They believe that all sickness stems from the spiritual levels of man's being, the physical manifestation being merely the effect. Because of this belief, the pri­mary goal of their healing activity is to assist in the spiritual upliftment of the patient or the speeding up of his soul's evolution. The curing of the patient plays secondary to then mission. It is, therefore, required of patients to have faith in divine providence before the healing can begin.

A. Diagnostic Procedure

One of the most amazing things that faith healers do is that they can accurate­ly diagnose a patient's illness without using any of the standard medical tools and instruments.

A lot of faith healers diagnose illness by using nothing more than an ordinary white bond paper and coconut oil. They would first apply oil on the affected part of the body, cover it with paper and then press the top of the paper with their hands. The outline of the in­ternal organ would be visible on the pa­per. Alex Orbito, one of the noted faith healers, uses this x-ray-like technique when trying to pinpoint the exact loca­tion of the tumor. Other healers use white cotton blanket or cloth as a sort of an x-ray , screen. They would place the blanket between the patient and themselves and would peer through it as if reading tiny prints on the cloth. Romy Bugarin, another well-known healer, does a similar technique, using a white towel as his x-ray instrument.

Clairvoyant or psychic diagnosis is another diagnostic approach used by faith healers. The method, simply stated, is to put one's self in an altered state of consciousness through meditation. Jose Silva, the man who developed the famous Silva Mind Control Method, can accurately describe the patient's physical condition and any attendant illness by simply knowing the name and age of the patient.

B. Treatment

Each healer has his own method or style of healing, depending on his beliefs, his mental conditioning and cultural background. What is common among healers is that they must somehow be able to go into a higher state of con­sciousness to be effective.

Some of the methods that faith healers use to cure are:

1.    Magnetic healing — Based on gene­ral observations, magnetic healers use a minimum of ritual. They simply con­centrate or pray and then wait for the energy to come. When they feel the power coming to them, they begin to pass then hands above the affected areas.

A woman, about 25 years of age, was visiting Benjamin Balacano, a faith healer, when she had an epileptic attack that caused her to hit the left back portion of her head against a concrete railing. She suffered a deep, 3-inch wide head wound as a result of the acci­dent. Bleeding was profuse. Benjamin calmly fixed his gaze on the wound and assessed the woman's condition. The first thing he did was to make magnetic passes of his hand on top of the open wound. Then he made slapping motion some five or six inches above the head a couple of times. The bleeding myste­riously stopped.

2.    Psychic Surgery — This usually in­volves a painless, barehanded, surgery-like intervention into the human body, the removal of diseased tissues or tumors or growths and the closing of the incision leaving hardly any trace of the opera­tion at all. Because psychic surgery de­fies all known scientific laws of physics, chemistry  and biology, it is regarded by most traditional scientists to be no­thing more than trickery, hypnosis, plain magic and sleight-of-hand, despite incontrovertible proof to the contrary.

Mrs. Ramona de la Cruz was suffering from an unknown illness. With the failure of all scientific means to cure her, the family decided to try one last thing that they themselves were skeptical about — faith healing. They brought her to Alex Orbito for treatment. Orbito first did an X-ray on her forehead by using oil and white typewriting paper. A head of a woman without a face was clearly outlined on the paper. Orbito said that it was the entity responsible for Mrs. de la Cruz' sickness. Immediately after this, Orbito began working on her stomach. It took him a relatively longer period to pull out something from the stomach of the patient, which turned out to be thick strands of black hah about 14 to 15 inches in length.

There are many theories advanced by scientists and medical observers regarding faith healing but none of these can be conclusively proven from the strictly scientific standpoint. It seems that the phenomenon of faith healing cannot be explained from the purely physical or scientific standpoint. For what happens during a healing session goes beyond physical science and beyond the physical senses of man. Unless, there­fore, we change our fundamental assump­tions regarding the nature of the physi­cal universe and admit the existence Of other levels of reality within which our healers act, then no explanation is possible or believable.

Paranormal or spiritual forms of healing should not be regarded as being in conflict with orthodox medical prac­tice. The objectives of both are the same: the prevention of illness and restoration of sick individuals back to health. The former deals primarily with spiritual causes of illness, whereas the latter deals with physical causes. Since man is both spirit and matter, there is a need for both approaches to effect a common ground.

Phobia is a suffix used to indicate fear of something. Some of the world's bravest men have been known to have one phobia or another. Thus, a Hon hunter may, in fact have a great fear of mice.