BY DORA KUNZ
Talk given at Indralaya July 30th, 1957.
Tonight I thought I would give you an introductory talk on this vast subject of spiritual healing because it is really a big subject and during the three weeks I though we would take it up from different angles. As you all know, I've been doing some of my particular kind of work with my auras, with doctors and that sort of thing,for many years. Tonight I'm going to take it from a wider angle, and I'll bring that other part in later. Why I am bringing it up at all is because interest in the subject of spiritual healing has increased- increased incredibly among doctors and psychiatrists.
For the last five years they have started in a place very near where we live in Rye, N.Y.. It's a place called Wainwright House, it belongs to the Christian Laymen movement, and they've had these seven conferences on spiritual healing. I've been, I think, to all of them except the very first one. Now, at such a small place people can come only by invitation, and what has been really fascinating is the kind of people who are coming. First of all, there are of course a great many clergymen; but then what really is incredible is the number of, you might say, hard-boiled surgeons. For instance, what you might say the convenor of this meeting is a Doctor Frank Slaydon who for many years was the head of the neurosurgeons who are attending; and besides that a great many psychiatrists and psychologists besides those people who do the healing or people who are interested in some of this phenomena - I have given some talks to this gathering - and they are constantly being questioned by these different people.
But the interest is there, and it's very sincere al over the world, not only in the United States- I think it is really much further ahead as a matte of fact in England than it is in the United States. Many thousands and hundreds of thousands of people are going to these healing and revival meetings. The last thing I attended which is very interesting, I think two weeks before I left New York, only a few of us- I think only about fifteen or seventeen because this was an invitation on the spur of the moment. We had this man Oral Roberts - he has been in the Northwest and in many parts of the United States, and he came to this very small session and we were supposed to ask him any question we liked. And also he told us the story of his life. I'm glad I went there because I will have to say that I went with an extraordinarily prejudiced mind - I'm going to be perfectly honest about it that nobody in the world could have been more prejudiced than I - and I think 50% of the people there were in the same frame of mind frankly. And I think the man was - well of course he felt nervous because he thought he was in a company of highbrows - but he was, I think, extraordinarily sincere. And I think he's very simple because he's part India - I believe he's half India, and he therefore is a man with no questioning, no subtle Emotions. I don't mean because he's an India, but because he belongs to a simple pattern. I like this thing about him, he was very honest. He said many times, over and over again,he didn't know - and I think that is very sincere.
And he,like every other healer who has come to these meetings- and some of them like Mrs.Agnes Sanford I believe are very well known- they all say the same thing,that of all the thousands of people, and I suppose Oral Roberts has many more thousands than anybody else, they all say that only a very few people of those who come forward get healed. And none of them - that's one of the things which they always discuss - none of them has any idea what it is which prevents this healing from taking place. But then they of course also testify to these hundreds of cases which have been medically tested to being healed spontaneously. For instance the man I heard the first time I ever went to a spiritual healing seminar was a man in England - his name is Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, and he has with him working during the week seven Harley Street specialists so every case - and practically no other healer I know does this, this particular thing, and I think of all the people I met I like him best, Dr. Weatherhead - he doesn't take first of all a case which has not gone, as it were, through the medical mill, so they have medical diagnosis. Then they go through the spiritual healing ritual and hey have many spiritual healing groups; and then after this healing takes place they are again tested by the doctors who can therefore write a report. That is the one thing that all the doctors and psychiatrists who attended all these Conferences are begging for. They are begging for medical reports to be kept, and I've got to admit that practically not one of them does it. This Doctor Leslie Weatherhead in England who is the head of some big Methodist church in London,is the only one who, you might say,has the scientific mind and a scientific method of keeping constantly records, year by yea. The rest of them ay well they are so busy,they don't have the time. They say we come and we try to help people because we are asked and we cannot be bothered to take records. They are definitely, I think,on the defensive a little bit and that is, of course,the one thing everyone is begging for , the records. Now Dr.Weatherhead has done this and he told us about an interesting case - you don't mind if I ramble a little bit, do you, and tell you these things that happen? Dr. Weatherhead has those healing groups and every Sunday I believe there's one healing group which - I think three to five thousand people come every Sunday- and here's a very important fact to remember- on the stroke of Big Ben they start, that's the signal for everybody, they start thinking of a person. And he was telling us that he had one of his parishioners who was a dock worker who was dying with a blood disease which is very rare and they didn't think this, and at the seven o'clock healing ceremony all these people prayed for him. The following morning he went back to the hospital -he really thought to make to make the funeral arrangements of the man - but when he went to the hospital and talked to the nurse she told him this: she didn't even know that they had been praying about him. The doctors thought he was dying and then something very strange happened. Suddenly after seven o'clock this blood disease was, and this blood, as it were,turned around and started - well it had the right quantity of white and red blood corpuscles, and the following morning he was out of bed, he was walking; in two days he was out of that hospital; and in week he was back as a dock worker.
Now the one thing - for instance very healer brings out a different angle- the one thing Dr. Weatherhead - and I'm interested in this and I've been experimenting along some of these lines myself - brings out is that in this healing services which he conducts on Sundays he never thinks of a more than one or two people. Because he feels if you can direct this energy, this force, at those few people,it has this remarkable effect.
Now of course, all the healers - there isn't one of them which doesn't agree to that - and as I say I've talked with all of them, I've watched all of them, I have been in private sessions, and I don't mean to be healed, but I've watched their healing in private sessions and seen what took place and sometimes what didn't take place too - but they all feel this that they are not the healer but only the instrument of a healing power. They may disagree on a lot of things but that is the universal attitude which they have. And they feel that they are an instrument of God and that through their fingers or through their thoughts,it doesn't matter which way, they are able to be, as it were, the tools of this great healing power which they feel comes from God through them to cure people. And they feel that another basic qualification , of course, is the desire to help.
Now all the healers I have met by this time and I've met a few, they are people, of course, who have in themselves an immense and overabundance of energy. I mean there isn't one of them who is sickly,there is not one of them who is successful who has not this overabundance of physical vitality with an outward going personality. For instance when we asked Oral Roberts - he belongs to the Pentecostal Church believe - he said that nothing happened to him till he was anointed. At first his language bewildered us and of course we didn't really know what that meant so finally somebody said "What do you mean, anointed?" And what he meant is - being anointed is that he feels nothing really till, as it were,he puts himself in a state of mind where he is in relationship with God, and then he feels he is this tool of God as a healing power. Now that is what he means by being anointed - and I believe that is a special term in his particular church.
Now of all these people and we had of course as a group,w e had many many patients brought to us, I mean in the healing groups why they like me is because I always explain to them- I'm really not the a healer in that term of the work - I always explain that. Also I am the only heathen, I've got to say it. (Laughter) The chairman of the board of directors always puts his arm around me every morning and says: "How is my little heathen today?" and I've always been struck by this thing that some of them are without any doubt very narrowly sectarian, others are not. But they have no philosophy in any way, I've got to say that of all of them, which makes them think why they do have a failure. And I've got to say it, I even got up a couple of times. If they think of a patient, I mean if they have worked on a patient for a long time and that patient dies, they feel and have that sense of absolute failure. So two things they lack from my point of view, which I think we theosophists have, that sense that death - to them it is really only in theory a release, if you know what I mean. I've head some of these preachers say how terrible they feel, and it happens, of course over and over again , that some of their patients die, and they do not have, except in pure theory, they say it is God's will, but they do not have the idea that the person may have a sense of release.
Secondly,they don't have, of course, this basic idea in our theosophical teaching of karma- that it is something in a person's fate that they cannot be cured- they also have no philosophical background to that, so over and over again in the Conferences they bring out that total inability of why so few fundamentally can use this healing power, and none of them - there isn't one of them - who of course knows which of their many patients is going to respond. And is very interesting to me and always has been.
The man after Dr. Weatherhead, whom after all I have only met once, but the man I have come to like enormously myself , and I've seen himself many times and I think we have become good friends - is a man who is an executive in the Glen Martin Air Company in Baltimore . He's an engineer, he's a little Scotchman, he never opens his mouth practically, he's a warm personality with this tremendous oh tremendous vitality. He's very humble, and I've seen him in action and I think he really has one of the finest healing power or healing hands I have ever seen. And he takes no money for it. He's completely dedicated to this work. He spends his eighth hours or whatever he does as an executive in the Glen Martin Aircraft Company - the first thing which impressed me, the first story he -you see I'm rambling, ain't I - he told me was this. The government had ordered, I think he said, fifty or sixty planes (for the people who work in Boeing this should be interesting) and it was a special new design, and just before he closed shop they found that in one plane something essential was missing. And that another plane therefore had two of them. And they had to go out with a government contract, all these planes had to go out the following day. Well,so he told his boss, he said, leave me alone,he said, let me be alone and I think I will know something. There was anyhow nothing much anybody could do. So he went into his hangar,he prayed as it were- which of these planes, he tried to find out, had this essential part missing. And he said he got it,and he said he went to the plane, got the workman to open it up, and that was the right one. Otherwise they would have to tear all the 50 or 60 other planes apart which would have had to out the following day. Now that's practical , isn't it? But that is beside the point.
He has this ability to help people. I have heard a story which he even doesn't know. Just before I went home,I was asked to a Methodist church or some sort of church, to meet with the preacher and to give a talk to a little healing group. So I did. Well, the preacher took me home and he said that he had an extraordinary experience. Because he had, he was terribly injured in some way, he had a dreadful headache. And he couldn't use his arms, this paralysis would get worse. Well, he had a parishioner, and this preacher knew nothing about it, in Baltimore where this Mr. Worral lives. She went to this healing service. Mr. Worral has in his house a little healing service and he puts his hands on peoples head, and what she thought of was that this healing power would go through her to this preacher who she liked, who was 250 miles away from her. Well, she went three times in this week, and she never said one word to this preacher. And the strangest thing is that suddenly he could move his arms, and his leg, and within two weeks he was completely over the paralysis which doctors said would be progressive. And he never knew what was the cause 'til the parishioner came home to her mother about six months after he was totalled cured,and told him. Now don't you think that's an interesting story? And Mr. Worral he's never this story because the preacher has never met Mr. Worral. So healing, in other words, why I'm telling you these stories is, is a very strange- can I say its a very strange business. Because as I say there is healing through another person, the direct effect- and I think we don't realize enough of that, and more and more doctors are genuinely studying this - of people's thoughts, of the laying on of hands of people, on record is absolutely amazing.
Now for instance the chief psychiatrist in the Roosevelt Hospital which is one of the big hospitals in New York, a Dr. Laidlaw, he is completely convinced on the subject of spiritual healing, and he of course works a great deal with this - not so much as this Mr. Worral I've been telling you about - but also with one of the know mediums in the United States,this Mrs. Eileen Garrett. She, when she goes into a trance, is able to tell the psychiatrist what is wrong with his patient and she tells him how to treat him, as a matter of fact, and she gives him many ideas. And of course Mrs. Garrett has been a medium - she's a short stout lady - she has again this incredible vitality although she is sick like a dog most of the time. Because being a medium her metabolism is very different. Now she really, because of this constant mediumship, she is destroying herself in many ways - I mean her kidneys, all these things are not functioning very well because of the use, as it were, of the fluid in her body. For instance, Dr. Laidlaw told us this, he stuck out his neck finally in saying this in a Conference like he was, he said Mrs. Garrett has two personalities who direct her, and Dr. Laidlaw has taken the basal metabolism - probably most of you know something bout what the basal metabolism is - now he has taken Mrs. Garret's basal metabolism, and that has been one; then he has taken the basal metabolism - within a space of half an hour - of Mrs. Garrett and both those entities; (one is supposed to be a Persian physician) and all three are different. Now that, I think, is interesting, isn't it? And he of course thought, in other words he has made several tests as much as he possibly could in this scientific testing of this poor woman - I mean I must say poor woman although she had this vitality when she talks, every time she goes into a trance the results in her own basic metabolism are disastrous as a matter of fact. And so she can only do very little of work. But she has been very helpful in letting people do everything in this world to her. Very drug has been tested on her , every medical gadget has been applied to her - that she is alive is a a miracle after all the things she has undergone? So I think she is a very remarkable person to be willing to be a guinea pig for so many years for so many doctors. And a funny thing is, she doesn't, of course, remember one thing which happens to her and she always says that she has no explanation and she doesn't know how much she believes of anything.
Now, these people are really sincerely searching, they are really trying to find out if there is any reasonable explanation,what are the attitudes of mind, what are the attitudes of mind which do not make for healing. And I don't think that at this time - after five years, I've got to say it - I don't think that they have got much further. I think what they have got so far as that without any doubt there is this great spiritual energy in the world, and it is able to function through these people who are these healers, and that some of the people who come to these, come with an attitude of mind which it is possible for this energy to move in the body which can heal tissues, organs, can be - for instance, people who have TB and have very little lungs, very little part of their lungs left, they have been able to grow complete lungs in the space of a a very short time. I mean I think that there have been rare cases where they have been X-rayed before and after, and that these things are facts. I think they are willing to accept this even if there is really no scientific explanation of it.
And thus meeting all these different people constantly, it is interesting to note this. The people who do the healing, of course they are without any doubt dedicated people, they very positively feel, and I must emphasize that they feel this very very strongly,they feel that they are the instruments and they pray for them to be instruments for this power of God. They spend, of course, a good many hours a day doing this. I mean it doesn't come on them without any hard work, and I think they are always willing o give. All of them have great feeling, I think, of cheerfulness. Some of them are, of course, more unselfish than others - in other words, a man like Mr. Ambrose Worral I think has very little ego in his personality. He is a man who laughs a lot, and he has a sense of humour, and I like him the best myself, Maybe because I like a practical man, I don't know.
But the think I don't like - and I must say Oral Roberts doesn't have that, even on TV- some of them have this, and I don't like it personally - they do have this terrible feeling that people can only be healed if they believe in Jesus Christ,and are only healed by this belief in Jesus Christ. Now I personally don't believe that, and of course in some cases, I think that one of the healers is without doubt a very fine healer, but of course she didn't make too favourable an impression on the psychiatrists and doctors because she was, I think, too dogmatic about herself and her religion. For instance,there were there a great many people of other faiths. And this emphasis on this one idea, which is first of all not basically true because there is spiritual healing going on in every sect of the Christian religion but also it happens in other parts of the world. And being a theosophist, being brought up in this idea of the world aspect of religion, of course that doesn't appeal to me personally.
And we had the most incredible doctor - a doctor from Harley Street, an Englishman,who was a converted Catholic. Well, he was - can I say it? - ferociously religious! Well, by that I mean he really shook himself practically to pieces, and he also took everything so completely literally. To him the whole thing was not something - and he said that over and over again -not something which happens 2000 years ago, it happened right now for him - you see what I mean? And he thought it was wicked that people thought that the crucifixion and all that , took place 2000 years ago. Now he was a very young man, and he did his healing in a totally and absolutely different way from any other people because he never, for instance, put his hands on people. What he did was - he of course was a qualified doctor, I mean he was both a psychiatrist and before that he had been a surgeon - he healed people by putting his hands what we would say around their aura,and he said he could feel, as it were, this healing power in that place making, as it were, passes around people, and never touching them once. That's how he worked, and he had some very interesting ideas. He did some interesting demonstrations, although I don't believe that he had a great success.
One of the poor man he was trying- you've probably heard of Sherwood Eddy, a famous evangelist in the U.S. at one time- I mean he's an old-timer, very well known in the U.S.. Well,he's stone deaf. And he certainly tried to heal him by this method, and at the end of it he said "Now can you hear , Mr. Eddy!" But I don't think he did. And it came to my lot, I had to have an interview -I must tell you this funny joke Before the man was supposed to treat any of these people I was supposed to diagnose to them what I thought was wrong with them, and then this doctor was to health them. But Mr. Sherwood Eddy was stone deaf, and I had to go to the top of the building, he didn't even know what it was all about. I had to yell at the top of my voices to tell him what the healing seminar was about, and so we shrieked at the top of our voices together. He was a sweet man,there's no doubt about it, but I was utterly convinced that nothing, nothing on earth, would make him a healing. Because I will tell you he was a very good man, but he genuinely didn't know because of his deadness even if I shrieked at the top of my voice, what it was all about. And he went there to be healed in an utterly bewildered attitude. And it is strange,but in my experience I don't think it helps for you to be healed - I mean I have watched this - it doesn't help if you go in an attitude "Well, let me try anything once". Mr. Eddy, whatever he understood, even if he was a very religious man for instance, went in that attitude.
I saw a cancer patient who went in that attitude - I've seen several of the patients- I saw a cancer patient in the last stages of the diseases; but you see she went there and I watcher her. She went there just to please her doctor who wanted her to be healed, and I won't say she went with a closed mind because if you are suffering that much you don't, I suppose,have a completely closed mind, but I think what is needed is at least an open mind- because without any doubt - I watched this woman before she went through this process and afterwards - what every patient gets is an immense amount of energy put into their body, and thus for a moment they do get - whether they are healed of the basic disease or not - everyone of them gets, for a little while, a sense of strength and well being - am I making that clear? I mean, all these healers, if you come back to our theosophical terminology, through this power which comes through their hands which hits,as it were, the etheric body, in the etheric body of course is primarily the seat of the disease. All our basic causes of physical disease, even if it's psychosomatic, the basic causes of the physical disease are in the etheric body. Now all the healers are able, as it were, to pour into the energy of these patients, an immense amount of this etheric energy, so that for a moment it is like a shock treatment you might say. And for a very short while there is enough energy poured into that etheric body that for a moment there is a swing towards harmony. Not it the healing really takes place, that swing towards harmony, that of course reflects on the organs,and then this genuine healing takes place.
Now we must realize this - healing and even sickness are different kinds of energy. The sickness is energy out of balance, but the healing power as it comes, comes from the level of God, if you like - or it comes not from this etheric level, it comes at least from the level of the soul. And if we could only realize that, within ourselves, a very little bit of that energy at the soul level, if it can be worked through the individual, even himself, worked through the motion and this etheric level, a little bit of that energy is like a torrent when it comes through. So even a little release as it were always is a hundredfold stronger on a lower level Because there,not at this lower level, is the energy of healing, and on that level is all level of spiritual healing. Nobody in the world can really know ahead of time, and none of us know, the immense power which lies at that level in our being, and it is really stored in the being of each human being. But unfortunately we ourselves block that. After all, there are many different ways of blocking ourselves. It isn't only the desire to get well. Physical wellness finally is a natural desire, but I don't think that is the quality which really makes for spiritual healing because I've watched that too. Some of those people who have had only just that desire to be well don't realise that with the desire of being physically well there must come at least the emotional counterpart. And also what we don't realize is this - for the spiritual healing to really break through, we have got get away from thinking exclusively of yourself.
What we don't realize often is that to ask ourselves all the time- am I well or am I sick, - this leads to sickness. Because if you are all the time questioning it, you are bringing forward from within yourself the negative part of this energy. And if I show you some of my sick auras which I will later on in the week, it is constantly these emotions which are surrounding us ourselves which keep us - you know what I call it - keep us in the bird cage of our own self. Why do I say birdcage? Because I have an aura which I'll show you and her aura is so totally enclosed - she really looks a person in a bird cage - because she is so totally the center of her own universe. Everything turns inward, everything turns towards herself Now I have seen a few of these patients come, and none of them has ever been able to be helped. Because you can see that when you are closed in like that, how can you even open yourself to spiritual healing - am I making sense to you when I say that? So I think the second basic thing which I think is necessary for spiritual healing is an attitude away from I-the self, and we have got to think of our body as a machinery. And I'm absolutely, totally convinced that for the machinery to work, it must be an unconscious process. If you throw the monkey-wrench of your conscious mind all the time into that machinery,you interfere with it. I mean, in other words, with spiritual development, with our emotional and physical development, what we should find out is what for us individually is the basic principle - what we wish to go by. Than as it were we sear our emotions, our mind, our spiritual powers towards that, and then flow as freely as you possibly can towards whatever you think are those principles. But don't think back eternally and say "Am I eating right? Am I feeling right? Am I doing right? Plenty of people are so scared of doing the wrong things that they don't do anything! Now, that's not the way out either, is it? The same thing about our thoughts. At all these levels to continually interfere with these questionings - what does it do? Doesn't it make you think all the the time of yourself? Thus the whole thing is really a flowing, it's an opening - spiritual healing- it's an opening in yourself to these forces very simply, and then secondly let us find wha ae the basic principles which enable us to reach, this power wihtin us because this power is within us as well as without. I think that's all I'm going to say tonight because the next two wweeks I think we will try to develop what are those basic principles. Thanks you.
(Answer to question)
So many people want to be spiritual healers who are totally not suited to it. Because if you don't have this tremendous vitality, if you don't have this outgoing personality, you are not capable of being a spiritual healer. You've got to have some sort of integrated personality. You must have a sense of being well within yourself.
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