At the Christian shrine at Lourdes, doctors have examined those who have come hoping to be healed. For over fifty years records have been kept of those who have been healed. These records detail the afflictions, give the time consumed in the healing, and the condition after healing.
There are two kinds of miraculous healing. The first is so rapid that it may be called instant healing. In a matter of seconds, or, at most, minutes, the diseased or deformed parts or tissues of the body are changed to healthy normal ones.
The second kind of healing is like the first except that the process of replacing abnormal tissues may take a few days. It seems to depend upon a great speeding up of normal healing processes.
Those who come to pray for others, rather than for themselves, seem more apt to be healed than those who pray for themselves alone.
Nearly all the ills common to man have been healed in this way. Cancers have vanished, deformed bones have been straightened, sight and hearing have been restored—the list is blessedly long.
Preliminary Notes:
Religion explains the miracle by saying that God or a Saint or other Superhuman Being performs the miracle of instant healing, but, as in the case of fire-walking and seeing the future (and changing it), only the kahunas have offered detailed explanations of how such things are accomplished. Our one and only hope of learning to get miracles performed by the Higher Beings, as a matter of daily occurrence, in any place, lies in close study and understanding of the beliefs and practices of the kahunas. It may well be objected that praying Christians and Mental Healers sometimes get miraculous cures of both body and purse. This is, happily, true. But they do not get them with certitude. There are a million failures to one successful demonstration. While the kahunas did not always succeed in gaining the help of a High Self each time they asked, their average of success was so high that there can be little comparison.
Dr. Brigham was fortunate enough to be able to study several cases of instant healing performed by kahunas, but the most simple case to come to my attention was the following.
The Case:
My close and trusted friend, J. A. K. Combs, of Honolulu, who is a fellow student of kahuna lore, and who has given me much invaluable aid, had for a grand-mother-in-law one of the most powerful women
kahunas in the Islands. She loved Combs and told him many things about her secret knowledge, her power, and her practices. On the occasion in question, Combs attended a beach party at her country home. Many guests had arrived when a car drove up to the edge of the beach sand and several Hawaiians got out. Among them was a man who was slightly intoxicated. He missed his step from car to soft sand and fell. As he fell, there was the characteristic snapping sound of breaking bones.
Inspection showed a compound fracture of the left leg just above the ankle. The bone ends pressed visibly out against the skin. Combs, who had heard the familiar sound of breaking bones and had himself suffered such a break, realized the seriousness of the injury and proposed that the man be taken at once to Honolulu for treatment, but the elderly kahuna arrived on the scene and took over. Kneeling beside the injured man she straightened the foot and leg, pressing on the place where the ends of the broken bones pushed out the skin, and then began a low chanted prayer for healing. In a short time she fell silent. Those who stood about watching tensely could see nothing until her hands suddenly moved slightly on the man's leg, and she took them away, saying quietly in Hawaiian, "The healing is finished. Stand up. You can walk."
The injured man, now entirely sobered, rose wonderingly to his feet, took a step, and then another. The healing was complete and perfect. The leg showed no indication of the break in any way.
Comment:
The kahuna explanation of instant healing is one which involves (1) a High Self with a superior form of mentality and with ability to do the work. (2) The high voltage of vital force or mana, natural to all High Selves, and used in all miraculous works. And (3) the flesh, bone and blood (technically these are all known as bodily "tissues") of the injured limb (taking the case above as an example), and the aka or shadowy body of the patient, particularly that part of it which duplicated the broken section of the leg.
The shadowy body of the low self is a mold of every cell of the body, also of its general shape, so the kahunas believed. To heal a broken bone, the High Self dissolved the injured bone and other tissues into ectoplasm, this usually being invisible, but not always. As the shadowy body mold is made of invisible (etheric?) substance, it cannot be broken or injured. Thus, with the mold of the normal leg there at hand, the ectoplasmic material of the dissolved parts is resolidified in the mold, with the result that the healing is instant and the limb is restored to its former condition.
This explanation applies equally to all healing in which abnormal conditions of deformity or disease prevail. If there is a cancer, it is changed to ectoplasmic substance and then made into normal tissue to fill the mold of that part of the body as it was before the cancer developed.
While the kahuna explanation is simple to state in general terms, it must be noted that there are certain
conditions which must be made right, if they exist, before healing is granted. There must be no complexed doubt or conviction of sin or guilt that has not been cleared away. What has been called "faith" is a condition of freedom from any hindering complex.
The COMPLEX or FIXATION OF IDEAS was referred to by one kahuna as the "thing eating inside." It is a belief or conviction held by the low self. It may or may not be a correct belief. Once it is fixed or lodged in the memory of the low self, it is difficult to find and more difficult to remove.
Modern psychology, fortunately, has explored the subconscious and found the complex, making it unnecessary to go to great lengths to prove that the kahunas were right in believing that such things existed and caused trouble.
One thing, however, which modern psychology has not yet learned, but which the kahunas knew to their profit, is the fact that all efforts to remove a complex will be far more successful if those efforts include a combination of logical appeal to the patient's conscious self, mild suggestion, and the use of a physical stimulus to accompany the administering of suggestion.
The low self is so accustomed to having the middle self think of imaginary things, that anything resembling an imagining is paid scant attention. The low self is best impressed by REAL AND TANGIBLE THINGS. For instance, the water used in religious ceremonies to "wash away sins" is something tangible, and therefore impressive to the low self. The kahunas have used water in ceremonial washing of the patient while giving the spoken suggestion that all sins are
being washed away. They have used many other physical stimuli—for perhaps ten thousand years.
Proof that the broken bone, in the case given above, was dissolved into invisible etheric substance or ectoplasm, and then made solid again as bone in the unbroken mold of the shadowy body—such proof—is difficult to give because nothing is to be seen by the observer.
For this reason it is necessary to call attention to the findings of Spiritualism and Psychical Research, for in these we find visible and tangible bodily tissues and other substances which have been seen to vanish into nothingness and to reappear—a process called "dematerialization" and "materialization."
Little need be said about the verification of these findings. So many cases have been verified by trained investigators that it is no longer possible to deny the actuality of the phenomena touched upon in this part of the study of kahuna beliefs.
Preliminary Notes:
Because of the inability of Science to explain the phenomena of Spiritualism, it has been customary for the press and schools to ignore them. For this reason the average person knows little or nothing of such phenomena.
Take the matter of apports. There are volumes of detailed reports covering instances in which objects have appeared or disappeared in a way quite contrary to the accepted laws of physics. At Stanford University
there are a number of cases filled with apported objects produced as from the void by spirits attending the seances of the famous apport medium, Bailey. And yet, these amazing happenings are kept from the public at large.
An apport is something which is dissolved into invisible form at one spot, is carried to a desired place, and solidified to the original state. Spirits of the dead are usually associated with the process.
It has been said by way of objection, that the spirit of a dead man could not do things a living man cannot do. This objection is logical enough to throw the unsound present theories of Psychical Research into a turmoil, but not the theories of the kahunas. The kahunas put forth the belief that the spirits of the dead, just as do the spirits of the living, in the body, sometimes gain contact with a High Self and get it to use the high voltage of vital force to dematerialize, and later rematerialize, the substances contained in the shadowy body mold of the apported object. It was believed by the kahunas that all things had a shadow body.
We know that when the voltage of an electric current or discharge is sufficiently high in atom-smashing machines, various elements are transmuted and become other elements. Knowing this, we may agree that the mana or electro-vital force in man, when stepped up to the highest voltage, can be used to change visible matter to the invisible form, and back again to the visible.
In making such changes—so we are told by Science—there would be generated great heat and cold. But,
as the High Self is able to control temperature changes in fire-walking, it would have no difficulty in exerting a similar control in causing the apporting of objects and things.
Living creatures have been frequently used as apports, and have ranged from tiny insects through birds, fish, beasts and men. Hot objects have been apported, and remained hot upon their arrival.
The Cases:
(A) Ernesto Bozzano, one of the most famous Psychical Research leaders, reported an apport case which will well illustrate the matters under discussion.
"In March, 1904, in a sitting in the house of Cavaliere Peretti, in which the medium was an intimate friend of ours, gifted with remarkable physical medium-ship, and with whom apports could be obtained at command, I begged the communicating spirit to bring me a small block of pyrites which was lying on my writing table over a mile away. The spirit replied (through the mouth of the entranced medium) that the power was almost exhausted, but that all the same he would make the attempt. Soon after the medium sustained the usual spasmodic twitchings which signified the arrival of an apport, but without hearing the fall of any object on the table or on the floor. We asked for an explanation from the spirit-operator, who informed us that although he had managed to disintegrate a portion of the object desired, and had brought it into the room, there was not enough power for him to be able to reintegrate it. He added, 'Light the light.' We did so, and found, to our great surprise, that the table, the clothes and hair of the sitters, as well as the furniture
and carpet of the room, were covered with the thinnest layer of brilliant impalpable pyrites. When I returned home after the sitting I found the little block of pyrites lying on my writing table. Missing from it was a large fragment, about one-third of the whole piece, which had been scooped out."
(B) A medium named Mrs. Guppy, who was a woman of wealth and note in the early days of Spiritualism, gave a sitting with her friends for Henry W. Longfellow in Italy. At the sitting a block of ice over a foot square was brought as an apport and dropped with a crash on the table. At a second sitting, while the famous poet was holding both the medium's hands, several oranges were apported. At still another sitting, in which the spirit spoke through the medium and asked what things were desired, the following items were apported: A banana, two oranges, a bunch of white grapes, a bunch of black grapes, a cluster of filberts, three walnuts, half a dozen damsons, a slice of candied pineapple, an onion, a peach, some almonds, three figs, two apples, four very large grapes, a potato, and several other objects. At still another sitting there were apports of pots of scalding hot tea and sizzling pans of frying eggs. Mrs. Guppy herself was brought as an apport from her own home to that of a friend. The distance was over a mile, and Mrs. Guppy was very stout.
(C) In 1926 at the British College of Psychic Science, Mrs. Barkel, a medium, saw the "shadow" of a bunch of violets near an electric light globe overhead. That evening, in the same room, at a sitting with the
apport medium, Heinrich Melzer, a quantity of violets dropped from empty air on to the table.
(D) One of the most famous and most studied mediums of the past century was Mme. d’Esperance. A spirit called "Yolande" frequently appeared, fully materialized as a pretty Arab girl, in good light and produced apports so that the sitters could observe all that was to be seen in the process. On June 28, 1890, she brought as an apport a rare golden lily measuring more than seven feet from roots to top and carrying eleven perfect flowers. Toward the end of the sitting she tried to dematerialize the plant to take it away, but the force was too weak by then and she failed. She asked that it be kept in a dark closet until she could try again. The plant had been borrowed, so she said, and had to be returned. At half after nine on July 5th, the plant was removed from the dark closet and placed in the center of the circle of sitters. Almost instantly it vanished. Another spirit, not Yolande, explained that the plant, in its invisible form, had been brought into the room at the first sitting fully an hour before it was solidified and became visible.
Comment:
In the above cases may be seen the mention of power or force similar to that suggested by the kahunas. The spirits undoubtedly had access to Beings able to use this power to produce apports, and, as the living cannot produce apports, it is to be concluded that the dead must have aid from some superior Being. The shadowy body of the apported objects has been seen at times, filmy, but having the form of the apport. In some
instances the thinly massed cloud of material is seen, suggesting that in its disintegrated condition the substance of the apport may be slightly visible, and, of course, greatly expanded.
There is no injury done plants, insects, animals or people when they are used as apports, even when brought from a distance and passed through sealed doors into the seance room. By comparison, the use of the same processes to heal a broken bone is but a trifling matter.
While the kahunas were not able to give a detailed explanation of how the High Selves use the high voltage of vital force to control temperature or to dematerialize and rematerialize apports, they were very sure that this force was used and that it was nearly always provided by the living. They were also sure that the shadowy body was always an important part of the process.
People who have been used as apports report either a short period of unconsciousness or a similar period in which the senses and mental faculties seem sharpened and quickened to a remarkable degree. However, they report little physical sensation during the course of the changes. This evidence tends to verify the Huna theory that we have in our low shadowy body a duplicate set of all the organs and tissues, and that these function when we are temporarily out of the body as in apporting cases, or after death when we are permanently out of the body.
