|
|
|
|
The Dark Side*
by
Patrick Huyghe
|
Tell
us about it. Terrorized by little gray creatures with large black eyes
who whisk you away from your bedroom at night? Plagued by poltergeists
rattling the bookshelf and hurling pictures from the wall? Haunted by
the ghost of a loved one, say, or precognitive dreams that turn
suddenly real? Whatever the nature of your encounter with the unknown,
you may have been left physically drained or emotionally scarred.
Chances are, you've confided in no one, fearful friends and relatives
would consider you insane. So where do you turn?
Actually, you have some options. You might, for instance, place your
trust in someone who makes a business out of the unknown. You saw the
movie; you know the tune. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters! If it's
psychic troubles you've had, you call a parapsychologist. And when it
comes to possessions and visions and such, there's always the minister,
rabbi, or parish priest. On the plus side, you can be fairly confident
these people will believe you. On the other hand, if your trouble is
even partially psychological, how much help would they be?
That's where mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists come in. If
you're hallucinating, they might have a treatment or cure. But don't
expect them to believe you. They'll dismiss your story as a raving
fantasy, and if you can't shake the episode, you may end up diagnosed
with schizophrenia and on anti-psychotic drugs.
Not what you had in mind? Then consider your third option: the new
breed of mental-health professional now contending that such other
worldly experiences are legitimate and commonplace among the sane.
That's not to say they accept the reality of alien abductors or
precognition or ghosts—though much to the horror of their
colleagues, a few of them have. But what many of these therapists have
come to believe over the past five years is that such
experiences—regardless of their cause—are common among
normal, healthy people, and that those who find themselves traumatized
by such episodes are just as deserving of psychological ministrations
as those who suffer anxiety, depression, or the trauma that follows a
plane crash or a rape.
To signal the birth of this new discipline, some dedicated
professionals have even formed a group known as TREAT, for clinicians
and physical and behavioral scientists interested in the Treatment and
Research of Experienced Anomalous Trauma. TREAT, which holds a
conference each spring, deals with everything from reports of UFO
abduction and precognition to near-death episodes, satanic possession,
and alleged contact with the dead. Another favorite TREAT area is
kundalini–often perceived as a burning, vibrating, or
electrifying sensation associated with meditation or any other
heavy-duty spiritual chore.
By all indicators, TREAT is a movement whose time has come. Indeed,
every national poll on the paranormal confirms just how widespread such
experiences are. A 1992 survey by the Roper Organization, for instance,
suggests that 2 percent of the population, or 1 of every 50 adult
Americans, exhibits the symptoms that sometimes mask a UFO abduction
experience. A 1987 study conducted by Andrew Greeley and colleagues at
the University of Chicago showed that 42 percent of American adults
reported contact with the dead, 67 percent claimed ESP experiences, and
31 percent reported clairvoyance. And a 1981 Gallup poll showed that an
extraordinary 15 percent of all people revived from the cusp of death
reported the spectacle of the near-death experience in which they
glimpsed such generic signposts as beckoning loved ones or a tunnel of
light.
One must not, of course, mistake these experiences for proof of their
reality. "Truth should not be defined by what people believe," warns
Harold Goldstein, a psychologist in the division of epidemiology and
services research branch of the National Institutes of Mental Health.
"Facts are facts. Now it may turn out that there are aliens and such
things, but there needs to be evidence for it, and belief is not
evidence."
Then again, say the professionals on the frontier of the new
psychology, beliefs should not be dismissed. "Paranormal experiences
are so common in the general population," psychiatrists Colin Ross of
Dallas and Shaun Joshi of Winnipeg, Canada, said in a recent issue of
the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, "that no theory of
normal psychology or psychopathology which does not take them into
account can be comprehensive." Such experiences, they say, could be
studied scientifically, "in the same way as anxiety, depression, or any
other set of experiences" without making "any decision as to whether
some, all, or none of them are objectively real."
That may sound good in theory, but some observers wonder whether it's
really possible in practice. Therapists, it turns out, are no more
immune to the potent lure of the unknown than anyone else. Unwary
specialists of the human mind may, in fact, be particularly prone to
accepting the reality of their patients' fascinating tales. And
enchantment can lead to obsession. The psychoanalyst Robert Lindner
admitted as much in 1955 after coming under the spell of a patient who
provided detailed accounts of visits into the future reality of another
planet. To help the patient, Lindner studied the mass of written
records Kirk had prepared, noted the inconsistencies, and confronted
him with the errors. That effort forced cracks in the fantasy and led,
eventually, to Kirk's recovery. But Lindner, meanwhile, become so
absorbed in the story that he had difficulty extricating himself from
its grip. In his classic book, The Fifty Minute Hour, he admits
to skirting "the edges of the abyss." Now, some 35 years later, the
latest mental-health professionals to flirt with UFO abduction, the
near-death experience, and psychic phenomena face this danger as well.
One mental-health worker to dive headlong into the dark pit of the
unknown in recent years is psychiatrist Rima Laibow. Her sprawling
office in the upscale Westchester County town of Hastings-on-Hudson,
New York, is ringed with the big fluffy pillows she uses in holding
therapy, originally designed to repair early attachment deficits in
autistic children but now used with other serious childhood and adult
problems as well. Dressed in blue slacks and a blouse, her frizzy hair
tossed to one side, Laibow recalls her first professional journey
through the looking glass. "It was 1988," she explains, "and a patient
whom I had known for many years came to me in a state of anxiety and
panic because, out of the corner of her eye, she had caught sight of
the cover of Communion."
The patient, a 43-year-old cardiologist, had never read this 1987
best-seller by horror novelist Whitley Strieber, didn't know that it
concerned alleged encounters with UFO entities, and had never been
interested in the subject of alien abduction at all. Despite all this,
after glimpsing the cover of Communion, she claimed terrifying
memory fragments of encounters with creatures like those on the book's
cover.
"Such notions had always struck me as psychotic," Laibow explains, "but
this patient taught me otherwise." Convinced that her patient showed no
sign of major psychopathology, in fact, Laibow came up with a different
diagnosis for the sudden breakdown the cardiologist experienced
following recall of an alleged alien encounter: posttraumatic stress
disorder, or PTSD.
According to the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, PTSD is a stress reaction triggered by various
external events "outside the range of usual human experience."
Triggering events, the American Psychiatric Association's manual goes
on to say, include such atrocities as rape, war, and natural disasters
like earthquakes or floods, which are "usually experienced with intense
fear, terror, and helplessness." In fact, Laibow's patient met all the
criteria for PTSD but one. "There had been no known trauma," recalls
Laibow, "so I thought, how could she have PTSD when we all know there
couldn't possibly be an external event like an alien
abduction—could there?"
Over the weeks that followed, Laibow worked to quell her patient's
anxiety and panic. But the doctor herself remained genuinely puzzled.
In search of answers, she read all the literature she could find on
reported alien abductions and spoke to the primary investigators in the
field: New York artist Budd Hopkins, who had written two books on the
topic, and Temple University historian David Jacobs, who, like Hopkins,
had become a kind of folk guru and de facto therapist for UFO abduction
victims.
"What I found," Laibow states, "left me both impressed and appalled."
She was impressed, she says, because "there's a substantial body of
data suggesting that under some circumstances, at some times, for some
reason, there are things in the atmosphere we call UFOs that appear to
have external physical reality." But she was appalled because from her
"sad and shocking experience, UFOlogy as it exists today is little more
than a collection of belief systems vying for dominance. The field is
plagued by the notion that just collecting neat stuff is the same as
doing research. If I were the National Science Foundation, I wouldn't
fund this research, either."
Hoping to change all that, Laibow began by giving UFO abduction and the
whole gamut of experience with unexplained phenomena a new, more
respectable name. "Experienced anomalous trauma," she called it, so
that "professionals, who would otherwise stop listening because you've
mentioned UFOs, parapsychology, and other weird things would now stop
and process those three words in relation to each other and ask, 'Like
what?"'
The strategy worked. In fact, with the name experienced anomalous
trauma as a draw, Laibow found dozens of psychiatrists and Ph.D.
psychologists intrigued by her ideas. To take advantage of the
momentum, she formed an umbrella organization for the Treatment and
Research of Experienced Anomalous Trauma, or TREAT, and held the
group's first meeting in May 1989. TREAT quickly attracted some big
guns in the mental-health community. One was John Wilson. A professor
of psychology at Cleveland State University, Wilson is one of the
pioneers in the field of posttraumatic stress disorder. He helped both
to coin the term and to formulate a definition of the disorder as far
back as 1980. In the past two decades, Wilson has listened patiently to
more than 10,000 people traumatized by some major life event and has
conducted major studies of PTSD in Vietnam combat veterans and victims
of toxic exposure.
Wilson's own curiosity with the unknown dates back to childhood, when a
neighbor of his worked for Project Blue Book, the notorious Air Force
effort responsible for investigating UFOs. When the abduction
phenomenon emerged, he began to wonder what symptoms the alleged
victims would report. "The most obvious answer," he says, "is that they
would have PTSD." According to Wilson, in fact, those who report
memories of UFO abduction find themselves in the same sort of
psychologically stressful dilemma as those who have been exposed to
invisible toxic contaminants such as hydrogen sulfide. "They aren't
sure about it," he explains, "not sure anybody is going to believe
them, don't know how to stop it, and don't know how long it has gone
on. But the big difference is that those claiming a UFO abduction don't
even know if it occurred for sure. If you've been exposed to a toxic
chemical, you can usually have a toxicologist come and study your
house, and they'll say, yeah, it's there, or it's not. But someone
who's had a UFO abduction experience can't point to the flying saucer
or the little gray guy with the almond-shaped eyes. That puts them in a
really psychologically ensnaring position." In fact, Wilson places UFO
abductions and exposure to invisible toxic contaminants in the same
general category of traumatic experiences as childhood sexual abuse and
psychological torture, calling them examples of "hidden events" that
may lead to PTSD but which often can't be proven real.
Wilson isn't surprised by his colleagues' slow reception to anomalous
trauma. "Fifty years ago, mental-health professionals didn't believe in
childhood abuse," Wilson notes. "When kids or adults would report
incest experiences, sexual molestation, or rape and went to see a
mental-health professional, they were told, 'That's a fantasy; that
doesn't happen; it can't be real.' It wasn't until the sixties that the
American College of Pediatrics even did a study to find out what was
going on. And then, voilá, it was out of the closet, and today
we have hard data on childhood sexual abuse. There is a parallel here
to anomalous experience; whether it's UFO abduction or demon
possession, our culture says no."
But as far as Wilson is concerned, the cultural disbelief system will
change as anomalous trauma becomes a diagnostic subcategory of PTSD.
"American culture is on the leading edge of this material," he says,
"and my prediction is that within five to ten years, the idea of
experienced anomalous trauma will get the serious consideration it
deserves."
Indeed, with Wilson's stamp of approval and Laibow's promotional drive,
other psychiatrists and psychologists have begun to come around. One
already going that route is kundalini expert Bonnie Greenwell, a
California-based psychotherapist and author of Energies of
Transformation. This "energy phenomenon," as Greenwell calls it,
has been described by Hindu mystics and practitioners of Yoga as an
"awakening" of spiritual energy that supposedly "sleeps" at the base of
the spine. But kundalini awakenings, considered the beginning of the
process of enlightenment by masters of the technique, can result in
serious psychological disturbance as well.
And that's where Greenwell comes in. Even those seeking the kundalini
experience can find it painful, she explains, and for those not
expecting it, the experience can be a nightmare. Indeed, those
undergoing the kundalini experience don't seem to know what hit them
because they are unaware that it might be triggered by anything from a
physical trauma or emotional shock to a long-term spiritual practice or
dose of LSD. What's more, says Greenwell, the experience may be
accompanied by visions and trances, the sensation of leaving the body,
and alternating periods of ecstasy and despair, symptoms that could
lead to pathological diagnoses by conventional shrinks. But Western
medicine is not alone in its ignorance of kundalini, according to
Greenwell. Many spiritual teachers don't have a clue what to do with
it, either. "Some teachers will tell them it can't be kundalini or it
would feel good," she says. "Others tell these people they're having a
breakdown. There are even cases in Buddhist retreats where people have
been taken to psychiatric hospitals when they had a kundalini opening.
Many people who teach yoga or meditation are not developed to the
extent that they have gone through this process themselves. It's very
unfortunate, and it's one of the major reasons I started doing what I
do."
Greenwell's craft includes helping those troubled by kundalini tap the
positive aspects of the phenomenon while discarding the negative as
quickly as they can. "Once they understand the process as essentially
positive in the long run," Greenwell says, "they are no longer afraid
of it and can often work it out quite effectively on their own."
One person Greenwell saw overcome the problems of kundalini was Sarah,
born after her father's death in 1918. During childhood, Sarah spent
numerous hours communing with her deceased father and as an adult used
that same impulse to meditate. Listening to high-frequency sound and
visualizing the inside of her body, Sarah began feeling waves of
kundalini along with terrifying visions: In one, she was cut up piece
by piece, and in another, her body was invaded by swords. In the end,
Sarah managed to control her terrors by expressing the creative energy
of kundalini in the form of dreams, dance, movement, and art.
Other clients, Greenwell adds, have been far more distressed by
kundalini energy than Sarah. In these severe cases, she notes, "the
person struggles to get control of a body which involuntarily forces
them into motions or freezes them in action, locks pain into the back
and shoulders or into the site of any preexisting injury, and flushes
them with intense heat and cold. Such subjects occasionally fall into
trance or report that they are leaving their body. They may be blinded
by lights upon entering a dark room or feel they're being electrocuted
in bed."
Depending upon who these people consult, says Greenwell, they may be
diagnosed with any number of disturbances from schizophrenia to grand
mal epilepsy. That's just what happened to Cathy, who experienced
periods of intense, trance-like states, extreme sensations of cold, and
"unusual energy flows" moving upward from her feet to her hands. Given
medication for everything from psychosis to seizures, Cathy finally
decided to abandon all conventional treatment and accept her symptoms
as "spiritual" in nature, coming from energies beyond. It was this
acceptance, Greenwell claims, that resulted in an immediate improvement
in Cathy's health and enabled her to give up anti-seizure drugs and
integrate her experiences in a positive way into her life.
Greenwell probably sees more patients with kundalini problems than
therapists on the East coast, perhaps because kundalini is largely a
California phenomenon. The high percentage of meditators out West, she
concedes, means "you have a lot of people primed for the experiences."
Those who suffer from spiritual traumas, kundalini or otherwise, can
also access another West Coast resource—the California-based
Spiritual Emergence Network, or SEN, a telephone referral service
(415-648-2610) founded by Christina Grof, who with her husband,
Stanislav, pioneered research on the altered state.
"We get about 150 calls a month," says Deane Brown, a therapist and the
Network's program director. "People call us when something is happening
that they don't understand. The volunteers who answer the phone come
from a variety of backgrounds, and many of them have experienced some
critical or frightening period of spiritual emergence of their own. So
they can truthfully say to the caller, 'I know what you're going
through; I've been there.' What we do, essentially, is listen. That's
the greatest gift that we can give to a caller. We don't judge the
content of what they say. We respond to the feeling rather than the
content. We never diagnose."
After talking to the caller for a while, SEN volunteers provide the
name and number of one of the 500 people in the SEN database. These
people range from psychiatrists and psychologists who are familiar with
the SEN philosophy of "spiritual emergence" to shamans, psychics,
healers, or clergy in the troubled caller's area.
"The types of calls seem to go in cycles," notes Brown. "We will often
get a lot of the same calls at about the same time from all over. For a
while we may get a lot of kundalini calls. Then we may get a lot of
psychic opening, including out-of-body experiences, telepathy, and
uncanny coincidences. Other callers report possession, psychic attack
by demons, and the like."
Despite the common goals of workers like Greenwell and Laibow, however,
the TREAT movement has run into some trouble of its own. The reason:
Laibow's strong resistance to the pioneering group of workers
without professional credentials who aided the spiritually
traumatized in the first place, years before it became fashionable for
those with degrees. The biggest rift was caused by her refusal to
accept artist Budd Hopkins, author of the classic volumes Missing
Time and Intruders, and the individual who brought the
plight of UFO abductees to the attention of physicians and the general
public when everyone else was ignoring them or calling them insane.
Laibow's beef: Hopkins and others had been hypnotizing the alleged
abductees to elicit their tales, and they had no business doing so
"since their formal training amounted to just about nil." Such "wannabe
clinicians," she believes, can be very dangerous, indeed.
Says Laibow, "There's a huge difference in being able to induce a
hypnotic trance and being a clinician who knows what to do when you've
got a trance, who knows how to not contaminate the material, and who
knows how to facilitate recovery rather than cause
retraumatization—because people can be retraumatized by the
unconscious repetition of their material. And what do you do if a UFO
investigator does you clinical harm by taking on clinical
responsibilities? Where is his malpractice liability, and how are you
going to be protected? People who are not willing to take the time and
the effort to become clinicians should not be stomping around in the
unconscious."
Though many professionals agreed with Laibow's argument, others felt it
was unjust to throw out those who had brought the phenomenon to their
attention in the first place. As Hopkins himself said, "Where have all
the mental-health professionals been all these years while these people
were clamoring for help." In fact, the dispute has done little to
diminish Hopkins' influence, who continues to bring mental-health
professionals into the fold.
One of Hopkins' recruits is Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John
Mack, author of the 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence
of Arabia. Though he is the most prominent and respected member of the
mental-health profession to take an interest in anomalous experiences
in recent years, Mack is not a pretentious man. The photo from a Boston
Globe profile shows him standing in a field wearing corduroy slacks
and a plaid shirt, his soft gray-green eyes staring calmly at the
camera. Unlike most therapists who take an interest in these matters,
Mack makes no attempt to hide the fact that he is "open to what these
people are telling us."
Mack met Budd Hopkins in January 1990, and was impressed both by the
man and the case histories of alleged UFO abductions he had collected
over the years. "The stories didn't sound at all like dreams or
fantasies to me," says Mack, his voice resonant with authority. "It
sounded like something real was happening. And I thought, well, if this
is real, what is it? Then Budd asked if I wanted to see some of these
people, and I realized I was crossing some kind of line, but I said
yes."
Since then, Mack has heard abduction stories from people of all walks
of life. "Forty years of psychiatry," he says, "has given me no way to
explain what I'm encountering in my interviews and hypnosis sessions of
these individuals. Something is going on; something is happening to
these people. I'm convinced of it."
In fact, Mack has done as much as TREAT to bring anomalous trauma to
center stage in the professional domain. He has spoken freely with the
media about his interest and has given talks and participated in
private conferences on the subject. Colleagues who hear him speak often
raise the issue of whether UFO abduction stories might not be covers
for episodes of sexual abuse and incest in childhood. But according to
Mack, the reverse has been the case. "There is not a single known case
of the thousands that have been investigated where exploring or looking
into the abduction story revealed behind it an incest or sexual-abuse
history," he says, "but therapists looking for incest stories have come
up with UFO abduction memories instead."
Mack understands his colleagues' reluctance to delve into the subject.
"It's so shocking to the paradigm of psychology and psychiatry, which
tend to look for the source of the experience in the psyches of the
people who are affected rather than to acknowledge that something
mysterious is happening to these people. The phenomenon is not simply a
product of their mental condition but has some kind of objective
reality. Whether you call it extraterrestrial or other-dimensional,
what it really means is that we may live in a rather different universe
from the one Western science has told us we live in."
Mack speaks of vast philosophical implications for this phenomenon and
human identity in the cosmos. "There's really a great fear of opening
up our world beyond what we know," he says. "But we need to get out of
the box we're in and see ourselves in relationship to the universe, and
I think this phenomenon could be very important in expanding our sense
of ourselves."
All therapists involved in the dark side of the unknown do not share
Mack's daring views. "If aliens are coming and invading us and abusing
us in a very literal sense," argues Toronto psychotherapist David
Gotlib, "then it's difficult for me to understand how a significant
portion of those who are taken could find it curious or enlightening.
If you compare it to the Holocaust or the Vietnam War or any kind of
traumatic event, then sure you can learn to grow through it, but only
after a lot of pain and soul searching, and not right away. So it
discourages me from subscribing to a literal explanation. It also
suggests to me that the phenomenon may be dependent on who's
experiencing it as well as on what's happening."
Gotlib has thought a lot about UFOs since 1988, when he began treating
a woman who had been turned down by other therapists because she
claimed her anxiety was due to an alien abduction. He has now seen 40
such patients and publishes the Bulletin of Anomalous Experience
so that his 150 subscribers in the mental-health professions can
network and exchange ideas on UFO abduction reports and related
phenomena. "I don't expect to solve the puzzle or have the puzzle
solved in my lifetime," notes Gotlib. "These kinds of things have been
going on for hundreds of years. I think if we start trying to solve the
question definitively, then we're chasing our tail. What I'm most
concerned about is, how can we help these people?"
Gotlib sees his next patient and 50 minutes later calls back to answer
his own questions. "Basically, what we have to do is listen to them
without judgment. You let them know that there are a lot of other
people who have had these kinds of experiences, that they are not
crazy, they are not psychotic, they are not mentally ill, they aren't
losing their minds, and this has the effect of empowering them. You
talk about the different ways that people understand this experience,
and you explore it with them. One patient left saying that his fear had
been transformed into curiosity. If I can do that, then I think I've
met my therapeutic objective."
It's not a surprise, of course, that Mack, Laibow, and other
mental-health professionals championing the anomalous have faced a
growing barrage of criticism both from colleagues and outsiders. Are
these therapists, critics wonder, clinging to the myth of their own
mental impregnability and being drawn into the abyss by the magnetic
pull of their patients' experiences? "One needs to monitor one's own
reaction to what it is that goes on," cautions NIMH psychologist Harold
Goldstein. "You can be sympathetic, you can be empathic, you can be
understanding, but your goal as a therapist is not to leap into the
same pit as the patient, but to be there to help pull someone out. I
think that when physicians or psychologists endorse these things, or
appear to endorse them, we do real damage to issues of rationality and
realistic evidence. When we reach a point that what's true is what
people believe, then we've sunk to a very dangerous situation."
Bill Ellis, a researcher in contemporary legends at Pennsylvania State
University in Hazleton applauds mental-health professionals for coming
to grips with anomalous experiences, but, like Goldstein, thinks a
little more objectivity is in order. "I think we forget how easily,
even if unintentionally, therapists can communicate through body
language what they want from their patients," he says. "It's the clever
Hans phenomenon. It's like the horse that could come up with the square
root of 360, but what it had really learned to do was keep pawing the
ground until its trainer relaxed. The trainer was not doing it
deliberately. The trainer was convinced that the horse could add and
subtract and do square roots. But eventually, somebody who was smart
enough to figure out what was going on stopped watching the horse and
started watching the trainer. I think we should have more people
watching the therapists."
Doing just that is Robert Baker, a retired professor of psychology who
taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University
of Kentucky. And Baker doesn't like what he sees. "I hope we can do
something about this nonsense, because it's getting to the point where
it's almost a national panic disorder," he says. "We have to do
something about therapists who really don't know what they're doing.
The therapists who commit themselves to this nonsense are not aware of
major areas of human behavior and just do not understand the way the
human nervous system works."
One thing that fools therapists, says Baker, is cryptoamnesia, a series
of false memories that form a fantasy with a few minor elements of
truth thrown in. "The fact is, we do not remember things exactly," he
explains. "We change, arrange, and distort the memories we have stored
to better serve our needs and desires. We fill the gaps in memory with
events that never happened or with events that did not happen the way
we imagine, and the results can be bizarre."
The other major cause of the wild stories people tell, according to
Baker, is sleep paralysis, a sleep disorder accompanied by
hallucinations that affects about 5 percent of the population. In sleep
paralysis, Baker explains, "people wake up in the middle of the night
and can't move. They feel like they're wide-awake, but they continue
dreaming and in the dreams often see such things as demons, aliens, or
ghosts. Since they're partly awake, however, they may think the dream
really happened when, in fact, it didn't. It's no wonder that people
find this terrifying, and that's what's responsible for the
post-traumatic stress disorder that therapists are talking about."
But Baker has no explanation for the wild stories told by the
therapists them- selves, unless, he notes, they're "simply seeking
attention." Laibow, for instance, claims to have personally experienced
anomalous "healing," an event she says cannot be explained by
conventional medical science. As Laibow recalls, it was a muggy day in
August 1991 when she "trucked on down to Brooklyn to an
un-air-conditioned high-school auditorium filled with lots of Polish
and Russian émigrés." She sat for three hours, she says,
watching Kiev-based psychiatrist and self-proclaimed healer Anatoly
Kashperovsky dance to New Age Gypsy music and thought, "What's a nice
girl like me doing in a place like this?"
Anyway, there was Laibow, watching Kashperovsky's performance,
impatient and skeptical and thinking, "This wouldn't work well at the
AMA," when suddenly," she says, "this Caesarean scar that I had, which
was thick and ropey and very prominent because I'd gotten an infection
immediately after the delivery of my son, began to tingle." As soon as
she could decorously take a peek, she hiked up her skirt and found to
her surprise that the scar was gone. She immediately made an
appointment with her gynecologist, "the head of reproductive medicine
at a major university," who, Laibow claims, was shocked when all he
could find was a very fine hairline scar. The gynecologist,
whom she will not name, was excited by her story. "Imagine if we could
do that," Laibow says he exclaimed. Laibow adds that the gynecologist
may be interested in collaborating on a future study of healing. One
possible subject: a Japanese healer who Laibow says "seems to have some
very substantial powers."
As founder of TREAT and raconteur of stories both marvelous and
strange, Laibow is controversial to say the least. But are the doctor
and her colleagues merely misguided, marrying their fortunes to the
winds of culture, much like those who touted fairies and dragons in
eras past? Or are they onto something new? Will their quest lead more
people to come forward with anomalous experiences and encounters,
providing the data necessary for proper scrutiny—perhaps even
authentication—by the scientific and medical communities at
large? In short, are these mental-health professionals fooling
themselves, or are they forging extraordinary paths through the byways
of consciousness and the murky outback of the unknown? To answer these
questions, of course, is to know the nature of the unknown, and that is
something we humans have ceaselessly attempted for thousands of
years—so far, without much success.
*This story originally appeared under the title "Dark Side of the
Unknown" in the September 1993 issue of Omni. Copyright: 1993
Omni. TREAT is no longer an active organization. This story was
reprinted in Swamp
Gas Times. |
|
|
|