Physical Aspects of Faith Healing

I note that at least one visitor to this blog reached it by using what might appear to be a strange search phrase: “bruno groening neck.” Odd although it is, I understood the search phrase immediately. This famed healer had what seems to be a contradictory medical history—which gives me the opportunity to comment on the physical aspects of faith healing. The wider context here? I referred to Bruno Gröning in a recent post on miracle cures and healers.

First some facts. The searcher’s question was no doubt occasioned by the fact that in many photographs, Bruno Gröning appears to have an abnormally swollen neck. Gröning also died at the relatively young age of 53 of cancer. Two of his sons died in their childhood. Why didn’t he cure his children? Why could he not heal himself?

The straightforward answer to these questions is that for Gröning himself, the healing stream (Heilstrom), as he called it, wasn’t something airy-fairy but a real energetic flow. He experienced it in his body, and it seemed to concentrate in his neck. He felt that he had to use this energy in healing others; if he did not, it actually harmed him. He is quoted as saying (here), “If I am prevented from doing my work, I will burn up inside.” But he was prevented—by a series of lawsuits—in his healing mission. And, evidently, he did burn up. The surgeon who last treated him is quoted on the site already referenced (Bruno Gröning-Freudenkreis) as saying, “The damage in Bruno’s body is terrible, it is a total internal incineration. How he could live so long and without suffering terrible pain is a mystery to me.”

His ability to use his power was also evidently limited and required the active, perhaps inner, participation of the “patient.” His own first wife did not believe in his powers and did not want him treating the children. His sons died years apart. He could also not heal himself; he thought that he was forbidden to do so, but that may be viewed as an interpretation of what he experienced—namely failure.

Now, to be sure, in my own posting on miracle cures, I was not, repeat not, suggesting that such cures are transcendental in character. Rather, I emphasized the fact that some kind of energy is involved—entirely in conformity with facts such as the above. One of the oddities of our perception is that the unfamiliar and the rare appear to us as transcendental; they don’t have to be so in fact. My objective in all of these postings is to enlarge our sphere of understanding. There is more to reality than our conventional modes of thought recognize.