While genuine curiosity is always present in humanity, institutionalized forms of it depend on the presence of a suitable ideology. Scientific study of so-called miraculous events, for example, is not undertaken. The scientific ideology just can’t work with the phenomena as these are actually experienced. Let us take something odd like bi-location, thus a person appearing in two places at the same time. Based on the scientific view, bi-location is impossible. Those who claim to have observed it are simply labeled credulous. If such a claim is ever scientifically investigated, the aim of the study is to prove its falsity. Similarly, the Vatican does undertake careful investigation of miracles, but always as part of a process of canonization, not as a general (scientific) undertaking. Thus the Vatican does not investigate claims of miracles surrounding Hindu or Muslim saints. Much as science has a strong view of the necessarily physical causation of any symptoms others might label miraculous, so also the Vatican has a strong view of the causation of miracles; these are necessarily God’s interventions.
For these reasons, we always find evidence for the miraculous in settings where the ideology colors the whole situation. Here and there, in the last two centuries, we’ve seen some few departures from this general tendency. These have been rare because a person, however well-qualified as a scientist, will draw tribal attacks if he or she wanders off the reservation. In the nineteenth century, before the establishment of Science with a leading cap, we have the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research by an elite. An example from our own time is Ian Stevenson, a trained medical man and biochemist, who investigated reincarnation. Near Death Experience studies represent another interesting cluster, also initiated by a doctor, Raymond Moody. NDE work has taken on a certain legitimacy precisely because Moody’s work was then taken up by multiple teams of other physicians—always those who were exposed to the phenomenon directly.
The point I’m after today, however, is not that “fringe” elements in science have “dared” to “dabble” in heresy—and have to some extent “gotten away” with it. Especially in NDE work, fame and fortune—if not in academic circles—may be achieved by heresy. The thought I had was that if the medium is the message, sometimes the framing is the picture. The extraordinary gifts that infrequently become visible surrounding saints or would-be saints—I’m thinking here of Padre Pio, who is, Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth who isn’t yet, and Bruno Gröning who never shall be—appear to me to be of the greatest interest. These are modern people; they’ve all lived during my life time; indeed I once lived a mere handful of miles away from Therese’s town during and after World War II. But I know of many scores of others who’ve lived in the past—and in every culture of the globe. The same stories surround them—albeit figures with stigmata are strictly in Catholic realms, which is itself worthy of careful note. The linkage between reincarnation studies and stigmata has never been noted, except, perhaps, by me (here). But as for other capacities these people have displayed, they are the same: bi-location, precognition, healing and other powers. Each is embedded in a religious culture which explains each in his or her own framing. The total phenomenon, as an established reality, has never been examined as it were objectively, as phenomena but yet with full acceptance of the observed realities. By full acceptance here I mean that to understand these people’s lives, experiences, and actions necessarily requires acceptance of a much more extended kind of reality than we believe surrounds us. (Here I provide this link to some reports on Padre Pio by way of illustration of the nature of this evidence—and how we actually encounter it).
Time still hides many things. The inertial pull of this dimension is enormous, but in due time genuine knowledge of these phenomena, which straddle the zones of here and over there, may become better understood—although, I suspect, never by more than just a minority. As genuine curiosity is always present, there will always be those with one foot in the borderzone.
Showing posts with label Gröning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gröning. Show all posts
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Thursday, September 10, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Miracle Cures and Healers
If no human being had ever experienced a miracle, faith healing, or the operation of some kind of strange, inexplicable power, I am sure that we’d still have religious practices, but they would all be of the variety we know as the worship of the collective. All rise. And now some celebrity will sing the National Anthem, possibly in a way we don’t even recognize. Three soldiers stand down there with the flags. And many people have a hand over their heart. State religion. Patriotism. Play ball.
We carry within us a vague intuition that all this stuff around and about us isn’t the be-all and the end-all here, but when we encounter the transcendental up close and personally, then we really know something. Then we take it seriously. And nothing gets our attention more swiftly and fully than hearing about cures. It is an astonishing fact—but nonetheless a fact—that great healers keep appearing among us, not many, but they keep appearing, and they do so no matter what stage of culture we have reached. When they do arise, a cult will invariably form around them either within the bosom of some established church or external to it.
Solanus Casey (1870-1957), a healing saint and a Capuchin priest, is one such figure in my own neck of the woods. As the author of the brief Wikipedia article about him puts it: “Many miraculous cures have been associated with Father Solanus’s intercession, both when he was alive and after his death. Pilgrims from around the world continue to make pilgrimages to the tomb of Father Solanus.” Casey is on the way to sainthood, having been given the “Venerable” designation by the Vatican. He is an example of a healer whose cult is embedded in a church.
Another modern example is the German Bruno Gröning (1906-1959). He was a carpenter by trade and later earned his living as a factory and general laborer. He emerged from obscurity in 1949 and became a very popular faith healer; his powers caused him to become embroiled in controversy. Controlling elements of the medical community opposed him; the state eventually forbade him to engage in healing activities. Thanks to the efforts of Greta Häusler, one of his early followers, the Bruno Gröning Circle of Friends has become a global organization with footprints in many countries. We find the same patterns wherever we go, never mind the locally dominant religions. Hopeful believers visit the graves of many famous Muslim saints with the same expectations—and occasional miraculous healing experiences—as they visit Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish figures.
The fascinating aspects of this phenomenon are three-fold. The healing power flows through a person, comes to be associated with a fixed place—hence pilgrimages to grave-sites or regions where the figure was active—and cures continue to take place after the individual passes away. It is also evident that the powers of the healer, and most likely the power of the person to be healed, both arise spontaneously. In the healer the power comes first; alignment with some religion or independent activity follows. Neither Casey nor Gröning were intellectuals. Gröning had very little formal education; and Casey, although he graduated from seminary, was ordained a “simplex” priest; this meant that he could neither hear confessions nor give homilies: his superiors didn’t think he had the intellectual capacity for such tasks. One smiles. The power in the person healed manifests, it seems to me, in response to the stimulus of the healer—but the healer need not be there. Otherwise post-mortem healings would not take place.
I have no doubt that some kind of energy does flows from or through these saints—but I suspect that it is always all around us. They manage somehow to concentrate and to direct it. It flows through them with great strength perhaps because something in us that normally blocks or weakens it is absent in them. It is very difficult to credit that the healing power is associated with a geographical location—easy to assume that it is everywhere. Casey lived decades in New York before he arrived in Michigan. But location—a grave-site, for example—may have bearing on the person to be healed. The healing may be a process in which receptivity to the “current of healing,” to use Gröning’s phrase, must first be stimulated. This receptivity may be enhanced by faith. Being at the place where the saint is buried or where he or she spent a life may heighten the receptivity.
There is ample evidence from many cases that the “faith” required to be healed is not something intellectual. Complete unbelievers are actually healed. But how great, really, was their disbelief? They went to see the healer, after all. This coincidence of intellectual doubt but contradictory action of the will illustrates how complex we are. What we think is often not even half the story. And many of us are far from sufficiently integrated.
We carry within us a vague intuition that all this stuff around and about us isn’t the be-all and the end-all here, but when we encounter the transcendental up close and personally, then we really know something. Then we take it seriously. And nothing gets our attention more swiftly and fully than hearing about cures. It is an astonishing fact—but nonetheless a fact—that great healers keep appearing among us, not many, but they keep appearing, and they do so no matter what stage of culture we have reached. When they do arise, a cult will invariably form around them either within the bosom of some established church or external to it.
Solanus Casey (1870-1957), a healing saint and a Capuchin priest, is one such figure in my own neck of the woods. As the author of the brief Wikipedia article about him puts it: “Many miraculous cures have been associated with Father Solanus’s intercession, both when he was alive and after his death. Pilgrims from around the world continue to make pilgrimages to the tomb of Father Solanus.” Casey is on the way to sainthood, having been given the “Venerable” designation by the Vatican. He is an example of a healer whose cult is embedded in a church.
Another modern example is the German Bruno Gröning (1906-1959). He was a carpenter by trade and later earned his living as a factory and general laborer. He emerged from obscurity in 1949 and became a very popular faith healer; his powers caused him to become embroiled in controversy. Controlling elements of the medical community opposed him; the state eventually forbade him to engage in healing activities. Thanks to the efforts of Greta Häusler, one of his early followers, the Bruno Gröning Circle of Friends has become a global organization with footprints in many countries. We find the same patterns wherever we go, never mind the locally dominant religions. Hopeful believers visit the graves of many famous Muslim saints with the same expectations—and occasional miraculous healing experiences—as they visit Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish figures.
The fascinating aspects of this phenomenon are three-fold. The healing power flows through a person, comes to be associated with a fixed place—hence pilgrimages to grave-sites or regions where the figure was active—and cures continue to take place after the individual passes away. It is also evident that the powers of the healer, and most likely the power of the person to be healed, both arise spontaneously. In the healer the power comes first; alignment with some religion or independent activity follows. Neither Casey nor Gröning were intellectuals. Gröning had very little formal education; and Casey, although he graduated from seminary, was ordained a “simplex” priest; this meant that he could neither hear confessions nor give homilies: his superiors didn’t think he had the intellectual capacity for such tasks. One smiles. The power in the person healed manifests, it seems to me, in response to the stimulus of the healer—but the healer need not be there. Otherwise post-mortem healings would not take place.
I have no doubt that some kind of energy does flows from or through these saints—but I suspect that it is always all around us. They manage somehow to concentrate and to direct it. It flows through them with great strength perhaps because something in us that normally blocks or weakens it is absent in them. It is very difficult to credit that the healing power is associated with a geographical location—easy to assume that it is everywhere. Casey lived decades in New York before he arrived in Michigan. But location—a grave-site, for example—may have bearing on the person to be healed. The healing may be a process in which receptivity to the “current of healing,” to use Gröning’s phrase, must first be stimulated. This receptivity may be enhanced by faith. Being at the place where the saint is buried or where he or she spent a life may heighten the receptivity.
There is ample evidence from many cases that the “faith” required to be healed is not something intellectual. Complete unbelievers are actually healed. But how great, really, was their disbelief? They went to see the healer, after all. This coincidence of intellectual doubt but contradictory action of the will illustrates how complex we are. What we think is often not even half the story. And many of us are far from sufficiently integrated.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Mystical Experiences: An Elaboration
The questions I’ve always asked myself about the mystical experience are these: What is it that mystics experience? Is it God? Or could it be something else extraordinarily energetic? Here I hasten to introduce qualifiers. I’m not in any doubt, myself, that God is ultimately the source of everything. But in the mystical experience, the claim is not that people experience some higher or more energetic order. It is that they have experienced, if only briefly, union with God. To illustrate this:
The Sufi mystic Al Hallaj (858-922) once said, “I am the Truth”; that statement cost him his life. Meister Eckhart (quoted in the last post) identified his eye with God’s—ambiguously enough, to be sure, to escape drastic censure. Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), another mystic, wrote in a poem: “I know God cannot live one instant without Me:/If I should come to naught, needs must He cease to be.” My modern example, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, said the exactly same sorts of things, especially in Chapter VI of his Pathways Through to Space but also sprinkled throughout his book elsewhere. Merrell-Wolff was a modern, wrote in the modern manner, and we understand from him that he fully understood the difference between his limited self and what he called the SELF. So also did, I have no doubt, Al Hallaj, Eckhart, and Silesius. But what they felt was a powerful identity with this higher something in their moments of exaltation—and identified it with the Absolute.
Other characteristics common to this experience are feelings of power and exaltation. The person feels all-knowing. The self seems vast and limitless. Everything seems mysteriously present in the experience—and is also known and understood. And over against that exalted feeling, ordinary life appears to be a mere illusion, nothing, shards, and insubstantiality.
But when the experience is over, the powers felt and the insights temporarily possessed seem to depart again. Nothing new is left over. The experience is most definitely energetic. Franklin called it a “current of bliss” and, in his description, even used electrical analogies. Bruno Gröning (1906-1959), a German faith-healer, spoke about the Heilstrom, the healing current. My own limited experience was also an unmistakeable perception of a powerful but benign vibration, of life and of vitality. It brought the very concrete I walked upon to life.
Now it strikes me that all of the people who have such experiences—except the few who experience them spontaneously—engage in inward practices like prayer and meditation, usually coupled with self-disciplines the aim of which is to shut out distractions, including those produced by the body itself. They are quite willfully seeking some internal origin. When the Buddha sat down under the bodhi tree just before his own personal breakthrough, he was determined to remain there until it happened. To be sure, the onset of the experience happens when it does. It can’t be forced. Sometimes it coincides with the effort. Often—as many Zen stories illustrate—something quite irrelevant triggers the satori. But effort is present in the context. A preparation is present. The focus, the personal viewpoint, has changed. And very often, these practices are also undertaken in a religious context. It is not therefore surprising that the experience itself should be explained in a religious way. The mystic is assaulting heaven—and the gates open! Overwhelming grace descends.
Long years of pondering this subject has gradually convinced me that the mystical experience is probably a temporary exposure to the life force—which, in my thought, originates in God. But I think of this concentrated and all-knowing energy as the creating impulse itself, not its culmination. By contrast with it the individual feels that ordinary reality, as we perceive it, is just ashes and cinder, but as I parse this complex of experience, it seems to me that the Creator intends the world to be—and to be what it is—a fantastic elaboration all of which, when you force your way back to the upwelling point of this energy, is still all fused into a single unity.
To put this in more mechanical terms, the aim of creation is precisely what we see around and beyond us, namely the vast societies of life, the churches militant, suffering, and triumphant. The vector of this great energy is in the direction of complexity, not fusion. Opening ourselves to the grace that flows is definitely desirable, but when it flows so potently as to disable us, we may have gone too far.
In this context, time and again, I’m reminded of the Sufi differentiation between those who do and those who do not have the option, as Idris Shah once put it in one of his books. What does this saying mean? To me it means that genuine spiritual achievement is to cultivate our ability to choose. In a great storm of any kind—not least one of vital energy—we have no option. For this reason Sufi sheiks did not approve of ecstatic experiences, thinking that those who underwent them were insufficiently trained. The real unveiling, when it happens, is something else. You retain the option.
The Sufi mystic Al Hallaj (858-922) once said, “I am the Truth”; that statement cost him his life. Meister Eckhart (quoted in the last post) identified his eye with God’s—ambiguously enough, to be sure, to escape drastic censure. Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), another mystic, wrote in a poem: “I know God cannot live one instant without Me:/If I should come to naught, needs must He cease to be.” My modern example, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, said the exactly same sorts of things, especially in Chapter VI of his Pathways Through to Space but also sprinkled throughout his book elsewhere. Merrell-Wolff was a modern, wrote in the modern manner, and we understand from him that he fully understood the difference between his limited self and what he called the SELF. So also did, I have no doubt, Al Hallaj, Eckhart, and Silesius. But what they felt was a powerful identity with this higher something in their moments of exaltation—and identified it with the Absolute.
Other characteristics common to this experience are feelings of power and exaltation. The person feels all-knowing. The self seems vast and limitless. Everything seems mysteriously present in the experience—and is also known and understood. And over against that exalted feeling, ordinary life appears to be a mere illusion, nothing, shards, and insubstantiality.
But when the experience is over, the powers felt and the insights temporarily possessed seem to depart again. Nothing new is left over. The experience is most definitely energetic. Franklin called it a “current of bliss” and, in his description, even used electrical analogies. Bruno Gröning (1906-1959), a German faith-healer, spoke about the Heilstrom, the healing current. My own limited experience was also an unmistakeable perception of a powerful but benign vibration, of life and of vitality. It brought the very concrete I walked upon to life.
Now it strikes me that all of the people who have such experiences—except the few who experience them spontaneously—engage in inward practices like prayer and meditation, usually coupled with self-disciplines the aim of which is to shut out distractions, including those produced by the body itself. They are quite willfully seeking some internal origin. When the Buddha sat down under the bodhi tree just before his own personal breakthrough, he was determined to remain there until it happened. To be sure, the onset of the experience happens when it does. It can’t be forced. Sometimes it coincides with the effort. Often—as many Zen stories illustrate—something quite irrelevant triggers the satori. But effort is present in the context. A preparation is present. The focus, the personal viewpoint, has changed. And very often, these practices are also undertaken in a religious context. It is not therefore surprising that the experience itself should be explained in a religious way. The mystic is assaulting heaven—and the gates open! Overwhelming grace descends.
Long years of pondering this subject has gradually convinced me that the mystical experience is probably a temporary exposure to the life force—which, in my thought, originates in God. But I think of this concentrated and all-knowing energy as the creating impulse itself, not its culmination. By contrast with it the individual feels that ordinary reality, as we perceive it, is just ashes and cinder, but as I parse this complex of experience, it seems to me that the Creator intends the world to be—and to be what it is—a fantastic elaboration all of which, when you force your way back to the upwelling point of this energy, is still all fused into a single unity.
To put this in more mechanical terms, the aim of creation is precisely what we see around and beyond us, namely the vast societies of life, the churches militant, suffering, and triumphant. The vector of this great energy is in the direction of complexity, not fusion. Opening ourselves to the grace that flows is definitely desirable, but when it flows so potently as to disable us, we may have gone too far.
In this context, time and again, I’m reminded of the Sufi differentiation between those who do and those who do not have the option, as Idris Shah once put it in one of his books. What does this saying mean? To me it means that genuine spiritual achievement is to cultivate our ability to choose. In a great storm of any kind—not least one of vital energy—we have no option. For this reason Sufi sheiks did not approve of ecstatic experiences, thinking that those who underwent them were insufficiently trained. The real unveiling, when it happens, is something else. You retain the option.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
