ALICE: Today, we’re continuing our conversation on Healing Energy, with leading researcher, Bill Bengston. Bill is a professor of sociology at St. Josephs College, in New York, where he specializes in research methods, and statistics.
To hear how Bill started his research into healing, and about his early experiences in the lab, and clinical work, listen to Episode 7.
ALICE: Bill’s book, The Energy Cure, tells the story of how he got into healing, and covers the development of the method, much of his early experiences in the lab, and clinical work.
ALICE: The Bengston Energy Healing Method, born from Bill’s years of research, uses “image cycling,” a largely mechanical technique of the mind
BENGSTON: There's a technique called rapid image cycling. And rapid image cycling involves a little bit of mental gymnastics. The mental gymnastics involve going through-- making up a list of very explicit things that you would like to see in the future. It can't be vague generalities like I want to be happy. The general idea is, after quite a bit of work trying to develop this list, when you have an emotion-- and it makes no difference what it is-- when you have an emotion, good or bad, you're going through this list at an extraordinary rate. So if I were to say, I'm going to drum on a desk, if [TAP] image, [TAP] image, [RAPID TAPPING] I would never go this slow. That's painful to me to be cycling at that rate. I'd cycle much, much, much faster. That takes some training and drill and practice and all that stuff, which you can do by practicing your brains out, getting a CD, taking a workshop, something like that.
In any event, that is the basic that never goes away, upon which we superimpose hands-on healing techniques, or distant healing techniques, which are, again, not particularly hard, but they take practice. Get on a bike, see if you can cycle. It's a sequential step that you don't master in a weekend. But you understand the plot, and then you decide you want to do it.
ALICE: Healing really is, ours to learn. But what I find fascinating about Bill’s current work is that he wants to make healing as easy as taking a vitamin pill!
BENGSTON: I want to turn healing into a conventional treatment that has nothing to do with belief of any sort. And make it storable, basically analogous to taking a pill.
ALICE: Wait. Did he just say “storable’? Can you store healing?
BENGSTON: If you take a multivitamin pill you've got a bunch of stuff loosely stored in the pill. I can put the pills in my pocket, take them on the road, plop them in when I need them. Can I have a little healing pill? Can I have a scalable way to deliver healing? And it's turning out to be yes.
Healing can be stored. The initial idea about storing healing goes to some very, very early work in the 1960s, early 1960s by Bernard Grad at McGill University in Montreal.
ALICE: Dr. Bernard Grad was a Canadian biologist, who is considered one of the foremost researchers of laying on of hands energy healing. His influence remains groundbreaking today, and is still the foundation for research in the field of subtle energy and energy medicine.
BENGSTON: Grad found that you can store healing in cotton. And what that meant was he would get Oskar Estebany to hold a piece of cotton. And then he would apply the cotton to wounded mice and they would be fixed, as if Estebany was holding the cage. You could put cotton in the soil of plants and they would grow differently. He found you could store healing in water. The question is what else can you store it in? And storage is an interesting problem, which would be necessary in order to make this scalable. But to demonstrate that it is storable doesn't mean that you've captured it in a way that makes it scalable.
ALICE: Bill started doing research into cotton, cotton that can store healing!
BENGSTON: If you can charge cotton-- and he had already demonstrated that you can, and I'd, again, just taken it farther-- it doesn't solve the problem. So I have experiments now at Brown University where you take a piece, you have charged cotton and you have uncharged cotton. And then you bring little dishes, called plates, but little dishes of cancer cells. And you bring the cancer cells and you plop them and you bring them gradually nearer to cotton, and you plop on top of the cotton, and then you look and see what happens. Well, if the cotton hasn't been charged, nothing happens. If the cotton has been charged, the cancer cells genomically change. And probably, cancer cells are not amenable to placebo effects or suggestion. But the cancer cells can tell whether cotton has been charged and they biologically respond. If we put cells that have motility they can swim near the cotton. It'll swim towards the cotton.
ALICE: Wow, that’s amazing. The healing cotton had an effect on the cancer cells. How can this be explained?
BENGSTON: I think healing occurs through a bonding between, we'll just call a healer and healee. And you can talk about this in a different way. It's assumed in traditional methodologies that, just anybody trained in experimental design knows that the basic plot of experimental design is you take, let's say we're testing a drug. The same thing, the drug could be hands-on healing. So we're testing a drug. You're going to take a pill. We're going to see if it works.
ALICE: To understand how healing can be stored, and reused and be effective, Bill first helped me understand the idea of bonding, and the experiments he did to prove this.
BENGSTON: And so the general plot, boiled down to its essence, is I have a therapy. The therapy could be a pill. I get a gaggle of volunteers and I break them up into two groups. You give the therapy to one and you give a placebo to the other. And the people don't know whether they're getting the placebo or they're getting the real thing. But you do this. And so I've got a handful of people, or a gaggle of people here, and a handful of people or a gaggle of people there. And they're separate. They're distinct. They're all volunteers in some crazy experiment. And the assumption is, in virtually all experimental design, is that physically separate groups or physically separate individuals are independent. I'm here. You're there. Well, OK, fine. I drink water, it doesn't do anything to you. You take a pill, doesn't do anything to me.
And so can you demonstrate to me they're independent? Can you demonstrate to me dependency? Well it turns out I can demonstrate dependency. I've taken, for example, EEGs, and I've had them synchronized and sampled every-- take 38 leads and you've got a bunch of stuff sticking out and you're someplace else, and I start cycling. And my brain changes. And I think about you and that signal appears in your brain. The cross correlations are so intense in the brain that you could reasonably say this is a phase lock of two brains. If I stick a pin in me, you jump. That's the short version.
Now everybody's experienced this. This isn't unique to me geeking out in the lab.
ALICE: When Bill says he starts cycling, it is his method of rapid image cycling, which helps with the energy exchange in his Bengston Healing Method. But I am not sure I have experienced a lock with someone else’s brain yet!
BENGSTON: Everybody here has felt connected and felt disconnected. It's not entanglement. That's crazy talk. You've felt the fluidity of the connection or lack of connection. I love my dog on Monday. I hate my dog on Tuesday. What changed? It's the same dog, but the connections changed. And you can feel a connection to people, dogs, ideas, places.
I think that individuals can be bonded together and the separateness isn't quite as separate anymore. And I suspect in a drug trial, for example, where you've got a gaggle of people broken up into independent groups, they're identifying… I think this is somehow connected. I don't know. Mice can become bonded to each other by shared experiences. They can be bonded together maybe by mice consciousness? They can be bonded together by the consciousness of the experimenter. I don't know the rules of bonding. So, there's bonding. There's unbonding.
ALICE: Ok, so what makes it bonded?
BENGSTON: Well, if I'm obsessed with, let's say I have an antiviral, and everybody's in the antiviral, I think you're going to get, if this group gets an effect, this group, whether they've taken the antiviral or not, will also get the effect. And so, if you study placebos-- and most people don't-- but if you study placebos you'll find some reasonably interesting phenomena. Placebo effects are directly proportional to the amount of the treatment in the other group. Now contemplate that. So, I give you x dosage, I get x placebo effect. If I give you 2x dose, I get a 2x placebo effect. Now, how do you explain that psychologically?
If you explain it as resonant bonding it's starting to make sense. Bonds become stronger as the number of bonders, bondees, I don't know what the right term is, are present. In my experiments, for example, the more mice in an experiment, the faster they'll collectively get cured. So if I have an experiment with five mice, they'll take longer to get better than an experiment with 25 mice. 25 mice will take longer than 75 mice. And I think what's happening is, a treatment to any one cage is a treatment to all the mice. Kind of like upping the placebo.
ALICE: Wow. So the more mice, or people, in the healing experiment, the shorter the time, and the more successful the healing effect will be. Treat one cage of mice, and you are treating all of them.
BENGSTON: As you move from, in FDA trials, from phase one to phase two to phase three, the number of bodies increases. As the number of bodies increase, similarly the placebo effect gets proportionately stronger. So by the time you get to a stage three FDA clinical trial, you have so many people that the placebo effect becomes so strong, you perceive nothing has happened, because the perception that something has happened is a function of what's the difference between the two groups. And as the placebo effect gets proportionately stronger, there's no difference. And so if you think nothing happened, in geek terms, this would be known as a type two error, where you think nothing has happened but something actually has happened.
ALICE: And something did happen…
BENGSTON: I did an experiment in one medical school where we had six rooms going on of six different conditions for treating the mice. And in all six rooms, all of the mice were cured. Now in this model, 100% should die. Instead 100% lived. But there was no difference among the six rooms. They were all cured. The conclusion was nothing happened. That's a type two error. I think we're making those errors all over the place routinely in conventional science because the scientists, like myself at one point, belong to the religion that physical separateness means independence
ALICE: Healing is connection between, the bond that takes place between healer and healee.
I had one more question for Bill: What does he think will be the most important contribution he could make in healing?
BENGSTON: I think the most important conceptual contribution I could make will be regarding resonant bonding. I have designed a sequence of experiments, because this is my superpower. But I've designed a sequence of experiments which I can't find a flaw in, which will actually parse out how much of placebo may be psychological. There may be something in there. How much is psychological, and how much is a physical connection. I haven't been able to do it yet. It has to be done in humans. I found placebo effects in mice that exactly mirror what happens when you study humans. I found placebo effects in cell cultures. And so that the bonding occurred-- something happens to the untreated group or the one that's alleged to be the control. So I think that would probably be my most important conceptual understanding, if I could unravel bonding,
ALICE: And getting back to that treated piece of cotton…
BENGSTON: I actually have Grad's original cotton here. He gave it to me as a gift after I had done something or other. Actually, I was just publishing a paper explaining how placebos work by resonant bonding, and how people have misinterpreted almost all experiments they've done in the last decades. And I went to his house in Montreal because he's a fierce critic. And he sat there, worked on it for hours. And he said, "I think you're right." And then he went to the back and he said, "I'd like to give you as a gift, 'cause you've gone past me, the original cotton I have." So that, to me, is a treasure. Yeah, that's one of the coolest gifts I've ever had. The Great One giving me cotton.
ALICE: Talk about bonding! Thank you Bill, for the great insights on storing healing, and I can’t wait to take a healing pill one day! But first, we will learn more about storing healing in water on our next episode with Bill.
For more on energy healing, check out our book “Tuning Into Frequency” everywhere books are sold.
That’s it for this mad tea party, stay tuned as we continue to explore energy healing futures with Bill Bengston because…
BENGSTON: There's so many interesting things to poke at. And the most wonderful thing, by doing experiments, is you find out, virtually at the end of every experiment, how little you know.
ALICE: I hope you, like me, keep wandering….
Bill Bengston Part 2: Bonding!