Energy Healing with Bill Bengston

Bill Bengston: https://bengstonresearch.com
The Energy Cure: https://www.soundstrue.com/products/the-energy-cure
SSE Society for Scientific Exploration: https://www.scientificexploration.org
Tuning into Frequency

ALICE INTRO… there’s a question I keep asking myself, can we use energy to heal? 

 

BILL BENGSTON: Bill Bengston is the name and healing research is my game. 

 

ALICE: My guest today is Bill Bengston, one of the leading researchers in energy and healing, Bill is a professor of sociology at St. Josephs College, in New York, where his areas of specialization include research methods, and statistics. 

Bill has conducted research into anomalous healing for over 35 years, and has proven the effectiveness of his technique, in controlled animal experiments conducted in university biological and medical laboratories. 

 

BENGSTON: I'm President of the Society for Scientific Exploration. This is a group of geeks and nerds from around the world. We're right now in 27 countries, and we do research in scientific anomalies. 

 

ALICE: Wait, did he just say: "Scientific Anomalies"?

 

BENGSTON: And what that means in simple terms is that we study stuff that doesn't make any sense. And not making sense means based on our understanding of the way the world works, our understanding through textbooks and all that kind of thing would indicate that the things that we look into can't be. And this group in 27 countries are serious researchers with usually serious academic appointments. And they do traditional scientific methodology on stuff that doesn't make sense. 

 

ALICE: His book, The Energy Cure, tells the story of how Bengston got into healing, and covers the development of the method, much of his early experiences in the lab, and clinical work.

 

BENGSTON: So, for example, I do research in healing, and I've been doing so for I think 115 years. And healing doesn't make any sense. If you talk about conventional medicine, or you talk about conventional biology, and somebody comes along and puts their hands on you and does whatever it is they do after that and something happens significantly regarding healing, that doesn't make any sense. And that would be an example of a scientific anomaly. ESP would be examples of scientific anomalies that my brain can link up with your brain at a distance. That simply makes no sense. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It just means it doesn't make any sense. And what an anomaly really does, more than anything else, is it teaches us what we don't know. And it teaches us to be skeptical of what we think we know. 

 

ALICE: Ok, so what do we think we know? Or what should we know?

 

BENGSTON: And so, if you have read the current textbooks in any field, you have the illusion that the stuff in the textbooks is real. It's not. They'll be modified in future editions of the textbook. And what it really means is that knowledge is an ongoing process. And what we focus on in the SSE, the Society for Scientific Exploration, is rigorous data and rigorous evidence looking into claims of things which would be considered loosely paranormal. Paranormal means beyond normal. That's what an anomaly is. It's beyond normal. I suspect that, in the case of a whole lot of paranormal phenomena, like ESP-- the data are overwhelming. And so sooner or later, there'll be an edition of the textbook that says yeah, there's such a thing as telepathy, and here's the mechanism of action, and here's what happens, and here's how it works. You wouldn't then ask, "Do you do believe it?" Because belief requires this leap of faith. I mean, there is telepathy. The question is, how does it work? And the question is, under what conditions?

Same thing is true in healing. You put your hands on, you have an intention, you do whatever you do, and then you have significant healing. In the same way we talk about climate change deniers, I would say there are healing deniers. It's the same thing. They're ESP deniers. Well, because they're deniers, it doesn't mean there's not climate change. And because there's ESP deniers, it doesn't mean there's not ESP. There’re healing deniers. And some of the folks, they get real worked up over the stuff. I don't. I just start out being a skeptic. So, I don't believe the stuff, either. But I study it. 

 

ALICE:  OK, well, I’m not a healing denier, but I keep wandering, what do we really mean when we say “healing”?

 

BENGSTON: I got into this many, many, many years ago. And basically, what happened is I had a chronic, multi-year bad back. And so, I walked around in pain all the time. I had actually given up a swimming scholarship for college because I was a butterflier and if you have a bad back, butterfly and bad backs don't go together well. But in any event, as I was a lifeguard, I transitioned from competitive swimmer to lifeguard, and of course later, professor. I've never had a real job. [CHUCKLES] I'm not a big fan of work. 

 

So, I sometimes hung out in a lifeguard stand and such, in pain. And I met a guy at a pool I was lifeguarding at, and he said that he had discovered eight months before I met him that he was psychic. And I said, "Uh-huh." [CHUCKLES] And he said, "Yeah, I found out by accident that I can do what was known as psychometry." And psychometry is a fancy name for token object reading. 

 

ALICE: Wait, did he just say ‘token object’ reading?

 

BENGSTON: So, you hold something of somebody's and then you get impressions, or you allege to download information, I don't know what the right analogy is. And I said, "Uh-huh." And so, I started to test him, you know, as a skeptic.

 

ALICE: Wow. So, exactly what did this guy do?

 

BENGSTON: I did spend some time with this guy, a lot of time with this guy. And then his readings turned into physical readings. So, if I held, and I'm just using as an example, if I gave him my wallet, and in a test, he wouldn't know it was a wallet. It would be in an envelope, which would be in an envelope and all that stuff. He would be getting an envelope. But if I gave him something like my wallet or a watch or a ring or something like that, he started to pick up physical symptoms on his own body. And the people he was reading would claim that when he picked this stuff up, it was leaving them. And I didn't believe that. He didn't believe that. He thought that was the dumbest thing he's ever heard. And so, this happened over and over again. 

And one day he and I were sitting in a kitchen. This was one of those life changing moments. And I was sitting on top of a counter, dangling my legs and bending forward, as people with bad backs tend to do, trying to stretch it out. And he was telling me of some reading he had done the night before, getting rid of this or that pain or whatever it was. And it suddenly dawned on me. I'm a little slow. It suddenly dawned on me, you're an idiot. This guy's talking about all his pain he's relieving, and I'm sitting there dangling my legs in pain. And just then, he says-- I didn't say a word. He goes "Ow, ow. Somebody has a bad back." And I didn't say anything. I just let him squirm for a while. He goes "Somebody has a bad back." He starts looking through his pockets for who would be giving him a bad back.

 

And finally, I said, "You can stop flopping now. It's me." And he said, "You?" And I said, "You're the guy who's supposed to be psychic. You're a loser. You've known me the whole-- for how many months now? You didn't even know I had a bad back. I think this does not speak highly of you." [CHUCKLES] And he said, "Keep your pain to yourself." I said, "Better idea, fix it." And he said, "How?" And I said, "Damned if I know." So, I leaned over on a kitchen table, standing up, leaned over. And he said, "What should I do now?" And I said, "Put your hands on my back and fix it, you big dope." And he put his hands on, and he goes, "OK, well, what should I be doing?" I said, "Just let it go, let it go." And I got to tell you, my back started to feel like it had been novocained. And then from the outside in, the Novocain feeling disappeared. I haven't had a back pain since. That'll get your attention. It's reasonably interesting. And then you're left with two possibilities. One, walk away, keep your world safe, and pretend it never happened. Or two, try to figure out what in heaven's name just happened. For better or for worse, I decided to go and try to figure out what in heaven's name just happened. 

 

I would drag his hands around and say, "Put your hands here, put your hands here, put your hands here." And I watched hundreds of people. And it was seriously interesting. Some things responded incredibly quickly, dramatically. For example, cancer. Cancer was not particularly a difficult problem. Some things, eh, not so much. So, it's a standing joke, but it's real, historically. He couldn't do warts. So, cancer was easy. Warts made us both flop on the floor and panic. And it turned out the more aggressive the cancer, the easier it was to fix. That was one of the first clues. 

 

ALICE: Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Aggressive cancer is easier to fix all with the touch of hands?

 

BENGSTON: So, we did this. This is, again, a very short version, plopping around, putting his hands-on things, seeing what happens. And then I started to join him. And the question was A, could I do it too? B, is this thing teachable? And C, what in heaven's name is going on? 

 

ALICE: Ah, could Bill learn how to heal? Could you or I learn to heal with touch?

 

BENGSTON: And so, it turns out, yeah, I could do it too. It turns out probably, probably it's teachable. Now I say this with a certain amount of irony, because I teach it. [CHUCKLES] And I also, being a good skeptic, I published a paper in, I don't even remember what journal. I think Explore Journal of Science and Healing, with a biologist buddy of mine entitled Can Healing Be Taught? And I suggested no one has ever demonstrated that it can. So, it doesn't mean it can't. It's just means there's a certain amount of belief that healing can be taught. 

 

ALICE: One night during a healing session of about a dozen people, Bill met Dave Krinsley, who at the time was the head of geology department at City University of New York, and together they decided to take this healing by hands therapy under serious controlled conditions. They worked with a junior member of the bio department…

 

BENGSTON: She was working on a mammary cancer in mice and had been working on the mammary cancer for 20 years. And it's the single most-studied animal model ever. I think that's fair. There were over 2,000 publications in scientific journals on this one mouse model. In the mouse model, mammary cancer, certain kinds of mice are given a certain strain of cancer and 100% of them die in a month. 100%. And the distribution of death looks like a traditional, normal curve. Standard deviation is 3 days. So, they die very tightly. What are the odds of them living 10 days, of 11 days, of 12 days, like that? And no mouse ever, anywhere, under any circumstances, regardless of treatment, had ever lived past 27 days. Could I turn it into a negatively skewed distribution so that mice are living longer? Let's find out what happens. 

 

ALICE: They set up a lab at City University in New York, but the healing guy Bill was working with backed out of the study.

 

BENGSTON: So, it was suggested since he's not doing it, I should do it. And I said, "Me? I'm not a healer. I can barely spell 'healing.'" And so nonetheless, I got a cage of mice, bunch of mice in a cage. And I put my hands around and I did the healing techniques that he and I had developed. And I don't believe this stuff. And the tumors started to grow. And I assumed it was failing. And I said, "OK, it doesn't work. I'm an empiricist. Let's pull the plug. It doesn't work." And my heartless friend said, "Give it a couple more days." I said, "But it doesn't work." And he said, "Give it a couple more days." 

Couple more days later, tumors are much bigger. And I went come on, pay attention, doesn't work. Let's be constrained by reality here. Couple more days, tumors getting bigger. I'm trying to pull the plug. They're trying to say go a couple more days. Tumors then grow a blackened area on the tip of them and now I'm sure that the mice are dying. And then the tumor ulcerates, opens up, and it looks ugly. And I'm jumping up and down going folks, this doesn't work. Couple more days. And the tumor ulcerates to a huge opening. The mice are otherwise healthy. The eyes are clear, the coats are fine, they're running around the cage, they're having fun, they're playing pinochle, they're doing whatever it is that they're doing in the cage. Except they got this big wonking ugly thing on the back of them. And a couple more days, couple more days, and then suddenly the thing collapses. And the mice are cured. 

 

ALICE: WOW! The mice are cured of their cancer tumors… now, was this an anomaly?

 

BENGSTON: They're not they're not under remission. They're cured. And by cured, it's not that the symptoms went away. It's, they have no more cancer. And they lived their entire lifespan. No mouse has ever had a recurrence of cancer. And I can take it farther, but we didn't know this at the time. We can re-inject cancer into this mouse and it won't take. The mouse is not only cured, it's immune from cancer.

So, first thing we had to do is replicate it, see is it a fluke, is it this, is it that? And in the replication, I said, "This is kind of weird. First all I wasn't supposed to be the subject in this thing to start with. And secondly, if I'm the only one who can do this, that's not good. That's not a good place to be." So, I said, "I got a great idea. Let's get some naive, inexperienced volunteers. Let them replicate it. And I'll teach them how to do it.” So, I got four volunteers to be the healers in the next experiment, totally inexperienced, not anything that would even remotely relate to any of this stuff. And we replicated this and all the mice were cured. 

 

ALICE: ALL the mice were cured, again and again. Bill and his team replicated the experiment over and over again, using naïve volunteers….

 

BENGSTON: Now at this point I think I have 18 replications. So that's close to enough. And so, then we moved from that to secondary questions. Not is there healing? If you asked "Is there healing?" Again, it's a stupid question. But rather, how does it work? What are its correlates? Does it have a dose response? Does it develop in a modellable fashion so after each treatment this happens? What's behind it? These are secondary or second order questions which are much more interesting. And to this point now, 120 years later, I'm still looking into it. But now my emphasis is on making it scalable. 

 

ALICE: So, what’s Bill’s endgame with this research? 

 

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. 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. 

 

ALICE: aaahh, Storable healing?? We’ll learn more about Bill’s experiments in storing healing into things like water and cotton in the next episode. But, for now, you can go down the rabbit hole of healing and learn about Bengston Energy Healing Method, born from Bill’s years of research. The Bengston Method uses “image cycling,” a largely mechanical technique of the mind, that, like any new skill, takes practice and commitment to become proficient at it. You can learn more at www.bengstonresearch.com.

 

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….