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assumed she had meant that they more strongly believed in the power of God to heal them, or that they healed themselves better. |
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Why did the healers palm chicken guts if they could rearrange eyeballs painlessly, and remove hemorrhoids with their bare fingers? I thought I had seen a tiny razor blade under one healer's fingernail, so, aha! He wasn't cutting people open with his finger! He was simply using a razor blade! (And then reaching inside people's bodies with his bare hands and pulling out tumors, while the people felt no pain?) Or did he cut people and use chicken guts, so they would believe they were being operated on and actually heal themselves? |
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I gave up the idea of writing anything about the healers for the newspaper. It wasn't possible for me to figure out what was actually going on. Smarter people than I had been perplexed by this. It didn't seem to be all fraud, all the time. And besides, I wanted people to get better, so why did it matter how it happened? |
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So what if the so-called operations were frauds, as long as people got well? If reporters think it's a problem, but sick people don't, is it meaningful to ask if the psychic surgeries are real or fake? Maybe, as the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna postulated, they are both real and not real.
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In any case, when I tried to make sense of it, my headache began. It was made worse by the fact that I had barely eaten anything in the past few days, because I was out of money and was waiting for the arrival of funds via Western Union. Also, I had not been sleeping well at all. In retrospect, my stress, my unintended fast and dehydration, physical exhaustion from months on the road, and the assaults by the healers on my view of reality all contributed to a situation that, in many ways, resembles a contemporary shamanic vision quest, or brainwashing. |
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I once heard it said that "mystical experiences are to religion what basic research is to science."
Anne Gordon A Book of Saints |
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I have no recollection of even one more moment of pain after I prayed. |
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