The Power of Belief

The minister, enough Vitalis in his hair to lube a Buick, places his palm on the forehead of the afflicted.
“Praise the Lord—you are healed!” As if on cue, the afflicted obeys gravity and falls backward, stricken with the spirit, into the arms of the good reverend’s assistants. Then, she walks back to her seat—without the use of her canes. A miracle?

No, it’s called subjective validation. The parishioner wants desperately to please the minister and believe in his power as a conduit of God’s energy. So she falls—then she walks. Her belief has released a powerful flow of endorphins in her body that temporarily allows her to overcome her pain and instability. And for a short time she is healed.

Then she goes home, endorphin levels drop, her pain returns, and she must again hobble through life with her canes. She will tell herself that it is because her belief is not strong enough, that she must pray harder, she must have zero doubt. Every week or two she’ll send 20 dollars in to the reverend’s ministry so prayers will be said for her. And that’s a big chunk out of her Social Security.

You can see dramas like this unfold at three a.m. if you cannot sleep and are foolish enough to turn on the television for diversion.

But they happen elsewhere, outside of fundamentalist Christianity. In the East, people believe in the power of chi, or energy. It is a force, without sentience, that pervades the universe. Acupuncture is based on the idea of chi; that we have invisible meridians and channels of energy that flow through our bodies and lead to our organ systems. If these channels become blocked, illness ensues. Acupuncture seeks to remove blockages with the use of fine needles.

I believe in chi, because I’ve felt it operating in my own body. For fifteen years I’ve practiced a form of chi kung, or energy work, called standing post meditation. After a couple of years of standing, I started to feel energy pulsing, like pinpricks of electricity, on areas on the soles of my feet. I asked my tai chi teacher about it, and he said that was a sign that my practice was good—the yongchuan cavities on my feet had opened.

However, many legends and myths about the power of chi exist. Some masters feel they can project it over long distances for healing. Others believe in something called empty force, in which you can knock over opponents, without touching them, by projecting chi.

My teacher, who is as accomplished a martial artist as I’ve ever seen, has attended demonstrations of empty force, in which the master knocks over his own students without landing a blow. As soon as the master seemingly projects energy from his palms, his students are thrown back as though they’ve been kicked.

Being a skeptic himself, Rami has approached these masters and asked for them to demonstrate on him. The answer is always the same—“No.” They give reasons like his meridians are not clear enough and the blow would kill him.

But the masters know it wouldn’t work on Rami. Their students expect it to work, want it to work, and again, the concept of subjective validation comes into play. Are the masters aware of this? I don’t know. Maybe they are falling for it, too. Or maybe claims of paranormal powers bring in more students and more money.

I’ve seen demonstrations of chi masters attempting to fight full-contact karate fighters and the results have been embarrassing—for the chi masters. Invariably, they’ll wave their arms at the oncoming fighter, hoping to project chi to knock them down. Invariably it doesn’t work, and they are knocked out in short order.

So do these subtle energies exist? Yes, they do. Some years ago one of the national news programs ran a segment on Tibetan monks who could melt snow with their body heat. The monks went out in the winter cold dressed in loincloths, sat down, meditated, and in short order large circles of the snow around them melted. They were on camera constantly—it wasn’t faked.

Paranormal powers of healing do exist. Those who have them have typically spent ten or twenty years in monasteries in deep meditation, developing areas of the brain inaccessible to those of us in the real world. These powers are treated as a gift to be used to help the afflicted. But always for free, never for financial gain. That is considered bad form.