CHAPTER TWO

HEALING, SPOON-BENDING, AND CLAIRVOYANCE

Many "miracles" I have witnessed weren’t connected with Babaji—at least, they didn’t involve His image or they didn’t take place in His presence. I’m writing about them because I want to convince everyone reading these stories that miracles abound and can be present in everyday life—even when we don’t expect them.

Three of these involve a Rebirther named Charlie whom I had met up at Campbell Hot Springs in June of ‘78. Charlie was an extremely good-looking man in his early 20s who had been leading a "wild" life in Reno before becoming involved with Rebirthing. He didn’t seem especially spiritual—just a regular guy.

The first "miracle" happened in July or August of ‘78, a few months after I first Rebirthed. That summer I was still seeing Primal patients as I had for the previous seven years. I was still exploring the usefulness of bringing old negative feelings up into consciousness and then expressing them by dramatizing them. But I no longer only practiced Primal therapy—after old negatives had been felt, dramatized, and understood, I taught my Primal patients the Rebirthing breathing and the use of affirmations so they could finally let their old negatives go.

I still had my Primal room intact with its padded ceiling, draped walls padded with six inches of acoustic batting all around, and the padded, carpeted floor. I usually kept nothing in it at all except a box of Kleenex and a pile of pillows in one corner patients could use to simulate a womb or birth canal or whatever.

One day, unexpectedly, I received a call from Charlie who told me that he and two other Rebirthers from CHS had been traveling in the West, leading Rebirth trainings for the past six weeks, day in and day out. The three of them had actually arrived in Los Angeles very late the evening before and had taken a hotel room for the night at a rather expensive hotel over on Sunset Strip. They wanted to see me before they left for Sierraville to go back to Campbell. So I told them to come over later after I finished working with my Primal patient, Sachi. Later that day they showed up—Charlie, Jim, and Mary—but they didn’t seem happy and Jim had a cut on his face and a black eye!

When I inquired about it, I was told that when they had checked into the hotel the night before, Jim had said something to which Charlie took offense. The consequence was that they got into an actual fist fight. They told me that while Charlie was berating and pounding on Jim, Jim had refused to fight him back, saying that he loved him and nothing Charlie did could make him react negatively. The episode ended when Charlie hit Jim on the face. Charlie’s ring cut Jim’s cheek just below his eye, so that a lot of blood started dripping all over. Jim said he put a cloth to his face and left the hotel room to wander the Strip most of the night, wondering what all of this had to do with peace, truth, simplicity, and love.

Remember, they had been together for six or more weeks doing Rebirth trainings, in each other’s presence essentially 24 hours a day, week after week after week. So their patience for each other had worn a little thin. Old stuff that would probably not have come up if they hadn’t been in such peculiar, intense circumstances did, instead, come up.

As they talked with me about it, I asked if they thought they’d gotten all their negative stuff out and had let it go. Charlie said that he didn’t think that he had. That was why he had phoned me and had delayed their departure in order to come talk with me. It turned out that what they really wanted was to go back into the Primal room and pound on each other with the batakas. They hoped such safe battle might actually give them a chance to bring up and let go of whatever negatives they’d been running. Their approach made a kind of convoluted sense, so I agreed.

I took them back to the Primal room where Sachi was just done with being in her old feelings so the room was free for Charlie and Jim to use. I made two piles of the pillows, and Sachi and I sat down, ready to view the battle of the batakas.

Charlie and Jim took off their shoes and jewelry, then picked the bats up. Charlie banged on Jim a few times, but Jim didn’t use his bat against Charlie. Jim simply held his bataka in front of him as a shield to fend off the blows that Charlie rained on him with increasing force and vigor.

Jim said several times that he had no grievance against Charlie and therefore nothing Charlie did to him would make him raise his hand against him in anger.

After perhaps two or three minutes of pounding Jim with the very safe bataka, Charlie said, "Enough of this nonsense, let’s fight like real men."

Then he threw his bataka into the corner, and proceeded to punch with his bare hands, pounding Jim on the shoulders and the arms and the head. Jim, as big if not bigger than Charlie, simply let Charlie hit him.

When she saw that Jim wasn’t defending himself at all, Sachi jumped up and ran over to Charlie to try to push him away from Jim and make him stop punching Jim. It was truly courageous of her. Sachi is five foot tall; Charlie is well over six foot. So there was no contest. Charlie simply stopped in the middle of his raging at Jim, put both his hands gently on both upper arms of Sachi and lifted her bodily, saying, "Sachi, you are a nice person, I wouldn’t dream of hurting you; now please go over there and sit down and stay out of the way."

I felt that there was no point in robbing anyone of their feelings, so I encouraged Sachi to sit next to me and feel hers. I reminded her that she had a good opportunity to get into her old negatives about violence. I still wasn’t worried that any harm would come to either Charlie or Jim as they continued fighting, even though Charlie was pounding on Jim with his full fists and the punches got harder and harder.

I had no question in my mind about their being serious, painful blows, yet Jim refused to protect himself. Finally Charlie said, "Oh, God damn, I can’t stand this."

He started to walk out of the Primal room, opened the door, turned around, and smashed his fist into the solid door frame into which the padded door fits, the one place in the whole Primal room where it’s possible to hurt yourself!

He stayed outside of the Primal room for a minute or two, and then came back in and came over to me, saying very softly, "Eve, please do something. I think I’ve broken my hand."

Indeed he had! I could see the break on one of the long bones on his right hand. I could also see the immense bruising and the hemorrhaging under the surface of the hand. He asked me if I would please set his hand, and I told him I would prefer to take him to an orthopedist. But Charlie said, "Please, I don’t want to go anywhere right now, please just see what you can do."

So, I pulled on his fingers so that the bones of his hand parted and realigned themselves, and then I wrapped his hand.

This was about 4:00 in the afternoon. There was certainly no doubt whatsoever in my mind about the fact that his hand was broken. In addition, it was obviously greatly swollen and badly bruised.

The next morning, most of the swelling had gone down and there was almost no bruising! I was bewildered and insisted that Charlie come to my orthopedist with me. The doctor examined Charlie’s hand and said it seemed to be fine, but he had it X-rayed to be sure. The X-rays showed a recently healed fracture!

Somehow, within less than twenty-four hours, Charlie’s hand had healed almost entirely and he was using his hand perfectly! Another part of that same "miracle" was that Jim showed no bruises from all the hard punches he had received during their afternoon—though his cut cheek and black eye from the previous night still remained.

A second unexplainable event that involved Charlie took place when a Native American from one of the nearby Southern California tribes came to the regular weekly Monday night meeting at my house to which all Rebirthers in the L.A. area are always invited. About twenty to twenty-five people were there that evening, including Charlie, Jim, and Mary, whom I had convinced to stay with me for a few days after the "fight." None of us knew the "Indian" or had met him before he entered my house and joined our circle.

When I asked him to introduce himself, he did and then asked us all to close our eyes. He said he was going to hand around a bunch of sage. It was about the size of a standard bunch of parsley found in the grocery store. He wanted each of us to speak of what came to our mind as we held the bunch of sage, using it to "channel" through. The small bundle of sage then was passed from person to person around the circle, with people mostly saying that nothing came to mind or else making associations to the smell of the sage itself.

Charlie and I were the last two in the circle. Charlie received the sage just before me. Charlie held it for a while and then said that he had an image in which he saw something with four corners, a naked Indian, some kind of large dirt-moving equipment, and a bow and arrow. He wasn’t sure about the four corners but that’s what he called them. He said they looked like posts in corners of an area of ground.

When Charlie handed the bunch to me, it was so hot that it felt as if it had been boiled—so hot, as a matter of fact, that I dropped it. My associations to it were struck with the heat that I had felt as I held it. I thought it was amazing that anything could be so hot, and yet still be a green, fresh, unwilted bunch of leaves.

After I gave the bunch of sage back to the Native American who had brought it, he told us he had picked it from sacred ground. He said he had come to talk with us about helping his tribe resist a modern construction company which had been permitted by their local government to start construction on a piece of land that the Indians contended was truly an old burial ground and therefore sacred to them.

To keep the bulldozers from going through their sacred land, the braves in that tribe had agreed that each day they would resist peacefully, though risking their lives. They staked out the corners of the burial ground, and at each corner they had rigged a bow with an arrow attached to the bowstring so that, as soon as a bulldozer or other heavy equipment moved forward, it would trip the bow, sending an arrow flying into the body of the naked brave who stood in its path. Each day for several weeks four different men had successfully prevented the construction equipment from entering the sacred ground.

I was amazed by the number of similarities between what Charlie had said and what the Indian told us. The tribe had staked the corners of their tribal burial ground. There was a nude Indian. There was an immense piece of earth-moving equipment. There was something to do with a bow and an arrow.

I knew that Charlie hadn’t talked with the Native American beforehand. So, I’m forced to conclude that the only way Charlie got information about what that bundle of sage was connected with was through holding it in his hands, letting thoughts come from the universe, channeled into his own brain. Perhaps the heat I felt was from cosmic energy passing through. However it happened, it seemed Charlie and the sage leaves had performed a "miracle of mind reading."

The third "miracle" that involved Charlie took place at an extremely unlikely spot for any kind of miracle, namely, at a nearby coffee shop on a big city street, five blocks away from my home.

A group of us Rebirthers, including Charlie and me, had gone over there, to get some breakfast. When I came back from washing my hands, the table was covered with five or six restaurant spoons and even a fork or two that had been bent into U’s and twisted into screwed shapes.

I was horrified and asked them to please stop it. I hissed that we would get in trouble, the waiter would certainly throw us out, and the restaurant would be extremely angry about their bent cutlery.

Charlie said it wasn’t anyone’s fault, that when they held the spoons, the spoons just got hot and melted and bent!

I was torn between disbelief and the desire to believe. So I said the only positive thing that I could think of at the time, "Oh, you mean like Uri Geller? Wow, I wish I could bend a spoon just using power of mind."

Charlie said, "You can. Just pick up the spoon by the bowl, and rub your hand across the handle of it and see what happens."

And so I held the spoon by the bowl in my left hand and stroked the handle of the spoon with the forefinger of my right hand, perhaps six or seven times.

Suddenly, I could see that the area I was stroking was beginning to get red hot and that the handle was bending toward the tabletop. I quickly caught the cool end of the molten handle with my right hand fingers and twisted it around so that it made three twists. Still disbelieving the evidence of my own eyes, I touched the part that looked red hot to see if it really were. I found that it was indeed burning hot, raising an instant blister on my finger!

Then I tried to unbend it, but without much success. With all my strength I perhaps shifted the curve slightly, but only just slightly. No question: The spoon had been well and truly twisted around on itself!

I had no rational explanation for it. I still don’t. Was it because Charlie has some magic powers that he asserted across the table top to bend the spoon I was stroking? That seems unlikely. Another explanation is just as improbable, and that is, that the spoon bent because I poured my energy into it. If so, I have never repeated such "magic." In any case, something happened for which there was no explanation.

A miracle?

Wasn’t it?

For the next ten years, I kept that bent spoon hanging from the drapery rod over one of the windows in my Rebirthing room—a material reminder that miracles do happen. All my Rebirthing clients saw it and many asked about it.

Then, one day, one of the men painting the interior of my house asked what the bent spoon was that was hanging from the drapery rod in the corner room upstairs, the room I call my Rebirthing room. When I told him the story, he asked if he could see it more closely. He told me he was a student of Yoga and had always hoped to see something miraculous. He asked if he could take it overnight to show it to his guru.

That was that. I never saw the spoon (or the painter) again. So proof of that particular miracle isn’t present any longer in my space. But then, I still know it happened, as do many of my patients.

Three years ago, my middle daughter called to tell me she and her three pre-teen children had tried and had succeeded in bending spoons with thought power alone! It was a rainy day where they lived and they had read a library book that told them how to do it!

I now have two of their spoons hanging in my Rebirthing room. Different spoons, but still the same miracle.

None of these stories involve "major" miracles. But I find them fascinating and not easily explained, even as coincidences. As Bob Mandel says, "There are no small miracles."

Each is a puzzlement and a comfort to everyone of us who witnesses it or learns about it.