My alien implant led me to agree with Nick Cave
Jenny Valentish looks at lightworkers and the placebo effect in Byron Bay.
It was news to me that I have a hostile alien universe in my pelvic bowl. The revelation occurred during a visit to Byron Bay, the town in farthest eastern Australia, where magical ley lines meet and spiritualism merges with capitalism through a montage of flapping white linen.
In a room behind a shop selling crystals and angel cards, the healer gazed at an energy block in my abdomen. “I often baulk at saying things like this because most people don’t react well,” Paul began. “But it’s an implant.”
Paul explained that Zeta Reticulans had placed an implant in me at birth, and that inside it was a whole universe.I was bummed. Last time I saw Paul, he’d told me that the reason I hated being touched around the hips was because I’d been shot by arrows in a past life. I was really trying to override my critical mind and get into energy healing – I couldn’t deny it relaxed me – but it was hard when the healer couldn’t keep their story straight.
The Power of the Placebo Effect
It got me wondering about the placebo effect, and whether healing requires the individual to mentally commit as much as the person we’re paying. If then – and only then – it can be effective.
We tend to think of the placebo effect in terms of medicine. During World War II, when Dr Henry Beecher ran out of pain medication, he gave soldiers saline solution and told them it was a powerful painkiller, which sometimes seemed to work. Then, in the 1950s, Dr Beecher worked at Harvard Medical School and found the phenomenon worked with post-surgical wound pain, seasickness, headaches, coughs, anxiety, and nervous disorders.
On average, the placebo effect leads to improvement in 30 percent of subjects who receive it, and that number is even higher for other conditions like depression, where it gets up to 45%. Hippocrates wrote in 400 BC that some patients, though conscious that their condition is perilous, recover their health simply through their contentment with the goodness of their physicians.
What Do the Myth-Busters Say?
Joe Nucci is a licensed psychotherapist in New York with a huge following on social media for his myth-busting videos, including one on the placebo effect, which had the caption ‘What makes you a bigger fool, believing in crystals and astrology or not using the placebo effect to your advantage?’ I interviewed him for my podcast, Spirit Levels, about whether his professional training means he disregards spiritual practises.
“History isn’t always super kind to things like meditation or hypnotism, or other modalities that are just par for the course nowadays,” he points out. “When it comes to things like Reiki [energy healing], I’m curious as to how different that is from what we call somatic therapy, which I’m a huge believer in. That’s a therapy of the body, usually facilitated through breath.”
Five Key Personality Types
There are five key personality types, and one is openness. Those people are particularly receptive to spiritual ideas. By his own admission, Joe scores highly.
“I always say this to people when it comes to picking a therapist: pick someone you’re comfortable with,” Joe says. “If the person is open to astrology and Reiki, and that makes you respect them, well, you’re probably going to open up more. If holding a crystal feels real, well, don’t stop doing it.”
Nick Cave Opens Up to Louis Theroux
I was recently listening to an interview the closest thing I have to a spiritual guru: Nick Cave, in conversation with Louis Theroux. Particularly since being permanently changed by grief, of the deaths of two of his sons, Nick’s found himself floating evermore towards faith.
“It provides something that, in my view, the secular world loses out on in some way [by] living within the tyranny of what is rational,” Nick told Louis. “I find that there are intimations within the world that exist somewhere between what is rational and what is woo-woo that are worth investigating: feelings, softly spoken whispers, hunches about things that exist somewhere, that feel very real to me. They’re not provable, but they have a spiritual dimension. They’re extraordinarily helpful to you if you’re going through difficult things.”
Finding The Power to Begin The Healing Process
Personally, I think the power of healing comes from the very fact that we have made a commitment to have a very intimate connection with another human being (let’s disregard the alien claims for a moment). We don’t have our phone, there are no distractions, and this stranger is being very kind and careful with you. That’s healing in the most basic sense of the word.
I just worry that spiritual narcissists calling themselves healers can take advantage of people at their most vulnerable. My history teacher at school taught us about the Black Death and how people would do weird things to cure themselves of the plague, like strapping a live chicken to their swollen nodes. Insanity. But like Mrs Toms said, “If you were dying, wouldn’t you just try?”
