By Stephan A. Schwartz

Article Excerpt:

Download PDF of “A Touch of Warmth”

We were studying healing. Bob was 25, sallow, and very sick. Diagnosed as being HIV-positive 18 months earlier, he was now in the final stages of full-blown AIDS, his once handsome features now disfigured by the beginnings of a cancerous lesion of Karposi Syndrome. I don’t know how he had found out about our study, but he had and on that Tuesday morning he presented himself at the clinic. Our research was simple in concept. We were asking 14 men and women, seven of them experienced healers using everything from evangelical Christian laying-on-of-hands, to channeling space people, and seven of them volunteers who had never tried energy healing, to treat 14 men and women suffering from everything from migraines to cancer, while small sealed vials of water were strapped to their hands.

Our focus was to see if the water changed, if something in its structure was altered by being exposed to healing energy, whatever that was, in a way that could be measured. For each of the three little sealed vials of triple distilled water used in a session there was a control; a vial of water exactly the same but one which was unexposed to the healing energy. The difference we were measuring was the difference between the treated vial and its control. Although real healing was going to take place, we hoped, our focus was on the water. 

Publication History: Slightly different versions appeared in New Age Journal May/June 1997, and Hot Chocolate for the Mystical Soul (Plume/Penguin: New York, 1998).

The Elevator Ride PDF

I had just come to Washington, D.C. in the early 1960s fresh from school, and was temporarily working for a law firm while I waited for another job to come open. My work was not demanding, doing research for the lawyers, filing documents at agencies, but the law firm was a force in the city, and the job gave me my first entrée into the nation’s power structure. Every day I went to work and saw evidence that who you knew, and the kind of access you had, gave you influence over events. It seemed like an important lesson at the time, but it was not the only lesson I learned in the nine months I worked there.

There was a bank of four elevators in our building. They still had operators, then, and on every elevator ride to and from my office at the firm, I had a one in four chance of getting Rosa’s car. She was a small Puerto Rican woman, middle aged and no more than five feet tall, who favored red, and had very little English. Over the nine months I worked there, the luck of the draw often found me standing next to her as she sat on her stool, just inside of the sliding bronze doors, and chauffeured Washington’s elite up and down. The thing you noticed about her was her smile, and she was not selfish with it.

Publication history: New Age Journal Nov/Dec 1997