My first encounter with a ghost was in the Lee Irwin Theater at Ateneo University, a good 12 years ago. A book author, Dr. Jampolsky, was the guest lecturer that afternoon. His topic was forgiveness.
The auditorium was full. My friend Mariel and I sat in the audience, right side, three rows from the front. Before the break, Dr. Jampolsky asked the audience to close their eyes for a five-minute meditation. But I opened my eyes too early and beheld, on the stage facing us, a plain, rather plump, middle-aged woman flailing her arms in what seemed like a wild dance. Then she was gone.
I nudged Mariel. “Did you see her?” I asked. “Did you see the woman on the stage?” “Who? What?” Mariel said, “There’s no one!” It was not until some time later that I realized that the figure wasn’t dancing; she was raging, flailing her arms at heaven. And that she was a ghost.
There is always a lapse of time after an appearance before I am able to comprehend what I saw. It seemed the ghost was angry at what Jampolsky had lectured about. Maybe she was someone who had been abused, or even killed. And she was not ready to forgive or forget.
Please do not follow me home, I begged the angry apparition. I told her it was pointless to be still walking the earth, seeking retribution. She would get it if she let go. Thankfully, I got home alone.
I was not brought up to believe in ghosts. From childhood, my father told me they did not exist. Even the servants were prohibited from talking to me about aswang and such. But invisible beings fascinated me. They were even the theme of my theater extravaganza called “Luna: An Aswang Romance.”
During the period of the production, I remember that whenever I sat down to type, imps seemed to be tweaking the ends of my hair. I wouldn’t be bothered, I just brushed them aside. After one particularly gruelling rehearsal, I sank into my easy chair at home to meditate.
Monstrous apparition
After a while, I felt a loving presence at my back, putting its arms around my shoulders. It was about to kiss me. I opened my eyes to see who it was, and beheld a horror—a monstrous apparition with black hair all over its face! I told my husband about it, but hard-boiled lawyers are not very sympathetic to sightings like this.
It was only later, when I told Chin-Chin Gutierrez, our lead actress in the production and a clairvoyant, that I got some clarification and sympathy.
“Of course it was an aswang,” said Chin-Chin. “Their whole community of underworld spirits simply wanted to express its gratitude to us for portraying them in a good light in the play. Just tell the creature, distancia, amigo, I know you mean well, but we are from different worlds and we look strange to each other. We understand you, so just please stay in your own space.” I did just that, and didn’t get another haunting.
I have always treated my every brush with the supernatural with a raised eyebrow. I prided myself in having both feet on the ground. So neither did I believe in the psychic knifeless operations that became the sensation in the ’80s.
Healers, real or fake, I didn’t know, were said to be able to part a person’s flesh with their bare hands, get into the organs, and remove a tumor. (Or a tooth). All without pain. It was bloody, but all the blood simply disappeared when the healer closed the wound, again with bare hands. There was no pain, no scar.
I was determined to expose them as fakes. I was a doctor’s daughter, and some things were just scientifically impossible. I found another skeptic in Dr. Alejandro Roces (later education secretary) who said it was all sleight of hand. He said he had brought a friend, Dr. Zialci, a magician by avocation, to a faith healer to witness one of these “operations.”
Roces said the blood, which must have been chicken blood, was squeezed out of either a small plastic bag (that’s why it squirted) hidden in between the healer’s fingers. The magician had palmed the tumor. Roces brought it to the NBI. Upon examination, the lump was declared “the lymph node of a pig.”
That particular healer was obviously a fake. But not every healer was, it turned out! All kinds of scientific investigators and doctors and patients were soon coming to the Philippines for these psychic healings and getting well! It was written about in reputable journals in Europe. The healer most written about was Alex Orbito.
Bare hands
By some accident, a year later, I found myself among half a dozen or so friends in a queue outside Orbito’s humble clinic. One by one we were made to lie down or sit on a bed and operated for whatever we said ailed us, all within view of the rest. We saw bellies, chests, backs, shoulders, opened with Orbito’s bare hands, blood gurgling or squirting or streaming out, and a lump, a ligament, or some cobwebby material removed. I was the last patient.
When my turn came I was asked to lie down. Orbito prayed over me and opened my stomach. I couldn’t look but my five friends witnessed “the operation.” I didn’t feel a thing. Orbito prayed some more, and my friends said he did the same— closed the gap with bare hands, too, and all the blood simply vanished. I witnessed all my friends’ operations, as well. The plastic pail beside the bed contained what seemed like human tissue, mucous, and teeth from all the patients who had come.
If one is conditioned not to believe the impossible, it is very difficult to accept an incredulity one has just witnessed. One begins to doubt one’s senses. It took me very many years to finally accept that I had witnessed the impossible.
In 1995, our son, Bey, died of kidney failure. He was 42 years old. I then belonged to a study group in anthroposophy facilitated by Nicky Perlas. We discussed the many writings of the clairvoyant Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who died in the 20s.
A helper of Nicky’s in his farm had died, and one of the things the study group did was read Steiner’s “Verses to the Dead.” The reading was supposed to help the soul of the recently departed find its way by describing the stages in the afterlife it was to go through (as Steiner described them).
When I went home that night and closed my eyes in meditation, I beheld my son, Bey, looking as vibrant as when he was alive! My son loved to cook and since it is said we do in the afterlife what we most like to do, I asked him eagerly if he was cooking up there.
Grade school
“No, no yet,” Bey said. “I’m not yet allowed to. I still have to go to school.” And he pointed to what looked like a row of elementary grade school classrooms. Later I asked Nicky Perlas what that meant. He explained that, according to Steiner, you do not at once do what you like after death. You have to first complete the learning that your soul did not finish on earth. The classrooms seemed to represent the equivalent of Catholic purgatory.
We read to the dead again the next Friday. Again I saw Bey as soon as I meditated. “So are you now cooking?” I asked “Ay, mammy, hindi!” he said, “Janitor pa rin!” I asked Nicky why my son was still a janitor! “That means he’s still cleansing,” explained Nicky.
My exchanges with Bey were often humorous, that’s why I was sure it was Bey. We were always kidding when he was on earth. One time I saw Bey in a T-shirt I had never seen him wear in life. I asked him who had given it to him. “Valera,” he said without missing a beat. “You know that he’s here with us.” I had to laugh out loud at the preposterous idea that the great couturier Ramon Valera was now designing T-shirts for the boys up there!
People often ask, “But isn’t it likely that you just imagined it?” I once read in one of Neale Donald Walsch’s “Conversations with God” books that if one had no imagination at all, one would never even experience a presence or any apparition! Clairvoyance needs the help of imagination to manifest a vision.
I do not generally rely on books to give me spiritual information, especially at that time when there were so few of such books. I’d rather learn by experiencing everything myself. Once I thought I had an out-of-body experience. I asked a psychic friend, whom I trusted, to verify what I had seen. I related it to him and he said, “No, this is what you should have seen, and this and that and that.” I realized that he was describing his own experience, which didn’t necessarily negate mine.
Another question I am always confronted with is, “Do you ‘see’ with your eyes closed or open?” What did that question imply? That if you had your eyes shut you could not possibly “see”? But the “seeing” we are referring to here is not physical. One can “see” either way.
Full color
I prefer to close my eyes rather than keep them open and see someone sitting at the foot of my bed! I am a visual person (that’s why I paint) and so I “see” presences in full color, as if they were living persons in front of me. And I always thought everyone who could, did see that way, that in fact it was the only way.
Until one night, in Banahaw, Quezon, Jeannie Javelosa asked me, “Didn’t you hear those horses galloping into the house last night? There were so many and they were so noisy!” For a long time I was skeptical of what Jeannie had said. But then, how come I could see figures but do not always hear them? Others just “feel” or sense a presence but do not see or hear.
Much later, Alya, who is a gourmand, said she “smelled” presences. I realized that I, therefore, “see” presences before me as if they were flesh and blood because it was my visual sense that was developed. Jeannie’s ears were her sensitive organs, as Alya’s nose was hers. To experience presences, I realized, it is one sharpest organ that likes to receive.
Please do not take my observations at face value. These are my own personal and very elementary experiences. I am not a gifted seer. I see things accidentally. I cannot summon something to manifest when I want. And it may be years before I see another.
Sometimes I also deliberately suppress an oncoming vision because I am afraid the next thing that appears may be too frightening to bear. Because when your third eye begins to see, when the curtain that covers the fourth dimension is removed, you have no choice—you just see all, all! Spare me!
(To be continued)
