Humanity does not abandon its ambition to heal with technology despite the challenges: from interspecies transplants to chips that will 'program' the brain to heal. And while all this is happening, a Mexican family cures cancer and materializes organs in the air thanks to the intervention of the spirit of the last Mexica tlatoani.
This is not an ancient technique or knowledge. In fact, they say, it is a gift that has been inherited by at least three generations, the first to put it into practice on a massive scale being Barbara Guerrero, better known as Pachita, whose healing sessions were recorded in the 1970s by neurophysiologist Jacobo Gringberg, who has been missing since December 8, 1994.
Grinberg described in volume four of his research on Mexican shamanism how Pachita, or rather, the spirit of Cuauhtémoc, 'the Little Brother', cured through the body of Bárbara Guerrero: with a knife that appeared in his hands, he made an incision in the part of the body where the evil was; later, using only his hands, he extracted a kind of dark mass to later appear an organ or tissue in his hands and insert it into the body. The procedure lasts minutes, does not require anesthesia and allows the patient to walk out with basic recommendations.
A similar description was made by Alejandro Jodorowsky in the novel The Dance of Reality after witnessing a ceremony on the rooftop of a building in front of Plaza Rio de Janeiro, in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City.
"I have seen heart surgeries that have lasted 20 minutes," says Domingo Ferrer, who met El Hermanito 30 years ago when he cured him of cancer, and since then has supported Pachita's family and coordinated the sessions of his son Enrique, who died in 2012, and now those of his grandson, Israel.
The process -with a variable cost, even becoming free in some cases- that Israel performs today is practically the same: he lays his patient down and proceeds to remove the damaged part or to fix internal lesions completely discarded by surgeons. Afterwards, the person rests for a few minutes and can walk home with the instructions prescribed by El Hermanito, which consist of general post-operative care.
It is a logical thing: if you have had an organ opened -because he opens, makes up and closes-, if you have had a heart operation where your heart has been opened, you recommend that preferably for a certain period of time he should not do any stress tests, because it is open. But that's all, and for a logical and concrete reason. The logic of heaven and the logic of earth is the same, that we look for three feet to the cat is another thing", assures Ferrer, who for six years assisted directly in the therapies.
Looking for the three feet to the cat
The work of El Hermanito is usually linked to the so-called "psychic surgeons", a group of people who, through energy, claim to cure all kinds of diseases with different techniques: from egg cleansing to gemstone sessions, all under the principle that energy is responsible for diseases and in turn for recovery, as shown in the documentary on the subject produced by TV UNAM.
However, Cuauhtémoc's gift is very different from that of the more traditional shamans and witches, since those who heal, in reality, enter a kind of trance that, they assure, makes them leave their body (as in an astral projection) to allow the spirit of El Hermanito to take possession and intercede between the patient and God. Meanwhile, the spirit of the bearer is in a place "where the All is, but there is nothing".
"It is not a decision of the Earth, it is not a question of learning: it is a question of heaven, it is heaven that decides. The predecessor knows who is going to be the successor, but the successor does not know that he is the one who is going to succeed, until he succeeds the previous one and the sky starts to work", specifies Ferrer when referring that the gift has been inherited to relatives of Pachita's direct line.
The synergistic theory of Jacobo Grinberg
Jacobo Grinberg's seven-volume study on shamanism was not limited to recording Pachita's sessions, as his intention was to understand what was happening in her brain every time she operated. With his observations, the UNAM psychologist developed the synergistic theory that, among other things, would explain in a scientific way how the Guerrero family can open people without medical training and materialize organs and objects as an act of magic.
Grinberg, a scholar in addition to meditation, considered that all consciousnesses are linked to a kind of invisible and universal network that he called lattice and that is responsible for showing us the physical reality that we live, that is, it is not us who interact directly with reality through the senses, but our consciousness through the lattice. The result of this interaction would be what we perceive as our reality: a projection/interpretation of our brain of the lattice, according to the theory, which somehow refers to and expands Plato's myth of the cave.
In the case of Pachita, according to Grinberg, she was able to consciously modify her interaction with this lattice which literally allowed her to transform and manipulate our physical reality to the degree of being able to materialize organs, tissues and objects just by thinking about it.
"It implies only one thing: to know that God exists and that when he allows it, everything can happen, and when he does not allow it, nothing can happen," counters Ferrer, who does not entirely share Gringberg's postulates.
For Ferrer, what happens is related to quantum physics, metaphysics, phenomenology and, yes, to theology. Despite his differences with the researcher, he agrees that the physical reality we live and study is only an illusion, as is the concept of time, since present, past and future occur simultaneously.
What we see there is that reality, this plane of reality, the one we consider to be forceful, concrete, is rather a fantasy. Einstein called it an illusion, Don Enrique called it a fallacy," he says.
The follower of El Hermanito explains that to understand what is happening, it is necessary to leave behind the idea that "perception generates reality" and the principle of exclusion with which we approach physics, which holds that a thing is so as long as it is not one of the infinite possibilities that it could have been.
"Reality is not like that, as long as there is no collapse of the function of goodness, what we have are infinite possibilities and suddenly all of those infinite possibilities become one," explains Ferrer, who adds that this possibility in which a person can be healed "magically" occurs through the intervention of Cuauhtémoc before God, and not so much through the medium's actions, in this case, Israel.
Because despite the impact of the story, everything unfolds in an environment in which it does not seem that something extraordinary is happening, according to the believer himself.
"You can be inside and feel that it's okay, that it's part of the natural order of things," says Domingo, who confesses that if he were to see on the street or elsewhere what happens in the sessions in which he helped as an assistant for six years, he would simply faint.
The struggle for great power
Jacobo Grinberg met Pachita at a meeting in Los Pinos, thanks to the help of Margarita López Portillo, sister of former Mexican President José López Portillo, since Bárbara Guerrero, unlike her descendants, assisted many politicians and artists of the 70s, such as María Félix, José José José and Antonio Aguilar.
Since then, Grinberg became obsessed with the subject and, according to Ferrer, wanted to claim part of El Hermanito's gift. The relationship between El Hermanito and the researcher, in Ferrer's opinion, also frayed because the researcher did not respect the Guerrero family's intimacy, even going so far as to convince Pachita's granddaughter, Liliana Ugalde, that she was the successor because of a sort of unwritten rule that holds that El Hermanito must manifest in a different sex in each generation.
"It was a Grinberg problem: they seek magic, they seek the knowledge of magic, they seek power, they don't seek to help. They think about power, they don't think about faith or knowledge", refers Domingo, who assures that the last thing they knew about the Mexican was that he was restless because he had to visit Carlos Castaneda, author of The Teachings of Don Juan, a book in which he captured his experiences with the shaman Juan Matus and his rituals with peyote (a psychoactive plant), and which, according to Octavio Paz, proposes "a radical critique of reality".
The Little Brother manifested on Earth has a single objective: to serve and heal people, which is why he visits different places around the world to attend to more than 400 people a week, as he did recently in Mexico City. Because despite how extraordinary the act is, there is no cult behind it, or a philosophy of life that will allow an apple to appear in your hand if you are hungry: it is an act of faith and spiritual reconnection that has been nurtured by Pachita's family, even without really understanding how they operate cases that doctors have taken for lost and in environments without asepsis that would scare the most open-minded.
"The knowledge derived from this is up to the individual. The person arrives and asks for help and is given it. And the next day, when the results are given to him, there are no explanations either. You came to ask for help and he tells you what to do. You don't want to do it? Don't do it," concludes Domingo Ferrer.