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Schelkun subsequently spent two years studying with another healer in the Philippines, and now practices his arts in Marin County. A burly, mustachioed man who likes to wear pink oxford-cloth button-down shirts, Schelkun hardly looks like a wizard. "I don't see disease written on a body with flashing neon lights saying 'Here! Here! Here!' " he says. "I place my hands to connect them to their healing source. My hands are able to feel hot spots, cold spots, pain and symptoms of problems in the body. We're not rocks. We're taught in this society to see only reflected light, instead of radiant or inner light."
There is always a danger of quackery in such unorthodox approaches, as orthodox doctors repeatedly warn. But some New Age healers have perfectly standard medical training. Bernie Siegel, for example, is a surgeon who teaches at Yale and has written a new best seller, Love, Medicine & Miracles. After years of treating cancer patients, he believes "all disease is ultimately related to a lack of love, or to love that is only conditional, for the exhaustion of the immune system thus created leads to physical vulnerability." Dolores Krieger, an R.N. and a Ph.D., teaches the art of therapeutic touch to nurses at New York University. "The best thing that happens," she says, "is rapid relaxation, the eradication or lessening of pain and the beginning of healing processes."
Another practitioner is a slight, intelligent, no-nonsense woman of 63, who treats ailments as varied as cancer, AIDS and multiple sclerosis in a cluttered studio apartment in Manhattan. A onetime bacteriologist, she had no psychic experiences until after the death of her husband, when she began hearing voices and seeing visions and "thought I was losing my mind." When she began to study these phenomena, she became convinced that unseen doctors were working through her. "I am not a mystical person," she says, "but I have learned to accept many, many things. I know my doctors are geniuses." She has applied her touch to 14 AIDS patients in the past few years and has lost only three so far. "I haven't found any disease that we can't do something for," she says. "Some people have disease for a reason, to learn a lesson in this life or from a past life."
There is no unanimity of New Age belief in anything, but many New Agers do believe in unidentified flying objects, crewed by oddly shaped extraterrestrials who have long visited the earth from more advanced planets, spreading the wisdom that created, among other things, Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt. Government officials keep announcing that there are no such things as UFOs, but the National Science Foundation reported last year that 43% of the citizenry believe it "likely" that some of the UFOs reported "are really space vehicles from other civilizations." (And where did those airstrip-like markings in the Peruvian Andes come from?)