My Trip To The Philippines

By Hans Carl Clausen

This is the story of an individual, me, who open-mindedly studied and listened to the new age ideas which have sprung forth in the recent past, and began incorporating them into his life in both an astute and practical way, in the most spiritually beneficent manner possible. Gaining from these explorations wondrous new knowledge and perception, thanks to experiences and abilities only an open inquisitive mind could allow. Which all came together on a not so random, apparently many thousands of years in the planning, spur-of-the-moment, delightfully diverting trip to the Philippines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626757875

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PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

One bright sunny Florida day I boarded my plane at the Sarasota airport. Prepared, at least mentally, for the 23-hour international flight ahead.

I would be sitting my entire flight next to a young Philippina female I’d only recently met. My travel agent had introduced us, as her only two customers who had bought similar tickets for the same flight. When my travel companion purchased her ticket and learned of my circumstances, that I was recently widowed at a fairly young age, how I was planning to travel exactly half way around the world in order to get as far away as I possibly could from my sadness and recent memories and my new unwanted loneliness, which lead me, when I looked at a globe of the world, to her home country, she, and her U.S. husband, invited me over to their Sarasota home one evening for dinner.

I should have suspected something. That she was more than just simply proud of her home country and wanted to introduce me to it. She, with her husband’s help, had prepared a lavish banquet on what was clearly their best chinaware. They were both exceptionally pleasant. Trying, it seemed to me, too hard to be so very nice to me, a stranger.

After dinner the wife played several videos of her charming but also rather rustic Philippine village. Through her videos I was introduced to all of her family and friends back home. The stories she shared as she reminisced were sweet.

She and her husband focused much of their attention and comments on one particular female cousin. After the videos had concluded, the true intent of their lavish dinner and video presentation to me, someone they’d known for less than three hours, was revealed. They asked if during my vacation in the Philippines I would be willing to marry this cousin. And, by doing so, bring her cousin, my brand new wife, back to the United States with me so that my hostess and her cousin could live close to each other. I would only have to stay married to her cousin for two years. My hostess then confessed how very lonely she has been living here in the States with her American husband, half way around the world from where she was born and raised.

I was quite shocked by their proposition. Somewhat sputtering that I had only just recently lost my wife, and how I had loved her dearly. How I was not prepared at all to marry someone at this time, so soon, especially someone I’d never met who lived so far away.

I knew inside then and now that I am, as broken or old-fashioned an idea this might seem, a man who marries for love.

I was also hoping, considering all I had recently been through in my own personal life, that my trip to the Philippines was going to provide me with an experience that would be far more lasting and of significantly greater depth than a quickie marriage based on nothing between us to a total stranger living in a small village half a world away.

They said they understood. But clearly dinner was now over, and I was shown to the door. Two weeks later and I find I am sitting in an airline seat next to my recent hostess. We were polite as we settled in and tried to make ourselves comfortable. Our travel agent had seated us next to each other, believing we would enjoy each other’s company for this long trip to the other side of the world. Very soon she and I cuddled our faces into the free pillows the flight attendant had given us and tried, with our backs facing each other and our faces away from each other, to get some sleep. I watched the first in-flight movie with one eye open. The second movie with only half an eye open. By the third movie I was out.

In the middle of the night our plane landed in Hawaii. At around 2AM local time everyone was ushered off the flight. All of us passengers stood together in an otherwise empty airport lobby. I gazed about at all of us making this adventurous trip flying over the world’s largest ocean. We were bleary eyed, dark shadowed, teetering, unshaven and a bit smelly. World trekkers as such travelers truly are during these moments. Very non-glam. One hour later all of us were ushered back on board, where once more I quickly and deeply passed out. I slept until I landed in Seoul South Korea, where I needed to make a plane transfer.

Boarding the airline that would take me the last leg of my trip I noted the advanced technology everywhere inside the passenger cabin. Above every seat was a sleek monitor that displayed multifaceted information pertaining to our destination including the weather, news, and most riveting to me, the exact time our flight was to arrive in Manila: 11:11.

The last time I’d encountered those numbers back to back in such an attention capturing manner was when I’d driven home from Gainesville to Sarasota one exceptionally rainy Florida night approximately one year earlier. I’d been chatting with a friend who lived in an apartment in Florida’s university town. She had been the personal assistant to the physician who had taken care of my wife, until my wife passed away. That evening, while chatting with her in her living room, she asked if I’d ever heard of 11:11.

No. I replied.

She continued, explaining, Whenever you see the numbers 11:11 together, especially if you begin to see them more frequently, it means that something really significant is about to happen. Something spiritual. Perhaps a major change is about to take place in your life. An event that will elevate you.

I’d never heard of this, and put this new information in that special isolated place in my mind where I often put such quirky or unusual information, a kind of temporary mental folder, until it proved either useful or nonsense. This, the coincidence of the numbers 11:11, seemed, at least that evening, like nonsense. I was prepared to toss what she was sharing with me into the trash, and then empty the trash, the very next day.

Later that evening, driving home down I-75, I was making my way through a pouring blinding rain. I was alone on the highway that night, except for very occasional large trucks that had massive yellow and red lights all over their frames. They would appear almost mysteriously out of the pitch pouring darkness and pass by me until I was once again left alone in the blinding rainfall. Inside my vehicle I was listening to a University of Florida radio station playing indigenous trance music that had been recorded around the world. The music, the rain, the appearing and disappearing lights, all put me in a certain frame or state of perception that seemed, even to me at the time, a little otherworldly.

Suddenly the radio stopped, and everything inside my vehicle became silent. I looked down at my radio. The clock on my dash read: 11:11.

I was stunned. I was sitting in absolute silence, driving through pure pouring blackness, with my clock privately displaying to me my only illuminated message: 11:11

I could not believe what I was seeing. Combined with my radio giving me no noise I could not believe what I was not hearing. I did not want to believe what was happening.

Then, after some moments had passed, I laughed out loud. Thinking, if this was some cosmic message or a bit of mystical humor, ok. I can accept it. But really, in a blinding rainstorm on a Florida turnpike in the middle of the night?

As I laughed my radio came back on. I looked down at my dashboard. The clock now read: 11:13

My vehicle’s clock had somehow kept the numbers 11:11 for at least three full minutes. Time enough, I guess, for me to become smart enough, or wise enough, or accepting enough, to believe what was happening, and maybe even enjoy it. Could the powers-that-be control all space and time? Even in Florida? Or, at the very least, the digital clock radio inside my vehicle?

Now, sitting in this aircraft, just a few short hours from my destination, looking forward to my landing very soon in the Philippines, I was seeing multiple monitors facing me from every location imaginable inside the plane’s seating area. And each and every monitor was constantly flashing the numbers 11:11 at me. This continued for hours during this entire last portion of my flight. I laughed again. Wondering, as I looked around at my fellow passengers, what amazing spiritually elevating experience they were all about to have when they landed. Each of my fellow travelers were, at that moment, either reading a book, taking a nap, or enjoying a snack. Seemingly completely oblivious to the significant numbers being flashed in their eyes. Numbers that apparently were going to mean so very much to at least little ol’ me. And quite soon.

At exactly 11:11 AM local time I landed on Philippine soil.

I was in another world. As far away from my own as the planet earth could offer. I can’t claim this as true, but it felt as if I could even sense an energy rising up from the Philippine ground beneath me, entering into my being. That feeling could also just have been my abstract imagination after an exceptionally long and exhausting flight.

I hailed a Jeepny, and was driven to a hotel in downtown Manila. A room had been reserved for me by the wife of the man I had come to the Philippines to spend much of my vacation with: Alex Orbito.

Reverend Alex Orbito, his wife Nina, and their children, had become very close to me. Alex is renowned worldwide as a healer. He uses a method that has come to be described as psychic surgery. A healing technique that is unique to the Philippines. Alex is able to place his hands on your body, and then, almost as if watching an illusion, his fingers, sometimes even his entire hand, will enter into your body. Which he will remove in moments, often pulling out, clutched in his fingertips, an ugly mass of grey and blood. This goo that he removes from deep inside your body is parts of a disease that was inside you. A little bit of blood might appear on the surface of your body where his fingertips passed through your skin. But when this blood is wiped away there is never any scar. Your skin looks totally as it was before he touched it. The only difference is that your body deep inside is now freer of disease.

This mystical method, psychic surgery, has been observed to truly heal. Heal people of cancer, clogged arteries, arthritis, heart problems, poor vision, and more.

When professional medical treatment for my cancer-ridden young wife, Erica, had reached an impasse and imminent death was her only medical prognosis I began to explore any and every alternative means available on our planet that might offer my wife some relief, if not a cure.

Erica had been bravely fighting her cancer, truly, from the day I had proposed marriage to her. I was living in New York working at that moment as a designer, display artist and model builder for Jim Henson & The Muppets. One soon to be special evening I invited Erica over to my apartment. When she arrived I got down on one knee in the middle of my living room and popped the question.

The next morning she woke me up and asked me to get out of bed. I was quite sleepy and uncertain about the reason for her request. She lifted back the covers.

Our bed, the bed we had slept in together the entire night, in what I thought was a night of shared sweet happiness, was covered in blood. Everywhere there was blood, except where my body had lain. The mattress was nearly soaked through from edge to edge with bright wet red blood.

Several years later, having fought bravely the cancer that was discovered, I would listen to the dire results and predictions the physicians would tell me during the day after their surgeries and treatments had failed. And then, during the evenings at home, look into the eyes and sweet face of my loving trusting wife. And I would feel that I had to do something. Something amazing. I needed to do something miraculous in order to save her. I did not want her to die.

We went on diets, together. We ate everything from Macrobiotics to Gerson. Together we went on spiritual pilgrimages. We shared alternative treatments, including unique and in depth chiropractor, massage and more. Everything that specialized in some approach to explore the inner mental emotional root of what might have caused the cancer inside her. And then, hopefully, to uproot that cause in order to allow a person, once they realize the original reason of their illness, to heal.

Many many years before, when I was fresh out of college, starting my own business, living in a cute beach apartment near the beautiful bright white sandy beaches on Sarasota’s Siesta Key, I played piano during the evenings at a local health food restaurant called The Wildflower. One night, after I’d gone home, the restaurant’s owner telephoned and asked If I’d care to come back to see some home movies a married couple that had only recently begun working for him at his restaurant were going to privately show that evening. This was well before video, dvds or computers. A 16-millimeter projector, with no audio track, was set up on the smoothie bar. A few of us Siesta locals sat in the restaurant’s tables and chairs. This married couple then turned on their film projector with that familiar whir sound and began narrating their recent trip to the Philippines. I saw brightly painted Jeepny’s and Philippine fruit stands filled with large luscious fresh produce. But the main focus of their trip and their 16 mm film was of them visiting a location where psychic surgeons performed their healings.

I was stunned by what I witnessed in their film. Human beings, known as psychic surgeons, were able to stick their bare hands deep inside people. And then remove from inside the ill people, many of whom had flown in from around the world just to see these healers, what could only be described as disease. Putrid looking masses of ugly globs of gooey grey.

At one point they made the projector run at a slower speed so that each of us could clearly observe one psychic surgeon placing a clean wad of white cotton inside the shoulder of an ill person. He then removed his hand without the cotton. This psychic surgeon had left the large white cotton deep inside the ill person’s shoulder. He then entered his hand into this person’s shoulder from the opposite side of their body. From this opposite side he now removed that original wad of cotton. A cotton that he had left inside that person’s body. A cotton that was no longer white, but was now covered with blood and putrid looking goo.

I had never seen anything like this before.

Years later, as hope and options for my wife dwindled, I recalled my seeing that homemade film that evening at The Wildflower so long ago. As fate would have it, the very next day, while shopping at a small local health food store, looking for organic produce to take home to make Erica a healthy meal, I encountered the now-divorced wife of the couple that presented their