Spiritual Surgery

In The Jaguar that Roams the Mind: An Amazonian Plant Spirit Odyssey, Robert Tindall talks about the extraordinary story that Ashaninka shaman Juan Flores Salazar of Peru shared with him.

Inca Brain Surgery shows that ancient Peruvians were doing brain surgery in the 15th century with a 90% success rate. Valerie Andrushko, of Southern Connecticut State University said, "These people were skilled surgeons." Yet, in the 18th century, European brain surgery still had a 100% mortality rate!

Juan Flores knew about those ancient surgeons, but he also knew something that would be impossible for most Westerners to believe. He knew he could contact those ancient experts and ask them to assist him in "spiritual surgeries"! Contacting the spirits required an arduous trek into the Andes. Don Flores went with a friend, an Australian doctor, to the place of the spirits of the Incas, a three-hour walk in the high mountains. They spent 9 days and nights with the Inca doctors, with their spirits.

Don Flores asked the doctors to teach him how they healed their patients with such exacting operations. The spirits taught him how to make signs with his hands to indicate where they should operate. It was then that he began to understand how to do "spiritual operations" in which the spirits of the doctors come and perform the operation when they are called. They don't cut with a physical knife. They remove the painful or infected part in the place it originates -- in the spirit. So, the patient does not have wounds to heal. They just remain in bed for a day or two to stabilize themselves.

Tindall explains that a patient named Carolina came to Juan Flores for help because she was suffering from migraine headaches and believed the tumor in her skull was a death sentence. With a variety of methods, Flores quickly cured her headaches and they never returned. Flores decided that Carolina's condition was so grave that he needed to operate immediately. The work had to be rapid and precise.

During the operation, the spirits appeared to Flores as doctors wearing gloves and handling the same instruments used in modern operating rooms. He directed the cut to Carolina's brain and took out the disease. As the day of Carolina's departure approached, she appeared renewed. She was off to face the final, and perhaps most difficult, stage of the healing process -- integration. Later, the results of the hospital exams showed no trace of a tumor. She had completely returned to normal and was healed. Carolina continues without remission and without need of any medication.