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Davitashvili, Dzhuna – Healing endorsements
Identifier
026279
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Psychic Warfare (Threat or Illusion) By Martin Ebon
Chapter 13 - Dzhuna The Healer
The same issue of the San Francisco publication contained ten texts testifying to Miss Davitashvili's success, including an enthusiastic endorsement by Shota A. Lomidze, Deputy Minister of Health Care for Georgia, Davitashvili's home state. The third issue of Parapsychology in the USSR (a series edited by Larissa Vilenskaya) contained a letter from her close Moscow friend, Barbara Ivanova, one of the participants in the Ogonyok round table.
Miss Ivanova noted that the meeting had taken place a year prior to publication and had lasted for five hours, with Dzhuna as one of four healers present. Also present were representatives from various public bodies, including the Medical Department of the State Committee for Science and Technology. Ivanova commented:
"However, in any case, the fact of such publication has some intriguing implications, with all its complications and controversies. But it does not mean - not at all - a reconciliation between the official viewpoint and our work, [the] activities of independent parapsychologists (on the contrary, after this publication, many things got worse). The fight for our science, for parapsychology, is proceeding still, with many facts and situations - but for the positive parapsychology, the open one, not hidden behind walls and doors."
These strikingly candid observations highlight the contrast in Soviet attitudes toward psychic studies, where public and secret research clearly differ in character, methods, and aims.
Miss Vilenskaya, conveying "Some Impressions Concerning Healing in the USSR," noted that it had previously been considered "non-scientific" to speak about psychic healing in the Soviet Union, but that "healing by biofield" and "biofield influence" were being widely discussed in relation to Dzhuna Davitashvili. Vilenskaya recalled that she had met the Georgian healer in the Moscow hotel Druzhba in April 1979.
Miss Vilenskaya noted that Dzhuna's methods and ideas were not unique, but part of a tradition and technique practiced by a large number of healers, including Alexey Krivorotov and his son Victor of Tbilisi, Vladimir Safonov of Moscow, and others.