He can make the blind see and the deaf hear just with his gaze, they say of the New Age healer Braco. Braco — it’s pronounced braht-zo and means “little brother — is a 44-year-old Croatian superstar of the New Age movement whose followers believe he can shrink cancerous tumors and unkink twisted spinal cords just with his penetrating stare. He started a series of two dozen or so of his so-called gazing sessions Friday at the Miami Beach Convention Center, where he’ll continue through Sunday.
Faith healers have been with us for centuries. What makes Braco unusual is that he doesn’t preach faith or philosophy or religion as a condition of his healing. In fact, he doesn’t say anything at all — literally. He hasn’t spoken in public in eight years. He just gives you a look that fixes you, and moves on.
“He’s not a yogi or a guru or anything like that,” says his biographer and chief handler, Angelika Whitecliff. “You can come from any religion or belief system or skin color and it doesn’t matter. Lots of scientists have studied him and some of them say he’s able to activate energy centers within the brain that people can’t ordinarily access.”
Along with about 90 others, I attended Friday’s first session. After watching a brief film clip of Braco visiting various famous places — I held my breath as he strolled past the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, waiting to see if the crack closed up — the man himself came on stage. Silently and stolidly he, well, gazed. And gazed. And gazed. Nobody tossed aside crutches or kicked over wheelchairs or shrieked that he could feel his withered heart valves blooming back to life, not even after Braco left and Whitecliff asked about our reactions. She was undismayed; before the gazing, she had warned us that while some people would be affected instantly by Braco’s stare, others “have to go back to their lives before they feel the change.” (And, she added in the fine print for cynics and newspaper reporters, “some people aren’t affected at all.”)
Now she coaxed us a little bit. Did we notice anything, even something small... anything at all? Finally a middle-aged blonde woman with an indeterminate European accent spoke up. “I saw a bright white light,” she ventured hesitantly, then beamed as the room erupted into applause. “I, too, saw white light,” agreed a man a few rows away. “My mind wanted to discount it. So thank you for sharing.” A young woman chimed in: “I think we all got the same white light.”
Well, at least one of us didn’t. But I was sort of relieved that nobody reported seeing Braco shift shapes during the gazing, a common enough claim among his audiences that the Internet bristles with accusations from Christian fundamentalists that he’s not a healer but a demon.
.
