23. When Healing Becomes a Commodity: The Spiritual Marketplace

By 2018, I had begun to see a harder truth about the spiritual marketplace: it could speak fluently of compassion while leaving the wounded outside the door. Zhen’s emails showed me what happened when someone fell too far without money, access, or sustained support. Around the same time, I watched a healing method become, in another person’s hands, something to claim, package, and sell.

What disturbed me was how little sacred language revealed about the person using it. Healing techniques could be taught, but the heart remained another matter. Without inner cultivation, even a sincere practice could be bent toward status, possession, or profit.

By then, my weariness had deepened into a question I could no longer think my way through. Somewhere beyond the arguments, the courses, and the price tags, I wanted to know what healing actually asked of a human being. That was when Brazil began to call me.

“I hate who I have become.”

Zhen wrote those words to me in the spring of 2018, after months of long, halting emails. By then, I Met Aliens had continued across different platforms, and my inbox had become a strange little refuge for people who had nowhere else to place the parts of their lives that could not survive ordinary conversation. Among all those voices, hers returned again and again.

She wrote as if she were speaking from a room no one in her real life could enter. Her family did not understand, and perhaps did not know how to care beyond the surface. Friends offered concern in the way people often do when they sense the depth of someone’s distress and become frightened by it: gently, briefly, from the doorway. Social life gave her only the usual small exchanges, the polite shadows of intimacy. So she came to me through email, placing before me, across the distance of a screen, the most private and shame-laden fragments of her suffering.

Again and again, I urged her toward the smallest possible acts of self-reconstruction. See a psychologist, I told her. Find a job, even a modest one. Volunteer somewhere. Learn a practical skill. Join a reading group. Repair one ordinary relationship. Begin with anything that might return her to the world. However small the step, it had to be hers. No one could change the reality of her life on her behalf.

She always replied with gratitude. She understood and agreed. Her letters carried the sincerity of someone who knew, at least in her rational mind, that these steps were necessary. Yet time passed, and none of those necessary things became action. She wanted to change. I could feel that clearly. Yet each time a possible step appeared before her, something in her mind seemed to rise up and dismantle it, turning hope into hesitation, and hesitation into another form of captivity.

In one email, she tried to explain what that failure felt like.

“I also hate the person I am now,” she wrote. “I desperately want to change, but it feels as if an invisible casing has been fixed over my head. It restrains every thought of becoming better. It ties down my feet before I can take a step.”

I read those lines more than once. What moved me was the clarity inside her pain. Zhen was not blind to her condition. She saw her own paralysis with almost unbearable precision. She hated her stubbornness, her helplessness, her isolation. She knew she was trapped. What she could not do was turn that knowledge into movement. The distance between understanding and action had become, for her, almost impossible to cross.

At the time, using the language and framework I had absorbed in UFO and contactee communities, Zhen’s condition resembled what I had come to think of as consciousness under interference, in other words–mind control. Within UFO and spiritual communities, such a state was often understood as the possible result of either extraterrestrial implants, military mind-control technology, or entity attachment. Within that framework, the pattern seemed disturbingly similar: a person could see what needed to be done while the bridge between insight and action appeared damaged or blocked, as though something had interfered with it.

This was where the gap between mainstream medicine and the world I had entered became painfully visible. Psychiatry and psychology had their own recognised language: symptoms, diagnoses, measurable criteria, treatment protocols. That language was useful, often necessary: it could stabilise a person, name forms of suffering, and offer practical care. However, there was no recognised clinical instrument that could detect an etheric implant, no accepted diagnostic category for negative alien interference, no sanctioned theory through which entity attachment or covert military mind-control technology could be named as the root of psychological distress.

For those who lived inside such experiences, this created a second form of isolation. They suffered from the condition itself, and from the absence of a public language capable of recognising the reality they believed they were living through.

In the world I had come to know, that silence did not feel accidental. Military insiders who tried to disclose information about mind control programmes were said to have been neutralised through “suicide,” suspicious accidents, or systematic discrediting by intelligence-linked actors. I could not verify such stories, but they shaped the atmosphere in which people like. Zhen tried to make sense of their suffering: official language could not name the thing, while unofficial language could easily be dismissed as madness.

The cruelest part was how ordinary her condition could appear from the outside. To others, it might have looked like laziness, weakness, avoidance, or lack of discipline. Yet that explanation never felt sufficient to me. Zhen did not lack awareness. She was watching herself fail from the inside, as if her own will had become a room she could see into but no longer enter.

There was another layer to it, quieter and more devastating. She did not merely struggle to act. She struggled to feel replenished by life. Joy, tenderness, satisfaction, the sense of being loved, the small warmth that allows a person to endure another day — these seemed to reach her only faintly, as if through glass. When a person lives too long in that condition, depression becomes something more structural than sadness. It becomes a narrowing of the possible. The routes upward close one by one, and even the inner light that might have guided her toward them begins to dim.

What frightened me most was how easily such a state could disguise itself as personality. After enough time, prolonged helplessness can begin to sound like temperament. A person who has been pressed down long enough may begin to believe that the pressure is simply who she is.

I knew Zhen’s situation was far beyond the kind of suffering that could be resolved by advice. Advice assumes that the listener still has enough inner freedom to act on it. Zhen needed something more sustained: real psychological support, stable companionship, economic ground beneath her feet, and perhaps spiritual assistance of a kind I could not easily find for her. Without those things, asking her to transform herself alone felt almost impossible.

***

Still, I tried.

I pleaded with Yin, an experienced psychologist I knew in the community, to make an exception and offer Zhen one free session. She kindly agreed. Afterward, her assessment was close to what I had already feared. Zhen’s condition was more serious than it appeared from the outside. One or two consultations would make little difference. She needed long-term, consistent care, with steady support from family, friends, and a life with some real structure around it.

Even then, Yin said to me, counselling had its limits. It could help Zhen recognise and stabilise the patterns that kept pulling her back: fear, shame, dependency, resistance, perhaps even an unconscious loyalty to her own suffering. But insight alone was not transformation. The decisive movement still had to come from Zhen herself.

She had to begin, however tentatively, to act against the old gravity of her life. Without that inner movement, even the most gifted psychologist could only stand beside her, helping her name the threshold. No one could cross it for her.

Zhang was a kind-hearted lightworker in the community, so I asked whether she knew anyone who might offer Zhen a low-cost, or even free, Theta Healing course. I explained Zhen’s situation plainly: she had almost no financial capacity.

Zhang listened, then answered with weary honesty. In China, the teaching resources for that course were limited and tightly held. They were largely controlled by two Taiwanese instructors, with another teacher from Singapore occasionally travelling in to teach. Their prices seemed to have settled into an unspoken range. They did not easily reduce their fees, and free places were out of the question.

“Don’t even think about it, Shao,” she said jokingly.

Once again, I felt the same wall rising in front of people like Zhen. Help existed somewhere, but every path toward it seemed to require money, access, language, or personal connection — precisely the things she did not have.

I could only sigh. Apparently, even enlightenment had acquired a fee schedule.

Later, Firefly told me more of the practical realities. Dr Ma had been travelling frequently between Beijing and Shanghai, and his schedule was already crowded. To see him, Zhen would likely have to appear in Beijing on a specific date, within a very narrow window of time. For someone already struggling to hold her life together, even that requirement might have been too much.

There was another difficulty. Firefly told me privately that Dr Ma had grown discouraged by some of the people I had introduced to him in the past. He understood that many of them were in genuine need. Some were under serious financial strain; others had come to see him as their last remaining source of help. For that reason, he had often tried to be generous.

Yet a few had received his help without even basic courtesy or gratitude. Others had treated his goodwill as an entitlement. Some had even asked for more before properly acknowledging what had already been given. Such encounters, small but corrosive, had worn him down.

I understood him. In spiritual circles, calling oneself a seeker did not guarantee gratitude or responsibility. Kindness, too, is a finite resource.  After being treated as free labour or an entitlement, it learns to protect itself. When trust and mutual responsibility disappear, even compassion begins to hesitate.

The other Daoist practitioners I knew were not willing to become involved, especially for free or at a reduced fee.

Cheng, a senior hypnotic regressionist with some reputation in the circle, was already booked months in advance. There was no opening there either.

In the West, I had more connections. If Zhen had spoken English and been able to move freely beyond China’s internet firewall, I might have found someone willing to help. But the language barrier and China’s information restrictions formed a double wall around Zhen. She could not easily reach the people beyond China, and they could not reach her.

Friends offered suggestions.

“If she is going to seek help,” one person said, “then she should probably look for someone with an established name in the community. Otherwise, if she goes to someone unknown, there is no guarantee that the person has enough experience to help her.”

On the surface, this sounded reasonable. In reality, it exposed the cruelty of the situation.

I understood what they meant. Many people had taken a short online course, collected a certificate, and begun presenting themselves as healers, yet they had little practical experience and no real evidence that they could handle complex cases. If Zhen was going to spend what little money she had, it made sense to look for someone whose reputation had at least been tested by time and community experience.

But that logic led us back to the same locked door.

Those with established names often charged fees far beyond what she could afford. The famous ones were expensive; the unknown ones were uncertain. Between the two, a person like Zhen could easily be left with no real choice at all.

Some of the famous teachers, with long titles across their profiles and reputations carefully polished by the spiritual marketplace, charged staggering amounts. A single consultation could easily cost anywhere from five thousand to fifty or sixty thousand yuan — from several hundred to several thousand US dollars for one session. For someone like Zhen, already pressed down by life, such a price was less a fee than a locked gate. Worse still, a high price did not guarantee depth, integrity, or skill. Branding offered no guarantee that a practitioner could reach the root of suffering as tangled as hers.

This was when I began to understand, more sharply than before, that money was not a secondary issue in spiritual healing. Money was the door. It decided who could enter, who had to remain outside, and who would be left with nothing except a few beautiful words about compassion.

The marketplace presented itself as abundance: healing courses, hypnosis, karmic clearing, Daoist methods, Reiki initiations, and past-life readings. The names multiplied until the field looked generous, even overflowing. Yet for a person in real distress, someone without money, language, mobility, or social support, that abundance could become almost meaningless. The real paths were few; the affordable ones fewer still. The reliable ones seemed to depend on luck, personal connections, or what people liked to call fate.

I thought often of Zhen after that. Once a person had fallen into the abyss, the community they had trusted often had very little meaningful help to offer.

Her situation forced me to confront a truth I had not wanted to see. Some suffering comes from the absence of a foundation. Even when answers exist, they may remain out of reach. Awakening does not always bring immediate freedom. Sometimes it simply reveals, with devastating clarity, the precise shape of the cage.

***

One night that week, I found myself complaining on WeChat to a tarot reader I knew about the disorder I had seen in China’s spiritual circles. People in real distress had nowhere to turn, while many who spoke most fluently of “healing,” “awakening,” and “compassion” charged fees far beyond their reach. It was as if every tender word carried, somewhere behind it, a price tag large enough to frighten away the very people who needed tenderness most.

There was a pause on the other side of the screen. When she finally replied, her tone carried the fatigue of someone who had seen too much of this to be surprised.

She told me that the fees charged by some so-called “famous teachers” had already climbed far beyond what I had imagined. Some charged tens of thousands for a single consultation. I simply had not yet seen the full scale of the market. Then she described a pattern she had seen: an opportunist would hurry overseas, approach the founder of a healing method or spiritual training system, and secure the exclusive rights to represent, promote, and teach the method across Greater China. Once that arrangement was in place, access, pricing, and authority all fell into the hands of a few people.

With exclusive rights, a method that might otherwise have been shared more widely became a scarce resource. With little competition, prices had little reason to fall. Students who had paid heavily for training needed to recover their costs, so they raised their own consultation fees. Practitioners measured themselves against one another, no one wanting to appear cheap, as if a lower price would diminish their spiritual authority. Layer by layer, the cost was pushed upward until it drifted far beyond what ordinary people could bear.

“Whoever secures the exclusive rights can turn it into a goldmine,” she told me, speaking from years of experience with people in spiritual circles.

I stared at those lines on my phone and felt a bleakness gather in me. These things had been wrapped in words like awakening, healing, and compassion. Beneath the language, I recognised a familiar commercial logic built on scarcity, price control, and authority.

Her casual analysis would soon prove uncannily relevant. Without knowing it, she had pointed toward a small drama of spiritual ambition and opportunism that I was about to witness for myself.

***

The path the tarot reader had hinted at began, almost innocently, with Jane.

Jane was a hypnotherapist in Western Australia, introduced to me by an acquaintance in the United States. She had a respected name in Australia’s hypnosis community. Years earlier, I had heard, Dolores Cannon herself — the founder of Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique — had publicly praised Jane as a “rising star” in the field. That detail stayed with me, partly because Dolores Cannon’s work had shaped so much of the language through which many contactees and spiritual seekers tried to understand their hidden memories, soul histories, and encounters with unseen dimensions.

Jane and I were never close. Our connection existed mostly through occasional emails, the kind of polite, intermittent correspondence that sometimes forms between people orbiting the same strange field of inquiry. Then, one day, she mentioned that she was developing a new hypnosis course.

She wrote about it without the feverish tone I had come to associate with spiritual marketing. Her language was plain, almost sober. She said she wanted to build on the framework of quantum hypnosis while integrating other spiritual hypnosis techniques she had found useful over the years. The work, as she described it, seemed to come from practice rather than performance — from years of sitting with clients, listening to what emerged from the subconscious, and recognising that old methods sometimes needed to be widened to meet new forms of distress.

I passed the information on to Cheng.

She was immediately interested, though almost at once her curiosity met the familiar wall of language. She did not understand English well enough to study with Jane herself. All she could do was summarise the information in Chinese and forward it to her hypnosis community, hoping that someone with better English, more mobility, or more resources might find it useful.

For a brief moment, I felt something like hope. This was how I had always wished knowledge could move: quietly, through trust; from one person to another; not as a possession to be hoarded, but as a light carried from one room into the next.

Soon afterward, Cheng told me that the group had responded with real enthusiasm. Several people were interested. A young woman from Kunming wanted to go. So did a Malaysian Chinese hypnotherapist. Both reached out to Jane and began making plans. In the end, the young woman from Kunming could not make the trip because her visa was refused. The Malaysian hypnotherapist, however, flew to Western Australia and began the course.

At first, this seemed like a simple continuation of what I had hoped for: someone from the Chinese-speaking world had crossed the distance, reached the source, and begun learning something new. I genuinely hoped that such exchanges might build a bridge between countries, languages, and methods — allowing knowledge to travel more freely, and perhaps allowing people in China’s spiritual circles to encounter something beyond the familiar limits of their own closed systems.

Then I heard another version of the story.

Someone in the hypnosis circle who had spoken with him told me that his purpose had gone beyond learning. He had gone there, I was told, with a much sharper intention: to arrive before anyone else and privately negotiate with Jane for the exclusive representation and teaching rights for Greater China. If he could secure that arrangement, Jane’s method could be carried back into the Chinese-speaking market under the seal of exclusivity, repackaged as a rare imported system, and sold at a price many times higher than the original cost.

As I listened, something in me went cold.

Only days earlier, this course had existed in my mind as a small opening. Now I could see how quickly a bridge could become a tollgate. The language of healing remained intact, yet the inner movement had changed. The question had shifted from How can this help more people? to Who can control it first?

What I sensed in this Malaysian hypnotherapist was calculation: timing, territory, profit, advantage. Before the method had entered him, before he had carried enough real cases to be humbled by what people bring into a session, he was already thinking in the language of markets.

A quiet anger rose in me. It had probably been gathering for a long time, fed by every desperate email I had received, every person like Zhen who could not afford help, every soft-spoken practitioner who wrapped ambition in the language of spiritual service. The wound beneath my anger was deeper than personal dislike. I felt the desecration of something that should have been handled with humility.

A healing method is never only a technique. At its deepest level, it is a form of trust. People enter such work with the most vulnerable parts of themselves: grief, terror, shame, memory, longing, spiritual confusion, sometimes even the broken remains of a life. Anyone who approaches that territory should do so with a certain inward bow, a recognition that the human soul is not a market to be captured.

Yet again and again, I saw the opposite. In a field that spoke endlessly of awakening, love, and light, many people remained strangely asleep to the condition of their own hearts. They learned procedures, collected certificates, borrowed sacred language, and chased authority from one lineage to another. The vocabulary changed. The old hunger remained: to be special, to be first, to be recognised, to stand at the gate and charge others dearly for entry.

That was what chilled me most: the speed with which something tender could be seized. Before this Malaysian student had carried enough real cases to be humbled by the work, he was already calculating how to secure exclusive rights and profit from the distance between access and need.

In certain hands, spiritual language became another resource to package and convert into profit. The vocabulary was spiritual. The old operating system remained intact.

Whenever I thought of Zhen — trapped in trauma, reaching for help and finding one closed door after another — and then of people calculating how to profit from the same scarcity, grief and anger rose together. In a field that loved to speak of awakening, spiritual practice, and ascension, goodwill was often the first thing placed on the table, and the easiest thing to betray.

I wrote to Jane immediately. The email was sharp, and I did not soften it. I explained what had happened, pointed out the opportunistic mentality I believed the Malaysian student had already revealed, and told her plainly that the so-called exclusive China rights should never be placed in the hands of someone like that.

I also made clear my original intention. I had recommended the course because I hoped the knowledge could be learned by more people, shared more openly, and eventually used to benefit those who genuinely needed help. Such sharing, I felt, should be grounded in responsibility and reverence. It should never become a way to manufacture monopoly or enlarge the space for private profit.

Nor did I hide my own feeling. His intention filled me with a deep, instinctive revulsion.

Jane replied soon afterward. Her response was sincere and measured, and I could feel that she understood my concern. She admitted that his behaviour in class had unsettled her as well. She described him as restless in class — often shaking his leg, his attention seeming elsewhere — and said something in his manner had already made her cautious. I treated those observations as impressions, not proof of his motives; her decision about the rights, however, was clear.

Most importantly, Jane promised me that under no circumstances would she give the exclusive China rights to someone like him.

After reading her email, much of the anger pressing against my chest began to loosen. Still, the episode left a residue of distrust.

A few weeks later, that lingering unease turned into something more immediate: shock.

An acquaintance sent me several screenshots from the Malaysian student’s WeChat Moments. He had already returned from his training and begun selling what he had only just learned. With layers of ornate language, he presented himself as if he had come back carrying some rare new authority. The advertisement was solemn, almost ceremonious, until it reached the earthly matter of price: one hypnosis session, plus training in the latest method he had learned from Australia — “only” 19,000 yuan, approximately A$3,900.

I stared at the number and could hardly believe what I was seeing. He had only just attended the training, yet was already charging close to twenty thousand yuan. What angered me even more was the brazenness of the overreach. Who had given him the authority to sell Jane’s course as if it already belonged to him,as if he had already acquired the right to package and profit from it?

I wrote to Jane again to confirm. Her reply was unequivocal. She had never authorised him to teach the course to others. Under her training requirements, a student had to complete dozens of client sessions and accumulate sufficient practical experience before formally graduating and receiving certification. He had merely attended the course. He was still far from being certified.

Jane asked me, if necessary, to make this clear within the Chinese-speaking circle: he was not authorised to teach her course and had not yet completed the practical requirements for certification.

In practical terms, that settled the matter. What had begun as a simple course recommendation had ended with Jane clarifying that he had no authority to teach her method.

Yet my heart did not settle so easily.

The emotion moving through me was more than anger. It was a deeper fatigue, the kind that comes when reality reminds you, once again, of something you already knew and still did not want to accept. For a moment, I even had the impulse to add that spiritual opportunist on WeChat and tell him directly: “Without inner cultivation, every sacred technique becomes another empty performance.”

Then I thought better of it. It was the sort of sentence that feels wiser before one presses Send, and it would probably have meant little to him. He seemed less an exception than a small mirror of the spiritual circles themselves: the heart still uncultivated, the inner life left largely unexamined, while the feet had already begun running toward profit and self-interest.

That incident made me see more clearly the disorder that had long existed in China’s spiritual circles. Information meant to help others could pass through only a few hands before private interest began to gather around it.

Many people were eager to collect techniques and move from one spiritual system to another; many also longed for reputation and authority. Far fewer were willing to return to themselves and patiently cultivate the heart. Perhaps this was the deepest wound in those communities: techniques were endlessly taught while the discipline required to shape one’s inner character was often left untouched.

***

Late one night that week, after I had fallen asleep, I left my body and found myself inside a craft.

The interior was filled with a peaceful light. Several tall luminous beings stood around me in stillness.We did not speak, yet thoughts and emotions seemed to move between us without words.It felt as if they were turning the pages of an old diary inside me, touching the anger, frustration, and helplessness I had carried through the day.

Then they conveyed a single understanding:

“You have no secrets from us. We know your thoughts, your intentions, and your feelings. We know your past, your present, and your future.”

In that moment, everything I had been wrestling with seemed to pass again through my awareness: people who had fallen into the abyss with nowhere to turn, the distortions inside China’s UFO and spiritual circles, the sacred language laid over ordinary greed. Nothing in me felt hidden from them.

Then the luminous beings placed an image into my mind.

I saw a man healing someone with his hands.

Almost at once, a silent message echoed through the centre of my chest:

“Go to Brazil. There you will find the answer you are looking for.”

As the message settled into me, an older memory rose from the depths. Years earlier, during meditation, I had seen in my mind’s eye a map of Latin America surrounded by ocean. The vision had come without warning, carrying a strange feeling of familiarity and certainty. My extraterrestrial mentor, Freddo, had offered no clear explanation. I only felt that the continent was somehow connected to my life path.

For years, I had not known what the image meant. Did it point to a place I would one day travel to, or to someone from that part of the world who would enter my life? Latin America had no visible place in my ordinary world. The map remained inside me like an unopened symbol.

Until that night.

Suddenly, the old vision and the new instruction joined together. The Latin American map I had seen years before and the unmistakable message to go to Brazil now seemed to answer each other across time.

I had no certainty about what this meant. If I had glimpsed the future years earlier, was it already waiting for me? Did free will allow us to alter the course of fate, or do we simply discover, step by step, the path the soul has already chosen?

I had no answer. The questions remained open, solemn and unresolved.

Yet from that night onward, Brazil was no longer merely a country on the map. It became a door standing quietly ahead of me, drawing my life toward it — toward an answer, or perhaps toward the beginning of another spiritual path.