Michael Ellner, AIDS Warrior
April 10, 1949 – February 26, 2018
Michael Ellner, titan warrior of HEAL (Health Education AIDS Liaison), master hypnotherapist and passionate, quintessential angel of hope who raised hell to promote heaven on Earth, has died. He was 68. He is survived by his son and daughter, John and Alexandria, and his daughter's mother, Pat Lynn.
It is typical in a remembrance to list a person's objective accomplishments, and Michael had plenty of them. He was president of HEAL, NYC from 1983-2016, famously leading many hundreds of popular and inspirational weekly meetings; as an author, he wrote or co-wrote books on hypnotherapy and meditation (Quantum Focus: The Quick, Mind-Powered Total Program for Self-Development, Healing and Happiness), inspiring essays on AIDS (emphasizing the need to include intense, negative emotional stress as a bona fide health-risk factor) and, believe it or not, pamphlets on dog training (he was a gifted trainer and animal communicator - once interviewed with Jackie Onassis for a job training her dog!); he was the recipient of countless hypnotherapy awards, plaques, trophies and certificates (particularly proud of his multiple Educator of the Year awards, from the IMDHA, NGH and NFNLP); as speaker and educator he gave lectures and workshops on both AIDS and hypnotherapy on four continents (a leader in warning people of the destructive consequences of unrecognized trance states, suggestion and self-hypnosis, especially as applied to making medical choices); he had a hypnotherapy practice of thirty years duration; and he was a martial arts practitioner (a student of Taekwondo - I still remember holding a one inch thick, four by four inch piece of wood for him which he cracked in half with a quick thrust of his hand).
But to fully appreciate Michael Ellner's life and contributions, particularly to the AIDS dissident movement, requires a list of his even more important subjective achievements; the less tangible, more qualitative impacts he had not only on those who were close to him, but as a public figure, on many thousands of people - many dealing with catastrophic illness and life-threatening fears, concerns and conditions. And while there are many in the AIDS dissident community who have factually saved many lives from iatrogenic death and doom, Michael was among the few on the front lines of the AIDS crisis, and from nearly the very beginning.
HEAL was founded in 1982. It was the first major dissident AIDS organization. It was a highly trusted clearinghouse for long term AIDS-survivors, offering the latest alternative challenges to the official AIDS model. Under Michael's leadership, the founding NYC chapter quickly became a well-respected international hub - both practical and spiritual - for information on a wide-ranging list of non-toxic, alternative healthcare options; the demystification of health and illness; and the essential yet too frequently ignored social, emotional and psychospiritual dimensions of AIDS, the true key to the efficacy of health interventions whether alternative or conventional.
Michael grabbed the reins in 1983 and for nearly thirty-five years, steered HEAL right toward the heart of the matter - the deception that fueled and escalated an otherwise containable crisis; one built upon a mountain of factual omissions, and dropped into an ocean of sexual terrorism, emotional exploitation and medical murder. Michael was relentless in deconstructing that mountain and throwing life lines into that ocean. He stood ready to rescue anyone who wanted a steadfast hand, and who'd lost all sense of hope or orientation in the face of the chaos.
Michael was moved very, very deeply by the AIDS disaster. Early in the crisis with the popularization of AZT, he would lose nights of sleep thinking about the fact people were being killed by the high doses. Having grown up in a Jewish family that held tightly to the theme of "always remember", he was outraged by the tendency of nearly everybody around him - Jew or Gentile - to dismiss the significance of another medical Holocaust.
Fortunately, as a renowned hypnotist, he saw better than most what he called the "trance logic" employed by both the standard-bearers of the HIV/AIDS fraud and its unwitting victims. How else could one convince oneself that, when deathly ill people took high doses of medically prescribed poison and died, and when symptomless "otherwise healthy" people took high doses of medically prescribed poison and became deathly ill, it had to have been some magic virus no one had ever seen that was killing them, and not the blatantly obvious ingestion of the prescribed poisons anyone could see.
Michael was particularly known for his ability to speak unscripted, straight from the heart, often with characteristically unsettling honesty. He could marshal relentless clarity, hard hitting factual evidence and an incisive humor to serve up punch lines that would dismantle and expose each and every mindless contradiction served up by the HIV/AIDS Establishment.
When the lie was perpetrated that AIDS was "always fatal", Michael was there to demonstrate it was only true when the conventional medical advice was followed. When it was falsely claimed HIV caused AIDS, the "HIV test" indicated the presence of "HIV" and that a positive antibody test result was a death sentence, Michael was there to point out you didn't need a virus to explain the symptoms unless you ignored the obvious, non-contagious health risk factors. When the deadly DNA chain terminator AZT was promulgated/misrepresented as "hope for life", Michael mounted a campaign to expose the genocide that resulted from use of a chemical compound designed to do nothing but indiscriminately kill dividing cells.
These experiences helped him to co-author a disturbing but thought-provoking quote, now found all over the Internet in an abridged form: "Everything is backwards, everything is upside down; doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality."
He likewise authored and/or helped promote such memorable catchphrases as:
"Fire Your Doctor!"
"Disempower the Whitecoats!"
"Hope is Realistic!"
"Expect Health!"
"High-Tech Bone-Pointing"
"Sexual Terrorism"
Whether the things he said raised eyebrows, raised spirits or raised hell, he didn’t care. He spoke the truth as he saw it. (If convincingly shown as much, he could also admit he was wrong.) After being booed at a public talk where as an invited speaker his presentation included open criticism of a friend of the host, he simply turned to me and said, “It’s not the first time I’ve been booed”.
If pithy phrases, trance-busting humor, mesmerizing lectures and unfiltered sentiments weren’t enough, there was his flare for the dramatic. Michael can lay claim to one of the most iconic images from the annals of AIDS history: his routine of invoking the aboriginal death curse known as "bone-pointing". While donning a white lab coat, he would mockingly wave and shake a large plastic caveman bone prop at the camera, eerily intoning the fake equation, “HIV=AIDS=Death!”
But maybe the most important of his contributions was his concept of "The AIDS Zone". Michael knew that understanding the HIV/AIDS fraud in a practical and truly robust fashion required a grasp of both objective and subjective reality. He defined The AIDS Zone as a mass self-hypnotic trance; an unrecognized, but psychosocially necessary space for cultural self-deception.
For the person with a positive test result, The AIDS Zone anchors to their cognitive and emotional paralysis. Feeling completely helpless and hopeless, they've become infected not with a virus, but with a hex - the programing to get sick and die. Everyone agrees to see things that aren't there (HIV), and to not see things that are there (preventable and/or reversible health risks). The person with a positive test is subsequently expected to surrender his or her freedom, responsibility and self-empowerment to AIDS activist groups, government officials and medical professionals (all of whom suffer from the same trance). Suddenly, meaning in life is no longer derived from the creative gratification of one’s basic human needs, but is instead derived from adherence to a script of biological decline and premature death; a script that, having disallowed the possibility for real solutions, predictably results in a compensatory need to generate, perpetuate and/or escalate even more crisis (a tendency that made the trance necessary in the first place).
Without factoring in this subjective phenomenon, it is impossible to make sense of, let alone escape from, The AIDS Zone - the only place in the universe where HIV can actually cause AIDS.
Michael felt, and HEAL operated on the principle, that until the AIDS fraud is exposed and "HIV testing" is ended, the best any one of us can do for people who test "positive" is to help them educate themselves, evaluate their actual health and health-risks and - its nonnegotiable - to do both from outside of The AIDS Zone.
On a more personal note, what stood out to me most about Michael Ellner from the first day I met him up to and including the last, was just how positive a person he was. Not in any ungrounded, flighty way. But for real. Centered and present. Because of this quality he saved countless lives and inspired many more. He also never seemed so at home as while leading a HEAL meeting. He absolutely loved doing it and I think it gave his life real meaning (whenever it was my turn to lead a meeting he’d always ask, "Are you psyched!?"). In part, this was because of two things Michael truly hated: deception and betrayal - the core of HIV/AIDS. At HEAL, he got to combine his passion for helping people with his passion for righting a wrong. For Michael, the two went together.
In closing, Michael and HEAL embodied a part of my own personal identity. That was what drew me to the cause. He and I worked head to head for over twenty-five years. When profound things happen, you tend to share them with those with whom you are close; those with whom you can identify and who you know will understand. The death of Michael is one of those profound things. It is a deeply sad event and an experience that I want to share with him and talk to him about. Except that I can't. I suppose that's part of what makes grief, grief.
With the death of Michael Ellner, the world has lost one of the best friends, most passionate health advocates and most indefatigable freedom fighters that health-conscious people, fellow AIDS activists, health practitioners and people with AIDS-related fears or concerns around the globe - whether they realized it or not - could ever have had.
I love you Michael. Rest in peace my friend.
Tom DiFerdinando, April 10, 2018
