John Chang, also known as the Magus of Java or the Electric Eel man is a mysterious Indonesian healer who reportely possesses an incredible power called nei kung.
Mr. Chang was first presented to the world in an award-winning documentary called The Ring of Fire, by brothers Lawrence and Lorne Blair. He requested his identity be protected and he was referred to as Dynamo Jack, in relation to the amazing current of energy he was able to produce with his body. In this documentary he showed the world how he uses Chi to heal his patients, sending electric impulses through their bodies and even treating Lorne for his eye infection. All he needed to do was touch certain areas of a person’s body and electricity just passed through them causing uncontrollable twitches. His power was so strong he needed an assistant to hold the patient’s body and ground them.
One of the sound engineers seemed skeptical of his powers so the Magus of Java unbuttoned his pants and asked her to touch his belly, right between his pelvis and bellybutton. She was immediately zapped and this seemed to convince her. The Indonesian master said his yin (positive) and yang (negative) energy met in that point they created electricity. At the end of the film shot in sometime in the 1980s he set a newspaper on fire with his bare hands, to demonstrate the nei kung he used for healing could also be used to do harm. After hearing the footage of him showing off his powers was shown to the general public, John Chang refused all future contact with anyone who wanted to document his amazing abilities and as the years passed the world slowly forgot all about him.
But, in 1997, Lawrence Blair was the one contacted by Chang, totally out of the blue. The Electric Eel Man called him back to Indonesia to tell him a story. He had returned from a two-year-long meditation alone in the heart of Borneo, and one of his revelations showed him a changing world, where the people forgot all about the old ways. So he reached out to Blair and asked him to film just enough of him to show the world this power lies in all of us and that there is nothing special about him but his long meditation and training. This time Blair also brought along scientists and measuring equipment to prove John Chang was not a fake. He was put through a series of tests and checked with a metal detector and voltmeter. But since his energy was Chi produced from the yin and yang chakra below the navel, not electricity, the meter wasn’t showing anything although the scientists felt it flowing through their bodies. Suspecting some kind of tricky setup on the premises, they took him to a random hotel room miles away and asked him to use his powers to light up LEDs. Remarkably enough he succeeded and things were going very well, until an accident changed everything.
After completing their tests, John Chang invited the crew out to lunch, where he tried another trick, pushing a chopstick through a table. After successfully piercing the formica surface of the table he cut the chopstick with his hand and a splinter hit one of his guests between the eyes, drawing blood. The minor incident was laughed off at the table, but the next morning Dynamo Jack was a different man. He told Blair and his team he had been visited by the angry spirit of his long-dead master raging that he had broken the rules of his sect: never to show off in public and never draw blood. He vowed never to show his powers again, or take any new students. He returned to healing people in obscurity, as he had always known was right.
John Chang has never appeared on camera since then and the footage filmed by Lawrence Blair and a book written by Kosta Danaos, one of the only five students Chang agreed to train are the only evidence of his nei kung powers. Kosta’s book is called The Magus of Java: Teachings of an Authentic Taoist Immortal, and has received great reviews since it came out, in 2000.
Sources: Boing Boing and Mind Energy
