OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER
John Gowan, Sr.
John Gowan, Sr.
OPERATIONS OF INCREASING
ORDER
AND OTHER ESSAYS
ON
EXOTIC FACTORS OF INTELLECT,
UNUSUAL POWERS and ABILITIES, ETC.
(as Found in Psychic Science)
Descriptors: Adamic ecstasy, altered states of consciousness, accelerated mental process, apports, auras, clairaudience, clairvoyance, dowsing, elongation, empery, ESP (extrasensory perception), gemeinschaftgefuhl, genius, healing, hologram model, incorruptibility, inedia, invisibility, infused knowledge, jhanas, levitation, mortem excursus, materialization, miraculous sight, non-somnia, poltergeists, precognition, psychometry, psychokinesis, psychic heat and surgery, psychic phenomena, precocity, reincarnation, siddhis, SHC (spontaneous human combustion), stigmata, telepathy, teleportation, time warp, transfiguration, translation, vision through opaque objects.
JOHN CURTIS GOWAN
Professor (Emeritus)
California State University, Northridge
A. B., Ed. M., Harvard, Ed. D. UCLA
Privately published by the author
Copyright, 1980 by John Curtis Gowan
Quotations under 500 words are authorized if credit is given.
This book on psychic science is dedicated with respect to the memories of Mesmer, von Reichenbach, Zollner, Crookes, Richet, Reich, Tromp, and Bentov, who were courageous pioneers in discovering the area. It is also dedicated with affection to the memory of E. J. Thompson, whose enterpris
Order is Heaven's first law.
-Pope
Every phenomenon of cryptesthesia must be preceded by an exterior energy that has started it. Some unknown vibration that has set in motion the latent energies of our human mind, unaware of all its powers.
_ Charles Richet
I want more ideas of soul-life, I am certain that there are more to be found.
-J. Jeffries
Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to that which is known to us of nature.
-St. Augustine
The "I" who observes the universe is the same "I" who controls it. The concept of separate "I's" is a myth.
-E. Schroedinger
There is nothing abnormal in the world-there is only the lack of understanding the normal.
-Swami Puri
Our unconscious existence is the real one and the conscious world is a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it.
-C. Jung
What we see is not nature, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
-W. Heisenberg
Can you walk on water? You have done no better than a straw. Can you fly in air? You have done no better than a bluebottle. Conquer your heart; then you may become somebody.
-Ansari of Herat
The solution to the problem isn't that you abandon rationality, but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a solution.
-R. M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The future is affected by what we imagine because the future is effected by what we imagine.
-J. C. Gowan
FOREWORD
by Dudley Lynch
(From Teleido Letter 1:4, March, 1979, © 1979 by Teleido Letter, 827 Westwood Dr., Richardson, TX, 75080, used by special permission.)
"The Road to El Dorado"
FOR EDUCATOR J. C. GOWAN CREATIVITY POINTS THE WAY TO "THE NUMINOUS"
For many of us, the journey of creativity begins and ends as a highly practical trip, in quest of our own versions of a better mouse trap, method of scheduling, means of processing or whatever. Creative problem-solving,we call it.
With patience, the learning of some new techniques for thinking, and a proper respect for the potential of "idea incubation," we usually come out ahead, ending up with not only our "problem" solved but with new insights into ourselves.
What we may fail to realize is that other fascinating possibilities exist. This, at least, has been a recurring theme for educator John Curtis Gowan during the Seventies. Gowan's search began, perhaps predictably, in quest of a solution: How best to educate the gifted (the 2nd edition of a wide-ranging anthology of which he is a co-ed itor, Educating the Ablest, is just off the presses of F. E. Peacock Publishers). But while peering into the store window of creativity, Gowan thought he saw other, even more exciting "realms."
In Trance, Art and Creativity (Creative Education Foundation, 1975), he wrote:
"If there is one entrance for Western scientific man into the arcana of developmental progress and self-actualization, that entrance is creativity. For it allows him, while still retaining his respectability as a cognitive thinker, to have intuitive brushes with the numinous element through creative outpourings from the preconscious. And it is heuristic, for it prepares him for the mind-expansion into psychedelic realms which inevitably follow."
Gowan's contention is that creativity is merely a way station or entry point for those willing to undertake an epic developmental journey on which the individual seeks to deal more and more intimately with the general. Lately, he's been hard at work arranging a road map with commentary of the Normal and Altered States of Consciousness that mark the way for the committed quester.
Teleido-letter asked Gowan for an update on his taxonomic art, and the following is culled from the papers he forwarded:
For Gowan, all discussion about creativity starts with "the numinous element." In his view, this is Jung's "collective unconscious," the Aztecs' "Smoking Mirror," the Hindus' "clear light of the Void," Emerson's "Oversoul," and the "Holy Ghost" or "Ground of Being" of Christian theologies. Gowan prefers to think of it impersonally as "a giant computer having access to all knowledge, intelligence, and power, but accessible to each of us under the proper conditions." It is a high-voltage, elemental force; playing with it haphazardly is foolhardy. His studies have always been of ways "to get in touch with the ground of being without losing [the "insulation" surrounding] ego-consciousness."
The process of getting in touch with the numinous is aided by altered states of consciousness (ASC), and he has clustered the possibilities in these groupings:
THE PROTOTAXIC (states of complete cognitive chaos) which includes (in ascending order of - what? - "enlightenment"), schizophrenia, trance, hypnotism, proactive drugs, and automatic writing.
THE PARATAXIC (a middle ground of imagery states) which includes archetypes, dreams, ritual, myth, and art.
THE SYNTAXIC (states with increasing cognitive control) which includes creativity, ortho-cognition, alpha biofeedback, meditation, peak experiences, satori or samadhi and higher jhanas.
Theoretically, Gowan's fledgling efforts to push humanistic psychology into taking a bold look at transcendental functions was on tentative footing when, suddenly, some equally venturesome voices weighed in from the non-psychological fields of physics and neurophysiology. What brain researchers like Sperry, Gazzaniga, and Bogen were pointing to as the specialized visual nature of the right brain's functions, Gowan could point to as "the herald of the numinous" as experienced in various ASCs. And the new Pribram-Bohm idea of the brain as a hologram interpreting or imaging - a holographic universe has Gowan thinking that perhaps his "levels" of advanced numinous experience are merely the results of that holographic-oriented right brain getting an increasingly better bead on the numinous.
Based on the right/left brain studies, Gowan says the left hemisphere's function is to support the normal state of consciousness. By holding the left brain "in abeyance," you get an altered state of consciousness. In most ASCs, you get either exterior hallucinations or interior imagery. If these manifestations aren't processed by either brain hemisphere, they "exit" in bodily fashion, often in trance, sometimes producing schizophrenia. If they are expressed directly by the right brain, they produce artistic (or non-verbal) creativity. If the left brain "mediates" the ASC, then we are into Gowan's syntaxic states, which includes verbalized creativity but reach ultimately to a rarefied level Gowan now calls the "transcendental union" of the individual and the numinous.
Without retracing all of his involved reasoning, we can permit him the ecstasy of his contention: "Transcendental union involves an expansion of consciousness in which time, space, and personality having been transcended, there is a state of neither perception nor non-perception ... or to put it another way: in the juncture between the individual and the general mind, duality becomes successively abolished through loosening constraints on the consciousness of time, space, and personality, so that ultimately through knowledge more and more complete, the one becomes the other, and union is reached. This is the 'Omega Point' of Teilhard de Chardin."
If that's not easily comprehended, Gowan thinks it is enough for now to realize that what was once "the provinces of mystics, schizophrenics, and other psychological deviates" is being studied with "a new scientific vigor," bringing validation and classification. He predicts, ". . . Having found that El Dorado actually exists, and in possession of a rudimentary map of how to get there, it is logical to expect that more average persons may try the journey. This makes life a great adventure."
PREFACE
Welcome, across the years, my young friend, who has just opened this book, and, in such magic, has allowed the promethean divinity in the author (for all else is soon dust) to salute the same divinity in the reader.
"Man was born to be free, but everywhere he is in chains." These words are as true today as they were when they were first written, over two centuries ago. Only now, the chains are not material, they are mental. Man's degraded view of himself as a reactive creature, instead of as a cosmic spirit, prevents him from claiming the powers and abilities to which his regnancy entitles him "Daily, with minds that cringe and plot, we Sinais climb and know it not," the poet Lowell told us. This book is an attempt to awaken mankind to his birthright.
Again and again we are told on good authority that "having ears we hear not, and having eyes we see not." We are abjured to "see the Divine beauty"; even the modern shaman Don Juan berates Castaneda for not "seeing." What is this second sight and second hearing which lifts knowledge from dependence on human organs and a physical landscape? Why is it so celebrated by saints and poets, all men of vision, throughout the ages? What is the nature of these higher senses, and what visions do they enable us to perceive? This matter is the task of this book.
Since a preface is nothing but a literary confessional, it is necessary to state at the outset that this collection of essays, unlike other books by the author, has not been assembled with the reader in mind. The book has no constituency; it is not written for others, but primarily for the author's musement. This word, an anonym of amusement, was coined by C. S. Peirce "for a mental state of free, unrestrained speculation, in which the mind engages in pure play with ideas." (Gardner 1978:239:1:18)
If perchance, unusual reader, these words shall strike a resonant chord in your mind, know at once by such presents that you are one of the elect, that you have been led to hallowed ground, and that you have been gifted with "an eye to see and an ear to hear." This opportunity is rare in nature, and unusual even in man, but it is par excellence what dignifies your existence as a numinous rather than a reactive creature. Much is herein demanded of you: for every great opportunity is also a great responsibility.
(page viii)
While the majority of the author's work has been with creativity, he thinks there are several higher levels of cognitive thought, with more order, and consequently more power. Creativity is merely the first in a series of increasing operations of more and more order. Some very spectacular effects occur in these higher and rarer states; indeed mystics of all ages and cultures have told us so for centuries. The laws of physics we hold to be true are merely special cases of more general laws whose operation is obscured because there is usually not enough order in the system for them to be seen on a macroscopic scale. Iron sinks and wood floats, so for centuries we refrained from building iron boats; heavier-than-air aircraft fall, so for decades we used balloons not airplanes. The laws we formerly thought operational were merely special cases, and when we learned new laws we were able to build modern boats and airplanes. It is the same with man. He considers himself to be an animal; actually his consciousness is Divine.
When we read histories of the overweening imperialism of the British, French, Germans, Spanish and others during their nationalist periods, when they felt that they were the elect of nations and possessed the inside track to all knowledge, or when we read of the unbelievable narrow-mindedness of both Catholic and Protestant missionaries to foreign countries, we are shocked and horrified by their unknowing arrogance, their lack of humility, and their unwillingness to learn from others and from a different cultural experience.
But mea culpa: all of us in the West are infected with the same pernicious intellectual arrogance, which is one of the worst concomitants of the scientific method. We also seem unwilling to realize that science is only one means of looking at reality, that there are others, that most of us are profoundly ignorant about the basic and fundamental aspects of life, and worse, are confirmed in our prejudices, so that we are unable or unwilling to discard enough of them to learn from experience.
Accept the sad fact, dear reader, that this is also true of you (as it is of the author). Be willing to suspend your belief system long enough to consider in these pages some startling facts and theories. We do not demand your subscription to any other belief system, for truth asks only for coexistence, but consider the possibility.
(page ix)
The author does not know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the wilder ideas expressed in this book are true; but they may be heuristic. If they are false, you have not wasted much time or money, and you have been diverted by some unusual concepts. But, if by any possibility they are true, then you have been forewarned of a revolution in man's thinking.
Let us consider two observers. The first says, in effect, "I hold a fixed set of beliefs. I will admit to no event which does not conform to those beliefs. I will not look through the telescope lest I should see something in which I do not believe." We would call such a person a religious bigot. Yet many famed men of science have held very similar views. The second observer says in effect, "I will empirically look at any event, no matter how strange, and then try to arrange my belief system to comply with the data." Yet many famous people who espoused such open-ended views have been denounced and persecuted by men of science.
Goddard, the father of space science, was considered a madman and hounded out of Massachusetts in the 1920's. Mesmer, Reichenbach, Zollner, Crookes and Richet, all respected scientists, endured persecution as a result of their advanced beliefs, theories, and experiments. Wilhelm Reich was imprisoned and had his books and papers burned by the U.S. Government in 1957. Let us never forget that the bigot in us all is alive and well today, and is as comfortable with men of science as with men of the cloth.
The author owes the reader a brief account of his interest in this subject, a story unlike most others. The best of the writers in this area, - those to whom this book is dedicated, - have been scientific experimenters, - men of science, who courageously turned to experimentation in the psychic area, thereby risking their reputations in the search for truth. Next come the practitioners, those who have some psychic power themselves, such as Muldoon, Garret, Cayce, and the Hindu yogis who speak from authority and personal experience. Then come the true believers, adherents to some sect, whether Catholic, Christian Science, Spiritualism or Theosophy, who must fit the data to their preconceptions. Then come the skeptics, such as Leuba and Rawcliffe, who differ from the believers only in the aspect that they fit the facts the other way. Since this analysis divides writers into polar types, it must be expected that some authors will have differing components of two or more types and hence be of mixed classification.
(page x)
The author of this book, however, cannot claim membership in any of the above categories. He is not an experimenter, has never engaged in psychic experiment or seance. He is not a practitioner, has never had a psychic experience and has no talents in this area. He is neither a believer nor a skeptic, having no need to fit data to any preconceptions. He falls, therefore, into a fifth and rarest class, a scholar and theorist, one who has read much of other men's efforts and ideas, and who has tended to sift the evidence, and fit things together in a way that made sense. He believes he detects in this vast mass of evidence, "operations of increasing order".1
If it be asked why another book of strange marvels, when the work of Fort and Corliss is extant, the author would note the redeeming differences in this volume as follows:
1 ) The book provides not only a catalogue of unusual events and powers, but a rationale for them, so as to make therm more understandable and, hence, believable.
2) The book provides testimony of various independent witnesses, which tends to give a kind of reliability to the phenomenon and so establish a basis for validity.
3) The taxonomy shows an order; and even if this order is in the mind of the beholder, it indicates a commensurability between that mind and the Mind which created the phenomena.
4) The direction of this order is toward growth, development, increasing health and order, in short, towards positive integration.
5) The scope of the vista envisaged for both mankind's genotype and phenotype is magnificent and grand.
6) The various components of powers, abilities, materials, and procedures, herein treated are shown to be interconnected, and to be part of a plenary structure d' ensemble.
7) The nature of this structure is numinous.
The author does not hold that the book is a complete compendium of the subject matter it treats, - instead it is a series of sketches. A thorough investigation would have taken years to write and tomes to publish. We have, therefore, incorporated by reference, those areas where there is a large extant literature (e.g., mediums and healing), and tended to concentrate on more exotic
(page xi)
aspects (e.g., firewalking and levitation), which have received less attention by others, and where the data are harder to come by.
Let us suppose that one receives the reports of absolutely truthful witnesses about an exterior event. Then it will be possible to make sense and order out of what they say: the accounts will fit together to form a unified whole. Let us suppose that one receives the reports of absolutely untruthful witnesses who lie in every particular about an imaginary event. Then it will not be possible to make sense and order out of what they say: the accounts will not fit together to form a unified whole. Now let us suppose that one receives the reports of witnesses whose truthfulness is unknown about an exterior event. The test of whether the reports are truthful will lie in whether the data makes sense and order when assembled, and the accounts fit together to form an organized whole. The author asks only that the reader use the latter reasonable test in evaluating the data.
Let us imagine that there are a number of open-minded scientists who differ only in the critical ratio of truth value they require of a piece of data, and let us also assume that it is possible to assign such a truth value to all raw data or reports. We designate the assembly of such persons as Scr where the critical ratio is now understood to be a variable which goes from a probability (of truth) of .5 to one of .99999999. We can now ask an important question: "What is the most useful critical ratio level?" If too low (as in the p=.5), half the time the data will be in error. If too high (as in p=.99999999), much real data will be ignored. The writer submits that the correct answer is not the 5%, or the 1% level or any other arbitrary level. Instead it is the least level at which the summation of the data will reveal an orderly, meaningful system. The real test of the level of confidence at which we should accept data is whether the sum total of such data makes some kind of sense. Here we have the author's reply to those who say he is too credulous.
Many may argue that the author has shown extreme naivete by taking so many different accounts of psychic phenomena at face value. But being an empiricist, the author would rather believe that most witnesses are honest, not perjured, and that more is to be gained by comparing the consistency of independent testimony to the miraculous and attempting to account for it, than by denying it out of hand because it does not suit prejudiced views
(page xii)
and constructs. After all, it is a first rule of measurement that there can be no validity without reliability.
"Very well," says the critic, "where is the replicability of the alleged phenomena under tightly controlled conditions?" Let us take, as a reducio ad absurdum example, the case of a scientific investigator who does not believe sexual intercourse is responsible for human procreation. He wants a tightly controlled laboratory demonstration with full lighting, and witnesses taking notes and photographs of all that goes on. Are there not some couples who would fail under such demands? Even if they are successful, in what percentage of the instances will the woman thereby become pregnant? Though replicability has been shot to smithereens, who among us can call his own being into question by denying the validity of the process that produced him?
It is the author's thesis, enunciated elsewhere (1975) that our experience here is the result of consciousness being locked up in time, space, and personality - that these alleged dramatic unities are actually illusory, that the anterior action to account for all which goes on in the physical realm is another vivency, outside of time and space, and finally that the whole meaning of life is for consciousness to free itself of these prison restrictions - to transcend from the larvae to the butterfly. But, as usual, Einstein said it so much better:
A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
- New York Times (March 29, 1972, p. 24, col. 6)
Three orders of reality can be envisaged: primary reality (the void), secondary reality (the numinous), and tertiary reality (the physical world). (Further discussion of these three realities is reserved for Chapter 7.) Our thought is constrained and impaired
(page xiii)
because we think in terms of partial derivatives (time and space-bound effects), instead of the full function. For example, the great Jung grappled somewhat ineptly with synchronicity. Let us see how easy the subject becomes with the new viewpoint (see Section 6C of the Introduction).
One will find in these essays a constant pressure towards taxonomic and metric interpretation. While this effort represents the author's mathematical background, it is a way of restoring some order to a system which is found in disarray and disorganization. For example, a look at the taxonomy in Chapters 3 and 4 on cosmogenic powers and abilities shows that the powers from 3.0 to 3.3 are connected with the transcendence of time and space, those from 3.4 to 3.7 are connected with the transcendence of the physical person, those from 3.8 to 4.7 are connected with the siddhis (miraculous powers), and 4.8 and 4.9 are related to cosmic contact and union. We have thereby reduced a bewildering host of miscellaneous anomalies to four "operations of increasing order".
This preface concludes with two postscripts from much wiser heads than the author's. First, let us return to C. S. Peirce's "musement." In a little known paper titled, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," Peirce argues that "musement" is not only a road toward theism, but it is actually the only road. Next, let us consider Jung's "inflation." Jung defined "inflation" (Starcke 1970:74) as "the distance between one's knowledge or concept of himself and one's personal development." Starcke continues, "Often a seeker can discern truths intellectually way in advance of his capacity to demonstrate them." But this is as dangerous spiritually as it is fiscally. He concludes (ibid:85):
Now the world - this world - is the stage set. When we look at it at face value we are seeing a facsimile, an imitation of reality made up of canvas, paint, and optical illusion. Our problem is that we confuse the set and the parts the actors are playing with reality.
Let this monition humble pride of authorship and counteract any tendency in the reader toward any false admiration in that direction: there is a great difference between chimpanzees and a scholar interested in chimpanzees.
A quotation from Prof. Price's introduction to Whitman (1961:xix) is appropriate here. Speaking of the mystic author, he says:
(page xiv)
"He holds, moreover that the capacity for 'objective inner experience' is something which all of us possess. The mystical life, in his view, is possible for every one of us, not just for a favored few. In the Prologue he says that there are two ways of writing about mysticism, as a spectator, or as a participant, and that he himself writes as a participant. But then he adds that 'all of us are to some degree participants, here and now in part, and after death more fully.' The point is that though all of us do have the capacity for living the mystical life, we cannot exercise this capacity until we are ready. The capacity for objective inner experience remains latent and unactualized until we reach a suitable stage of moral and spiritual development."
This beautiful quotation could well serve as the theme of this book. There is an El Dorado; the map is outlined in these pages; the way to it is through the inner reaches of the latent powers of man's mind; and, knowing that it exists, having the map and the road, it behooves us all to start on the immense journey.
Let the dead bury the dead. It is to you, my young friend, alive and in the seat of action, that these pages speak. May they add comprehension and understanding to your goodness, and make you aware of why you search and what it is you search for. May they illuminate the Divinity which resides in you, and make it blossom like the rose.
For those new readers who are not familiar with the author's earlier efforts, Development of the Psychedelic Individual(1974), and Trance, Art, and Creativity (1975), a few preliminary words of explanation may be appropriate. To aid the reader, this section has been arranged like a glossary:
ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS: (Contrasted with the normal state when the left cerebral hemisphere is dominant.) A state, such as sleep, dreaming, trance, satori, where the left hemisphere is in abeyance, and the right hemisphere may be active.
ENTROPY: disorder or randomness; in physics, heat.
JHANA (or jnana): a level of knowledge; a grace of the syntaxic mode (cf 1975:351 ff).
NUMINOUS ELEMENT: The impersonal, ineffable Absolute.
(page xv)
ORTHOCOGNITION: Literally "correct-thought"; a valid model of reality; realization that time, space, and personality are illusions (see Section 4.6).
PARATAXIC: Experience (such as of the numinous) received as images (such as in art).
PRANA: psychic energy (see Section 3.5).
PROTOTAXIC: Experience (such as of the numinous) received before images, hence somatically.
PRECONSCIOUS: That aspect of the psyche, sometimes, not always, available to the ego. Preconscious insights tend to be expressed through right-hemisphere imagery.
PSYCHEDELIC (literally "mind-expansion"): That state when the powers of the preconscious are opened up for conscious use; a higher syntaxic level of jhanas (cf 1975:351 ff).
RIGHT HEMISPHERE: (as opposed to left hemisphere, generally the dominant one in ordinary life); the intuitive, spatially-oriented, musical and artistic hemisphere which seems to be the source of creative imagery, healing power, and is perhaps a receiver of transpersonal information through tuned resonance.
SIDDHIS: Specific psychic powers (such as ESP, see Section 3.03). SYNTAXIC: Experience (such as of the numinous) received cognitively with full consciousness.
VIVENCY: A theater of action in which consciousness finds itself. (The physical universe is the vivency of the ordinary state of consciousness.)
Readers who have not read Trance, Art and Creativity are encouraged to read Chapter V I first, as it contains a brief review.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Candor demands answer to two questions:
1) Is the order in the author's mind rather than in the universe of data? and
2) Can the author vouch for the unimpeachable origin on writing in this book which have come directly transcribed from a creative revery?
1) The writer maintains that the perception of order in his mind in arranging the data could not occur unless there was potential order in the data.
2) The ultimate origin of creative matter is a sticky wicket. If the right hemisphere gets it through imagery produced by resonance with some transpersonal source, then one may inquire what source. In this respect, the author has been chagrined to find that ideas which came to him in 1974 in writing Trance, Art and Creativity(e.g., Time, space, and personality as the three illusions) have been subsequently identified by him as belonging to Theosophist writings with which he was not familiar. Obviously, therefore, such writing, whatever its source, is not the result of logical analysis. The reader is hence on notice, that the author cannot so vouch for unimpeachable origin.
INTRODUCTION
"First, you must know that the heavens, the earth, the watery plain of the sea, the moons' bright globe, the sun and the stars are all sustained by a spirit within; for imminent mind flowing through all its parts and leavening its mass makes the universe work. This union produced mankind, the beasts, the birds of the air and the strange creatures that live under the sea's smooth face. The life-force of these seeds is fire. Each of us finds in this world his own level."
- Virgil, The Aeneid VI
Let us co-opt majesty by paraphrase: When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one group of people to dissolve the intellectual bands which have connected them to the paradigms of the past, and to assume a new understanding of the laws of nature, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to this separation.
The argument of this chapter may be summarized into seven sequential sentences as follows:
1 ) When examined carefully, things are not what they seem.
2) Physical reality is junior to the normal state of consciousness.
3) Scientific knowledge must change and grow in order to live.
4) The number of "exceptions" to the present paradigm requires change.
5) This change is towards the wholistic, mystic, and cosmic.
6) Paradigms exist which handle the "exceptions."
7) We need to decide whether to replace present paradigms with new ones.
Each of these allegations will now become a topic to be treated in order.
0.1) When examined carefully, things are not what they seem.
Nothing seems on the surface more reasonable than that matter is tangible, durable, and solid - "loose and separate" as Hobbs called it. Then under scientific investigation it turned out that
(page 1)
matter was composed of little hard balls, - atoms, which combined in orderly fashion to form molecules. Then again under scientific investigation it turned out that the atom was not a hard little ball at all but consisted of a small nucleus and spinning electrons, with mostly space in between. Then the nucleus was found to consist of hadrons of different kinds, which in turn consisted of quarks, which seemed to be some kind of energy resonance, which didn't appear to exist separately, but only in combination. In short, there didn't seem to be any "material" in matter.
Nothing seems on the surface more reasonable than that the normal state of consciousness is the one in which mankind is able to apprehend the physical reality of nature through the five senses. In other words nature is there, and we are able to perceive it. But let us suppose for a moment that the statement is turned around and that nature is what the normal state of consciousness sees, in other words that nature is junior to the state of consciousness we are in, or to put it another way, that nature is the vivency of the normal state.
The fact that things are not at all what they seem has been the theme of Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, 1979. Marilyn Ferguson in a review of this new book (Brain/Mind Bulletin 4:17, July 16, 1979) said:
As Zukav summarizes the difference between the two world views, the old physics worked toward a model of reality that could be visualized, even observed, and it tried to describe things, individual objects in space. It attempted to predict events. It assumed that there was an objective reality 'out there.' it claimed to be based on absolute truth, 'the way things really are.'
The new physics found a realm too strange to imagine or visualize. It concedes that there are aspects of reality that can never be observed directly and that the act of observing alters the reality. The new physics predicts probabilities, does not assume an objective reality apart from conscious experience and claims only to correlate experience rather than absolute truth.
He describes with detail and clarity the stunning implications of the theorem proposed by J. S. Bell in 1964. Bell's theorem, proved by other experimenters in 1972, should give pause to the most devout materialist. In a federal report in 1975, physicist Henry Stapp called it 'the most profound discovery of science.'
(page 2)
Bell's theorem was foreshadowed in 1935 when Einstein and two associates proposed an experiment which they believed a challenge to quantum logic. If the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was correct, they said, then a change in the spin of one particle in a two-particle system would affect its twin simultaneously, even if the two had been widely separated in the meantime.
This Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect became, as Zukav put it, 'the Pandora's Box of modern physics.' If true, it inadvertently illustrated an unexplainable connectedness between particles in two different places. The particle in area B would seem to know instantaneously the spin status of the particle in area A. This connectedness would enable an experimenter in one place to affect the state of a system in another place.
Einstein's challenge failed; quantum logic, however bizarre its implications, has proved invariably correct in its statistical predictions. Which leads us to the amazing Bell's theorem.
Paired particles are like identical twins in their polarity. If they fly apart and the polarity of one is changed by an experimenter, the other changes instantaneously.
'Bell's theorem,' Zukav said, 'not only suggests that the world is quite different than it seems, it demands it. There is no question about it. Something very exciting is happening. Physicists have 'proved,' rationally, that our rational ideas about the world in which we live are profoundly deficient.'
Zukav (1979:90) quotes Stapp on the non-material aspects of physics: "An elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things . . ." The wholistic aspects of all this are also emphasized by Stapp, (Zukav 1979:96): The physical world is ". . . not a structure built out of independently existing entities, but rather a web of relationships between elements whose meanings arise wholly from their relationships to the whole." And this leads Stapp to an inevitable conclusion, (Zukav 1979:105):
If the attitude of quantum mechanics is correct in the strong sense that a description of the substructure underlying experience more complete than the one it provides, is not possible, then there is no substantive physical world, in the usual sense of this
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term. The conclusion here is not the weak conclusion that there may not be a substantive physical world, but rather that there
definitely is not a substantive physical world.
Zukav (1979:135) quotes Nils Bohr as stating that quantum mechanics entails "the necessity of a final renunciation of the classical idea of causality, and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality."
0.2) Physical reality is junior to the normal state of Consciousness
Instead of naively accepting physical reality as a primary "given", let us instead note that it is never apprehended except in the normal state of consciousness. It is, therefore, a product of the normal state, and junior to it. The supposed "durability" continuity and "thingness" of nature over time then would merely reflect durability, continuity, etc., in the normal state.
Indeed, the "maya" or illusion surrounding the individual in the normal state of consciousness may be likened to a placenta which protects the nascent ego from the outer world, but also restricts and constrains. In the past, shamans, saints, and mystics have somehow escaped from this caul to awake in a larger vivency; premature forms of this placenta-breaking, like premature birth, may produce temporary disorientation, about which we are elsewhere on record (1974: 188). Here we quote Lang (1967):
Most people most of the time experience themselves and others in one or another way that I shall call egoic. That is, centrally or peripherally, they experience the world and themselves in terms of a constant identity within a framework of certain ground structures of space and time shared by other members of their society.
However, religious ... philosophies have agreed that such egoic experience is a preliminary illusion, a veil, a film of maya - a dream to Heraclitus and to Lao Tze, the fundamental illusion of all Buddhism, a state of sleep, of death, of socially accepted madness, a womb state to which one has to die, from which one has to be born. The person going through ego-loss or transcendental experiences may or may not become in different ways confused. Then he might legitimately be regarded as mad. But to be mad is not necessarily to be ill, notwithstanding the fact that in our culture the two categories have become confused. The 'ego' is the instrument for living in this world. If the ego is broken up or
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destroyed (by the insurmountable contradictions of certain life situations, by toxins, chemicals, etc.) then the person may be exposed to other worlds, 'real' in different ways from the more familiar territory of dreams, imagination, perception or fantasy.
True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality.
Capra (1975:88) puts it this way:
Maya, therefore, does not mean that the world is illusion as is often wrongly stated. The illusion merely lies in our point of view, if we think that the shapes and structures, things and events around us are realities of nature, instead of realizing that they are concepts of our measuring and categorizing minds. Maya is the illusion of taking these concepts for reality, of confusing the map with the territory.
Again, he pin-points the illusion to our time-bound egos (ibid:171):
All these relativistic effects only seem strange because we cannot experience the four dimensional space-time world with the senses but can only observe its three dimensional images. These images have different aspects in different frames of reference; moving objects look different from objects at rest, and moving clocks run at a different rate. These effects will seem paradoxical if we do not realize that they are only the projections of four dimensional phenomena, just as shadows are projections of three dimensional objects. If we could visualize the four dimensional space-time reality, there would be nothing paradoxical at all.
As Zukav (1979:240) states:
If we can experience the most fundamental functions of our psyche, and if they are quantum in nature, then it is possible that the ordinary conceptions of space and time might not apply to them at all.
0.3) Scientific knowledge must change and grow in order to live.
Scientific thought differs from sects and cults in that it is and must be a body of constantly expanding knowledge. It cannot, like some religious systems, rest on a fixed system of belief. It grows not
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by disavowing its former hypotheses, but in extending them as they are seen to be special cases of ever larger hypotheses.
But humankind is not accustomed to change its belief systems easily. The old mores which have been used with regard to religious beliefs are unconsciously superimposed on scientific theories, so that it is not so much that established scientists come easily to accept new theories as it is that they age and die, and newer scientists without the same prejudices (but perhaps with different ones) take their place.
That there might be two kinds of physics is not such a unique idea as one might think. A small example of the same thing is seen in the difference between two kinds of subatomic particles, one set of which obey Bose Einstein statistics and the other Fermi statistics. These are called respectively, bosons and fermions. They differ because the fermion has net spin (which means that it has a magnetic field, and hence an electric charge). If this spin is somehow removed, then the difference is gone. But note what a major property is controlled by the difference. For the bosons can occupy two "slots" at the same time, while the ferminos cannot.
In a rather analogous way, when we through meditation or an altered state of consciousness remove the "spin" and hence the field and charge from ourselves, we may find that the physics which has heretofore restricted us to the Ordinary state of consciousness has been removed and that properties of Non-ordinary reality (such as levitation, bilocation, invisibility) and the like (siddhis) are manifest.
The poet, Holmes, sang, "Build thee more stately mansions, Oh, my soul." If we wish to live in a roomier house, we do not start in by dynamiting the old one. Instead we plan where we can extend this room, alter that one, and break through yonder wall. Similarly, if we wish to enlarge the edifice of physics, we plan to save as many postulates as possible, to extend others, and so to come to a new and roomier paradigm which will accommodate the strange data experience has visited upon us. By extending the laws of conservation from matter to energy, we have already enlarged our paradigm of physics; perhaps we shall have to extend it again to gain the maximum benefit with the minimum dislocation.
Let us imagine that John Dalton, the British 19th century
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physicist, and inventor of Dalton's atomic theory, were to come back and engage in conversation with a particle physicist. Let us review his hypotheses:
1 ) Matter is made up of small, indivisible particles called atoms.
2) The atoms combine in chemical combinations to form molecules.
3) The ratio of combination is always that of small whole numbers.
Let us now specify examples in modern physics which are almost opposite to Dalton's premises:
1) Quarks
2) Plasma theory
3) DNA
But let us note, that even though modern physics comes to far different conclusions than Dalton's, it represents the end product of graduated growth spurts from his premises, which are now seen as very special cases of a much wider field.
If this sort of advancement and wider understanding can happen in a little over a century in physical science, is it not conceivable that a similar enlightenment can occur in the area of metaphysics?
0.4) The number of exceptions to the present scientific paradigm requires change.
We live in an age of revolutionary thought; in our own lifetime we have seen Einsteinian mechanics supplant Newtonian, and the views of Planck and Heisenberg upset all of previous physics. If this were not enough for one century, now science is plagued with anomalies whose increasing frequency and disturbance require the kind of epicycle building that the frantic Ptolemians indulged in just before the advent of Copernicus. Among these are:
1) The discontinuity as opposed to the continuity in nature, (quantum);
2) The complementarity and the Heisenberg uncertainty principles;
3) The quark theory (Quarks do not seem to have material properties individually);
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4) The number of disfavored ideas which have become standard and continuance of same (e.g., continental drift);
5) The peculiar development of inventions which seem to parallel our model of man (no end to them);
6) The number of very bright men espousing the psychedelic hypothesis;
7) The compatibility with science of some of the psychedelic hypotheses which merely adjoins what is presently known in an orderly way.
Indeed classical physics was mortally wounded by the quantum theory, and even scientists realize there is need for a new paradigm. Says Brownoski (1973:364):
... New ideas in physics amount to a different view of reality. The world is not a fixed, solid array of objects out there, for it cannot be fully separated from our perception of it. It shifts under our gaze, it interacts with us, and the knowledge that it yields has to be interpreted by us. There is no way of exchanging information that does not demand an act of judgment ...
Zukav (1979:271) points out that: quantum phenomena may be connected so intimately, that things once dismissed as occult could become topics of serious conversation between physicists.
Kuhn (1967) in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gives a useful model of the paradigm shift which goes on during the revolution. The old paradigm embraces a believed postulate (such as "not more than one parallel to a line through an outside point"). Behind such a postulate there is a kind of world-view (here Euclidean geometry). Daring innovators (such as Riemann) now question the necessity for this paradigm and propose that there are exceptional cases where it does not hold. These exceptions in turn become the foundation stones for a new set of postulates (which develop a new non-Euclidean geometry).
Shyman (1976) in discussing the same problem declares (p. 19):
Paradigm change completes the picture of a scientific revolution. To review: an anomaly develops and grows as model
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and reality refuse to be brought together. When the anomaly has resisted repeated attack, a crisis develops. The paradigm must be changed, since the foundations are at fault. A chaotic period follows during which the new paradigm is sought. When a new one is found and accepted, the revolution is complete and the new order takes over. The new paradigm must be able to explain the anomaly that caused all the trouble in the first place ...
Whatever the fundamental units the world is put together from, they are more delicate, more fugitive, more startling than we catch in the butterfly net of our senses.
0.5) This change is in the direction of the wholistic, the mystic and the cosmic.
Nineteenth century positivistic materialistic science which regarded things as "loose and separate" has been changing by virtue of the discoveries of the scientists themselves in the direction of the wholistic, the mystic, and the cosmic. The breaking of the conservation of matter theory, and the supplanting of classical mechanics by both the theory of relativity and the quantum theory have been landmarks in this development. Great names such as Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, and Schoedinger, to name but a few, have been associated with this change.
Some specifics:
1 ) In place of "loose and separate" everything seems connected to everything else;
2) In place of an observer and an experiment, each independent, we have situations where the observation and measurement affects the experiment;
3) In place of absolute time and space, we have relative space/time which may under some circumstances interact;
4) In place of the theoretical possibility of exact measurement, we have, at a certain critical level (Planck's "h") an indeterminacy principle;
5) In place of our conception of waves as waves, and corpuscles as little balls, we have an intuitively impossible situation (the complementarity principle) where each behaves like the other under certain cases;
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6) In place of material objects which exist in their own right, we have quarks which exist only in triplets.
Zukav (1979:331) concludes: "We are approaching the end of science ... The end of science means the coming of western civilization ... into the higher dimensions of human experience."
0.6) Paradigms exist which handle the exceptions.
6a) Hologram Theory
A hologram is an interference pattern (which looks like contour lines or a moire screen) on a photographic plate, caused by the alternating reinforcing and canceling effects of two laser beams, one direct from the laser (the reference beam) and the other reflected from an object (the object beam). (See Figure 0-1.) When laser light shines on any part of this interference pattern, a virtual (apparent but not real) image in three dimensions appears in the same relative spot as the original object stood. Holography, which most of us have seen in exhibitions, has the unique property that any part of the hologram contains all the information (hence the name). The hologram, which is a matter of physical optics, furnishes us with a very powerful analogy, known as the Pribram-Bohm hologram model of ultimate reality. For the latter we quote from Ferguson (1977:3):
Neuroscientist Karl Pribram of Stanford and physicist David Bohm1of the University of London have proposed theories that, in tandem, appear to account for all transcendental experience, paranormal events and even 'normal' perceptual oddities. The implications for every aspect of human life, as well as for science, are so profound that we have dedicated an issue to the subject.
This breakthrough fulfills predictions that the long-awaited theory would (1) draw on theoretical mathematics; (2) establish the 'supernatural' as part of nature.
The theory, in a nutshell: Our brains mathematically construct 'concrete' reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension, a realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality that transcends time and space. The brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe.
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Figure 0-I THE HOLOGRAM MODEL OF ULTIMATE REALITY
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We do not have here the time nor space fully to investigate the implications of hologram theory. This has been excellently done by the symposium issue of Revision 1:3 (Summer-1978), and also by the McKennas (1975:38-51). But it is one thing to find holography in optics, and another to find it in brain function. Pribram (1969:77) feels that certain brain functions make it possible (see McKennas 1975:43). Coherence and harmonics have also been mentioned. We quote the McKennas (1975:46-7):
The constructs of the mind are, by and large, couched in symbols; even 'raw' sensory data is seldom experienced without symbolic interpretations, associations, and judgments. This tendency of the mind to symbolize, to organize experience into meaningful, coherent pattern, is indicative of its ceaseless effort to somehow 'encompass' reality, to construct a suitable model of self and world. This quality of mind is seen best of all, however, in the dynamics of unconscious processes, in dreams, vision, and trance; indeed, the individuation process in Jungian psychology represents an attempt on the part of the unconscious to construct a totality symbol which both encompasses and defines the self and the world in relation to the self. Jung has shown in numerous works (cf. 1952, 1959) the important role played by mandala symbolism as a means for expressing the underlying order of psychic unity and totality. This property of symmetrical, mandalic organization is found universally in all artifacts of human thought, from the most abstract metaphysical systems to the commonest objects of everyday use, and it, indeed, appears to be intrinsic to the organization of the psyche. May not this proclivity of the mind to elaborate symbolic totality metaphors be reflective of the holographic structure of the psyche:
The unformed archetypes of the collective unconscious may be the holographic substrate of the species' mind. Each individual mind-brain is then like a fragment of the total hologram; but, in accordance with holographic principles, each fragment contains the whole. It will be remembered that each part of a hologram can reconstruct an entire image, but that the details of the image will deteriorate in proportion to its fragmentation, while the overstructure will remain. Out of this feature of holography arises the quality of individual point of view and, in fact, individuality itself. If each mind is a holographic medium, then each is contiguous with every other, because of the ubiquitous distribution of information in a hologram. Each individual mind would thus be a representation of the 'essence' of reality, but the details could not be
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resolved until the fragments of the collective hologram were joined.
Anderson (1977) in a brilliant paper, "A Holographic Model of Transpersonal Consciousness," traces in detail the importance of their view. After discussing the optical aspects, he turns to possible holograms in the brain, in which he says in part:
The holographic nature of the brain is further evidenced by the fact that the visual image system is sensitive to spatial frequency patterns (that is, the coarseness or fineness of texture) in the environment. In addition, the holographic view of memory and perception accounts for the brain's seemingly limitless capacity to store information. The holograph also provides a means by which associative memory might occur (Pribram, Nuwer, and Baron, 1974). The light from one object may be used as the reference beam for a second object and thus may be used to obtain the second object's image. Since more than one such "association" may be stored on a single plate, the similarities between the hologram and the operations of the brain seem quite striking. For example, a thought of a certain place may remind you of someone you knew there, and more than one such association may be stored in the brain.
If these considerations and data are studied thoroughly, the hologram hypothesis can seem quite enticing.
If sensuous reality consists of a hologram illusion, then it should be possible under certain exceptional conditions for it to dissolve and reveal a hitherto concealed underlying reality. But this is precisely what both mystics and scientific investigators have been telling us. Consider the following from the latter (Coblenz 1954:219):
I believe that in some mysterious manner the veil over the normal confusions of life is sometimes drawn aside, to reveal to competent clairvoyants the pattern of a deeper reality, which we cannot comprehend, because we attempt to perceive and interpret it through preconceived notions and according to the prejudices, superstitions and other intellectual deficiencies of which we are largely unaware.
If we reread Plato's famous model of the cave (Plato, 1956: 312-16) in the light of the hologram theory, it is obvious that they talk the same language. In both cases there is a projection of substance onto a screen medium, which projection appears real but in
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fact is virtual. Equally compelling in its accuracy is Plato's account of him who by some means is able to turn and so see the real objects whose projections are on the cave wall. "He would be puzzled and believe that what he saw before was more true than what was shown to him now (p. 313)." And further: "Looking toward the real light would hurt his eyes and he would escape by turning away," (how like this is to the Bardo Thodol!). Finally: "And when he came to the light of the sun, the brilliance would fill his eyes and he would not be able to see even one of the things now called real." (Compare with any account of mystic experience.)
Plato concludes this dialog of Socrates:
Finally, he would most easily look at shadows, after that images of man and the rest in water, lastly the things themselves. After this he would find it easier to survey the night heavens rather than by day the light of the sun . . . Then we must apply this to all we have been saying: the world of our sight is like the habitation in prison; the firelight there to the sunlight here. The ascent of view of the upper world is the rising of the soul into the world of mind. (p. 315)
Let us imagine that a holographic image is observed, but that for reasons unknown the illusions which formed the hologram are temporarily at least partly dissolved. What will then be seen? First, obviously, would be the strong coherent light of the laser reference beam which might appear blinding. (Evans-Wentz 1960:89ff speaks of "the clear light of the Void" as blinding to most individuals.) Secondly, there would be an expansion of knowledge (as when one awakes from a dream or sees in a theatre the backdrops lift and a much larger set come into view: it is essentially the comprehension of a larger gestalt). Another startling example would be when one in a train or plane views another similar vehicle and at first thinks that one is moving, but actually one then realizes with a start that it is the other vehicle which is in motion. There would be, as it were, a dissolution of the ordinary and previous supposition, or perhaps, better stated, the superposition on it of something more real and extraordinary. Anything part of that first illusion (such as time) would be transcended (e.g., Happold: 1970: pp. 45, 129, 130, 134). Thirdly, the constituent parts of the holographic image would be integrated into a kind of wholeness or oneness.
As we reinspect the previous paragraph, it must become
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obvious at once that what is being described is none other than mystical experience. Of all the incidents open to the human mind, it and it alone fits the descriptions. We may hence redefine mystic experience as the non-holographic (that is direct) experience of ultimate reality, and conversely, non-mystic (ordinary) experience as the holographic experience of reality.
While hologram theory in itself is enough to explain all the anomalies which parapsychology presents to science, since it asserts that what we see is a world of effect and not cause - a virtual image, really an illusion - we should take note of some other, perhaps less global paradigms which may be of interest.
6b) The vacuum or zero-order state: order and entropy.
In a state of disorder and asymmetry (which is our present condition), it is very difficult to imagine and intuit the properties of a state of order and symmetry. In a state of some disorder (heat or entropy in physics), statistical laws hold, which means the normal curve or law of averages is in operation. But in a state of order this is not true; when the law of averages does not operate, miracles are possible. In physics under conditions of high order and low entropy, the microscopic order in the atoms may become (as in crystals) macroscopic and, hence, visible. For quantum mechanics laws obtain in the atom, whereas statistical laws obtain in our everyday physical interactions.
The "zero-order" state or state of maximum symmetry and least excitation in an atom (or indeed anything else) may be conceived as a proto-existence in a vivency of higher dimensions called by us the realm of all possibilities. As the electron is excited, symmetry is broken, and matter in its usual form becomes apparent. As Orme-Johnson and others say (Orme-Johnson 1977:712):
The parallel between the quantum field theory of effortless creation and Maharishi's theory of sanyama continues in that both involve symmetry breaking. (i.o.) The creation of a Goldstone boson takes place whenever the influences involved are such as to produce a spontaneous change from a more homogeneous state to a less homogeneous state.
As Domash (Orme-Johnson 1977:30): continues:
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In quantum physics the vacuum state contains no real matter or light yet has in it (through the uncertainty principle) all possible matter and light in the form of so-called 'virtual particles' or 'zero-point' fluctuations. Likewise, the state of pure consciousness is said to contain all possibilities, to be a state of pure potentiality in the sense that it is empty but lively.2
One could quip that general order in the general state, when symmetry is broken, may become particular order in the particular. And we are reminded again of Brown's statement (1972:v) that, "A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart." Manifestation in the material and categorical may then represent the furthest extension of spirit when symmetry and order have been withdrawn, and the siddhis seen in rare physical states may represent a semblance of order and symmetry remaining in a restricted area after general symmetry is broken.
As Schroedinger (1944:69) puts it:
The physicist is familiar with the fact that the classical laws of physics are modified by the quantum theory especially at low temperature. There are many instances of this. Life seems to be one of them, a particularly striking one. Life seems to be an orderly and lawful behavior of matter, not based exclusively on its tendency to go over from order to disorder, but based partly on existing order that is kept up.
To the physicist ... I could hope to make my view clearer by saying: The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behavior approaches to that purely mechanical... conductivity to which all systems tend as the temperature approaches absolute zero and the molecular disorder is removed.
6c) Time-Bound States vs. Time-Free States
The first fetter from which consciousness needs release is time. Whereas our cognition of each dimension of space is full and extensive in two directions, our perception of time is partial, for it has a one-way arrow. Indeed, in one sense, time is imaginary space, since mathematically time is to space as "i" (the square root of minus one) is to one. It is not easy to divest our thinking of
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this time-bound fetter, since even our language is made up of tensed verbs.
The transcendence of time occurs in two modes: magiscule (or the experiencing of large areas of time compressed as it were), and miniscule (or the experience of microscopic instants of time, expanded as it were). Let us examine these two in order.
If the numinous (which is beyond time) is to be experienced by us in time, it must be perceived as a series of periodic cycles or recurrences. An old and familiar form of this relationship is seen in the myth and ritual annual seasonal changes. We quote from work elsewhere (Gowan 1975:206) on the "durative topocosm", which is to the ritual celebrating it as climate is to weather:
"Gaster (1959: 11) traces the origin of myth as 'a sequence of ritual acts, which . . . have characterized major seasonal festivities.' These as he explains (1959:9) are 'derived from a religious ritual designed to ensure the rebirth of a dead world.' He elaborates on the central thesis (1959:17) as follows:
Seasonal rituals are functional in character. Their purpose is to revive the topocosm (i.o.), that is, the entire complex of any given locality conceived as a living organism. But this topocosm possesses a ... durative aspect, representing not only actual and present community, but also the ideal of community, an entity of which the latter is but the current manifestation. Accordingly, seasonal rituals are accompanied by myths which are designed to present the purely functional acts in terms of ideal and durative situations. The impenetration of myth and ritual creates drama. . . . What the King does on the punctual plane, the God does on the durative ... The pattern is based on the conception that life is vouchsafed in a series of leases which have annually to be renewed.
"it would be difficult to state more clearly and concisely the central motivating elements of myth than has here been done. The concept that the topocosm needs to be renewed like an annual lease, and that since it exists on the transcendental (durative) level, it can be affected as if in sympathetic magic on the temporal (punctual) level, and finally that it is a living organism amenable to the efforts of man, is both good anthropology and excellent psychology regarding man's parataxic relationship to the numinous element."
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Schlipp, (1949:114) quotes de Broglie:
In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc . . . each observer as his time passes discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.
But time may be experienced, at least by the subconscious mind in greatly expanded form. We know that many atomic reactions take place in nano-seconds. Evidently this is the level at which the next higher realm operates. Consider the following enlightening quotation from Wilber (1978:53-5):
No matter how much we may detail the historical (ontogenic and phylogenic) aspects of the spectrum of consciousness, these details remain, in my opinion, purely secondary. For without any doubt the most important aspect of the spectrum is that the entire sequence of evolution is entertained now, moment to moment to moment, not once but thousands upon thousands of times. In this present instant we unceasingly re-create the entire spectrum with all its levels and potentials. Moment to moment, through the various forms of resistance that operate on different levels - from the basic ignorance (avidya) in the Buddhist sense to concrete repression in Freud's sense - we narrow, restrict, and constrict our basic awareness from prior unity consciousness to successively evermore impoverished, fragmented, and isolated forms. From absolute Self to illusory ego, through all sorts of stages, moment to moment to moment ...
This moment-to-moment evolution is nothing but the process of microgeny, which in orthodox psychology is the study of the immediate unfolding or micro-evolution of a psychological process or form ...
From our point of view, however, microgeny is not just, nor even primarily, a moment-to-moment unfolding of conscious states from physical and physiological stimuli, but a moment to-moment evolution of the separate self out of unity or nondual consciousness (the Brahman-Atman). In this moment and this moment and this, an individual perpetually, if unconsciously, manufactures various substitute selves out of prior, open-ground consciousness ...
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When you start to think about all this, the whole situation is truly astounding, for the implication is nothing less than this: in this moment, and this moment, and this, an individual is Brahman, the Godhead, the Dharmakaya - but, in this moment and this moment and this, he ends up as John Doe, as a separate self, as an isolated phenomenon apparently bounded by other isolated phenomena. Put rather poetically, at the beginning of this and every moment, each individual is God; but by the end of this same moment - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye - he winds up as an isolated ego.
For further views on this matter, we quote from Gowan, 1974:44-45:
"According to Evans-Wentz (1960:31) the Tibetian belief is that as the human being dies and the individual psyche is reabsorbed into the Spirit of Man, there is a review or recessional of the periodic stages in inverse order. First comes the vision of the Clear Light of the Void (our ninth stage), then the Clear Light somewhat obscured (the eighth stage), then the vision of seven peaceful (affective) deities (aspects) and then the vision of seven wrathful (cognitive) aspects."
Evans-Wentz (1960:31) tells us:
Definite psychological significance attaches to each of the deities appearing in the Bardo Thodol; but in order to grasp it, the student must bear in mind that . . . the apparitional visions seen by the deceased . . . are not visions of reality, but nothing more than the hallucinatory embodiments of the thought-forms born of the mental content of the percipient; or in other words, they are the intellectual impulses which have assumed personified form in the after-death dream state.
He goes on to distinguish between the two orders of deities:
The peaceful deities are the personified forms of the sublimest human sentiments which proceed from the psychic - heart center ... Whereas the peaceful deities are the personification of the feelings, the wrathful deities are the personification of the reasonings, and proceed from the psychic brain center. (In psychological language - the affective and the cognitive).
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After the final appearance of the wrathful deities the deceased is frightened into wishing for rebirth, and is driven to seek a conceiving womb. Thus starts the cycle over again. The fit between the life processional or development through the stages, and the after-death recessional back through them in reverse order to rebirth (if the Clear Light is not grasped) is a remarkable example of the goodness of fit between ancient Eastern mysticism and modern western psychology, confirming the validity of both.
Evans-Wentz describes the Bardo apparitions which appear after death; first come the peaceful (affective deities).
POST-MORTEM BARDO APPARITIONS
Devas
1
7
Generativity
Spreading forth of the seed (EW 105)
Asuras
2
6
Intimacy
(The father) embraced by the mother (EW108)
Humans
3
5
Identity
Power of egotism EW 111)
Brutes
4
4
Industry
.
Pretas
5
3
Initiative
Avoid Jealousy (EW 117)
Hell
6
2
Autonomy
.
.
7
1
Trust
,
Then come the wrathful (cognitive) deities.
In comparing this Bardo vision with the inverse of the developmental stages in life, one should note several remarkable correspondences:
1) The Bardo Thodol defines two orders of deities and states that both are hallucinations of the mind, one being sprung from the sentiments and emotions (affective) and the second being sprung from the intellect (cognitive).
2) There are seven visions in each corresponding to the stages one to seven in reverse.
3) In the peaceful deities, some actual correspondences with stage characteristics can be noted (see above).
An even more interesting issue has to do with comparisons between the Buddhist view of the Bardos after death (EvansWentz 1960), (Gowan, 1974:44-45), (Wilber, 1978:57ff), as seen in the Bardo Thodol, and Western developmental stage theory. Developmental stage theory seems to be the processional of life,
(page 20)
and the post-mortem bardos the recessional. Or, to look at things like a monopoly game, the cycle of birth is like trying to go around the board and back to "Go" during the period of a single life: only the saints get the $200, the rest of us recess back through the bardos to have another probably futile try. Not only is there a close fit between the deities and the stages, but the peaceful and wrathful deities of the East correspond nicely to the affective and cognitive stages of the West. It was Durr (1970:89) in a book on poetic vision who brought this to our attention.
In Trance, Art and Creativity, (1975:247) Table VI-4 was presented showing development in terms of jhanas (or levels of knowledge). If this table is compared with Table 0-2, (Gowan 1974:51), a complete picture of developmental process is obtained at least from the personal view. One may also look at this progress from a transpersonal view, as does Wilber (1978:58), given here as Table 0-3. It is easy to see that the outward devolution corresponds rather clearly to the first five stages of the Periodic Table 0-2, while the involutionary return path corresponds to the higher periodic stages, and the jhanas in Table VI-4. The reader is urged to make this comparison.
6d) Resonance, vibrations, and periodicity3
Let us imagine an estate of order in the numinous realm. (We use state rather than event, to signify that the meta-event is outside time, and we use estate rather than state to emphasize that the noun is being used with a transcendental meaning.) Let us suppose that the idiosyncratic aspects of this estate are to be manifested in our realm; how shall this be done?
A little thought will reveal that timelessness will appear as multiple recurrence, as if the same thing continued to be experienced. The order will make these appearances regular both in time (the wave frequency), and in magnitude (the wave amplitude); we now have vibrations of a given periodicity and strength. If such vibrations have the same frequency as other vibrations somewhere else, harmonic sympathetic vibration is set up between them, and a state of resonance results. All of these concepts are very important in explanation of a number of transcendental effects.
(page 21)
TABLE 0-2. THE ERIKSON-PIAGET-GOWAN PERIODIC DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE CHART
TABLE 0-3: MICROGENY IN THE MATURE ADULT
(page 22-23)
David Wechsler (1974:170-1) analyzed this subject thusly:
We now come to the possible physical equivalent of what we have termed insightful or intelligent behavior: namely, the event or the events that take place in the brain when an individual may be said to perceive ...
With the foregoing as a point of departure, it would seem that insight as a physical fact could be intelligibly described as a collective response of the elementary systems in cortical cells in one or another region of the brain. This interaction must be conceived as occurring not through the transmission of impulses, in the manner classically postulated, along axons or nerve trunks, but rather as a resonance phenomenon.
The resonance with which we are most familiar is the kind manifested in the re-echoing of sounds through reflection or its prolongation through reverberation. It is the response of a system or object, such as a tuning fork, having a given vibrating frequency to another periodic stimulus or vibration of the same of nearly the same frequency. Similar phenomena characterize the reinforcement and impedance conditions of electric circuits, but perhaps what would be im mediately pertinent for our conceptualization of mental processes are the behavioral properties of the individual elementary particle. One of the most important of these is the property of quantum mechanical resonance. The quantum mechanical resonance of an elementary system differs in a basic respect from the performance of macroscopic bodies such as, for example, the prongs of a tuning fork. In the latter, the reinforcement of sound vibration results from a simple addition or superposition of one series of amplitudes onto that of another. In the case of quantum mechanical resonance, 'the separate wave components are no longer considered as existing independently. The resultant amplitude formed by superposition of other states is not a simple sum of the amplitudes of the interacting components. The wave interaction of one set of particles with another results in a new state or system' (Stern, 1956).
In the light of the foregoing I suggest that mental events in the brain consist of the creation of successive molecular systems when activity in any one group of cells is reinforced or inhibited by the reverberation to particles in some other group of cells. Mental phenomena are patterns of such resonances, or recurring quantum mechanical systems, activated in one or another part of the brain. Insight is the perception or psychological equivalent of a certain type of resonance: the type that happens to have meaningful implications for the individual experiencing it. Intelligence is a sequence of such insights leading to purposeful or practical behavior.
(page 24)
The McKennas (1975:76) believe that this resonance is due to electron spin in the molecules of the brain. They theorize (P. 92-4) that the electron spin in tryptamines cancels the charge transfer of the metabolizing harmine, causing it to lose electrical resistance, and behave for a microsecond as a superconductor. In this way the material stored in the DNA neurogenetic material may be made available to consciousness, somewhat similar to the manner of a broadcast from the harmine DNA circuit. In the synthesis of tryptamine, one of which is serotonin (p. 97) ". . . may be one of the many possible resonate transmitters of the information hologram stored in DNA."
Anderson (1977) in a particularly brilliant summation combines holographic and resonance theories:
ORDER
AND OTHER ESSAYS
ON
EXOTIC FACTORS OF INTELLECT,
UNUSUAL POWERS and ABILITIES, ETC.
(as Found in Psychic Science)
Descriptors: Adamic ecstasy, altered states of consciousness, accelerated mental process, apports, auras, clairaudience, clairvoyance, dowsing, elongation, empery, ESP (extrasensory perception), gemeinschaftgefuhl, genius, healing, hologram model, incorruptibility, inedia, invisibility, infused knowledge, jhanas, levitation, mortem excursus, materialization, miraculous sight, non-somnia, poltergeists, precognition, psychometry, psychokinesis, psychic heat and surgery, psychic phenomena, precocity, reincarnation, siddhis, SHC (spontaneous human combustion), stigmata, telepathy, teleportation, time warp, transfiguration, translation, vision through opaque objects.
JOHN CURTIS GOWAN
Professor (Emeritus)
California State University, Northridge
A. B., Ed. M., Harvard, Ed. D. UCLA
Privately published by the author
Copyright, 1980 by John Curtis Gowan
Quotations under 500 words are authorized if credit is given.
This book on psychic science is dedicated with respect to the memories of Mesmer, von Reichenbach, Zollner, Crookes, Richet, Reich, Tromp, and Bentov, who were courageous pioneers in discovering the area. It is also dedicated with affection to the memory of E. J. Thompson, whose enterpris
Order is Heaven's first law.
-Pope
Every phenomenon of cryptesthesia must be preceded by an exterior energy that has started it. Some unknown vibration that has set in motion the latent energies of our human mind, unaware of all its powers.
_ Charles Richet
I want more ideas of soul-life, I am certain that there are more to be found.
-J. Jeffries
Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to that which is known to us of nature.
-St. Augustine
The "I" who observes the universe is the same "I" who controls it. The concept of separate "I's" is a myth.
-E. Schroedinger
There is nothing abnormal in the world-there is only the lack of understanding the normal.
-Swami Puri
Our unconscious existence is the real one and the conscious world is a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it.
-C. Jung
What we see is not nature, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
-W. Heisenberg
Can you walk on water? You have done no better than a straw. Can you fly in air? You have done no better than a bluebottle. Conquer your heart; then you may become somebody.
-Ansari of Herat
The solution to the problem isn't that you abandon rationality, but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a solution.
-R. M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The future is affected by what we imagine because the future is effected by what we imagine.
-J. C. Gowan
FOREWORD
by Dudley Lynch
(From Teleido Letter 1:4, March, 1979, © 1979 by Teleido Letter, 827 Westwood Dr., Richardson, TX, 75080, used by special permission.)
"The Road to El Dorado"
FOR EDUCATOR J. C. GOWAN CREATIVITY POINTS THE WAY TO "THE NUMINOUS"
For many of us, the journey of creativity begins and ends as a highly practical trip, in quest of our own versions of a better mouse trap, method of scheduling, means of processing or whatever. Creative problem-solving,we call it.
With patience, the learning of some new techniques for thinking, and a proper respect for the potential of "idea incubation," we usually come out ahead, ending up with not only our "problem" solved but with new insights into ourselves.
What we may fail to realize is that other fascinating possibilities exist. This, at least, has been a recurring theme for educator John Curtis Gowan during the Seventies. Gowan's search began, perhaps predictably, in quest of a solution: How best to educate the gifted (the 2nd edition of a wide-ranging anthology of which he is a co-ed itor, Educating the Ablest, is just off the presses of F. E. Peacock Publishers). But while peering into the store window of creativity, Gowan thought he saw other, even more exciting "realms."
In Trance, Art and Creativity (Creative Education Foundation, 1975), he wrote:
"If there is one entrance for Western scientific man into the arcana of developmental progress and self-actualization, that entrance is creativity. For it allows him, while still retaining his respectability as a cognitive thinker, to have intuitive brushes with the numinous element through creative outpourings from the preconscious. And it is heuristic, for it prepares him for the mind-expansion into psychedelic realms which inevitably follow."
Gowan's contention is that creativity is merely a way station or entry point for those willing to undertake an epic developmental journey on which the individual seeks to deal more and more intimately with the general. Lately, he's been hard at work arranging a road map with commentary of the Normal and Altered States of Consciousness that mark the way for the committed quester.
Teleido-letter asked Gowan for an update on his taxonomic art, and the following is culled from the papers he forwarded:
For Gowan, all discussion about creativity starts with "the numinous element." In his view, this is Jung's "collective unconscious," the Aztecs' "Smoking Mirror," the Hindus' "clear light of the Void," Emerson's "Oversoul," and the "Holy Ghost" or "Ground of Being" of Christian theologies. Gowan prefers to think of it impersonally as "a giant computer having access to all knowledge, intelligence, and power, but accessible to each of us under the proper conditions." It is a high-voltage, elemental force; playing with it haphazardly is foolhardy. His studies have always been of ways "to get in touch with the ground of being without losing [the "insulation" surrounding] ego-consciousness."
The process of getting in touch with the numinous is aided by altered states of consciousness (ASC), and he has clustered the possibilities in these groupings:
THE PROTOTAXIC (states of complete cognitive chaos) which includes (in ascending order of - what? - "enlightenment"), schizophrenia, trance, hypnotism, proactive drugs, and automatic writing.
THE PARATAXIC (a middle ground of imagery states) which includes archetypes, dreams, ritual, myth, and art.
THE SYNTAXIC (states with increasing cognitive control) which includes creativity, ortho-cognition, alpha biofeedback, meditation, peak experiences, satori or samadhi and higher jhanas.
Theoretically, Gowan's fledgling efforts to push humanistic psychology into taking a bold look at transcendental functions was on tentative footing when, suddenly, some equally venturesome voices weighed in from the non-psychological fields of physics and neurophysiology. What brain researchers like Sperry, Gazzaniga, and Bogen were pointing to as the specialized visual nature of the right brain's functions, Gowan could point to as "the herald of the numinous" as experienced in various ASCs. And the new Pribram-Bohm idea of the brain as a hologram interpreting or imaging - a holographic universe has Gowan thinking that perhaps his "levels" of advanced numinous experience are merely the results of that holographic-oriented right brain getting an increasingly better bead on the numinous.
Based on the right/left brain studies, Gowan says the left hemisphere's function is to support the normal state of consciousness. By holding the left brain "in abeyance," you get an altered state of consciousness. In most ASCs, you get either exterior hallucinations or interior imagery. If these manifestations aren't processed by either brain hemisphere, they "exit" in bodily fashion, often in trance, sometimes producing schizophrenia. If they are expressed directly by the right brain, they produce artistic (or non-verbal) creativity. If the left brain "mediates" the ASC, then we are into Gowan's syntaxic states, which includes verbalized creativity but reach ultimately to a rarefied level Gowan now calls the "transcendental union" of the individual and the numinous.
Without retracing all of his involved reasoning, we can permit him the ecstasy of his contention: "Transcendental union involves an expansion of consciousness in which time, space, and personality having been transcended, there is a state of neither perception nor non-perception ... or to put it another way: in the juncture between the individual and the general mind, duality becomes successively abolished through loosening constraints on the consciousness of time, space, and personality, so that ultimately through knowledge more and more complete, the one becomes the other, and union is reached. This is the 'Omega Point' of Teilhard de Chardin."
If that's not easily comprehended, Gowan thinks it is enough for now to realize that what was once "the provinces of mystics, schizophrenics, and other psychological deviates" is being studied with "a new scientific vigor," bringing validation and classification. He predicts, ". . . Having found that El Dorado actually exists, and in possession of a rudimentary map of how to get there, it is logical to expect that more average persons may try the journey. This makes life a great adventure."
PREFACE
Welcome, across the years, my young friend, who has just opened this book, and, in such magic, has allowed the promethean divinity in the author (for all else is soon dust) to salute the same divinity in the reader.
"Man was born to be free, but everywhere he is in chains." These words are as true today as they were when they were first written, over two centuries ago. Only now, the chains are not material, they are mental. Man's degraded view of himself as a reactive creature, instead of as a cosmic spirit, prevents him from claiming the powers and abilities to which his regnancy entitles him "Daily, with minds that cringe and plot, we Sinais climb and know it not," the poet Lowell told us. This book is an attempt to awaken mankind to his birthright.
Again and again we are told on good authority that "having ears we hear not, and having eyes we see not." We are abjured to "see the Divine beauty"; even the modern shaman Don Juan berates Castaneda for not "seeing." What is this second sight and second hearing which lifts knowledge from dependence on human organs and a physical landscape? Why is it so celebrated by saints and poets, all men of vision, throughout the ages? What is the nature of these higher senses, and what visions do they enable us to perceive? This matter is the task of this book.
Since a preface is nothing but a literary confessional, it is necessary to state at the outset that this collection of essays, unlike other books by the author, has not been assembled with the reader in mind. The book has no constituency; it is not written for others, but primarily for the author's musement. This word, an anonym of amusement, was coined by C. S. Peirce "for a mental state of free, unrestrained speculation, in which the mind engages in pure play with ideas." (Gardner 1978:239:1:18)
If perchance, unusual reader, these words shall strike a resonant chord in your mind, know at once by such presents that you are one of the elect, that you have been led to hallowed ground, and that you have been gifted with "an eye to see and an ear to hear." This opportunity is rare in nature, and unusual even in man, but it is par excellence what dignifies your existence as a numinous rather than a reactive creature. Much is herein demanded of you: for every great opportunity is also a great responsibility.
(page viii)
While the majority of the author's work has been with creativity, he thinks there are several higher levels of cognitive thought, with more order, and consequently more power. Creativity is merely the first in a series of increasing operations of more and more order. Some very spectacular effects occur in these higher and rarer states; indeed mystics of all ages and cultures have told us so for centuries. The laws of physics we hold to be true are merely special cases of more general laws whose operation is obscured because there is usually not enough order in the system for them to be seen on a macroscopic scale. Iron sinks and wood floats, so for centuries we refrained from building iron boats; heavier-than-air aircraft fall, so for decades we used balloons not airplanes. The laws we formerly thought operational were merely special cases, and when we learned new laws we were able to build modern boats and airplanes. It is the same with man. He considers himself to be an animal; actually his consciousness is Divine.
When we read histories of the overweening imperialism of the British, French, Germans, Spanish and others during their nationalist periods, when they felt that they were the elect of nations and possessed the inside track to all knowledge, or when we read of the unbelievable narrow-mindedness of both Catholic and Protestant missionaries to foreign countries, we are shocked and horrified by their unknowing arrogance, their lack of humility, and their unwillingness to learn from others and from a different cultural experience.
But mea culpa: all of us in the West are infected with the same pernicious intellectual arrogance, which is one of the worst concomitants of the scientific method. We also seem unwilling to realize that science is only one means of looking at reality, that there are others, that most of us are profoundly ignorant about the basic and fundamental aspects of life, and worse, are confirmed in our prejudices, so that we are unable or unwilling to discard enough of them to learn from experience.
Accept the sad fact, dear reader, that this is also true of you (as it is of the author). Be willing to suspend your belief system long enough to consider in these pages some startling facts and theories. We do not demand your subscription to any other belief system, for truth asks only for coexistence, but consider the possibility.
(page ix)
The author does not know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the wilder ideas expressed in this book are true; but they may be heuristic. If they are false, you have not wasted much time or money, and you have been diverted by some unusual concepts. But, if by any possibility they are true, then you have been forewarned of a revolution in man's thinking.
Let us consider two observers. The first says, in effect, "I hold a fixed set of beliefs. I will admit to no event which does not conform to those beliefs. I will not look through the telescope lest I should see something in which I do not believe." We would call such a person a religious bigot. Yet many famed men of science have held very similar views. The second observer says in effect, "I will empirically look at any event, no matter how strange, and then try to arrange my belief system to comply with the data." Yet many famous people who espoused such open-ended views have been denounced and persecuted by men of science.
Goddard, the father of space science, was considered a madman and hounded out of Massachusetts in the 1920's. Mesmer, Reichenbach, Zollner, Crookes and Richet, all respected scientists, endured persecution as a result of their advanced beliefs, theories, and experiments. Wilhelm Reich was imprisoned and had his books and papers burned by the U.S. Government in 1957. Let us never forget that the bigot in us all is alive and well today, and is as comfortable with men of science as with men of the cloth.
The author owes the reader a brief account of his interest in this subject, a story unlike most others. The best of the writers in this area, - those to whom this book is dedicated, - have been scientific experimenters, - men of science, who courageously turned to experimentation in the psychic area, thereby risking their reputations in the search for truth. Next come the practitioners, those who have some psychic power themselves, such as Muldoon, Garret, Cayce, and the Hindu yogis who speak from authority and personal experience. Then come the true believers, adherents to some sect, whether Catholic, Christian Science, Spiritualism or Theosophy, who must fit the data to their preconceptions. Then come the skeptics, such as Leuba and Rawcliffe, who differ from the believers only in the aspect that they fit the facts the other way. Since this analysis divides writers into polar types, it must be expected that some authors will have differing components of two or more types and hence be of mixed classification.
(page x)
The author of this book, however, cannot claim membership in any of the above categories. He is not an experimenter, has never engaged in psychic experiment or seance. He is not a practitioner, has never had a psychic experience and has no talents in this area. He is neither a believer nor a skeptic, having no need to fit data to any preconceptions. He falls, therefore, into a fifth and rarest class, a scholar and theorist, one who has read much of other men's efforts and ideas, and who has tended to sift the evidence, and fit things together in a way that made sense. He believes he detects in this vast mass of evidence, "operations of increasing order".1
If it be asked why another book of strange marvels, when the work of Fort and Corliss is extant, the author would note the redeeming differences in this volume as follows:
1 ) The book provides not only a catalogue of unusual events and powers, but a rationale for them, so as to make therm more understandable and, hence, believable.
2) The book provides testimony of various independent witnesses, which tends to give a kind of reliability to the phenomenon and so establish a basis for validity.
3) The taxonomy shows an order; and even if this order is in the mind of the beholder, it indicates a commensurability between that mind and the Mind which created the phenomena.
4) The direction of this order is toward growth, development, increasing health and order, in short, towards positive integration.
5) The scope of the vista envisaged for both mankind's genotype and phenotype is magnificent and grand.
6) The various components of powers, abilities, materials, and procedures, herein treated are shown to be interconnected, and to be part of a plenary structure d' ensemble.
7) The nature of this structure is numinous.
The author does not hold that the book is a complete compendium of the subject matter it treats, - instead it is a series of sketches. A thorough investigation would have taken years to write and tomes to publish. We have, therefore, incorporated by reference, those areas where there is a large extant literature (e.g., mediums and healing), and tended to concentrate on more exotic
(page xi)
aspects (e.g., firewalking and levitation), which have received less attention by others, and where the data are harder to come by.
Let us suppose that one receives the reports of absolutely truthful witnesses about an exterior event. Then it will be possible to make sense and order out of what they say: the accounts will fit together to form a unified whole. Let us suppose that one receives the reports of absolutely untruthful witnesses who lie in every particular about an imaginary event. Then it will not be possible to make sense and order out of what they say: the accounts will not fit together to form a unified whole. Now let us suppose that one receives the reports of witnesses whose truthfulness is unknown about an exterior event. The test of whether the reports are truthful will lie in whether the data makes sense and order when assembled, and the accounts fit together to form an organized whole. The author asks only that the reader use the latter reasonable test in evaluating the data.
Let us imagine that there are a number of open-minded scientists who differ only in the critical ratio of truth value they require of a piece of data, and let us also assume that it is possible to assign such a truth value to all raw data or reports. We designate the assembly of such persons as Scr where the critical ratio is now understood to be a variable which goes from a probability (of truth) of .5 to one of .99999999. We can now ask an important question: "What is the most useful critical ratio level?" If too low (as in the p=.5), half the time the data will be in error. If too high (as in p=.99999999), much real data will be ignored. The writer submits that the correct answer is not the 5%, or the 1% level or any other arbitrary level. Instead it is the least level at which the summation of the data will reveal an orderly, meaningful system. The real test of the level of confidence at which we should accept data is whether the sum total of such data makes some kind of sense. Here we have the author's reply to those who say he is too credulous.
Many may argue that the author has shown extreme naivete by taking so many different accounts of psychic phenomena at face value. But being an empiricist, the author would rather believe that most witnesses are honest, not perjured, and that more is to be gained by comparing the consistency of independent testimony to the miraculous and attempting to account for it, than by denying it out of hand because it does not suit prejudiced views
(page xii)
and constructs. After all, it is a first rule of measurement that there can be no validity without reliability.
"Very well," says the critic, "where is the replicability of the alleged phenomena under tightly controlled conditions?" Let us take, as a reducio ad absurdum example, the case of a scientific investigator who does not believe sexual intercourse is responsible for human procreation. He wants a tightly controlled laboratory demonstration with full lighting, and witnesses taking notes and photographs of all that goes on. Are there not some couples who would fail under such demands? Even if they are successful, in what percentage of the instances will the woman thereby become pregnant? Though replicability has been shot to smithereens, who among us can call his own being into question by denying the validity of the process that produced him?
It is the author's thesis, enunciated elsewhere (1975) that our experience here is the result of consciousness being locked up in time, space, and personality - that these alleged dramatic unities are actually illusory, that the anterior action to account for all which goes on in the physical realm is another vivency, outside of time and space, and finally that the whole meaning of life is for consciousness to free itself of these prison restrictions - to transcend from the larvae to the butterfly. But, as usual, Einstein said it so much better:
A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
- New York Times (March 29, 1972, p. 24, col. 6)
Three orders of reality can be envisaged: primary reality (the void), secondary reality (the numinous), and tertiary reality (the physical world). (Further discussion of these three realities is reserved for Chapter 7.) Our thought is constrained and impaired
(page xiii)
because we think in terms of partial derivatives (time and space-bound effects), instead of the full function. For example, the great Jung grappled somewhat ineptly with synchronicity. Let us see how easy the subject becomes with the new viewpoint (see Section 6C of the Introduction).
One will find in these essays a constant pressure towards taxonomic and metric interpretation. While this effort represents the author's mathematical background, it is a way of restoring some order to a system which is found in disarray and disorganization. For example, a look at the taxonomy in Chapters 3 and 4 on cosmogenic powers and abilities shows that the powers from 3.0 to 3.3 are connected with the transcendence of time and space, those from 3.4 to 3.7 are connected with the transcendence of the physical person, those from 3.8 to 4.7 are connected with the siddhis (miraculous powers), and 4.8 and 4.9 are related to cosmic contact and union. We have thereby reduced a bewildering host of miscellaneous anomalies to four "operations of increasing order".
This preface concludes with two postscripts from much wiser heads than the author's. First, let us return to C. S. Peirce's "musement." In a little known paper titled, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," Peirce argues that "musement" is not only a road toward theism, but it is actually the only road. Next, let us consider Jung's "inflation." Jung defined "inflation" (Starcke 1970:74) as "the distance between one's knowledge or concept of himself and one's personal development." Starcke continues, "Often a seeker can discern truths intellectually way in advance of his capacity to demonstrate them." But this is as dangerous spiritually as it is fiscally. He concludes (ibid:85):
Now the world - this world - is the stage set. When we look at it at face value we are seeing a facsimile, an imitation of reality made up of canvas, paint, and optical illusion. Our problem is that we confuse the set and the parts the actors are playing with reality.
Let this monition humble pride of authorship and counteract any tendency in the reader toward any false admiration in that direction: there is a great difference between chimpanzees and a scholar interested in chimpanzees.
A quotation from Prof. Price's introduction to Whitman (1961:xix) is appropriate here. Speaking of the mystic author, he says:
(page xiv)
"He holds, moreover that the capacity for 'objective inner experience' is something which all of us possess. The mystical life, in his view, is possible for every one of us, not just for a favored few. In the Prologue he says that there are two ways of writing about mysticism, as a spectator, or as a participant, and that he himself writes as a participant. But then he adds that 'all of us are to some degree participants, here and now in part, and after death more fully.' The point is that though all of us do have the capacity for living the mystical life, we cannot exercise this capacity until we are ready. The capacity for objective inner experience remains latent and unactualized until we reach a suitable stage of moral and spiritual development."
This beautiful quotation could well serve as the theme of this book. There is an El Dorado; the map is outlined in these pages; the way to it is through the inner reaches of the latent powers of man's mind; and, knowing that it exists, having the map and the road, it behooves us all to start on the immense journey.
Let the dead bury the dead. It is to you, my young friend, alive and in the seat of action, that these pages speak. May they add comprehension and understanding to your goodness, and make you aware of why you search and what it is you search for. May they illuminate the Divinity which resides in you, and make it blossom like the rose.
For those new readers who are not familiar with the author's earlier efforts, Development of the Psychedelic Individual(1974), and Trance, Art, and Creativity (1975), a few preliminary words of explanation may be appropriate. To aid the reader, this section has been arranged like a glossary:
ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS: (Contrasted with the normal state when the left cerebral hemisphere is dominant.) A state, such as sleep, dreaming, trance, satori, where the left hemisphere is in abeyance, and the right hemisphere may be active.
ENTROPY: disorder or randomness; in physics, heat.
JHANA (or jnana): a level of knowledge; a grace of the syntaxic mode (cf 1975:351 ff).
NUMINOUS ELEMENT: The impersonal, ineffable Absolute.
(page xv)
ORTHOCOGNITION: Literally "correct-thought"; a valid model of reality; realization that time, space, and personality are illusions (see Section 4.6).
PARATAXIC: Experience (such as of the numinous) received as images (such as in art).
PRANA: psychic energy (see Section 3.5).
PROTOTAXIC: Experience (such as of the numinous) received before images, hence somatically.
PRECONSCIOUS: That aspect of the psyche, sometimes, not always, available to the ego. Preconscious insights tend to be expressed through right-hemisphere imagery.
PSYCHEDELIC (literally "mind-expansion"): That state when the powers of the preconscious are opened up for conscious use; a higher syntaxic level of jhanas (cf 1975:351 ff).
RIGHT HEMISPHERE: (as opposed to left hemisphere, generally the dominant one in ordinary life); the intuitive, spatially-oriented, musical and artistic hemisphere which seems to be the source of creative imagery, healing power, and is perhaps a receiver of transpersonal information through tuned resonance.
SIDDHIS: Specific psychic powers (such as ESP, see Section 3.03). SYNTAXIC: Experience (such as of the numinous) received cognitively with full consciousness.
VIVENCY: A theater of action in which consciousness finds itself. (The physical universe is the vivency of the ordinary state of consciousness.)
Readers who have not read Trance, Art and Creativity are encouraged to read Chapter V I first, as it contains a brief review.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Candor demands answer to two questions:
1) Is the order in the author's mind rather than in the universe of data? and
2) Can the author vouch for the unimpeachable origin on writing in this book which have come directly transcribed from a creative revery?
1) The writer maintains that the perception of order in his mind in arranging the data could not occur unless there was potential order in the data.
2) The ultimate origin of creative matter is a sticky wicket. If the right hemisphere gets it through imagery produced by resonance with some transpersonal source, then one may inquire what source. In this respect, the author has been chagrined to find that ideas which came to him in 1974 in writing Trance, Art and Creativity(e.g., Time, space, and personality as the three illusions) have been subsequently identified by him as belonging to Theosophist writings with which he was not familiar. Obviously, therefore, such writing, whatever its source, is not the result of logical analysis. The reader is hence on notice, that the author cannot so vouch for unimpeachable origin.
INTRODUCTION
"First, you must know that the heavens, the earth, the watery plain of the sea, the moons' bright globe, the sun and the stars are all sustained by a spirit within; for imminent mind flowing through all its parts and leavening its mass makes the universe work. This union produced mankind, the beasts, the birds of the air and the strange creatures that live under the sea's smooth face. The life-force of these seeds is fire. Each of us finds in this world his own level."
- Virgil, The Aeneid VI
Let us co-opt majesty by paraphrase: When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one group of people to dissolve the intellectual bands which have connected them to the paradigms of the past, and to assume a new understanding of the laws of nature, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to this separation.
The argument of this chapter may be summarized into seven sequential sentences as follows:
1 ) When examined carefully, things are not what they seem.
2) Physical reality is junior to the normal state of consciousness.
3) Scientific knowledge must change and grow in order to live.
4) The number of "exceptions" to the present paradigm requires change.
5) This change is towards the wholistic, mystic, and cosmic.
6) Paradigms exist which handle the "exceptions."
7) We need to decide whether to replace present paradigms with new ones.
Each of these allegations will now become a topic to be treated in order.
0.1) When examined carefully, things are not what they seem.
Nothing seems on the surface more reasonable than that matter is tangible, durable, and solid - "loose and separate" as Hobbs called it. Then under scientific investigation it turned out that
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matter was composed of little hard balls, - atoms, which combined in orderly fashion to form molecules. Then again under scientific investigation it turned out that the atom was not a hard little ball at all but consisted of a small nucleus and spinning electrons, with mostly space in between. Then the nucleus was found to consist of hadrons of different kinds, which in turn consisted of quarks, which seemed to be some kind of energy resonance, which didn't appear to exist separately, but only in combination. In short, there didn't seem to be any "material" in matter.
Nothing seems on the surface more reasonable than that the normal state of consciousness is the one in which mankind is able to apprehend the physical reality of nature through the five senses. In other words nature is there, and we are able to perceive it. But let us suppose for a moment that the statement is turned around and that nature is what the normal state of consciousness sees, in other words that nature is junior to the state of consciousness we are in, or to put it another way, that nature is the vivency of the normal state.
The fact that things are not at all what they seem has been the theme of Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, 1979. Marilyn Ferguson in a review of this new book (Brain/Mind Bulletin 4:17, July 16, 1979) said:
As Zukav summarizes the difference between the two world views, the old physics worked toward a model of reality that could be visualized, even observed, and it tried to describe things, individual objects in space. It attempted to predict events. It assumed that there was an objective reality 'out there.' it claimed to be based on absolute truth, 'the way things really are.'
The new physics found a realm too strange to imagine or visualize. It concedes that there are aspects of reality that can never be observed directly and that the act of observing alters the reality. The new physics predicts probabilities, does not assume an objective reality apart from conscious experience and claims only to correlate experience rather than absolute truth.
He describes with detail and clarity the stunning implications of the theorem proposed by J. S. Bell in 1964. Bell's theorem, proved by other experimenters in 1972, should give pause to the most devout materialist. In a federal report in 1975, physicist Henry Stapp called it 'the most profound discovery of science.'
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Bell's theorem was foreshadowed in 1935 when Einstein and two associates proposed an experiment which they believed a challenge to quantum logic. If the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was correct, they said, then a change in the spin of one particle in a two-particle system would affect its twin simultaneously, even if the two had been widely separated in the meantime.
This Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect became, as Zukav put it, 'the Pandora's Box of modern physics.' If true, it inadvertently illustrated an unexplainable connectedness between particles in two different places. The particle in area B would seem to know instantaneously the spin status of the particle in area A. This connectedness would enable an experimenter in one place to affect the state of a system in another place.
Einstein's challenge failed; quantum logic, however bizarre its implications, has proved invariably correct in its statistical predictions. Which leads us to the amazing Bell's theorem.
Paired particles are like identical twins in their polarity. If they fly apart and the polarity of one is changed by an experimenter, the other changes instantaneously.
'Bell's theorem,' Zukav said, 'not only suggests that the world is quite different than it seems, it demands it. There is no question about it. Something very exciting is happening. Physicists have 'proved,' rationally, that our rational ideas about the world in which we live are profoundly deficient.'
Zukav (1979:90) quotes Stapp on the non-material aspects of physics: "An elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things . . ." The wholistic aspects of all this are also emphasized by Stapp, (Zukav 1979:96): The physical world is ". . . not a structure built out of independently existing entities, but rather a web of relationships between elements whose meanings arise wholly from their relationships to the whole." And this leads Stapp to an inevitable conclusion, (Zukav 1979:105):
If the attitude of quantum mechanics is correct in the strong sense that a description of the substructure underlying experience more complete than the one it provides, is not possible, then there is no substantive physical world, in the usual sense of this
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term. The conclusion here is not the weak conclusion that there may not be a substantive physical world, but rather that there
definitely is not a substantive physical world.
Zukav (1979:135) quotes Nils Bohr as stating that quantum mechanics entails "the necessity of a final renunciation of the classical idea of causality, and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality."
0.2) Physical reality is junior to the normal state of Consciousness
Instead of naively accepting physical reality as a primary "given", let us instead note that it is never apprehended except in the normal state of consciousness. It is, therefore, a product of the normal state, and junior to it. The supposed "durability" continuity and "thingness" of nature over time then would merely reflect durability, continuity, etc., in the normal state.
Indeed, the "maya" or illusion surrounding the individual in the normal state of consciousness may be likened to a placenta which protects the nascent ego from the outer world, but also restricts and constrains. In the past, shamans, saints, and mystics have somehow escaped from this caul to awake in a larger vivency; premature forms of this placenta-breaking, like premature birth, may produce temporary disorientation, about which we are elsewhere on record (1974: 188). Here we quote Lang (1967):
Most people most of the time experience themselves and others in one or another way that I shall call egoic. That is, centrally or peripherally, they experience the world and themselves in terms of a constant identity within a framework of certain ground structures of space and time shared by other members of their society.
However, religious ... philosophies have agreed that such egoic experience is a preliminary illusion, a veil, a film of maya - a dream to Heraclitus and to Lao Tze, the fundamental illusion of all Buddhism, a state of sleep, of death, of socially accepted madness, a womb state to which one has to die, from which one has to be born. The person going through ego-loss or transcendental experiences may or may not become in different ways confused. Then he might legitimately be regarded as mad. But to be mad is not necessarily to be ill, notwithstanding the fact that in our culture the two categories have become confused. The 'ego' is the instrument for living in this world. If the ego is broken up or
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destroyed (by the insurmountable contradictions of certain life situations, by toxins, chemicals, etc.) then the person may be exposed to other worlds, 'real' in different ways from the more familiar territory of dreams, imagination, perception or fantasy.
True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality.
Capra (1975:88) puts it this way:
Maya, therefore, does not mean that the world is illusion as is often wrongly stated. The illusion merely lies in our point of view, if we think that the shapes and structures, things and events around us are realities of nature, instead of realizing that they are concepts of our measuring and categorizing minds. Maya is the illusion of taking these concepts for reality, of confusing the map with the territory.
Again, he pin-points the illusion to our time-bound egos (ibid:171):
All these relativistic effects only seem strange because we cannot experience the four dimensional space-time world with the senses but can only observe its three dimensional images. These images have different aspects in different frames of reference; moving objects look different from objects at rest, and moving clocks run at a different rate. These effects will seem paradoxical if we do not realize that they are only the projections of four dimensional phenomena, just as shadows are projections of three dimensional objects. If we could visualize the four dimensional space-time reality, there would be nothing paradoxical at all.
As Zukav (1979:240) states:
If we can experience the most fundamental functions of our psyche, and if they are quantum in nature, then it is possible that the ordinary conceptions of space and time might not apply to them at all.
0.3) Scientific knowledge must change and grow in order to live.
Scientific thought differs from sects and cults in that it is and must be a body of constantly expanding knowledge. It cannot, like some religious systems, rest on a fixed system of belief. It grows not
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by disavowing its former hypotheses, but in extending them as they are seen to be special cases of ever larger hypotheses.
But humankind is not accustomed to change its belief systems easily. The old mores which have been used with regard to religious beliefs are unconsciously superimposed on scientific theories, so that it is not so much that established scientists come easily to accept new theories as it is that they age and die, and newer scientists without the same prejudices (but perhaps with different ones) take their place.
That there might be two kinds of physics is not such a unique idea as one might think. A small example of the same thing is seen in the difference between two kinds of subatomic particles, one set of which obey Bose Einstein statistics and the other Fermi statistics. These are called respectively, bosons and fermions. They differ because the fermion has net spin (which means that it has a magnetic field, and hence an electric charge). If this spin is somehow removed, then the difference is gone. But note what a major property is controlled by the difference. For the bosons can occupy two "slots" at the same time, while the ferminos cannot.
In a rather analogous way, when we through meditation or an altered state of consciousness remove the "spin" and hence the field and charge from ourselves, we may find that the physics which has heretofore restricted us to the Ordinary state of consciousness has been removed and that properties of Non-ordinary reality (such as levitation, bilocation, invisibility) and the like (siddhis) are manifest.
The poet, Holmes, sang, "Build thee more stately mansions, Oh, my soul." If we wish to live in a roomier house, we do not start in by dynamiting the old one. Instead we plan where we can extend this room, alter that one, and break through yonder wall. Similarly, if we wish to enlarge the edifice of physics, we plan to save as many postulates as possible, to extend others, and so to come to a new and roomier paradigm which will accommodate the strange data experience has visited upon us. By extending the laws of conservation from matter to energy, we have already enlarged our paradigm of physics; perhaps we shall have to extend it again to gain the maximum benefit with the minimum dislocation.
Let us imagine that John Dalton, the British 19th century
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physicist, and inventor of Dalton's atomic theory, were to come back and engage in conversation with a particle physicist. Let us review his hypotheses:
1 ) Matter is made up of small, indivisible particles called atoms.
2) The atoms combine in chemical combinations to form molecules.
3) The ratio of combination is always that of small whole numbers.
Let us now specify examples in modern physics which are almost opposite to Dalton's premises:
1) Quarks
2) Plasma theory
3) DNA
But let us note, that even though modern physics comes to far different conclusions than Dalton's, it represents the end product of graduated growth spurts from his premises, which are now seen as very special cases of a much wider field.
If this sort of advancement and wider understanding can happen in a little over a century in physical science, is it not conceivable that a similar enlightenment can occur in the area of metaphysics?
0.4) The number of exceptions to the present scientific paradigm requires change.
We live in an age of revolutionary thought; in our own lifetime we have seen Einsteinian mechanics supplant Newtonian, and the views of Planck and Heisenberg upset all of previous physics. If this were not enough for one century, now science is plagued with anomalies whose increasing frequency and disturbance require the kind of epicycle building that the frantic Ptolemians indulged in just before the advent of Copernicus. Among these are:
1) The discontinuity as opposed to the continuity in nature, (quantum);
2) The complementarity and the Heisenberg uncertainty principles;
3) The quark theory (Quarks do not seem to have material properties individually);
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4) The number of disfavored ideas which have become standard and continuance of same (e.g., continental drift);
5) The peculiar development of inventions which seem to parallel our model of man (no end to them);
6) The number of very bright men espousing the psychedelic hypothesis;
7) The compatibility with science of some of the psychedelic hypotheses which merely adjoins what is presently known in an orderly way.
Indeed classical physics was mortally wounded by the quantum theory, and even scientists realize there is need for a new paradigm. Says Brownoski (1973:364):
... New ideas in physics amount to a different view of reality. The world is not a fixed, solid array of objects out there, for it cannot be fully separated from our perception of it. It shifts under our gaze, it interacts with us, and the knowledge that it yields has to be interpreted by us. There is no way of exchanging information that does not demand an act of judgment ...
Zukav (1979:271) points out that: quantum phenomena may be connected so intimately, that things once dismissed as occult could become topics of serious conversation between physicists.
Kuhn (1967) in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gives a useful model of the paradigm shift which goes on during the revolution. The old paradigm embraces a believed postulate (such as "not more than one parallel to a line through an outside point"). Behind such a postulate there is a kind of world-view (here Euclidean geometry). Daring innovators (such as Riemann) now question the necessity for this paradigm and propose that there are exceptional cases where it does not hold. These exceptions in turn become the foundation stones for a new set of postulates (which develop a new non-Euclidean geometry).
Shyman (1976) in discussing the same problem declares (p. 19):
Paradigm change completes the picture of a scientific revolution. To review: an anomaly develops and grows as model
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and reality refuse to be brought together. When the anomaly has resisted repeated attack, a crisis develops. The paradigm must be changed, since the foundations are at fault. A chaotic period follows during which the new paradigm is sought. When a new one is found and accepted, the revolution is complete and the new order takes over. The new paradigm must be able to explain the anomaly that caused all the trouble in the first place ...
Whatever the fundamental units the world is put together from, they are more delicate, more fugitive, more startling than we catch in the butterfly net of our senses.
0.5) This change is in the direction of the wholistic, the mystic and the cosmic.
Nineteenth century positivistic materialistic science which regarded things as "loose and separate" has been changing by virtue of the discoveries of the scientists themselves in the direction of the wholistic, the mystic, and the cosmic. The breaking of the conservation of matter theory, and the supplanting of classical mechanics by both the theory of relativity and the quantum theory have been landmarks in this development. Great names such as Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, and Schoedinger, to name but a few, have been associated with this change.
Some specifics:
1 ) In place of "loose and separate" everything seems connected to everything else;
2) In place of an observer and an experiment, each independent, we have situations where the observation and measurement affects the experiment;
3) In place of absolute time and space, we have relative space/time which may under some circumstances interact;
4) In place of the theoretical possibility of exact measurement, we have, at a certain critical level (Planck's "h") an indeterminacy principle;
5) In place of our conception of waves as waves, and corpuscles as little balls, we have an intuitively impossible situation (the complementarity principle) where each behaves like the other under certain cases;
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6) In place of material objects which exist in their own right, we have quarks which exist only in triplets.
Zukav (1979:331) concludes: "We are approaching the end of science ... The end of science means the coming of western civilization ... into the higher dimensions of human experience."
0.6) Paradigms exist which handle the exceptions.
6a) Hologram Theory
A hologram is an interference pattern (which looks like contour lines or a moire screen) on a photographic plate, caused by the alternating reinforcing and canceling effects of two laser beams, one direct from the laser (the reference beam) and the other reflected from an object (the object beam). (See Figure 0-1.) When laser light shines on any part of this interference pattern, a virtual (apparent but not real) image in three dimensions appears in the same relative spot as the original object stood. Holography, which most of us have seen in exhibitions, has the unique property that any part of the hologram contains all the information (hence the name). The hologram, which is a matter of physical optics, furnishes us with a very powerful analogy, known as the Pribram-Bohm hologram model of ultimate reality. For the latter we quote from Ferguson (1977:3):
Neuroscientist Karl Pribram of Stanford and physicist David Bohm1of the University of London have proposed theories that, in tandem, appear to account for all transcendental experience, paranormal events and even 'normal' perceptual oddities. The implications for every aspect of human life, as well as for science, are so profound that we have dedicated an issue to the subject.
This breakthrough fulfills predictions that the long-awaited theory would (1) draw on theoretical mathematics; (2) establish the 'supernatural' as part of nature.
The theory, in a nutshell: Our brains mathematically construct 'concrete' reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension, a realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality that transcends time and space. The brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe.
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Figure 0-I THE HOLOGRAM MODEL OF ULTIMATE REALITY
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We do not have here the time nor space fully to investigate the implications of hologram theory. This has been excellently done by the symposium issue of Revision 1:3 (Summer-1978), and also by the McKennas (1975:38-51). But it is one thing to find holography in optics, and another to find it in brain function. Pribram (1969:77) feels that certain brain functions make it possible (see McKennas 1975:43). Coherence and harmonics have also been mentioned. We quote the McKennas (1975:46-7):
The constructs of the mind are, by and large, couched in symbols; even 'raw' sensory data is seldom experienced without symbolic interpretations, associations, and judgments. This tendency of the mind to symbolize, to organize experience into meaningful, coherent pattern, is indicative of its ceaseless effort to somehow 'encompass' reality, to construct a suitable model of self and world. This quality of mind is seen best of all, however, in the dynamics of unconscious processes, in dreams, vision, and trance; indeed, the individuation process in Jungian psychology represents an attempt on the part of the unconscious to construct a totality symbol which both encompasses and defines the self and the world in relation to the self. Jung has shown in numerous works (cf. 1952, 1959) the important role played by mandala symbolism as a means for expressing the underlying order of psychic unity and totality. This property of symmetrical, mandalic organization is found universally in all artifacts of human thought, from the most abstract metaphysical systems to the commonest objects of everyday use, and it, indeed, appears to be intrinsic to the organization of the psyche. May not this proclivity of the mind to elaborate symbolic totality metaphors be reflective of the holographic structure of the psyche:
The unformed archetypes of the collective unconscious may be the holographic substrate of the species' mind. Each individual mind-brain is then like a fragment of the total hologram; but, in accordance with holographic principles, each fragment contains the whole. It will be remembered that each part of a hologram can reconstruct an entire image, but that the details of the image will deteriorate in proportion to its fragmentation, while the overstructure will remain. Out of this feature of holography arises the quality of individual point of view and, in fact, individuality itself. If each mind is a holographic medium, then each is contiguous with every other, because of the ubiquitous distribution of information in a hologram. Each individual mind would thus be a representation of the 'essence' of reality, but the details could not be
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resolved until the fragments of the collective hologram were joined.
Anderson (1977) in a brilliant paper, "A Holographic Model of Transpersonal Consciousness," traces in detail the importance of their view. After discussing the optical aspects, he turns to possible holograms in the brain, in which he says in part:
The holographic nature of the brain is further evidenced by the fact that the visual image system is sensitive to spatial frequency patterns (that is, the coarseness or fineness of texture) in the environment. In addition, the holographic view of memory and perception accounts for the brain's seemingly limitless capacity to store information. The holograph also provides a means by which associative memory might occur (Pribram, Nuwer, and Baron, 1974). The light from one object may be used as the reference beam for a second object and thus may be used to obtain the second object's image. Since more than one such "association" may be stored on a single plate, the similarities between the hologram and the operations of the brain seem quite striking. For example, a thought of a certain place may remind you of someone you knew there, and more than one such association may be stored in the brain.
If these considerations and data are studied thoroughly, the hologram hypothesis can seem quite enticing.
If sensuous reality consists of a hologram illusion, then it should be possible under certain exceptional conditions for it to dissolve and reveal a hitherto concealed underlying reality. But this is precisely what both mystics and scientific investigators have been telling us. Consider the following from the latter (Coblenz 1954:219):
I believe that in some mysterious manner the veil over the normal confusions of life is sometimes drawn aside, to reveal to competent clairvoyants the pattern of a deeper reality, which we cannot comprehend, because we attempt to perceive and interpret it through preconceived notions and according to the prejudices, superstitions and other intellectual deficiencies of which we are largely unaware.
If we reread Plato's famous model of the cave (Plato, 1956: 312-16) in the light of the hologram theory, it is obvious that they talk the same language. In both cases there is a projection of substance onto a screen medium, which projection appears real but in
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fact is virtual. Equally compelling in its accuracy is Plato's account of him who by some means is able to turn and so see the real objects whose projections are on the cave wall. "He would be puzzled and believe that what he saw before was more true than what was shown to him now (p. 313)." And further: "Looking toward the real light would hurt his eyes and he would escape by turning away," (how like this is to the Bardo Thodol!). Finally: "And when he came to the light of the sun, the brilliance would fill his eyes and he would not be able to see even one of the things now called real." (Compare with any account of mystic experience.)
Plato concludes this dialog of Socrates:
Finally, he would most easily look at shadows, after that images of man and the rest in water, lastly the things themselves. After this he would find it easier to survey the night heavens rather than by day the light of the sun . . . Then we must apply this to all we have been saying: the world of our sight is like the habitation in prison; the firelight there to the sunlight here. The ascent of view of the upper world is the rising of the soul into the world of mind. (p. 315)
Let us imagine that a holographic image is observed, but that for reasons unknown the illusions which formed the hologram are temporarily at least partly dissolved. What will then be seen? First, obviously, would be the strong coherent light of the laser reference beam which might appear blinding. (Evans-Wentz 1960:89ff speaks of "the clear light of the Void" as blinding to most individuals.) Secondly, there would be an expansion of knowledge (as when one awakes from a dream or sees in a theatre the backdrops lift and a much larger set come into view: it is essentially the comprehension of a larger gestalt). Another startling example would be when one in a train or plane views another similar vehicle and at first thinks that one is moving, but actually one then realizes with a start that it is the other vehicle which is in motion. There would be, as it were, a dissolution of the ordinary and previous supposition, or perhaps, better stated, the superposition on it of something more real and extraordinary. Anything part of that first illusion (such as time) would be transcended (e.g., Happold: 1970: pp. 45, 129, 130, 134). Thirdly, the constituent parts of the holographic image would be integrated into a kind of wholeness or oneness.
As we reinspect the previous paragraph, it must become
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obvious at once that what is being described is none other than mystical experience. Of all the incidents open to the human mind, it and it alone fits the descriptions. We may hence redefine mystic experience as the non-holographic (that is direct) experience of ultimate reality, and conversely, non-mystic (ordinary) experience as the holographic experience of reality.
While hologram theory in itself is enough to explain all the anomalies which parapsychology presents to science, since it asserts that what we see is a world of effect and not cause - a virtual image, really an illusion - we should take note of some other, perhaps less global paradigms which may be of interest.
6b) The vacuum or zero-order state: order and entropy.
In a state of disorder and asymmetry (which is our present condition), it is very difficult to imagine and intuit the properties of a state of order and symmetry. In a state of some disorder (heat or entropy in physics), statistical laws hold, which means the normal curve or law of averages is in operation. But in a state of order this is not true; when the law of averages does not operate, miracles are possible. In physics under conditions of high order and low entropy, the microscopic order in the atoms may become (as in crystals) macroscopic and, hence, visible. For quantum mechanics laws obtain in the atom, whereas statistical laws obtain in our everyday physical interactions.
The "zero-order" state or state of maximum symmetry and least excitation in an atom (or indeed anything else) may be conceived as a proto-existence in a vivency of higher dimensions called by us the realm of all possibilities. As the electron is excited, symmetry is broken, and matter in its usual form becomes apparent. As Orme-Johnson and others say (Orme-Johnson 1977:712):
The parallel between the quantum field theory of effortless creation and Maharishi's theory of sanyama continues in that both involve symmetry breaking. (i.o.) The creation of a Goldstone boson takes place whenever the influences involved are such as to produce a spontaneous change from a more homogeneous state to a less homogeneous state.
As Domash (Orme-Johnson 1977:30): continues:
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In quantum physics the vacuum state contains no real matter or light yet has in it (through the uncertainty principle) all possible matter and light in the form of so-called 'virtual particles' or 'zero-point' fluctuations. Likewise, the state of pure consciousness is said to contain all possibilities, to be a state of pure potentiality in the sense that it is empty but lively.2
One could quip that general order in the general state, when symmetry is broken, may become particular order in the particular. And we are reminded again of Brown's statement (1972:v) that, "A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart." Manifestation in the material and categorical may then represent the furthest extension of spirit when symmetry and order have been withdrawn, and the siddhis seen in rare physical states may represent a semblance of order and symmetry remaining in a restricted area after general symmetry is broken.
As Schroedinger (1944:69) puts it:
The physicist is familiar with the fact that the classical laws of physics are modified by the quantum theory especially at low temperature. There are many instances of this. Life seems to be one of them, a particularly striking one. Life seems to be an orderly and lawful behavior of matter, not based exclusively on its tendency to go over from order to disorder, but based partly on existing order that is kept up.
To the physicist ... I could hope to make my view clearer by saying: The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behavior approaches to that purely mechanical... conductivity to which all systems tend as the temperature approaches absolute zero and the molecular disorder is removed.
6c) Time-Bound States vs. Time-Free States
The first fetter from which consciousness needs release is time. Whereas our cognition of each dimension of space is full and extensive in two directions, our perception of time is partial, for it has a one-way arrow. Indeed, in one sense, time is imaginary space, since mathematically time is to space as "i" (the square root of minus one) is to one. It is not easy to divest our thinking of
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this time-bound fetter, since even our language is made up of tensed verbs.
The transcendence of time occurs in two modes: magiscule (or the experiencing of large areas of time compressed as it were), and miniscule (or the experience of microscopic instants of time, expanded as it were). Let us examine these two in order.
If the numinous (which is beyond time) is to be experienced by us in time, it must be perceived as a series of periodic cycles or recurrences. An old and familiar form of this relationship is seen in the myth and ritual annual seasonal changes. We quote from work elsewhere (Gowan 1975:206) on the "durative topocosm", which is to the ritual celebrating it as climate is to weather:
"Gaster (1959: 11) traces the origin of myth as 'a sequence of ritual acts, which . . . have characterized major seasonal festivities.' These as he explains (1959:9) are 'derived from a religious ritual designed to ensure the rebirth of a dead world.' He elaborates on the central thesis (1959:17) as follows:
Seasonal rituals are functional in character. Their purpose is to revive the topocosm (i.o.), that is, the entire complex of any given locality conceived as a living organism. But this topocosm possesses a ... durative aspect, representing not only actual and present community, but also the ideal of community, an entity of which the latter is but the current manifestation. Accordingly, seasonal rituals are accompanied by myths which are designed to present the purely functional acts in terms of ideal and durative situations. The impenetration of myth and ritual creates drama. . . . What the King does on the punctual plane, the God does on the durative ... The pattern is based on the conception that life is vouchsafed in a series of leases which have annually to be renewed.
"it would be difficult to state more clearly and concisely the central motivating elements of myth than has here been done. The concept that the topocosm needs to be renewed like an annual lease, and that since it exists on the transcendental (durative) level, it can be affected as if in sympathetic magic on the temporal (punctual) level, and finally that it is a living organism amenable to the efforts of man, is both good anthropology and excellent psychology regarding man's parataxic relationship to the numinous element."
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Schlipp, (1949:114) quotes de Broglie:
In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc . . . each observer as his time passes discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.
But time may be experienced, at least by the subconscious mind in greatly expanded form. We know that many atomic reactions take place in nano-seconds. Evidently this is the level at which the next higher realm operates. Consider the following enlightening quotation from Wilber (1978:53-5):
No matter how much we may detail the historical (ontogenic and phylogenic) aspects of the spectrum of consciousness, these details remain, in my opinion, purely secondary. For without any doubt the most important aspect of the spectrum is that the entire sequence of evolution is entertained now, moment to moment to moment, not once but thousands upon thousands of times. In this present instant we unceasingly re-create the entire spectrum with all its levels and potentials. Moment to moment, through the various forms of resistance that operate on different levels - from the basic ignorance (avidya) in the Buddhist sense to concrete repression in Freud's sense - we narrow, restrict, and constrict our basic awareness from prior unity consciousness to successively evermore impoverished, fragmented, and isolated forms. From absolute Self to illusory ego, through all sorts of stages, moment to moment to moment ...
This moment-to-moment evolution is nothing but the process of microgeny, which in orthodox psychology is the study of the immediate unfolding or micro-evolution of a psychological process or form ...
From our point of view, however, microgeny is not just, nor even primarily, a moment-to-moment unfolding of conscious states from physical and physiological stimuli, but a moment to-moment evolution of the separate self out of unity or nondual consciousness (the Brahman-Atman). In this moment and this moment and this, an individual perpetually, if unconsciously, manufactures various substitute selves out of prior, open-ground consciousness ...
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When you start to think about all this, the whole situation is truly astounding, for the implication is nothing less than this: in this moment, and this moment, and this, an individual is Brahman, the Godhead, the Dharmakaya - but, in this moment and this moment and this, he ends up as John Doe, as a separate self, as an isolated phenomenon apparently bounded by other isolated phenomena. Put rather poetically, at the beginning of this and every moment, each individual is God; but by the end of this same moment - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye - he winds up as an isolated ego.
For further views on this matter, we quote from Gowan, 1974:44-45:
"According to Evans-Wentz (1960:31) the Tibetian belief is that as the human being dies and the individual psyche is reabsorbed into the Spirit of Man, there is a review or recessional of the periodic stages in inverse order. First comes the vision of the Clear Light of the Void (our ninth stage), then the Clear Light somewhat obscured (the eighth stage), then the vision of seven peaceful (affective) deities (aspects) and then the vision of seven wrathful (cognitive) aspects."
Evans-Wentz (1960:31) tells us:
Definite psychological significance attaches to each of the deities appearing in the Bardo Thodol; but in order to grasp it, the student must bear in mind that . . . the apparitional visions seen by the deceased . . . are not visions of reality, but nothing more than the hallucinatory embodiments of the thought-forms born of the mental content of the percipient; or in other words, they are the intellectual impulses which have assumed personified form in the after-death dream state.
He goes on to distinguish between the two orders of deities:
The peaceful deities are the personified forms of the sublimest human sentiments which proceed from the psychic - heart center ... Whereas the peaceful deities are the personification of the feelings, the wrathful deities are the personification of the reasonings, and proceed from the psychic brain center. (In psychological language - the affective and the cognitive).
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After the final appearance of the wrathful deities the deceased is frightened into wishing for rebirth, and is driven to seek a conceiving womb. Thus starts the cycle over again. The fit between the life processional or development through the stages, and the after-death recessional back through them in reverse order to rebirth (if the Clear Light is not grasped) is a remarkable example of the goodness of fit between ancient Eastern mysticism and modern western psychology, confirming the validity of both.
Evans-Wentz describes the Bardo apparitions which appear after death; first come the peaceful (affective deities).
POST-MORTEM BARDO APPARITIONS
Devas
1
7
Generativity
Spreading forth of the seed (EW 105)
Asuras
2
6
Intimacy
(The father) embraced by the mother (EW108)
Humans
3
5
Identity
Power of egotism EW 111)
Brutes
4
4
Industry
.
Pretas
5
3
Initiative
Avoid Jealousy (EW 117)
Hell
6
2
Autonomy
.
.
7
1
Trust
,
Then come the wrathful (cognitive) deities.
In comparing this Bardo vision with the inverse of the developmental stages in life, one should note several remarkable correspondences:
1) The Bardo Thodol defines two orders of deities and states that both are hallucinations of the mind, one being sprung from the sentiments and emotions (affective) and the second being sprung from the intellect (cognitive).
2) There are seven visions in each corresponding to the stages one to seven in reverse.
3) In the peaceful deities, some actual correspondences with stage characteristics can be noted (see above).
An even more interesting issue has to do with comparisons between the Buddhist view of the Bardos after death (EvansWentz 1960), (Gowan, 1974:44-45), (Wilber, 1978:57ff), as seen in the Bardo Thodol, and Western developmental stage theory. Developmental stage theory seems to be the processional of life,
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and the post-mortem bardos the recessional. Or, to look at things like a monopoly game, the cycle of birth is like trying to go around the board and back to "Go" during the period of a single life: only the saints get the $200, the rest of us recess back through the bardos to have another probably futile try. Not only is there a close fit between the deities and the stages, but the peaceful and wrathful deities of the East correspond nicely to the affective and cognitive stages of the West. It was Durr (1970:89) in a book on poetic vision who brought this to our attention.
In Trance, Art and Creativity, (1975:247) Table VI-4 was presented showing development in terms of jhanas (or levels of knowledge). If this table is compared with Table 0-2, (Gowan 1974:51), a complete picture of developmental process is obtained at least from the personal view. One may also look at this progress from a transpersonal view, as does Wilber (1978:58), given here as Table 0-3. It is easy to see that the outward devolution corresponds rather clearly to the first five stages of the Periodic Table 0-2, while the involutionary return path corresponds to the higher periodic stages, and the jhanas in Table VI-4. The reader is urged to make this comparison.
6d) Resonance, vibrations, and periodicity3
Let us imagine an estate of order in the numinous realm. (We use state rather than event, to signify that the meta-event is outside time, and we use estate rather than state to emphasize that the noun is being used with a transcendental meaning.) Let us suppose that the idiosyncratic aspects of this estate are to be manifested in our realm; how shall this be done?
A little thought will reveal that timelessness will appear as multiple recurrence, as if the same thing continued to be experienced. The order will make these appearances regular both in time (the wave frequency), and in magnitude (the wave amplitude); we now have vibrations of a given periodicity and strength. If such vibrations have the same frequency as other vibrations somewhere else, harmonic sympathetic vibration is set up between them, and a state of resonance results. All of these concepts are very important in explanation of a number of transcendental effects.
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TABLE 0-2. THE ERIKSON-PIAGET-GOWAN PERIODIC DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE CHART
TABLE 0-3: MICROGENY IN THE MATURE ADULT
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David Wechsler (1974:170-1) analyzed this subject thusly:
We now come to the possible physical equivalent of what we have termed insightful or intelligent behavior: namely, the event or the events that take place in the brain when an individual may be said to perceive ...
With the foregoing as a point of departure, it would seem that insight as a physical fact could be intelligibly described as a collective response of the elementary systems in cortical cells in one or another region of the brain. This interaction must be conceived as occurring not through the transmission of impulses, in the manner classically postulated, along axons or nerve trunks, but rather as a resonance phenomenon.
The resonance with which we are most familiar is the kind manifested in the re-echoing of sounds through reflection or its prolongation through reverberation. It is the response of a system or object, such as a tuning fork, having a given vibrating frequency to another periodic stimulus or vibration of the same of nearly the same frequency. Similar phenomena characterize the reinforcement and impedance conditions of electric circuits, but perhaps what would be im mediately pertinent for our conceptualization of mental processes are the behavioral properties of the individual elementary particle. One of the most important of these is the property of quantum mechanical resonance. The quantum mechanical resonance of an elementary system differs in a basic respect from the performance of macroscopic bodies such as, for example, the prongs of a tuning fork. In the latter, the reinforcement of sound vibration results from a simple addition or superposition of one series of amplitudes onto that of another. In the case of quantum mechanical resonance, 'the separate wave components are no longer considered as existing independently. The resultant amplitude formed by superposition of other states is not a simple sum of the amplitudes of the interacting components. The wave interaction of one set of particles with another results in a new state or system' (Stern, 1956).
In the light of the foregoing I suggest that mental events in the brain consist of the creation of successive molecular systems when activity in any one group of cells is reinforced or inhibited by the reverberation to particles in some other group of cells. Mental phenomena are patterns of such resonances, or recurring quantum mechanical systems, activated in one or another part of the brain. Insight is the perception or psychological equivalent of a certain type of resonance: the type that happens to have meaningful implications for the individual experiencing it. Intelligence is a sequence of such insights leading to purposeful or practical behavior.
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The McKennas (1975:76) believe that this resonance is due to electron spin in the molecules of the brain. They theorize (P. 92-4) that the electron spin in tryptamines cancels the charge transfer of the metabolizing harmine, causing it to lose electrical resistance, and behave for a microsecond as a superconductor. In this way the material stored in the DNA neurogenetic material may be made available to consciousness, somewhat similar to the manner of a broadcast from the harmine DNA circuit. In the synthesis of tryptamine, one of which is serotonin (p. 97) ". . . may be one of the many possible resonate transmitters of the information hologram stored in DNA."
Anderson (1977) in a particularly brilliant summation combines holographic and resonance theories:
So far we have attempted to show that the brain is holographic in nature in both the implicate and explicate orders. It is this conceptualization that provides a key to the nature of transpersonal consciousness and its relation to personal consciousness.
First let us ask: 'What state of mind and brain often precedes and accompanies insights and glimpses of unitive consciousness?' Almost invariably there is a stilling or emptying (Kapleau, 1965) of the mind and an accompanying regularity and slowing of the brain wave in which alpha or theta is produced (Green and Green, 1977). Normally our attention hops from one thought or event to another, and the brain displays rapid, irregular beta waves (Kasamatsu and Hirai, 1973). As one develops meditation, however, the mind is no longer distracted by the flow of images and becomes quiet. When this occurs, the brain seems to be less active. It is at this point that resonance can take place between the brain's explicate holographic structure and the implicate holographic structure. This resonance is analogous to the resonance occurring between two tuning forks. If the molecular structure, shape, and size of the tuning forks is such that they produce the same frequency of sound when struck, then, if the forks are placed near one another and one of them is struck, a similar vibration will be elicited from the other fork. This resonance is made possible by the structural similarity between the two forks. Similarly, in the case of personal and transpersonal consciousness, the resonance between the holographic structure of the brain and that of the universe is due, in part, to the structural similarity. The resonance allows for the transference of information from the implicate order to the explicate order. Since the entirety
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of the explicate order is encoded throughout the implicate order, the resonance provides personal consciousness with access to all knowledge.
This, however, is not wholly true. If it were entirely true, then one would expect various highly enlightened individuals to have written out in all its rigor Einstein's theory of relativity, and the DNA code, centuries ago. The access personal consciousness has to the implicate order is limited by a residue of memories, both recent and long term, that remain encoded in the cortex. This residue of memories has a particular configuration which, like a 'reference beam,' allows the explicate holographic structure of the brain to resonate with only a small subset of the information in the implicate structure, that is, only that information which is directly relevant to the memories.
When a numinous thought form is to be actualized in our world of experience, despite its specific nature, its non-categoricalness dictates that it be experienced in multiples: which may be distributed over either space or time. (If distributed over both, the coincidences will hardly be noticed.)
Thus with regard to accidents, the result may be a series of similar accidents at the same or near times in widely separated spots, or they may be a series of accidents in the same spot over various times. What appears determined is the thought form (often with amazingly coincidental specifics), but the results are at least partly under the control of the wise/brave utilization of humans connected with the situation at the time of occurrence versus stupid/unintelligent action in the crisis.
We notice such coincidences with regard to dramatic events, but similar ones exist in creative thought forms. When the zeitgeist is opportune, the same non-categorical impulse will be manifested in several dedicated scientists, artists or researchers at the same time in different places, and they will each add an idiosyncratic flavor to a common discovery or new idea.
Jung (1960) in a booklet called Synchronicity, first explicated this multiple effect in passing from the non-categorical to the categorical, but despite his own experiences with it (p. 28), and 22 examples of it (pp. 14-15), he was unable to account for the reason developed here.
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6e) The void (absolute), the realm of potentiality, and the world of manifestation.
We introduce this theory here, although further explication of it must wait until Chapter VII. In line with the triplicity of substance, the Avatamsaka Sutra tells us that Buddha (here taken to mean All That Is) has a threefold body:
1) an aspect of Essence (dharma-kaya)
2) an aspect of potentiality (sambhoga-kaya)
3) an aspect of manifestation (nirmana-kaya)
Essence appears to our consciousness simply as "voidness: or sunyata, (emptyness)," and we delay any further discussion of it until later on.
It is the relationship between the level of potentiality and the level of manifestation which is useful to develop at this stage. This theory hypothesizes a multi-dimensional plenum of all possibilities, where thoughts and images take the place of things on our level. While there is pressure for each of them to manifest, only one out of each set is enabled to do so. We can gain access to this higher realm through dreams and in right-hemisphere creative imagery. It is the abode of the etheric body as well as of archtypes, myths, and ritual; hence, it is the generating area for what we see in a world of effect. It is also the environment of altered states of consciousness. We can, therefore, roughly stereotype the left hemisphere as the one attentive to the world of manifestation, while the right hemisphere is attentive to the realm of all potentiality.
6f) Photon-quenching
Bearden's (1977) theory hypothesizes that it is precisely the photons in the one octave spectrum of vision which quench constant tulpoid activity and pressure from the realm of all potentialities to manifest here. Indeed, from an evolutionary aspect, life on earth has evolved because in this octave its vision is secured from this kaleidoscopic realm and is safe in the physical world of material manifestation. When such light is absent (at night) or when reversed (as by the full moon), psychic phenomena find a lowered manifestation threshold and, hence, are more often seen.
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6g) Prigogine's Theory of Dissipative Structures4
A Belgian chemist, Dr. Ilya Prigogine, was awarded a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1977 for his theory of dissipative structures. According to Brainl/Mind Bulletin (May 21, 1979), this theory states that "Order emerges because of entropy not despite it":
The more complex a structure, the more energy it must dissipate to maintain all that complexity. This flux of energy makes the system highly unstable, subject to internal fluctuations - and sudden change. If these fluctuations or perturbations reach a critical size, they are amplified by the system's many connections - and can drive the system into a new state even more ordered, coherent, and connected. The new state occurs as a sudden shift.
The brain is such a complex structure, and the theory hence explains both the suddenness of altered states of consciousness, and the increased insights into them. Society, itself, is another such complex structure. There a creative minority can cause an escalation into a new order.
Prigogine's model also is compatible with the holographic paradigm. The dissipative structures may represent the way Bohm's implicate components of reality become explicate, that is, how changes take place from the level of essence to the level of potentiality and finally to the level of manifestation.
Editor Ferguson (B/M Bulletin 4:13:4) concludes: "The more complex a system, the greater its potential for self-transcendence: its parts cooperate to reorganize it. The brain is its own evolutionary tool." And again (The Research Reporter 3:3:3, Spring 1979), she says: "Pribram suggested that the dissipative structures may represent the way the "implicate" aspects of reality become "explicate" - that is, how they manifest in time and space from a timeless, spaceless primary order."
Let us hypothesize that the holographic theory of the universe is correct and that there does exist an anterior realm of potentiality which is the home of archetype, myth, dream, creativity, in which thoughts exist as things, a whole dimension larger than this one, and whose presence explains much that is now not comprehended by science. Let us further imagine that all-wise cosmic intelligence desires to establish the rules regarding the
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interaction of human beings with this realm. Would it not be reasonable to assume that the following might be established:
1 ) Mankind has refuge from this realm in daylight spectrum, and in the normal state of consciousness experienced by the left hemisphere.
2) Mankind has, however, access to this realm through the right hemisphere as the percipient of non-ordinary reality through altered states of consciousness.
3) Man has dominion over which of the potentialities of the expanded realm will be manifested in this realm.
4) Right hemisphere imagery is the vehicle through which incubation is able to produce creativity or healing.
0.7) We need to take a more careful look.
Let us imagine that a passenger train is running along a straight track on one side of which there is an indefinitely long, high wall. The setting sun throws moving shadows of the train and its passengers onto the wall. You are now asked if the shadows explain the phenomena of the moving train and its occupants.
We are, of course, back to the "cave" analogy of Socrates and Bacon when asked the question: "Do scientific and essentially rational explanations (such as those in this book), actually "explain" the phenomena they discuss, or do they merely describe it and analyze it so that it can be understood by our minds?" In one dictionary sense of "explain" (i.e., to make intelligible), they probably do; but in a deeper sense of connecting cause and effect, they seem to leave something to be desired.
As the train homologue indicates, there is a relationship between the action of the train and the moving shadows. But the shadows are a two-dimensional effect of the causes which animate the train and its passengers. They may help us somewhat to understand their movement, but they can never completely account for the whole activity or give us the primal causes for it.
To be more specific, let us suppose that a lady with an old-fashioned hat and her adolescent daughter, hatless and with short hair, are therein observed by their shadows. The lady's shadow is more idiosyncratic, and we can still identify her as she walked around the car. Her daughter, however, becomes indistinct as she
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turns her head or moves about. Only when we see her stationary silhouette can we be sure it is she. Now transfer this analogy to the larger world scene. A scientist would say that the two systems (i.e., the lady and her daughter) behave differently, that is, obey different laws. The one remains relatively constant and identifiable. The other appears and disappears as if by magic. But all this is due merely to our misguided interpretation in two dimensions of cause which is three-dimensional in nature. Can it not be that our misguided interpretation of nature partakes of the same partiality?
In the metaphor of the divided line (Raven J. A. Classical Quarterly July 1953, p. 22-32), let AB = images (shadows), let AC = objects (things), let CD = thought or ideal images (such as those in geometry), and let DE = dialectical thought ideals (beauty, truth, goodness). Then CE/AC = DE/CD = BC/AB, whence BC = CD, and is the mean proportional between AB (images) and DE (ideals). Hence, conjecture is to belief as understanding is to the exercise of reason. The ratio of the proportion is that as images are the shadows of things, so thought images are the shadows of ideas. In this context recall Socrates in the Symposium: ". . . In that communion, he would bring forth not images of Beauty, but Beauty herself . . ." Or to put it more modernly, using the Pribram-Bohm holographic model: AB is the holographic (virtual) image of the real object (AC), all this being in sensory reality; but this is the same ratio, in ultimate reality, as thought images (which are holographic reproductions (CD) of ultimate reality (ideals, (DE)). The relationship between AB (images or shadows) and DE (ideals or primal causes) is very much the relationship between the train shadows on the wall and the primal causes of them.
We have now examined a number of possible paradigms, all allowing for a more expanded view of physics than has previously been the case. We do not insist that these are sufficient for the data developed here and elsewhere (1974, 1975), but we suggest that they may be necessary.
We must always remind ourselves that not only is our intuition (since time and space bound) not able to handle adequately the relationships in a larger vivency, but even our language does not contain the expanded nouns and the untensed verbs which adequately define the enlarged relationships in a higher realm. Let us look at some of the problems more in detail.
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If everything in the physical world is but the holographic (virtual) image of some anterior substance, then every thing, event, person or entity (TEPE) has a para-mundane or para-logical essence in that it is non-categorical and, hence, incapable of being fully explained by any syntaxic knowledge no matter how refined. For any discipline of syntaxic knowledge will present a categorical (one discrete and particular aspect), of the metaphysical TEPE, and for every TEPE there is more than one aspect. (Like the elephant and the blind Hindus.) Each view (like each kind of flat projection of the globe) will have certain strengths and corresponding weaknesses. The concept of categoricalness, so useful in cognitive discourse, is only a temporary crutch for the developing ego.
It follows that there is an infinite regression of constructs to explain the physical universe (or anything else), and that while each succeeding construct gets us nearer the truth, no such construct will ever finally reach ultimate truth. Furthermore, for every construct which attempts to get near the truth (the wave theory of light), there will be found a complementary or antithetical construct (corpuscular theory of light) which appears paradoxical, thus demonstrating the non-categorical nature of the metaphysical substratum.
Constructs are, hence, maps of the terrain, useful in orientation and guidance, but by no means to be confused with reality. Like each map, each construct has certain disadvantages. Experience is the ineffable reality; our constructs are our fallible and imperfect and incomplete perceptions and knowledge of experience - in other words, a single categorical impression of a noncategorical experience.
While it is probable that absolute knowledge about ultimate reality is ineffable in a categorical sense, it may be very useful to make partial excursions into such a realm for the sake of higher information about our own state which it may develop. By analogue it may be impossible to "intuit" the "surface" of a four dimensional object, but it may be very useful to examine by partial derivatives the slope of particular contours, especially as to maxima and minima. In a non-mathematical sense this is what the remaining essays in this book are about. They attempt partial excursions into such a realm with the idea of bringing back particular understandings in discrete areas.
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Chapter I contains the title essay, hazarding a guess that discontinuities with interesting properties (after the two-fluid model) occur near the extremities of the order-entropy continuum. Chapter II begins a specific and important example of the same, by examining exotic factors of human intellect. Chapter III and IV continue this search with a discussion of powers and abilities of the human mind which have heretofore been considered miraculous, and attempts to arrange them into a taxonomy. These two chapters form the heart of the book. Chapter V is an essay on "Genius, Precocity, and Reincarnation." Chapter VI is a treatise on "Altered States of Consciousness: A Taxonomy." Chapter VII is a discussion on "Form as Devolution of Cosmic Substance," which seeks to answer the question: "Where does imagery come from?" Chapter VIII, perhaps the most profound in the book, is called "The Three-fold Body of the Buddha," and discusses eternal triplicities. The final chapter is a summary and conclusion.
This is a book on psychic science and the individual, which follows in the path of the great masters Mesmer, von Reichenbach, Zollner, Crookes, Richet, Reich, Tromp, and Bentov. These men had the courage to believe and state that man has powers that conventional science has not appreciated. But instead of becoming magicians, they were true to their scientific background and believed that this new area should be adjoined to science, not demarcated from it. We join them in that honorable effort.
FOOTNOTES:
1. For a good explanation of Bohm's "implicate-explicate" theory, see Zukav (1979:323ff).
2. The vacuum state appears to represent energy in potential (Cf Zukav 1979: 241), which in a footnote says: "The point is that empty space is not really 'nothing.' Empty space has infinite [potential] energy. According to Sarfatti, a virtual process gets triggered by a superluminal (faster-than-light) jump of negentropy (order or information) which briefly organizes some of the infinite vacuum energy to make the virtual particle." (This is an illustration of what Wilber (1978:58) calls microgeny, the continual dance of Shiva, which each moment goes through the permutations (changes) of essence, potentiality, and manifestation.)
3. The reader who wishes further discussion of this subject is referred to Bentov 1977:8-25.
4. For an extensive article by Prigogine, see pp. 93-129 of Jantsch E. and Waddington, C. H., Evolution and Consciousness, Addison-Wesley Inc., 1976.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS: OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD (by Dudley Lynch)
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION 1
.1 Things Are Not What They Seem 1
.2 Physical Reality is Junior to Normal State 4
.3 Knowledge Must Change and Grow 5
.4 The Number of Exceptions to the Present Paradigm Requires Change 7
.5 This Change is Toward the Holistic and Cosmic 9
.6 Paradigms Exist Which Handle the Exceptions 10
.7 We Need to Decide if Replacement is Necessary 29
1. OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER 33
2. EXOTIC ABILITIES OF MANKIND 47
2.0 Introduction 47
2.1 Animal Senses and Their Refinement 57
2.2 A Taxonomy of Exotic Factors of Intellect 62
2.3 The Etheric Body 66
2.4 Non-Paranormal Human Oddities 68
2.5 Developmental Aspects in Phenotype and Genotype. .72
3. COSMOGENIC POWERS AND ABILITIES 76
3.0 Introduction to Paranormal Powers 76
.01 Telepathy 80
.02 Dowsing 86
.03 Siddhis 93
3.1 Physical Mediumship 98
.10 Mediumship and Possession 99
.11 Psychokinesis 107
.12 Materializations 111
.13 Poltergeist Phenomena 120
.14 Apports 125
.15 Conclusion 128
3.2 Transformations in Space and Time 130
.21 Out-of-Body Experience (OBE) and Bilocation 130
.22 Clairvoyance 138
.23 Precognition 139
.24 Teleportation and Time-Warp 143
3.3 Endothermic and Exothermic Reactions 149
.31 Firewalking 149
.32 Psychic Heat 160
.33 Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) 162
.34 Other Thermal Effects 165
3.4 Stigmata 167
3.5 Electromagnetic Effects: Prana 172
.51 Luminosity and Auras 177
.52 Electromagnetic Properties 181
3.6 Independence from Physical Functions 184
.61 (Breathing, Excretion and Sex Deleted), A Note on Chastity 184
.62 Inedia (not eating) 185
.63 Non-Somnia (not sleeping) 187
3.7 Mortem Effects 187
.71 Transfiguration 188
.72 Translation 188
.73 Automatic Disposal of Body After Death 189
.74 Incorruptibility of Body 189
.75 Knowing Hour of One's Death 189
3.8 Levitation 190
.81 Among Christian Mystics 190
.82 Among Non-Religious Paragnosts 195
.83 Levitation in the TM Siddhi Program 202
.84 Theories to Account for Levitation 204
3.9 Invisibility 206
3.X Body Size and Weight Changes, Abnormal Strength 207
.X1 Elongation 208
.X2 Size and Weight Changes 209
.X3 Extraordinary Strength 210
3.Y Externalization of Sense Organs: Odor of Sanctity 211
.Y1 Conclusion to Chapter 3 212
4. COSMOGENIC MENTAL ABILITIES 214
.01 Psychometry 215
.02 Knowledge of Arrangement and Motion of Stars 217
4.1 Vision of Cosmic Beings 218
4.2 Calm - 219
4.3 Vision Through Opaque Objects: Miraculous Sight. .219
4.4 Miraculous Touch 222
.41 Healing Through Laying-on-of- Hands 223
.42 Psychic Surgery I 228
4.5 Miraculous Hearing: Clairaudience 234
4.6 Empery 236
.61 Over Self 237
.62 Over Others: Orthocognitive Healing 237
.63 Over Animals 245
.64 Over Natural Elements and Other Forms 247
4.7 Adamic Ecstasy 248
.71 Time Recovery and Other Characteristics . . . . .248
.72 Friendliness or Gemeinschaftgefuhl 252
.73 Union-Compassion Healing 253
4.8 Infused Knowledge: Omniscience 254
4.9 Continuous Contact and Union 256
5. GENIUS, PRECOCITY AND REINCARNATION 262
5.0 Introduction 262
5.1 Genius and Some Examples and Conclusions 273
5.2 Precocity as the End Product of Neotony 292
5.3 Reincarnation or Something Grander? 308
5.4 Conclusion 317
6. ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: A TAXONOMY 320
7. FORM AS THE DEVOLUTION OF COSMIC SUBSTANCE 336
8. THE THREE-FOLD BODY OF BUDDHA 348
9. SUMMARY 357
9.1 Recapitulation 357
9.2 Unsolved Problems and Needed Research 360
9.3 Epilogue 367
REFERENCES 373
Comments and Addendum
SUBJECT INDEX 383
TABLES AND FIGURES
CHAPTER I
OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER
"All things begin in order, and so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics in the city of heaven."
- Sir Thomas Browne
ABSTRACT: Considering the continuum of order-entropy, at either end of which 'since there is not enough of the lesser to go around,' a discontinuous two-fluid state model manifests, with emergent and integrative properties. Various examples of this model in physical and in biological systems are then considered.
Let us start with absolute perfection, - an undifferentiated state of absolute order and zero entropy.1 Let us imagine that there is introduced into this yin state some asymmetry. Let us assume that this entropy, E, as it increases has a diluting effect on a specific power, P, and that P is a parameter, taking discrete values, and that with increasing asymmetry, it will decline discontinuously to lower and lower values, until at length it vanishes.
Now let us imagine that there is a second power, P', of which the same is true. Let us further imagine that P and P' interact, so that the interaction is also a significant, discontinuous, and discrete variable. We name the discrete values of P as Po, P1, P2, etc., and similarly for P'. For every P, there will be a "Distance" from perfection, Dp at which the phenomena cease.
We now have a model that tells us that near absolute order or perfection there may be found a series of discontinuous states in which there is escalation of a particular power in that there is sudden and discontinuous appearance of interaction factors which produce emergence (the debut of new powers). Of course, so
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far this is merely a theoretical model, which we shall call "Operations of Increasing Order."
While the model has been derived from imagination only, it is the argument of this essay that is a powerful analog of a number of "real" situations, and that it furnishes us with both understanding and enhanced ability to deal with them. Let us turn, therefore to some possible isomorphic examples.
The simplest and most obvious example of such a discontinuity is the behavior of helium-3 and helium-4 near and below 2.2 Kelvin, (near absolute zero). (We paraphrase the next paragraph from Cohen 1977).
Whereas most substances when cooled become solids at O degrees K, helium-4 shows a phase transition of the lambda type to another liquid state, He I, which has superfluid properties. The He-3 isotope affects this critical point, so that below .87K the homogeneous mixture becomes unstable and splits into two and with a meniscus in the interface. He II emits second sound and He-4 at the transition of He I and He II obeys Bose statistics, whereas He-3 obeys Fermi statistics (because of the odd number of elementary particles and the nuclear spin of 1/2). All this peculiar behavior (for those of us in high entropy) indicates that at critical points near but not at total order (zero degrees K) there is an abrupt change to a different set of laws (quantum macroscopic).
What happens, apparently, is that the quantum laws, which under ordinary conditions of entropy are seen only microscopically, under a condition of near total order, are seen macroscopically. The apparent continuity of the macroscopic law of averages disappears when entropy is not present to smooth the dichotomies, and consequently we see a discontinuous quantum state in the entire system. The fact that near zero, entropy produces an effect of sudden shift of law, - frorn statistical to quantum, - is a most important point. Conditions where laws of probability do not operate are conditions favoring "miracles."
By reversing the words "order" and "entropy" let us now attempt to restate the previous construct negatively. When symmetry breaking occurs in a system of perfect disorder so that some order is introduced into the system, since there is not enough order to go around, the system divides into two domains,
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one of which contains all the order (and some entropy), and the other of which is still in a state of complete disorder. In such a transformation, disorder in general is replaced by disorder in particular.
And now the converse going in the other direction: When in a system the order drops to a very low state so that there is not enough order to go around, the system divides into two domains, one of which contains all the order (and some entropy), and the other of which is degraded to a state of perfect disorder. In such a system, order in general is replaced by order in particular.
What has been described here in theory fits perfectly the experience of multiple personalities in schizophrenia, and the experience of disorder in the body and the environment heightening when there is an overload of disorder in the mind. But others have described these experiences better and earlier from work elsewhere (1978:4:2:145).
In particular, the theories of Van Rhijn (1960) (which will be found in the essay, "Altered States of Consciousness: A Taxonomy" in this book, Chapter VI) are most relevant; and readers are urged to consult the section on "A Taxonomy of States of Consciousness" for further amplification.
Let us again try to state this very important construct in the simplest way possible: When symmetry breaking occurs in a system of perfect order so that some entropy is introduced into the system, since there is not enough entropy to go around, the system divides into two domains, one of which contains all the entropy and the other of which is, hence, still in a state of perfection. In symmetry breaking, order in general is replaced by order in particular.
Now let us state the converse of the previous principle, going from more to less entropy: When in a system the entropy drops to a very low state, so that there is not enough entropy to go around, the system divides into two domains, one of which contains all the entropy (with some order), and the other of which is elevated to a state of perfect order. In such asymmetry breaking, disorder in general is replaced by disorder in particular.
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In stating the general principle in both directions, readers will recognize that in the first instance we have formulated a theory to account for the two fluid state of He-3, while in the latter instance we have formulated a theory to account for the manifestation of the siddhis (see p. 93).
It is worth a little reflection to consider some possible consequences of human analogs to quantum levels in atomic nuclei structure. An atom can only absorb certain discrete quanta of energy. When it does, it undergoes a change of state in which energy is absorbed, but new properties are established. The change is sudden and discontinuous. The atom may emit the quanta of light and revert to its previous state; this action is also sudden and discontinuous.
Now let us compare some human testimony:
"And as he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined about him a light from heaven and he fell to the ground....."
(Acts 9:3).
"There are moments ... when a startling but marvelous experience leaps into mind ... A curtain hitherto unnoticed is suddenly twitched aside . . ." (Blofeld 1970:23).
"I climbed up on a tree stump and suddenly felt immersed in Itness. . ." (Berenson 1949:18)
"And when the day of Pentecost was come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly . . ." (Acts 11)
"Suddenly, without warning he had a sense of being immersed in a flame or cloud . . ." (Bucke 1901)
"I was walking lone in the forest ... Suddenly, I felt the walls between the visible and the invisible grow thin . . ." (Jones 1932:196)
"But what a thing it was, this awareness: it was so intangible, yet it struck me like a thunderclap ... It was as if I had suddenly been illuminated . . ." (Merton 1962:278)
We have here testimony spanning two thousand years and several cultures of a common experience which is very sudden and
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discontinuous, which results in enhanced abilities, powers, and perceptions, and which is ephemeral and transitory ... For other similar experiences, see Happold (1970:129ff); Johnson (1953: 302ff), Gowan 0 975:351-379).
As Domash (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1977:657-8) puts it:
In the present context, the laser is an especially interesting instance of a non-equilibrium highly ordered state because of the sharp phase transition it displays (Graham and Haken (24)) and also because it gives rise to macroscopic quantum wave coherence at high temperatures (as opposed to the superfluids). Prigogine has noted the general thermodynamic comparison between a laser and a living system (22).
Also we may note here that the concept of the TM technique and the pure consciousness state as evolutionary are consistent with the general physical basis of life as viewed from an earlier perspective, that of E. Schrodinger (54). Schrodinger's analysis of the process of being alive comes to the conclusion that living organisms maintain their integrity in the midst of a high entropy environment primarily by finding sources of orderliness, 'eating negative entropy,' 'drinking orderliness from the environment.' While all organisms do this by taking in low entropy food, by reference to their DNA as a source of low entropy information, and by maintaining cycles of rest and activity, it seems that the human organism, as the most highly evolved, has in addition the capacity to put itself directly into a condition, the pure consciousness state, which is experienced as a zero-entropy state psychologically and is clearly a low entropy state as measured physiologically. Indeed we will suggest later that the pure consciousness state is now only perceived subjectively as a condition of perfect order, but may actually be connected with a true zero-entropy quantum fluid in the brain.
We have just stated a principle of enormous importance, which is new and, hence, difficult to understand. To help the reader in this matter, we will now restate the theory in somewhat different words, looking at the process of symmetry-breaking.
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This process involves a series of breakings or severances of perfect primordial symmetry. As Patanjali says: "Manifestation occurs when the three gunas are in the same phase." And Brown (1972:v) says: "A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart". Ghykka, (1946), restates Curies's principle: "In order that a phenomenon should be produced in a system, it is necessary that certain elements of symmetry should be missing." Speaking of the production of the siddhis Orme-Johnson and others (1977:712) say:
The parallel between the quantum field theory of effortless creation and Maharishi's theory of sanyama continues in that both involve spontaneous symmetry breaking. The creation of a Goldstone boson takes place in a quantum field whenever the influences are such as to produce a spontaneous change from a more homogeneous to a less homogeneous state. In the regime of consciousness the influence of the Patanjali sutra on the wholeness of pure consciousness is such as to cause a spontaneous localization of the pure consciousness in the direction of a particular result specified by Patanjali, that is a symmetry breaking of the consciousness takes place whereby the wholeness of consciousness flows into a particular location.
We thus have something analogous to the two fluid model wherein all of the induced entropy caused by the asymmetry is contained in one fluid or location, leaving the other in a perfect state of order and hence with unusual properties. Since the operation can be run "backwards" (in the direction of order) as well as "forwards" (in the direction of entropy), we have a theoretical construct for unusual states (and in humans, unusual powers such as levitation).
Domash (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1977:661) compares cosmic consciousness to the two-fluid model of physics:
In the light of our own macroscopic quantum phase coherent model of the pure consciousness state in the nervous system, the fifth state of consciousness (stabilized pure awareness along with thought) becomes exceedingly reminiscent of the two-fluid model used to describe a superfluid or superconductor. In the fifth state, one experiences a well defined duality of consciousness: a silent, distinctly separate, spatially unbounded, temporally stabilized self-awareness along with
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the usual localized excitations of consciousness (i.e., thoughts and perceptions), much as the long-range orderly aspect of the superfluid coexists with an active component at finite temperatures. Indeed, one might read F. London's description of the two-fluid model: . . . two interpenetrating fluids, of which one is in a macroscopic quantum state while the other is the carrier of the whole entropy of the liquid . . . an equilibrium between two fluids which mutually interpenetrate in ordinary space but are in general separated in momentum space . . . The superfluid shows long-range order of the momentum vector and does not contribute appreciably to the entropy. The other, normal fluid is very much like the ordinary fluid,' and find in this description a rather exact parallel to the subjective cognition which is claimed to be the long range result of the TM technique . . .
We propose that the subjective experience of the fifth state of consciousness may in fact actually reflect the establishment of a permanent macroscopic quantum coherent wave function over long distances in the brain, accounting for the uniqueness and universality of this striking mental phenomenon. This may be thought of without regard to any specific model for the quantum basis of the neurophysiology of the TM technique (i.e., whether it is electron superconductivity, laser-type cellular electromagnetic oscillation, or some third class of coherent behavior which is involved). As Charles Enz has recently pointed out, the two-fluid model may easily be generalized to describe any of the highly ordered states seen in nature, including superfluids, superconductors, dielectric crystals, and ferromagnets.
In order that the reader may truly grasp the full impact of the previous argument, we are going to repeat its essence, yet again, this time in simpler and less formal language. Only this time, instead of starting with an almost impossible-to-comprehend ideal state of order, we start with the process of development in nature and in mankind of increasing order from a state of high entropy or disorder.
The effects of increasing order are discontinuous, emergent, and integrative. This is the total message; the rest of this presentation will merely elaborate and explain the details. First, some definitions.
Entropy is a term in physics which refers to randomness,
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and is therefore the opposite of order. The second law of thermodynamics indicates that in a closed system the entropy constantly increases and hence the universe appears to be "running down." But it also appears that life processes are anti-entropic, that is they generate order out of chaos. The results of this increasing order are discontinuous, emergent and integrative, both in nature and in man.
Let me repeat the theme of this section which is: The effects of increasing order are discontinuous, emergent, and integrative. Discontinuous means that there is a sudden, sharp escalation into a higher state. (it is really a carrying over of the quantum laws of physics into behavioral science.) Emergence means the onset of some higher power or ability not previously seen. Integrative means that the new operations have some holistic, boundary-breaking, synergic quality, which binds together in a single Gestalt aspects which before were not seen to be capable of unification.
Before starting in on psychology, we might mention a good example from physics. This is the behavior of helium 3 and 4 near and below 2.2 degrees absolute. Whereas most substances when cooled to this temperature become solid, helium shows a sudden phase transition into a remarkable state (Helium-2) which appears to be liquid but has properties of superconductivity and superfluidity. Superconductivity means that there is no resistance, and hence an electric current set in motion will continue without hindrance forever; superfluidity means that there is no surface (it is unbounded), and hence it will flow up the side of the beaker and out. It also emits second sound. All this peculiar behavior indicates that at a critical point near but not at absolute zero there is an abrupt change to a different set of laws. What happens, apparently, is that the quantum laws which under ordinary conditions of entropy (such as those which obtain here) are seen only microscopically, under a condition at or near total order are seen macroscopically. (Parenthetically this is why crystals are so interesting, because their atomic regularity, which is microscopic, is preserved by their lining up in macroscopic form.) For example, there are increased resonance effects of macroscopic elastic vibrations in crystals, in regular polyhedra, and possibly (due to electron spin resonance) in the right cerebral hemisphere. The apparent continuity of the macroscopic law of averages disappears when entropy is not present to smooth the dichotomies,
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and consequently we see the discontinuous quantum state in the entire system. The fact that near zero low entropy produces an effect of sudden shift of law, from statistical to quantum is a most important point. Conditions where laws of probability (the law of averages) do not operate are conditions favoring miracles."
Let us imagine an anti-entropic force, F, which has the property of decreasing the entropy in whatever system it affects to some critical value near zero, at which time, quantum mechanics laws which heretofore operate only microscopically within the system, suddenly pervade the system macroscopically as a whole. Let us further suppose that an observer, 0, is not conscious of any direct effects on the system S. The observer will see a sudden, and discontinuous change of state or behavior, and not understanding the underlying laws, will attribute the effect to some miracle or other unexplainable activity. This model is highly useful in explication of a number of anomalous events, from healing to telepathy and other siddhis, generally spoken of as "miracles." It may be recalled that pranic energy, odic force, orgone energy, spoken of by diverse writers in both East and West, fit this model of F very well.
Let us now turn to behavioral science, particularly the psychology of human development where much of my work has been centered.2 Three of the most fruitful researchers in this field have been Piaget (who enunciated cognitive stages of development), Erikson (who enunciated affective stages), and Kohlberg (who enunciated moral developmental stages). The interesting thing is that they all three agree that the stages are discontinuous, emergent, and integrative. If you look at the stages you will find that Erikson extended his 8 stages through the human life span, while Piaget stopped at adolescence. Others have speculated on a higher stage of cognitive development which was not mentioned by Piaget. There is a very simple reason for this omission on Piaget's part. He experimented longitudinally on only three subjects, his own three children, testing them over and over again as they grew up. As any parent will at once understand, when they became adolescent, they would not have any more of this annoyance, and so poor Piaget never did get to the adult cognitive stages.
It is, however, not hard to figure out what the next is. Since Piaget's formal operations is the same as Guilfordian conver-
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gent production, the next stage is divergent production, which in popular parlance is "creative thinking." Hence creativity is the first adult cognitive stage.
Recent theories about creativity hold that creativity is produced by imagery, which in turn is produced by resonance effects in the right hemisphere so that it operates like a radio receiver in picking up transpersonal vibrations. This may sound like a wild idea to you, but let me give you some sobering examples from the testimony of creative people. (Because of duplication, those citations which are omitted here will be found in section 5.1 under the depositions of musicians).
Let us see if we can induct laws of the general system applying:
1) Man is the measure of all things; alias the laws of physics mirror the laws applying to man; development in man corresponds to ordering in physics.
2) In the usual state of entropy (balanced between order/disorder) in both man and physics, macroscopic statistical laws (e.g. gas laws) hold; but as entropy (randomness) is removed from either system, there arise discontinuous phase changes in which different laws obtain, (e.g. quantum mechanics, siddhis). These singularities are most commonly seen in the most ordered operators (e.g. helium with 4 nucleons, highly evolved meditators, Dodd's order to an ordered power). For it is the removal of entropy which allows the simplicity of the laws (formulas) covering nearly perfect order to be seen in manifestation; such laws are of a different order than macroscopic statistical laws (e.g. the comparison between a pushing, shoving mob, and the same number of soldiers marching in the perfect order).
3) In every general system analogous to the ones we have discussed we will hence do well to look for singularities which are placed in the most ordered operators but which fall near but short of the limits of order for the system. In such cases of Dodd's "fulfillment" we will perhaps discover transcendent states and laws applying to them alone3. These laws are not miraculous, but they are extensions and simplifications to the general (high
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entropy law) caused by random effects, which in this near perfect state can be discovered.
Domash views TM as the conscious exploration of very low or ordered mental temperatures. The genesis of the pure consciousness state is seen as a phase transition of the nervous system to a state of long-range order and correlation among neurons. Similarities exist between this state of pure awareness and macroscopic quantum mechanisms such as superconductivity and superfluidity. This "fifth yogic state" (Gowan 1975: Table 8) can be modeled in terms of the two fluid model characteristic of superfluids, in which special laws of nature, not ordinarily seen during ordinary high entropy states become evident. The juncture between the fourth and fifth yogic state may be analogous to such a "Lambda critical point." The fact that as increasing order supervenes in consciousness, critical phase changes occur short of the absolute, making the whole process strikingly similar to the behavior of He-4 near zero degrees K It may be that such siddhis as levitation, (recently announced by the TM group), as well as more ordinary powers such as precognition, telepathy, etc. are effects of this change in laws which appear to occur discontinuously in atomic structure near, but not at absolute zero. For example, superconductivity in He-3 might be analogous to resonant superconductive cell firing under high frequency electric vibrations in biomolecules of the type proposed by Froelich, and also with one another according to an AC Josephson effect. The analogue of second sound has not yet been found.
The discontinuities of the accretive, replicative, and mutualistic phases of growth have already been enunciated by Land (1974). As one moves from disorder to order it is also possible that as one nears order there occur phase transitions analogous to the ones seen in the two previous situations. Such discontinuities might have important implications for biological and developmental theory.
Let us push the quantum analogy just a bit further. In atomic energy levels, there is not just one, but there are several. These levels are related one to another in a series of harmonic overtones.
Indeed, Domash (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1978:658) declares:
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Indeed, the idea that the functioning of the brain which gives rise to the everyday experience of thinking is in itself inherently quantum mechanical, is not a new one among physicists. Niels Bohr suggested that thought involved such small energies in the brain as to be necessarily governed by quantum effects; David Bohm speculated further that thinking and shifts of attention seem to behave subjectively according to an uncertainty principle - perhaps the very same uncertainty principle as that characteristic of quantum physics.
A related view is due to Sudarshan, who has developed the idea that the self-referent quality of consciousness, and with it the multiple co-existing levels of poetic, non-logical, nonlinear, mutually contradictory thoughts and feelings characteristic of the human mind, are much better modeled by the non-commutative (self-referent) operator dynamics of quantum theory than they are by classical dynamics.
In addition, it may be argued that the quantum theory of measurement, which, in the view of Wigner, points indisputably to an intimate and unavoidable relationship between the quantum mechanical wave function and human consciousness, is in itself a reason to seek for quantum mechanisms in the mind. In Wigner's words, 'The very study of the physical world (has) led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality' and 'all the possible knowledge concerning any object can be given as its wave function.' Such a view is also implicit in Heisenberg's statement that 'the laws of nature which we formulate mathematically deal no longer with the particles themselves but with our knowledge of the elementary particles,' that is, that quantum dynamics is a dynamics of states of knowledge, excitations of consciousness, as much as it is a dynamics of physical objects.
Let us summarize what we have learned about The Operations of Increasing Order:
1 ) As order increased (or entropy decreases) in a system, a series of discontinuous states ensue, each with characteristic emergent functions of higher power, authority or scope.
Viz:
a) Dodd's increasing order in n + n and nn . (Gowan 1975:407-8)3
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b) Superfluidity and superconductivity of gases near zero degrees absolute (Kelvin).
c) Powers of individuals in developmental stage theory.
d) Increasing resonance effects of lattice vibration in crystals, regular polyhedra, and the right hemisphere.
e) Jhanas (see Table VI-4)
2) Order is occasioned by:
a) Regularity, and decrease of randomness.
b) Coincidence of variables at same value (as nn instead of nr; n x n instead of n x r)3
c) Removal of need for statistical law which allows microscopic order to be macroscopic order.
d) Life
3) Order results in escalation: discontinuity, succession, emergence, differentiation, integration.
We have enunciated two concepts in this essay, both with indifferent success. The first is that near conditions of total order in a system, there may emerge a "two fluid" phenomenon wherein all of the entropy is confined to a particular domain, leaving the rest in a state of perfect order, and hence unusual unbounded properties. The second that the effects of increasing order, near a state of complete order in a system are discontinuous, emergent, and integrative. The rest of these essays will attempt some examples of these effects in discrete areas, but the reader may well be able to adduce others unknown or unsuspected by the author. As we end this chapter the author is conscious of only partial success at explicating some very new and controversial ideas. Much of the material herein is so theoretical and general that it needs fleshing out in the chapters to follow before any semblance of understanding can be reached. It is therefore, suggested that these be read next, and that at the end, the reader return to this chapter which contains the general statement.
These subsequent essays each reflect different aspects of the generality. Exotic Human Powers and Abilities treats of the expansion of human abilities in three domains, phylogenic, ontogenic, and particularly cosmogenic. There is then a shorter essay on Genius, Precocity and Reincarnation, and another on
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Altered States of Consciousness: A Taxonomy. This is followed by Form as Devolution of Cosmic Substance, and then by The Three-Fold Body of the Buddha. The book ends with a final summary chapter.
The motto on the Great Seal describes the United States of America as "A New Order of Society," (as illustrated on the reverse of the dollar bill). What has been attempted here is a similar description of a new order of humanity, with new and enlarged powers and abilities, which lie within mankind's purview, though often not realized or understood . . . But Popol Vul, the Mayan Bible says it best:
Let there be Light!
Let the dawn arise over heavens and earth!
There can be no glory, no splendor
Until the humanistic being exists
The fully developed man.
FOOTNOTES:
1 The naive reader may wish to start at the bottom of page 39 for a more informal presentation from a popular speech.
2 At this point the author-speaker referred to Table 0-2 (p.22).
3 For more on Dodd see Gowan 1975:392-408.
4 Found herein as table 6-4.
ADDENDUM: If we ask why the 2-fluid model near total order, (see p. 33, paragraph 1), the answer may be entropy is not eternally divisible but at some state there is minimum packet, Em. Then Dp (here tm), has relationship: NEM =Heat. where N= number of units in system.
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CHAPTER 2
The Exotic Abilities of Mankind
'My inference is a different one; it is that the human personality has both material and psychological powers that we do not know. In our present state of knowledge, we are not in a position to know.'
-Charles Richet
When Pope in 1711 told us that "the proper study of mankind is man," he did not realize how much our species objects to self-scrutiny. Even today, some readers will find this chapter unusual, and others unacceptable. Nevertheless, it must treat of this necessary and important subject, if we are to advance in knowledge and self-concept. Our task is two-fold: first to produce a map or taxonomy of the domain, and second to categorize various incidents and accounts into that paradigm.
By "mankind" (with apologies to feminists) we shall mean the human race collectively, (as in the first sense of the dictionary definition.) By "ability" we shall, in accordance with the same authority, mean "the power or capacity to do or act in any relation" as well as "talents, mental gifts or endowments." Thus ability involves both knowledge and power.
It may be desirable to linger for a moment on the word "exotic," one of whose definitions is "strikingly unusual." Curiously enough, it is not the magnitude and ability of a power which excites admiration and surprise in us, it is the "strikingly unusual" aspect. The ability of a pigeon to "home" is a major example of spatial visualization, not possessed by a majority of humans, yet it is not considered "exotic" because it is a common phylogenic ability of homing pigeons.
One may turn this point around, and note that abilities which are now considered exotic and occult, may someday be considered commonplace and ordinary. The derivation of the word "to read" for example, is cognate to a kind of divination, because when reading first was introduced, the common folk who could not read felt it was an occult power. . .
For "occult" let us substitute "latent, subconscious cognitive ability," and stipulate that such ability is the product of right
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hemisphere functioning, in contradistinction to most "accepted" talents, which are the product of left hemisphere functioning, - verbal ability being a prime example.
While it does not write or speak, the right hemisphere seems to have enormous advantages over the left in its ability to contact an impersonal universal source of knowledge which we have elsewhere (Gowan 1975:3) called "the collective preconscious" or the "numinous." This giant computer memory (outside of time and space) is the source of all creativity, all paranormal knowing, all of the hidden (occult) faculties. Hence it represents an enormous expansions of man's powers, and forms the central explanation of this chapter.
With this understanding behind us, we are left with two points of procedure:
1) How to gain easy access to right hemisphere functioning, and
2) How to mediate right hemisphere, (dumb, non-verbal), knowledge through the left hemisphere so as to have a verbal output.
Since we are elsewhere on record in these regards, (Gowan 1978a) we shall merely summarize here that both operations are easily executed with a little practice, and go on to other implications.
One of the most important of these is that the entire present theory of intelligence (as exemplified by the Structure of Intellect model) is really a map of left hemisphere functioning, as is the Stanford-Binet Individual Intelligence Test (and all other IQ measures). We have not really begun to map the possibilities of the right hemisphere.
That the potential talents of mankind lie supine in most of us is evident from Jane Robert's "Seth" (1974:333) who declares:
"The performance of great athletes gives evidence of abilities inherent in the human form that are little used. Great artists by their very works demonstrate other attributes latent in the race as a whole ... Within the experience of your race lie all the patterns that would point to some fully developed
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human being, in which all inherent tendencies were given full plan and come to fruition."
That this development process in some people may continue throughout life, involving increasing escalation through right hemisphere function is also "Seth's" view, (ibid:294):
"As the mind within the body clearly sees its earthly time coming to an end, mental and physical accelerations take place. These are in many ways like adolescent experiences in their great bursts of creative activity ... and the preparation for a completely new kind of personality growth and fulfillment ... Many instances of the growth of consciousness, and mental and psychic growth are interpreted by you as senility . . . The experiences, however, affect the right hemisphere of the brain, in such a way that abilities are released in somewhat the same manner as an adolescent's . . . The individual at this time begins to see beyond temporal life, to open up dimensions of awareness ... This is one of the most creative, valuable aspects of your lives ... Old age is a highly creative part of living . . . Even the chemical and hormonal changes are those that are conducive to spiritual and psychic growth . ."
Consider the prescience of the North American Reviewer, (April 1855, as quoted by Podmore 1902:290), in attempting a theory to account for some of the phenomena of physical mediumship: "it is probably . . . the right hemisphere of the brain which in the trance state acts independently of its usual controlling centers in the left hemisphere ..."
The inspiration which is always attendant upon genius appears to follow from the easy production of right hemisphere images, which are then mediated by the left hemisphere into intellectually negotiable form. Consider Tyrrell (1936:30ff):
"It is a highly significant, though generally neglected, fact that those creations of the human mind, which have borne preeminently the stamp of originality and greatness, have not come from within the region of consciousness. They have come from beyond consciousness, knocking at its door for admittance: they have flowed into it, sometimes slowly as if by seepage, but often with a burst of overwhelming power. This fact did not escape the keen observation of Socrates: 'I soon found,' he said, 'that it is not by wisdom that the poets create their works, but by a certain natural power and
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by inspiration, like soothsayers and prophets, who say many fine things, but who understand nothing of what they say.'
"How comes it that the finest products of the mind are, in this sense, extramental? What is there outside consciousness which can produce them? They come not only with power, but often with something exotic and other-worldly about them. Sometimes they bring with them a sense of exquisite joy. In his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Shelley says: 'Sudden thy shadow fell on me; I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy.' And there is also a sense of revelation. In Mont Blanc he exclaims: 'Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled the vale of life and death?' The task of consciousness is not to create but to seize this inrush and express it. The difficulty is immense.
"'Poetry,' declared Shelley, 'is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will.' A man cannot say: 'I will write poetry. The greatest poet even cannot say it.' One after another the great writers, poets, and artists confirm the fact that their work comes to them from beyond the threshold of consciousness. It is not as though this material came passively floating towards them. It is imperious, dynamic, and willful. Blake said of his poem, Milton: 'I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will.'
"Keats said that the description of Apollo in the third book of Hyperion came to him 'by chance or magic - to be, as it were, something given to him.' He said also that he had 'not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after he had composed and written it down.' It had then struck him with astonishment and seemed rather the production of another person than his own.
"Madame Guyon confesses that 'before writing I did not know what I was going to write; while writing I saw that I was writing things I had never known.'
"Goethe said of his poems: 'The songs made me; not I them.'
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"Wordsworth told Bonamy Price that the line in his ode beginning: "Fallings from us, vanishings,' which has since puzzled so many readers, refers to those trance-like states to which he was at one time subject. During these moments the world around him seemed unreal and the poet had occasionally to use his strength against an object, such as a gatepost, to reassure himself.' And when the power would not come, the conscious mind was helpless. 'William tired himself with hammering at a passage,' wrote Dorothy Wordsworth. It was useless if the power was denied.
"Dickens declared that when he sat down to his book, 'Some beneficent power showed it all to him.' And Thackeray says in the Roundabout Papers: 'I have been surprised at the observations made by some of my characters. It seems as if an occult Power was moving the pen.'"
In searching therefore, for "occult" and exotic abilities possessed by only a few, we are not so much entering arcane paths, as we are attempting to catch the first faint glimpses of a "shore dimly seen," -- emerging powers of mankind, now seen in a few rare and generally higher developed individuals, someday, hopefully, to be seen in the generality of men. We are furthermore attempting to show that these powers are associated with the operation of increasing order both in the individual integration, and in the evolution of society.
Mental abilities, according to the Guilford SOI model depend on three components:
1) Input information (contents).
2) Throughput process (process).
3) Output action (product).
In the usual mental abilities, input is conveyed to be mind through the senses. A semantic question then arises: are there higher abilities (telepathy might be an example) where input information is not received from the senses? We will solve this dilemma by ukase: input must be received through senses: where a known sense does not exist, we simply postulate the existence of an unknown one.
Another semantic question has to do with the difference between quantity and quality. Let us say that an individual or
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species a) has a higher ability by a factor of X to discern a certain sensory level than another individual or species b) if X=2, the difference is quantitative. But suppose X=1 million, have we now a qualitative difference? Since Wechsler (1974) laid down the law for the limit of inter-individual differences in the same species as "e", (2.718), we shall assume that this is the limit between quantitative and qualitative differences in one species. These words merely mean that the ability is operated on a different principle in one case than the other. We will leave undefined the limits between quantitative and qualitative differences between species.
Let us informally define "exotic abilities" by the following characteristics:
EXOTIC ABILITIES
1) Are not miraculous and are not generally considered miraculous by those who possess them. They are considered matter-of-fact extensions of more ordinary abilities.
2) They are "shy" abilities, never used for spectacular effects, best operated when not paid attention to, often only inferred by others, because not claimed by the individual, and often only realized after the fact.
3) They require finer extensions of ordinary powers of more magnitude of difference. They are, therefore, found in those who have practiced careful and precise inspection in some discipline, and who are open to the discrepancies afforded by conventional thought about the discipline.
4) They are ephemeral and tenuously held, hence, usually not under the full control of the possessor, but available to him at some times more than others. They are not graces, nor illustrations of divine nor cosmic favor. They should, therefore, never be regarded by the possessor with spiritual pride but only as adventitious occurrences.
5) They depend upon the most careful tuning and attention to small vibrations, and the consequent power to amplify that which has come to the mind as a radio signal.
6) They are creative in the sense of extending the incubation process from an unconscious to an intuitional
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practice.
7) Nevertheless, the exact mechanism of their practice and production is almost never well understood by the possessor.
8) They represent in wild form the nascent sport or mutant ability which can by practice and education be domesticated into an enhanced power.
9) They represent earnests of the fact that man is created in the cosmic image and that mankind in totality possesses in posse all of the transcendent abilities of his Creator.
To those who wonder about the commensurability of exotic and conventional abilities, we may point out as follows:
1 ) There is no easy place to draw a distinction between ordinary and exotic abilities; they form a taxonomy in a family, rather than a dichotomy of distinction.
2) Not only are the abilities similar, but so are their first derivatives: precocity in respect to exotic abilities seems very similar to precocity in respect to ordinary abilities.
3) A large number of mystics (i.e., those possessed of exotic abilities) have also been very bright, suggesting that ordinary and exotic abilities are positively correlated with each other in similar fashion to the positive correlation among ordinary abilities.
4) The specification of exotic abilities (e.g., one saint will have this power, another saint that power) and the rare versatility of exotic abilities in masters (such as Jesus) is very similar to the corresponding psychological manifestations of conventional abilities in those possessed of a strong aptitude (e.g., Mozart) compared with a universal genius (e.g., Goethe, Leonardo, Einstein).
5) The development of exotic abilities through exercise, education, experience and eduction by a mentor is very similar in both kinds of abilities.
Biofeedback expert Barbara Brown, author of New Mind, New Body, at a Los Angeles conference spoke of the laws of "super-mind" (as reported by Ferguson 1978:2, July 3, 1978):
Human beings possess an innate awareness of the state of their
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biological being, from the total physical body image down to the awareness of a single cell.
Human beings possess an innate ability to form complex abstract concepts from primal sensory data.
Human beings possess an innate ability to exert control over the direction and flow of nerve impulses in any nerve of the body of their choosing.
The human mind has the innate ability to supervene and direct the physical activities of every physiologic function of the body, within the limits of physical nature.
The mind of human beings can control the physical activity of the brain. (... The ultimate control of the brain by the mind itself is, of course, during thinking .... Thinking is voluntary control of the brain.)
All diseases of society originate in the intellectual processes of man.
The highest-order intellectual capacities of man reside in and may always reside in what we call the unconscious.
It is obvious from the foregoing that many human powers and abilities are not fully conscious, being part of the autonomic nervous system or skin-reaction. The bringing of this somatic knowledge to consciousness and, hence, to control is part of biofeedback procedure. The concept is also enlightening in clarifying the distinction between physical powers and mental abilities. It may be that this difference is merely one between prototaxic (somatic abilities), such as skin-reaction, and syntaxic (cognitive) abilities, such as verbal intelligence. The process of claiming regnancy over the latent exotic factors of intellect may merely reduce to the ability to pay more conscious attention (and hence develop control) over natural physiological powers.
The concept that not all knowledge is gathered from the senses is at least as old as Plotinus and forms the basis of most mystical belief as well as transcendentalism, as witness Ellis (Miller 1957:23):
That belief we term Transcendentalism .... maintains that man has ideas that come not through the five senses or the powers of reasoning, but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence....
Wilber (1977) quotes Kahn as follows:
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The mental functioning which expresses itself as 'logical reasoning' on the gross plane of consciousness has other plane-specific manifestations on the other 'inner' planes of consciousness. Specifically, the cognitive power of logic is described as the gross plane expression of the cognitive power which in the inner planes is referred to hierarchically as intuition, inspiration, illumination, and enlightenment.
Powell (1965:222) in a chapter on the subject declares:
Psychic powers can be developed by anyone ... Astral senses exist in all men, but are latent in most and, generally, need to be artificially forced, if they are to be used in the present state of evolution.
He declares that their possession does not necessarily mean high moral character and counsels against the dangers inherent in a premature development.
Dr. Mary Meeker, protege of Prof. Guilford and eminent explicator of the Structure of Intellect theory of intelligence, wrote to the author in a private communication (Sept. 12, 1979) as follows:
No, I do not believe, and this is only hypothetical, that precognitive, aura seeing, or other non documented metaphysical abilities are in the figural abilities dimensions.
My thought is that clairvoyance is heightened visual cognition, that clairaudience is heightened auditory cognition - that these metaphysical abilities are actual cognition abilities developed beyond that which most of us enjoy. In other words, the cognition (which I label as receptive intelligence) is better developed and more finely tuned, gifted cognition abilities.
Meeker concludes (from an unpublished article on Psychic Children):
Thus the heightened sensitivity in awareness either auditory (clairaudient) or visual (clairvoyant) may be a second level in the spiral of intelligence in which the circle starting with cognition, memory, evaluation, convergent production and divergent production, further enhance the ability to cognize at a more keen level.
That respectable scientists are reluctantly coming to new
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and open-ended conclusions regarding the incipient powers of man's mind is evident in this Brain/Mind Bulletin (July 3, 1978) report of remarks by the eminent psychologist Carl Rogers at a Los Angeles convention:
Perhaps our more primitive capabilities, our largely unused right brain, is beginning to function again, as it so often does in the so-called less-civilized societies. Perhaps this metaphoric mind can come to know a universe that is non-linear, in which the terms time and space come to have very different meanings.
Here I'm going to limit myself to my own observations and experiences. I have no explanation for which I shall describe - I simply know that I have observed at first hand, and experienced myself, phenomena I cannot explain on a rational basis or in terms of the scientific laws that I know. A few years ago I would have scoffed at the possibility of any such phenomena, but I can't quite deny the evidence of my senses.
I have observed incidents among friends of mine [that] can only be described as telepathic communication. This makes me ready to believe the scientist John Lilly, who tells of his experiences in such communication which came about quite unexpectedly. I've had some experience with clairvoyants.
How can we account for such experiences and many others like them that have been reported? Are there unknown waves in the atmosphere through which visual and psychological messages can be sent and received? I don't know. Even more mysterious to me is precognition...
I've also been forced to reconsider the possibility of reincarnation, which in the past I'll admit I thought was a ridiculous belief.
I don't know how this world of the paranormal may change us, but I believe we are perhaps opening up vast new fields of knowledge and power, a quantum leap. And every time new forces or energies have been discovered in our universe, they have changed our perception of reality and have opened new doors and new opportunities for the human being. It seems possible that this is in the process of occurring again.
Contrary to the belief of many, this expanding discovery of the psychic world is in no way anti-scientific. In the most
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basic of sciences, physics, creative discoveries are taking us closer and closer to a mystic view of life, to a recognition that the more we know, the nearer our thinking is to that of the ancient sages.
In a similar vein Orme-Johnson and Farrow (1977:703) say:
After the TM-Sidhi practices, many areas of consciousness are found to be open that were previously not available to awareness. With regular practice there arises a natural tendency for desires to meet spontaneous fulfillment from nature, a growth of ability to anticipate events, an improvement in intuition and a striking degree of harmony with the surroundings. This is amply illustrated by the study of intelligence, creativity, field independence, and behavioral flexibility by Orme-Johnson and Granieri (paper 103). In this study intelligence and creativity were found to be initially high and to increase even further during the course. In the case of field independence, students were able to complete the tests at as much as 200% of the speed the tests were designed for, necessitating major adjustments to prevent a 'ceiling effect.' It should be remembered that these tests, although well-validated, measure only a fraction of the individual's true abilities, and hardly do justice to the enormous potential offered by the state of enlightenment. At the same time they amply demonstrate the degree to which human potential has been underestimated in the past.
2.1) Animal Senses and Their Refinement
In primitive forms of an evolving organism, sensual levels so low as to be virtually non-existent, may become, because of adaptation due to survival value, developed into more and more acute receptors.
Let us, therefore, note a few examples: first of animals which have evolved far more acute forms of one of the five senses than humans possess, and then of animals which have evolved other senses. Most of these are drawn from the Jonas and Jonas book, Other Senses, Other Worlds (1976).
A German sheep-dog's nose is one million times more acute than a human's (Jonas and Jonas 1976:23); it has 44 times as many olfactory-sensory brain cells. A moth's ability in this area is a million times more acute than a dog's: "A male moth can smell the
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-sex scent signal of a female of its own kind as far away as 20 kilometers." ibid:24)
A bee's complex eye polarizes light, and the bee can remember its own path as well as calculate "the angular velocity and celestial path of the sun from moment to moment, even on a cloudy day." (ibid:63) This ability enables the bee not only to locate honey sources and return straight to the hive, but even to tell other bees about the source.
The aural powers of the dolphin are awesome. It apparently can carry on two conversations at once, as different halves of the brain pick up different signals on different frequencies, but can also receive information about food and even texture by analysis of sound vibrations (ibid: 122,130). Dolphins are not the only creatures possessing unusual sound discrimination. Bats can discriminate between sonic pulses separated by as little as .001 second (ibid: 132). Each bat seems to emit its own frequency, and bats can avoid objects in the dark by sonic radar, and can locate the source of sound by moving the ears up to 60 times per second (ibid: 133).
Jonas and Jonas report (ibid: 122):
The remarkable thing about the large cetacean brain is that its two hemispheres often work separately, and what is more, rest separately. When a dolphin sleeps one of its eyes is always open and alert, as is the brain hemisphere to which it reports."
Again, on the remarkable sensing abilities of fish (ibid:97): Lateral organs of electric fish react to a drop on voltage of .03 millionth of volt per cm (comparable to an eye which can see a single quantum of light).
Some fish, notably the sole, respond to temperature changes in the water of as little as .03C. ". . . a fish could be trained to recognize a specific temperature, say 580F within 1 dg. of accuracy, irrespective of whether the fish came from a warmer or colder environment." The Australian bush turkey maintains the heat of its eggs at a constant temperature of 330C: "The bird was so sensitive to heat differences that its tongue was within a . 1 degree of thermometer accuracy." (ibid:159) Jonas and Jonas (ibid: 129-30) describe echo-location, a property in some animals which
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enables sounds to be felt as vibration in the bones, and then to be noted directionally. In this connection Hitching (1978:148) says:
It has long been apparent that some creatures have additional ways of communicating with one another and of perceiving information. The biologist Juan Bigu del Blanco, working at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, says that among the more striking and unusual methods are 'sonar techniques (bats, etc.), electric field scanning and sensing (certain fish), temperature scanning (some snakes), sensing by means of chemicals (silkworms), sensing by movement or ritualization (monkeys, bees, etc.). There are a variety of different known methods of communication, but there are also a great number of cases in which the information transfer mechanism is far from being clear.'
Tromp (1949:6) in a scholarly examination of bioluminescence in lower animals concludes that the radiation:
.... is mainly due to luciferous bacteria. In the first group the radiation is bound to certain organs of the body, it is subject to the will-power of the organism and depends on the presence of free oxygen. However, the radiation is not a function of life only, as the light organs of certain insects, when made wet, can radiate a long time after death.
Due to the studies of Radzizewsky a.o., we know that many organic compounds occurring in living organisms, such as fats, lecithin, cholesterin, essential oils, gallic acid, glucose, etc., radiate in alkaline solutions under certain conditions at normal or slightly increased temperature if they are exposed to free oxygen (particularly if they are shaken). This explains why many marine organisms only radiate in a strong surf.
DuBois was able to isolate two protein substances, luciferin and luciferase, which when together produce light, a process responsible for light phenomena in several insects and molluscs.
A. EXAMPLES OF LUCIFEROUS ANIMALS
A few striking examples are the following:
Luciferous trails of certain millipedes;
luciferous water round the Ostracod crab pyrocypris;
pholas dactylus, a stone borer, that radiates light when two substances are brought together: a crystalline substance luciferin) and a ferment (luciferase);
red light radiated by the rib-jelly fish (salpen and cleodora);
First let us ask: 'What state of mind and brain often precedes and accompanies insights and glimpses of unitive consciousness?' Almost invariably there is a stilling or emptying (Kapleau, 1965) of the mind and an accompanying regularity and slowing of the brain wave in which alpha or theta is produced (Green and Green, 1977). Normally our attention hops from one thought or event to another, and the brain displays rapid, irregular beta waves (Kasamatsu and Hirai, 1973). As one develops meditation, however, the mind is no longer distracted by the flow of images and becomes quiet. When this occurs, the brain seems to be less active. It is at this point that resonance can take place between the brain's explicate holographic structure and the implicate holographic structure. This resonance is analogous to the resonance occurring between two tuning forks. If the molecular structure, shape, and size of the tuning forks is such that they produce the same frequency of sound when struck, then, if the forks are placed near one another and one of them is struck, a similar vibration will be elicited from the other fork. This resonance is made possible by the structural similarity between the two forks. Similarly, in the case of personal and transpersonal consciousness, the resonance between the holographic structure of the brain and that of the universe is due, in part, to the structural similarity. The resonance allows for the transference of information from the implicate order to the explicate order. Since the entirety
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of the explicate order is encoded throughout the implicate order, the resonance provides personal consciousness with access to all knowledge.
This, however, is not wholly true. If it were entirely true, then one would expect various highly enlightened individuals to have written out in all its rigor Einstein's theory of relativity, and the DNA code, centuries ago. The access personal consciousness has to the implicate order is limited by a residue of memories, both recent and long term, that remain encoded in the cortex. This residue of memories has a particular configuration which, like a 'reference beam,' allows the explicate holographic structure of the brain to resonate with only a small subset of the information in the implicate structure, that is, only that information which is directly relevant to the memories.
When a numinous thought form is to be actualized in our world of experience, despite its specific nature, its non-categoricalness dictates that it be experienced in multiples: which may be distributed over either space or time. (If distributed over both, the coincidences will hardly be noticed.)
Thus with regard to accidents, the result may be a series of similar accidents at the same or near times in widely separated spots, or they may be a series of accidents in the same spot over various times. What appears determined is the thought form (often with amazingly coincidental specifics), but the results are at least partly under the control of the wise/brave utilization of humans connected with the situation at the time of occurrence versus stupid/unintelligent action in the crisis.
We notice such coincidences with regard to dramatic events, but similar ones exist in creative thought forms. When the zeitgeist is opportune, the same non-categorical impulse will be manifested in several dedicated scientists, artists or researchers at the same time in different places, and they will each add an idiosyncratic flavor to a common discovery or new idea.
Jung (1960) in a booklet called Synchronicity, first explicated this multiple effect in passing from the non-categorical to the categorical, but despite his own experiences with it (p. 28), and 22 examples of it (pp. 14-15), he was unable to account for the reason developed here.
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6e) The void (absolute), the realm of potentiality, and the world of manifestation.
We introduce this theory here, although further explication of it must wait until Chapter VII. In line with the triplicity of substance, the Avatamsaka Sutra tells us that Buddha (here taken to mean All That Is) has a threefold body:
1) an aspect of Essence (dharma-kaya)
2) an aspect of potentiality (sambhoga-kaya)
3) an aspect of manifestation (nirmana-kaya)
Essence appears to our consciousness simply as "voidness: or sunyata, (emptyness)," and we delay any further discussion of it until later on.
It is the relationship between the level of potentiality and the level of manifestation which is useful to develop at this stage. This theory hypothesizes a multi-dimensional plenum of all possibilities, where thoughts and images take the place of things on our level. While there is pressure for each of them to manifest, only one out of each set is enabled to do so. We can gain access to this higher realm through dreams and in right-hemisphere creative imagery. It is the abode of the etheric body as well as of archtypes, myths, and ritual; hence, it is the generating area for what we see in a world of effect. It is also the environment of altered states of consciousness. We can, therefore, roughly stereotype the left hemisphere as the one attentive to the world of manifestation, while the right hemisphere is attentive to the realm of all potentiality.
6f) Photon-quenching
Bearden's (1977) theory hypothesizes that it is precisely the photons in the one octave spectrum of vision which quench constant tulpoid activity and pressure from the realm of all potentialities to manifest here. Indeed, from an evolutionary aspect, life on earth has evolved because in this octave its vision is secured from this kaleidoscopic realm and is safe in the physical world of material manifestation. When such light is absent (at night) or when reversed (as by the full moon), psychic phenomena find a lowered manifestation threshold and, hence, are more often seen.
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6g) Prigogine's Theory of Dissipative Structures4
A Belgian chemist, Dr. Ilya Prigogine, was awarded a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1977 for his theory of dissipative structures. According to Brainl/Mind Bulletin (May 21, 1979), this theory states that "Order emerges because of entropy not despite it":
The more complex a structure, the more energy it must dissipate to maintain all that complexity. This flux of energy makes the system highly unstable, subject to internal fluctuations - and sudden change. If these fluctuations or perturbations reach a critical size, they are amplified by the system's many connections - and can drive the system into a new state even more ordered, coherent, and connected. The new state occurs as a sudden shift.
The brain is such a complex structure, and the theory hence explains both the suddenness of altered states of consciousness, and the increased insights into them. Society, itself, is another such complex structure. There a creative minority can cause an escalation into a new order.
Prigogine's model also is compatible with the holographic paradigm. The dissipative structures may represent the way Bohm's implicate components of reality become explicate, that is, how changes take place from the level of essence to the level of potentiality and finally to the level of manifestation.
Editor Ferguson (B/M Bulletin 4:13:4) concludes: "The more complex a system, the greater its potential for self-transcendence: its parts cooperate to reorganize it. The brain is its own evolutionary tool." And again (The Research Reporter 3:3:3, Spring 1979), she says: "Pribram suggested that the dissipative structures may represent the way the "implicate" aspects of reality become "explicate" - that is, how they manifest in time and space from a timeless, spaceless primary order."
Let us hypothesize that the holographic theory of the universe is correct and that there does exist an anterior realm of potentiality which is the home of archetype, myth, dream, creativity, in which thoughts exist as things, a whole dimension larger than this one, and whose presence explains much that is now not comprehended by science. Let us further imagine that all-wise cosmic intelligence desires to establish the rules regarding the
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interaction of human beings with this realm. Would it not be reasonable to assume that the following might be established:
1 ) Mankind has refuge from this realm in daylight spectrum, and in the normal state of consciousness experienced by the left hemisphere.
2) Mankind has, however, access to this realm through the right hemisphere as the percipient of non-ordinary reality through altered states of consciousness.
3) Man has dominion over which of the potentialities of the expanded realm will be manifested in this realm.
4) Right hemisphere imagery is the vehicle through which incubation is able to produce creativity or healing.
0.7) We need to take a more careful look.
Let us imagine that a passenger train is running along a straight track on one side of which there is an indefinitely long, high wall. The setting sun throws moving shadows of the train and its passengers onto the wall. You are now asked if the shadows explain the phenomena of the moving train and its occupants.
We are, of course, back to the "cave" analogy of Socrates and Bacon when asked the question: "Do scientific and essentially rational explanations (such as those in this book), actually "explain" the phenomena they discuss, or do they merely describe it and analyze it so that it can be understood by our minds?" In one dictionary sense of "explain" (i.e., to make intelligible), they probably do; but in a deeper sense of connecting cause and effect, they seem to leave something to be desired.
As the train homologue indicates, there is a relationship between the action of the train and the moving shadows. But the shadows are a two-dimensional effect of the causes which animate the train and its passengers. They may help us somewhat to understand their movement, but they can never completely account for the whole activity or give us the primal causes for it.
To be more specific, let us suppose that a lady with an old-fashioned hat and her adolescent daughter, hatless and with short hair, are therein observed by their shadows. The lady's shadow is more idiosyncratic, and we can still identify her as she walked around the car. Her daughter, however, becomes indistinct as she
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turns her head or moves about. Only when we see her stationary silhouette can we be sure it is she. Now transfer this analogy to the larger world scene. A scientist would say that the two systems (i.e., the lady and her daughter) behave differently, that is, obey different laws. The one remains relatively constant and identifiable. The other appears and disappears as if by magic. But all this is due merely to our misguided interpretation in two dimensions of cause which is three-dimensional in nature. Can it not be that our misguided interpretation of nature partakes of the same partiality?
In the metaphor of the divided line (Raven J. A. Classical Quarterly July 1953, p. 22-32), let AB = images (shadows), let AC = objects (things), let CD = thought or ideal images (such as those in geometry), and let DE = dialectical thought ideals (beauty, truth, goodness). Then CE/AC = DE/CD = BC/AB, whence BC = CD, and is the mean proportional between AB (images) and DE (ideals). Hence, conjecture is to belief as understanding is to the exercise of reason. The ratio of the proportion is that as images are the shadows of things, so thought images are the shadows of ideas. In this context recall Socrates in the Symposium: ". . . In that communion, he would bring forth not images of Beauty, but Beauty herself . . ." Or to put it more modernly, using the Pribram-Bohm holographic model: AB is the holographic (virtual) image of the real object (AC), all this being in sensory reality; but this is the same ratio, in ultimate reality, as thought images (which are holographic reproductions (CD) of ultimate reality (ideals, (DE)). The relationship between AB (images or shadows) and DE (ideals or primal causes) is very much the relationship between the train shadows on the wall and the primal causes of them.
We have now examined a number of possible paradigms, all allowing for a more expanded view of physics than has previously been the case. We do not insist that these are sufficient for the data developed here and elsewhere (1974, 1975), but we suggest that they may be necessary.
We must always remind ourselves that not only is our intuition (since time and space bound) not able to handle adequately the relationships in a larger vivency, but even our language does not contain the expanded nouns and the untensed verbs which adequately define the enlarged relationships in a higher realm. Let us look at some of the problems more in detail.
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If everything in the physical world is but the holographic (virtual) image of some anterior substance, then every thing, event, person or entity (TEPE) has a para-mundane or para-logical essence in that it is non-categorical and, hence, incapable of being fully explained by any syntaxic knowledge no matter how refined. For any discipline of syntaxic knowledge will present a categorical (one discrete and particular aspect), of the metaphysical TEPE, and for every TEPE there is more than one aspect. (Like the elephant and the blind Hindus.) Each view (like each kind of flat projection of the globe) will have certain strengths and corresponding weaknesses. The concept of categoricalness, so useful in cognitive discourse, is only a temporary crutch for the developing ego.
It follows that there is an infinite regression of constructs to explain the physical universe (or anything else), and that while each succeeding construct gets us nearer the truth, no such construct will ever finally reach ultimate truth. Furthermore, for every construct which attempts to get near the truth (the wave theory of light), there will be found a complementary or antithetical construct (corpuscular theory of light) which appears paradoxical, thus demonstrating the non-categorical nature of the metaphysical substratum.
Constructs are, hence, maps of the terrain, useful in orientation and guidance, but by no means to be confused with reality. Like each map, each construct has certain disadvantages. Experience is the ineffable reality; our constructs are our fallible and imperfect and incomplete perceptions and knowledge of experience - in other words, a single categorical impression of a noncategorical experience.
While it is probable that absolute knowledge about ultimate reality is ineffable in a categorical sense, it may be very useful to make partial excursions into such a realm for the sake of higher information about our own state which it may develop. By analogue it may be impossible to "intuit" the "surface" of a four dimensional object, but it may be very useful to examine by partial derivatives the slope of particular contours, especially as to maxima and minima. In a non-mathematical sense this is what the remaining essays in this book are about. They attempt partial excursions into such a realm with the idea of bringing back particular understandings in discrete areas.
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Chapter I contains the title essay, hazarding a guess that discontinuities with interesting properties (after the two-fluid model) occur near the extremities of the order-entropy continuum. Chapter II begins a specific and important example of the same, by examining exotic factors of human intellect. Chapter III and IV continue this search with a discussion of powers and abilities of the human mind which have heretofore been considered miraculous, and attempts to arrange them into a taxonomy. These two chapters form the heart of the book. Chapter V is an essay on "Genius, Precocity, and Reincarnation." Chapter VI is a treatise on "Altered States of Consciousness: A Taxonomy." Chapter VII is a discussion on "Form as Devolution of Cosmic Substance," which seeks to answer the question: "Where does imagery come from?" Chapter VIII, perhaps the most profound in the book, is called "The Three-fold Body of the Buddha," and discusses eternal triplicities. The final chapter is a summary and conclusion.
This is a book on psychic science and the individual, which follows in the path of the great masters Mesmer, von Reichenbach, Zollner, Crookes, Richet, Reich, Tromp, and Bentov. These men had the courage to believe and state that man has powers that conventional science has not appreciated. But instead of becoming magicians, they were true to their scientific background and believed that this new area should be adjoined to science, not demarcated from it. We join them in that honorable effort.
FOOTNOTES:
1. For a good explanation of Bohm's "implicate-explicate" theory, see Zukav (1979:323ff).
2. The vacuum state appears to represent energy in potential (Cf Zukav 1979: 241), which in a footnote says: "The point is that empty space is not really 'nothing.' Empty space has infinite [potential] energy. According to Sarfatti, a virtual process gets triggered by a superluminal (faster-than-light) jump of negentropy (order or information) which briefly organizes some of the infinite vacuum energy to make the virtual particle." (This is an illustration of what Wilber (1978:58) calls microgeny, the continual dance of Shiva, which each moment goes through the permutations (changes) of essence, potentiality, and manifestation.)
3. The reader who wishes further discussion of this subject is referred to Bentov 1977:8-25.
4. For an extensive article by Prigogine, see pp. 93-129 of Jantsch E. and Waddington, C. H., Evolution and Consciousness, Addison-Wesley Inc., 1976.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS: OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD (by Dudley Lynch)
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION 1
.1 Things Are Not What They Seem 1
.2 Physical Reality is Junior to Normal State 4
.3 Knowledge Must Change and Grow 5
.4 The Number of Exceptions to the Present Paradigm Requires Change 7
.5 This Change is Toward the Holistic and Cosmic 9
.6 Paradigms Exist Which Handle the Exceptions 10
.7 We Need to Decide if Replacement is Necessary 29
1. OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER 33
2. EXOTIC ABILITIES OF MANKIND 47
2.0 Introduction 47
2.1 Animal Senses and Their Refinement 57
2.2 A Taxonomy of Exotic Factors of Intellect 62
2.3 The Etheric Body 66
2.4 Non-Paranormal Human Oddities 68
2.5 Developmental Aspects in Phenotype and Genotype. .72
3. COSMOGENIC POWERS AND ABILITIES 76
3.0 Introduction to Paranormal Powers 76
.01 Telepathy 80
.02 Dowsing 86
.03 Siddhis 93
3.1 Physical Mediumship 98
.10 Mediumship and Possession 99
.11 Psychokinesis 107
.12 Materializations 111
.13 Poltergeist Phenomena 120
.14 Apports 125
.15 Conclusion 128
3.2 Transformations in Space and Time 130
.21 Out-of-Body Experience (OBE) and Bilocation 130
.22 Clairvoyance 138
.23 Precognition 139
.24 Teleportation and Time-Warp 143
3.3 Endothermic and Exothermic Reactions 149
.31 Firewalking 149
.32 Psychic Heat 160
.33 Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) 162
.34 Other Thermal Effects 165
3.4 Stigmata 167
3.5 Electromagnetic Effects: Prana 172
.51 Luminosity and Auras 177
.52 Electromagnetic Properties 181
3.6 Independence from Physical Functions 184
.61 (Breathing, Excretion and Sex Deleted), A Note on Chastity 184
.62 Inedia (not eating) 185
.63 Non-Somnia (not sleeping) 187
3.7 Mortem Effects 187
.71 Transfiguration 188
.72 Translation 188
.73 Automatic Disposal of Body After Death 189
.74 Incorruptibility of Body 189
.75 Knowing Hour of One's Death 189
3.8 Levitation 190
.81 Among Christian Mystics 190
.82 Among Non-Religious Paragnosts 195
.83 Levitation in the TM Siddhi Program 202
.84 Theories to Account for Levitation 204
3.9 Invisibility 206
3.X Body Size and Weight Changes, Abnormal Strength 207
.X1 Elongation 208
.X2 Size and Weight Changes 209
.X3 Extraordinary Strength 210
3.Y Externalization of Sense Organs: Odor of Sanctity 211
.Y1 Conclusion to Chapter 3 212
4. COSMOGENIC MENTAL ABILITIES 214
.01 Psychometry 215
.02 Knowledge of Arrangement and Motion of Stars 217
4.1 Vision of Cosmic Beings 218
4.2 Calm - 219
4.3 Vision Through Opaque Objects: Miraculous Sight. .219
4.4 Miraculous Touch 222
.41 Healing Through Laying-on-of- Hands 223
.42 Psychic Surgery I 228
4.5 Miraculous Hearing: Clairaudience 234
4.6 Empery 236
.61 Over Self 237
.62 Over Others: Orthocognitive Healing 237
.63 Over Animals 245
.64 Over Natural Elements and Other Forms 247
4.7 Adamic Ecstasy 248
.71 Time Recovery and Other Characteristics . . . . .248
.72 Friendliness or Gemeinschaftgefuhl 252
.73 Union-Compassion Healing 253
4.8 Infused Knowledge: Omniscience 254
4.9 Continuous Contact and Union 256
5. GENIUS, PRECOCITY AND REINCARNATION 262
5.0 Introduction 262
5.1 Genius and Some Examples and Conclusions 273
5.2 Precocity as the End Product of Neotony 292
5.3 Reincarnation or Something Grander? 308
5.4 Conclusion 317
6. ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: A TAXONOMY 320
7. FORM AS THE DEVOLUTION OF COSMIC SUBSTANCE 336
8. THE THREE-FOLD BODY OF BUDDHA 348
9. SUMMARY 357
9.1 Recapitulation 357
9.2 Unsolved Problems and Needed Research 360
9.3 Epilogue 367
REFERENCES 373
Comments and Addendum
SUBJECT INDEX 383
TABLES AND FIGURES
CHAPTER I
OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER
"All things begin in order, and so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics in the city of heaven."
- Sir Thomas Browne
ABSTRACT: Considering the continuum of order-entropy, at either end of which 'since there is not enough of the lesser to go around,' a discontinuous two-fluid state model manifests, with emergent and integrative properties. Various examples of this model in physical and in biological systems are then considered.
Let us start with absolute perfection, - an undifferentiated state of absolute order and zero entropy.1 Let us imagine that there is introduced into this yin state some asymmetry. Let us assume that this entropy, E, as it increases has a diluting effect on a specific power, P, and that P is a parameter, taking discrete values, and that with increasing asymmetry, it will decline discontinuously to lower and lower values, until at length it vanishes.
Now let us imagine that there is a second power, P', of which the same is true. Let us further imagine that P and P' interact, so that the interaction is also a significant, discontinuous, and discrete variable. We name the discrete values of P as Po, P1, P2, etc., and similarly for P'. For every P, there will be a "Distance" from perfection, Dp at which the phenomena cease.
We now have a model that tells us that near absolute order or perfection there may be found a series of discontinuous states in which there is escalation of a particular power in that there is sudden and discontinuous appearance of interaction factors which produce emergence (the debut of new powers). Of course, so
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far this is merely a theoretical model, which we shall call "Operations of Increasing Order."
While the model has been derived from imagination only, it is the argument of this essay that is a powerful analog of a number of "real" situations, and that it furnishes us with both understanding and enhanced ability to deal with them. Let us turn, therefore to some possible isomorphic examples.
The simplest and most obvious example of such a discontinuity is the behavior of helium-3 and helium-4 near and below 2.2 Kelvin, (near absolute zero). (We paraphrase the next paragraph from Cohen 1977).
Whereas most substances when cooled become solids at O degrees K, helium-4 shows a phase transition of the lambda type to another liquid state, He I, which has superfluid properties. The He-3 isotope affects this critical point, so that below .87K the homogeneous mixture becomes unstable and splits into two and with a meniscus in the interface. He II emits second sound and He-4 at the transition of He I and He II obeys Bose statistics, whereas He-3 obeys Fermi statistics (because of the odd number of elementary particles and the nuclear spin of 1/2). All this peculiar behavior (for those of us in high entropy) indicates that at critical points near but not at total order (zero degrees K) there is an abrupt change to a different set of laws (quantum macroscopic).
What happens, apparently, is that the quantum laws, which under ordinary conditions of entropy are seen only microscopically, under a condition of near total order, are seen macroscopically. The apparent continuity of the macroscopic law of averages disappears when entropy is not present to smooth the dichotomies, and consequently we see a discontinuous quantum state in the entire system. The fact that near zero, entropy produces an effect of sudden shift of law, - frorn statistical to quantum, - is a most important point. Conditions where laws of probability do not operate are conditions favoring "miracles."
By reversing the words "order" and "entropy" let us now attempt to restate the previous construct negatively. When symmetry breaking occurs in a system of perfect disorder so that some order is introduced into the system, since there is not enough order to go around, the system divides into two domains,
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one of which contains all the order (and some entropy), and the other of which is still in a state of complete disorder. In such a transformation, disorder in general is replaced by disorder in particular.
And now the converse going in the other direction: When in a system the order drops to a very low state so that there is not enough order to go around, the system divides into two domains, one of which contains all the order (and some entropy), and the other of which is degraded to a state of perfect disorder. In such a system, order in general is replaced by order in particular.
What has been described here in theory fits perfectly the experience of multiple personalities in schizophrenia, and the experience of disorder in the body and the environment heightening when there is an overload of disorder in the mind. But others have described these experiences better and earlier from work elsewhere (1978:4:2:145).
In particular, the theories of Van Rhijn (1960) (which will be found in the essay, "Altered States of Consciousness: A Taxonomy" in this book, Chapter VI) are most relevant; and readers are urged to consult the section on "A Taxonomy of States of Consciousness" for further amplification.
Let us again try to state this very important construct in the simplest way possible: When symmetry breaking occurs in a system of perfect order so that some entropy is introduced into the system, since there is not enough entropy to go around, the system divides into two domains, one of which contains all the entropy and the other of which is, hence, still in a state of perfection. In symmetry breaking, order in general is replaced by order in particular.
Now let us state the converse of the previous principle, going from more to less entropy: When in a system the entropy drops to a very low state, so that there is not enough entropy to go around, the system divides into two domains, one of which contains all the entropy (with some order), and the other of which is elevated to a state of perfect order. In such asymmetry breaking, disorder in general is replaced by disorder in particular.
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In stating the general principle in both directions, readers will recognize that in the first instance we have formulated a theory to account for the two fluid state of He-3, while in the latter instance we have formulated a theory to account for the manifestation of the siddhis (see p. 93).
It is worth a little reflection to consider some possible consequences of human analogs to quantum levels in atomic nuclei structure. An atom can only absorb certain discrete quanta of energy. When it does, it undergoes a change of state in which energy is absorbed, but new properties are established. The change is sudden and discontinuous. The atom may emit the quanta of light and revert to its previous state; this action is also sudden and discontinuous.
Now let us compare some human testimony:
"And as he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined about him a light from heaven and he fell to the ground....."
(Acts 9:3).
"There are moments ... when a startling but marvelous experience leaps into mind ... A curtain hitherto unnoticed is suddenly twitched aside . . ." (Blofeld 1970:23).
"I climbed up on a tree stump and suddenly felt immersed in Itness. . ." (Berenson 1949:18)
"And when the day of Pentecost was come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly . . ." (Acts 11)
"Suddenly, without warning he had a sense of being immersed in a flame or cloud . . ." (Bucke 1901)
"I was walking lone in the forest ... Suddenly, I felt the walls between the visible and the invisible grow thin . . ." (Jones 1932:196)
"But what a thing it was, this awareness: it was so intangible, yet it struck me like a thunderclap ... It was as if I had suddenly been illuminated . . ." (Merton 1962:278)
We have here testimony spanning two thousand years and several cultures of a common experience which is very sudden and
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discontinuous, which results in enhanced abilities, powers, and perceptions, and which is ephemeral and transitory ... For other similar experiences, see Happold (1970:129ff); Johnson (1953: 302ff), Gowan 0 975:351-379).
As Domash (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1977:657-8) puts it:
In the present context, the laser is an especially interesting instance of a non-equilibrium highly ordered state because of the sharp phase transition it displays (Graham and Haken (24)) and also because it gives rise to macroscopic quantum wave coherence at high temperatures (as opposed to the superfluids). Prigogine has noted the general thermodynamic comparison between a laser and a living system (22).
Also we may note here that the concept of the TM technique and the pure consciousness state as evolutionary are consistent with the general physical basis of life as viewed from an earlier perspective, that of E. Schrodinger (54). Schrodinger's analysis of the process of being alive comes to the conclusion that living organisms maintain their integrity in the midst of a high entropy environment primarily by finding sources of orderliness, 'eating negative entropy,' 'drinking orderliness from the environment.' While all organisms do this by taking in low entropy food, by reference to their DNA as a source of low entropy information, and by maintaining cycles of rest and activity, it seems that the human organism, as the most highly evolved, has in addition the capacity to put itself directly into a condition, the pure consciousness state, which is experienced as a zero-entropy state psychologically and is clearly a low entropy state as measured physiologically. Indeed we will suggest later that the pure consciousness state is now only perceived subjectively as a condition of perfect order, but may actually be connected with a true zero-entropy quantum fluid in the brain.
We have just stated a principle of enormous importance, which is new and, hence, difficult to understand. To help the reader in this matter, we will now restate the theory in somewhat different words, looking at the process of symmetry-breaking.
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This process involves a series of breakings or severances of perfect primordial symmetry. As Patanjali says: "Manifestation occurs when the three gunas are in the same phase." And Brown (1972:v) says: "A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart". Ghykka, (1946), restates Curies's principle: "In order that a phenomenon should be produced in a system, it is necessary that certain elements of symmetry should be missing." Speaking of the production of the siddhis Orme-Johnson and others (1977:712) say:
The parallel between the quantum field theory of effortless creation and Maharishi's theory of sanyama continues in that both involve spontaneous symmetry breaking. The creation of a Goldstone boson takes place in a quantum field whenever the influences are such as to produce a spontaneous change from a more homogeneous to a less homogeneous state. In the regime of consciousness the influence of the Patanjali sutra on the wholeness of pure consciousness is such as to cause a spontaneous localization of the pure consciousness in the direction of a particular result specified by Patanjali, that is a symmetry breaking of the consciousness takes place whereby the wholeness of consciousness flows into a particular location.
We thus have something analogous to the two fluid model wherein all of the induced entropy caused by the asymmetry is contained in one fluid or location, leaving the other in a perfect state of order and hence with unusual properties. Since the operation can be run "backwards" (in the direction of order) as well as "forwards" (in the direction of entropy), we have a theoretical construct for unusual states (and in humans, unusual powers such as levitation).
Domash (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1977:661) compares cosmic consciousness to the two-fluid model of physics:
In the light of our own macroscopic quantum phase coherent model of the pure consciousness state in the nervous system, the fifth state of consciousness (stabilized pure awareness along with thought) becomes exceedingly reminiscent of the two-fluid model used to describe a superfluid or superconductor. In the fifth state, one experiences a well defined duality of consciousness: a silent, distinctly separate, spatially unbounded, temporally stabilized self-awareness along with
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the usual localized excitations of consciousness (i.e., thoughts and perceptions), much as the long-range orderly aspect of the superfluid coexists with an active component at finite temperatures. Indeed, one might read F. London's description of the two-fluid model: . . . two interpenetrating fluids, of which one is in a macroscopic quantum state while the other is the carrier of the whole entropy of the liquid . . . an equilibrium between two fluids which mutually interpenetrate in ordinary space but are in general separated in momentum space . . . The superfluid shows long-range order of the momentum vector and does not contribute appreciably to the entropy. The other, normal fluid is very much like the ordinary fluid,' and find in this description a rather exact parallel to the subjective cognition which is claimed to be the long range result of the TM technique . . .
We propose that the subjective experience of the fifth state of consciousness may in fact actually reflect the establishment of a permanent macroscopic quantum coherent wave function over long distances in the brain, accounting for the uniqueness and universality of this striking mental phenomenon. This may be thought of without regard to any specific model for the quantum basis of the neurophysiology of the TM technique (i.e., whether it is electron superconductivity, laser-type cellular electromagnetic oscillation, or some third class of coherent behavior which is involved). As Charles Enz has recently pointed out, the two-fluid model may easily be generalized to describe any of the highly ordered states seen in nature, including superfluids, superconductors, dielectric crystals, and ferromagnets.
In order that the reader may truly grasp the full impact of the previous argument, we are going to repeat its essence, yet again, this time in simpler and less formal language. Only this time, instead of starting with an almost impossible-to-comprehend ideal state of order, we start with the process of development in nature and in mankind of increasing order from a state of high entropy or disorder.
The effects of increasing order are discontinuous, emergent, and integrative. This is the total message; the rest of this presentation will merely elaborate and explain the details. First, some definitions.
Entropy is a term in physics which refers to randomness,
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and is therefore the opposite of order. The second law of thermodynamics indicates that in a closed system the entropy constantly increases and hence the universe appears to be "running down." But it also appears that life processes are anti-entropic, that is they generate order out of chaos. The results of this increasing order are discontinuous, emergent and integrative, both in nature and in man.
Let me repeat the theme of this section which is: The effects of increasing order are discontinuous, emergent, and integrative. Discontinuous means that there is a sudden, sharp escalation into a higher state. (it is really a carrying over of the quantum laws of physics into behavioral science.) Emergence means the onset of some higher power or ability not previously seen. Integrative means that the new operations have some holistic, boundary-breaking, synergic quality, which binds together in a single Gestalt aspects which before were not seen to be capable of unification.
Before starting in on psychology, we might mention a good example from physics. This is the behavior of helium 3 and 4 near and below 2.2 degrees absolute. Whereas most substances when cooled to this temperature become solid, helium shows a sudden phase transition into a remarkable state (Helium-2) which appears to be liquid but has properties of superconductivity and superfluidity. Superconductivity means that there is no resistance, and hence an electric current set in motion will continue without hindrance forever; superfluidity means that there is no surface (it is unbounded), and hence it will flow up the side of the beaker and out. It also emits second sound. All this peculiar behavior indicates that at a critical point near but not at absolute zero there is an abrupt change to a different set of laws. What happens, apparently, is that the quantum laws which under ordinary conditions of entropy (such as those which obtain here) are seen only microscopically, under a condition at or near total order are seen macroscopically. (Parenthetically this is why crystals are so interesting, because their atomic regularity, which is microscopic, is preserved by their lining up in macroscopic form.) For example, there are increased resonance effects of macroscopic elastic vibrations in crystals, in regular polyhedra, and possibly (due to electron spin resonance) in the right cerebral hemisphere. The apparent continuity of the macroscopic law of averages disappears when entropy is not present to smooth the dichotomies,
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and consequently we see the discontinuous quantum state in the entire system. The fact that near zero low entropy produces an effect of sudden shift of law, from statistical to quantum is a most important point. Conditions where laws of probability (the law of averages) do not operate are conditions favoring miracles."
Let us imagine an anti-entropic force, F, which has the property of decreasing the entropy in whatever system it affects to some critical value near zero, at which time, quantum mechanics laws which heretofore operate only microscopically within the system, suddenly pervade the system macroscopically as a whole. Let us further suppose that an observer, 0, is not conscious of any direct effects on the system S. The observer will see a sudden, and discontinuous change of state or behavior, and not understanding the underlying laws, will attribute the effect to some miracle or other unexplainable activity. This model is highly useful in explication of a number of anomalous events, from healing to telepathy and other siddhis, generally spoken of as "miracles." It may be recalled that pranic energy, odic force, orgone energy, spoken of by diverse writers in both East and West, fit this model of F very well.
Let us now turn to behavioral science, particularly the psychology of human development where much of my work has been centered.2 Three of the most fruitful researchers in this field have been Piaget (who enunciated cognitive stages of development), Erikson (who enunciated affective stages), and Kohlberg (who enunciated moral developmental stages). The interesting thing is that they all three agree that the stages are discontinuous, emergent, and integrative. If you look at the stages you will find that Erikson extended his 8 stages through the human life span, while Piaget stopped at adolescence. Others have speculated on a higher stage of cognitive development which was not mentioned by Piaget. There is a very simple reason for this omission on Piaget's part. He experimented longitudinally on only three subjects, his own three children, testing them over and over again as they grew up. As any parent will at once understand, when they became adolescent, they would not have any more of this annoyance, and so poor Piaget never did get to the adult cognitive stages.
It is, however, not hard to figure out what the next is. Since Piaget's formal operations is the same as Guilfordian conver-
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gent production, the next stage is divergent production, which in popular parlance is "creative thinking." Hence creativity is the first adult cognitive stage.
Recent theories about creativity hold that creativity is produced by imagery, which in turn is produced by resonance effects in the right hemisphere so that it operates like a radio receiver in picking up transpersonal vibrations. This may sound like a wild idea to you, but let me give you some sobering examples from the testimony of creative people. (Because of duplication, those citations which are omitted here will be found in section 5.1 under the depositions of musicians).
Let us see if we can induct laws of the general system applying:
1) Man is the measure of all things; alias the laws of physics mirror the laws applying to man; development in man corresponds to ordering in physics.
2) In the usual state of entropy (balanced between order/disorder) in both man and physics, macroscopic statistical laws (e.g. gas laws) hold; but as entropy (randomness) is removed from either system, there arise discontinuous phase changes in which different laws obtain, (e.g. quantum mechanics, siddhis). These singularities are most commonly seen in the most ordered operators (e.g. helium with 4 nucleons, highly evolved meditators, Dodd's order to an ordered power). For it is the removal of entropy which allows the simplicity of the laws (formulas) covering nearly perfect order to be seen in manifestation; such laws are of a different order than macroscopic statistical laws (e.g. the comparison between a pushing, shoving mob, and the same number of soldiers marching in the perfect order).
3) In every general system analogous to the ones we have discussed we will hence do well to look for singularities which are placed in the most ordered operators but which fall near but short of the limits of order for the system. In such cases of Dodd's "fulfillment" we will perhaps discover transcendent states and laws applying to them alone3. These laws are not miraculous, but they are extensions and simplifications to the general (high
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entropy law) caused by random effects, which in this near perfect state can be discovered.
Domash views TM as the conscious exploration of very low or ordered mental temperatures. The genesis of the pure consciousness state is seen as a phase transition of the nervous system to a state of long-range order and correlation among neurons. Similarities exist between this state of pure awareness and macroscopic quantum mechanisms such as superconductivity and superfluidity. This "fifth yogic state" (Gowan 1975: Table 8) can be modeled in terms of the two fluid model characteristic of superfluids, in which special laws of nature, not ordinarily seen during ordinary high entropy states become evident. The juncture between the fourth and fifth yogic state may be analogous to such a "Lambda critical point." The fact that as increasing order supervenes in consciousness, critical phase changes occur short of the absolute, making the whole process strikingly similar to the behavior of He-4 near zero degrees K It may be that such siddhis as levitation, (recently announced by the TM group), as well as more ordinary powers such as precognition, telepathy, etc. are effects of this change in laws which appear to occur discontinuously in atomic structure near, but not at absolute zero. For example, superconductivity in He-3 might be analogous to resonant superconductive cell firing under high frequency electric vibrations in biomolecules of the type proposed by Froelich, and also with one another according to an AC Josephson effect. The analogue of second sound has not yet been found.
The discontinuities of the accretive, replicative, and mutualistic phases of growth have already been enunciated by Land (1974). As one moves from disorder to order it is also possible that as one nears order there occur phase transitions analogous to the ones seen in the two previous situations. Such discontinuities might have important implications for biological and developmental theory.
Let us push the quantum analogy just a bit further. In atomic energy levels, there is not just one, but there are several. These levels are related one to another in a series of harmonic overtones.
Indeed, Domash (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1978:658) declares:
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Indeed, the idea that the functioning of the brain which gives rise to the everyday experience of thinking is in itself inherently quantum mechanical, is not a new one among physicists. Niels Bohr suggested that thought involved such small energies in the brain as to be necessarily governed by quantum effects; David Bohm speculated further that thinking and shifts of attention seem to behave subjectively according to an uncertainty principle - perhaps the very same uncertainty principle as that characteristic of quantum physics.
A related view is due to Sudarshan, who has developed the idea that the self-referent quality of consciousness, and with it the multiple co-existing levels of poetic, non-logical, nonlinear, mutually contradictory thoughts and feelings characteristic of the human mind, are much better modeled by the non-commutative (self-referent) operator dynamics of quantum theory than they are by classical dynamics.
In addition, it may be argued that the quantum theory of measurement, which, in the view of Wigner, points indisputably to an intimate and unavoidable relationship between the quantum mechanical wave function and human consciousness, is in itself a reason to seek for quantum mechanisms in the mind. In Wigner's words, 'The very study of the physical world (has) led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality' and 'all the possible knowledge concerning any object can be given as its wave function.' Such a view is also implicit in Heisenberg's statement that 'the laws of nature which we formulate mathematically deal no longer with the particles themselves but with our knowledge of the elementary particles,' that is, that quantum dynamics is a dynamics of states of knowledge, excitations of consciousness, as much as it is a dynamics of physical objects.
Let us summarize what we have learned about The Operations of Increasing Order:
1 ) As order increased (or entropy decreases) in a system, a series of discontinuous states ensue, each with characteristic emergent functions of higher power, authority or scope.
Viz:
a) Dodd's increasing order in n + n and nn . (Gowan 1975:407-8)3
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b) Superfluidity and superconductivity of gases near zero degrees absolute (Kelvin).
c) Powers of individuals in developmental stage theory.
d) Increasing resonance effects of lattice vibration in crystals, regular polyhedra, and the right hemisphere.
e) Jhanas (see Table VI-4)
2) Order is occasioned by:
a) Regularity, and decrease of randomness.
b) Coincidence of variables at same value (as nn instead of nr; n x n instead of n x r)3
c) Removal of need for statistical law which allows microscopic order to be macroscopic order.
d) Life
3) Order results in escalation: discontinuity, succession, emergence, differentiation, integration.
We have enunciated two concepts in this essay, both with indifferent success. The first is that near conditions of total order in a system, there may emerge a "two fluid" phenomenon wherein all of the entropy is confined to a particular domain, leaving the rest in a state of perfect order, and hence unusual unbounded properties. The second that the effects of increasing order, near a state of complete order in a system are discontinuous, emergent, and integrative. The rest of these essays will attempt some examples of these effects in discrete areas, but the reader may well be able to adduce others unknown or unsuspected by the author. As we end this chapter the author is conscious of only partial success at explicating some very new and controversial ideas. Much of the material herein is so theoretical and general that it needs fleshing out in the chapters to follow before any semblance of understanding can be reached. It is therefore, suggested that these be read next, and that at the end, the reader return to this chapter which contains the general statement.
These subsequent essays each reflect different aspects of the generality. Exotic Human Powers and Abilities treats of the expansion of human abilities in three domains, phylogenic, ontogenic, and particularly cosmogenic. There is then a shorter essay on Genius, Precocity and Reincarnation, and another on
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Altered States of Consciousness: A Taxonomy. This is followed by Form as Devolution of Cosmic Substance, and then by The Three-Fold Body of the Buddha. The book ends with a final summary chapter.
The motto on the Great Seal describes the United States of America as "A New Order of Society," (as illustrated on the reverse of the dollar bill). What has been attempted here is a similar description of a new order of humanity, with new and enlarged powers and abilities, which lie within mankind's purview, though often not realized or understood . . . But Popol Vul, the Mayan Bible says it best:
Let there be Light!
Let the dawn arise over heavens and earth!
There can be no glory, no splendor
Until the humanistic being exists
The fully developed man.
FOOTNOTES:
1 The naive reader may wish to start at the bottom of page 39 for a more informal presentation from a popular speech.
2 At this point the author-speaker referred to Table 0-2 (p.22).
3 For more on Dodd see Gowan 1975:392-408.
4 Found herein as table 6-4.
ADDENDUM: If we ask why the 2-fluid model near total order, (see p. 33, paragraph 1), the answer may be entropy is not eternally divisible but at some state there is minimum packet, Em. Then Dp (here tm), has relationship: NEM =Heat. where N= number of units in system.
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CHAPTER 2
The Exotic Abilities of Mankind
'My inference is a different one; it is that the human personality has both material and psychological powers that we do not know. In our present state of knowledge, we are not in a position to know.'
-Charles Richet
When Pope in 1711 told us that "the proper study of mankind is man," he did not realize how much our species objects to self-scrutiny. Even today, some readers will find this chapter unusual, and others unacceptable. Nevertheless, it must treat of this necessary and important subject, if we are to advance in knowledge and self-concept. Our task is two-fold: first to produce a map or taxonomy of the domain, and second to categorize various incidents and accounts into that paradigm.
By "mankind" (with apologies to feminists) we shall mean the human race collectively, (as in the first sense of the dictionary definition.) By "ability" we shall, in accordance with the same authority, mean "the power or capacity to do or act in any relation" as well as "talents, mental gifts or endowments." Thus ability involves both knowledge and power.
It may be desirable to linger for a moment on the word "exotic," one of whose definitions is "strikingly unusual." Curiously enough, it is not the magnitude and ability of a power which excites admiration and surprise in us, it is the "strikingly unusual" aspect. The ability of a pigeon to "home" is a major example of spatial visualization, not possessed by a majority of humans, yet it is not considered "exotic" because it is a common phylogenic ability of homing pigeons.
One may turn this point around, and note that abilities which are now considered exotic and occult, may someday be considered commonplace and ordinary. The derivation of the word "to read" for example, is cognate to a kind of divination, because when reading first was introduced, the common folk who could not read felt it was an occult power. . .
For "occult" let us substitute "latent, subconscious cognitive ability," and stipulate that such ability is the product of right
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hemisphere functioning, in contradistinction to most "accepted" talents, which are the product of left hemisphere functioning, - verbal ability being a prime example.
While it does not write or speak, the right hemisphere seems to have enormous advantages over the left in its ability to contact an impersonal universal source of knowledge which we have elsewhere (Gowan 1975:3) called "the collective preconscious" or the "numinous." This giant computer memory (outside of time and space) is the source of all creativity, all paranormal knowing, all of the hidden (occult) faculties. Hence it represents an enormous expansions of man's powers, and forms the central explanation of this chapter.
With this understanding behind us, we are left with two points of procedure:
1) How to gain easy access to right hemisphere functioning, and
2) How to mediate right hemisphere, (dumb, non-verbal), knowledge through the left hemisphere so as to have a verbal output.
Since we are elsewhere on record in these regards, (Gowan 1978a) we shall merely summarize here that both operations are easily executed with a little practice, and go on to other implications.
One of the most important of these is that the entire present theory of intelligence (as exemplified by the Structure of Intellect model) is really a map of left hemisphere functioning, as is the Stanford-Binet Individual Intelligence Test (and all other IQ measures). We have not really begun to map the possibilities of the right hemisphere.
That the potential talents of mankind lie supine in most of us is evident from Jane Robert's "Seth" (1974:333) who declares:
"The performance of great athletes gives evidence of abilities inherent in the human form that are little used. Great artists by their very works demonstrate other attributes latent in the race as a whole ... Within the experience of your race lie all the patterns that would point to some fully developed
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human being, in which all inherent tendencies were given full plan and come to fruition."
That this development process in some people may continue throughout life, involving increasing escalation through right hemisphere function is also "Seth's" view, (ibid:294):
"As the mind within the body clearly sees its earthly time coming to an end, mental and physical accelerations take place. These are in many ways like adolescent experiences in their great bursts of creative activity ... and the preparation for a completely new kind of personality growth and fulfillment ... Many instances of the growth of consciousness, and mental and psychic growth are interpreted by you as senility . . . The experiences, however, affect the right hemisphere of the brain, in such a way that abilities are released in somewhat the same manner as an adolescent's . . . The individual at this time begins to see beyond temporal life, to open up dimensions of awareness ... This is one of the most creative, valuable aspects of your lives ... Old age is a highly creative part of living . . . Even the chemical and hormonal changes are those that are conducive to spiritual and psychic growth . ."
Consider the prescience of the North American Reviewer, (April 1855, as quoted by Podmore 1902:290), in attempting a theory to account for some of the phenomena of physical mediumship: "it is probably . . . the right hemisphere of the brain which in the trance state acts independently of its usual controlling centers in the left hemisphere ..."
The inspiration which is always attendant upon genius appears to follow from the easy production of right hemisphere images, which are then mediated by the left hemisphere into intellectually negotiable form. Consider Tyrrell (1936:30ff):
"It is a highly significant, though generally neglected, fact that those creations of the human mind, which have borne preeminently the stamp of originality and greatness, have not come from within the region of consciousness. They have come from beyond consciousness, knocking at its door for admittance: they have flowed into it, sometimes slowly as if by seepage, but often with a burst of overwhelming power. This fact did not escape the keen observation of Socrates: 'I soon found,' he said, 'that it is not by wisdom that the poets create their works, but by a certain natural power and
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by inspiration, like soothsayers and prophets, who say many fine things, but who understand nothing of what they say.'
"How comes it that the finest products of the mind are, in this sense, extramental? What is there outside consciousness which can produce them? They come not only with power, but often with something exotic and other-worldly about them. Sometimes they bring with them a sense of exquisite joy. In his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Shelley says: 'Sudden thy shadow fell on me; I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy.' And there is also a sense of revelation. In Mont Blanc he exclaims: 'Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled the vale of life and death?' The task of consciousness is not to create but to seize this inrush and express it. The difficulty is immense.
"'Poetry,' declared Shelley, 'is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will.' A man cannot say: 'I will write poetry. The greatest poet even cannot say it.' One after another the great writers, poets, and artists confirm the fact that their work comes to them from beyond the threshold of consciousness. It is not as though this material came passively floating towards them. It is imperious, dynamic, and willful. Blake said of his poem, Milton: 'I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will.'
"Keats said that the description of Apollo in the third book of Hyperion came to him 'by chance or magic - to be, as it were, something given to him.' He said also that he had 'not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after he had composed and written it down.' It had then struck him with astonishment and seemed rather the production of another person than his own.
"Madame Guyon confesses that 'before writing I did not know what I was going to write; while writing I saw that I was writing things I had never known.'
"Goethe said of his poems: 'The songs made me; not I them.'
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"Wordsworth told Bonamy Price that the line in his ode beginning: "Fallings from us, vanishings,' which has since puzzled so many readers, refers to those trance-like states to which he was at one time subject. During these moments the world around him seemed unreal and the poet had occasionally to use his strength against an object, such as a gatepost, to reassure himself.' And when the power would not come, the conscious mind was helpless. 'William tired himself with hammering at a passage,' wrote Dorothy Wordsworth. It was useless if the power was denied.
"Dickens declared that when he sat down to his book, 'Some beneficent power showed it all to him.' And Thackeray says in the Roundabout Papers: 'I have been surprised at the observations made by some of my characters. It seems as if an occult Power was moving the pen.'"
In searching therefore, for "occult" and exotic abilities possessed by only a few, we are not so much entering arcane paths, as we are attempting to catch the first faint glimpses of a "shore dimly seen," -- emerging powers of mankind, now seen in a few rare and generally higher developed individuals, someday, hopefully, to be seen in the generality of men. We are furthermore attempting to show that these powers are associated with the operation of increasing order both in the individual integration, and in the evolution of society.
Mental abilities, according to the Guilford SOI model depend on three components:
1) Input information (contents).
2) Throughput process (process).
3) Output action (product).
In the usual mental abilities, input is conveyed to be mind through the senses. A semantic question then arises: are there higher abilities (telepathy might be an example) where input information is not received from the senses? We will solve this dilemma by ukase: input must be received through senses: where a known sense does not exist, we simply postulate the existence of an unknown one.
Another semantic question has to do with the difference between quantity and quality. Let us say that an individual or
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species a) has a higher ability by a factor of X to discern a certain sensory level than another individual or species b) if X=2, the difference is quantitative. But suppose X=1 million, have we now a qualitative difference? Since Wechsler (1974) laid down the law for the limit of inter-individual differences in the same species as "e", (2.718), we shall assume that this is the limit between quantitative and qualitative differences in one species. These words merely mean that the ability is operated on a different principle in one case than the other. We will leave undefined the limits between quantitative and qualitative differences between species.
Let us informally define "exotic abilities" by the following characteristics:
EXOTIC ABILITIES
1) Are not miraculous and are not generally considered miraculous by those who possess them. They are considered matter-of-fact extensions of more ordinary abilities.
2) They are "shy" abilities, never used for spectacular effects, best operated when not paid attention to, often only inferred by others, because not claimed by the individual, and often only realized after the fact.
3) They require finer extensions of ordinary powers of more magnitude of difference. They are, therefore, found in those who have practiced careful and precise inspection in some discipline, and who are open to the discrepancies afforded by conventional thought about the discipline.
4) They are ephemeral and tenuously held, hence, usually not under the full control of the possessor, but available to him at some times more than others. They are not graces, nor illustrations of divine nor cosmic favor. They should, therefore, never be regarded by the possessor with spiritual pride but only as adventitious occurrences.
5) They depend upon the most careful tuning and attention to small vibrations, and the consequent power to amplify that which has come to the mind as a radio signal.
6) They are creative in the sense of extending the incubation process from an unconscious to an intuitional
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practice.
7) Nevertheless, the exact mechanism of their practice and production is almost never well understood by the possessor.
8) They represent in wild form the nascent sport or mutant ability which can by practice and education be domesticated into an enhanced power.
9) They represent earnests of the fact that man is created in the cosmic image and that mankind in totality possesses in posse all of the transcendent abilities of his Creator.
To those who wonder about the commensurability of exotic and conventional abilities, we may point out as follows:
1 ) There is no easy place to draw a distinction between ordinary and exotic abilities; they form a taxonomy in a family, rather than a dichotomy of distinction.
2) Not only are the abilities similar, but so are their first derivatives: precocity in respect to exotic abilities seems very similar to precocity in respect to ordinary abilities.
3) A large number of mystics (i.e., those possessed of exotic abilities) have also been very bright, suggesting that ordinary and exotic abilities are positively correlated with each other in similar fashion to the positive correlation among ordinary abilities.
4) The specification of exotic abilities (e.g., one saint will have this power, another saint that power) and the rare versatility of exotic abilities in masters (such as Jesus) is very similar to the corresponding psychological manifestations of conventional abilities in those possessed of a strong aptitude (e.g., Mozart) compared with a universal genius (e.g., Goethe, Leonardo, Einstein).
5) The development of exotic abilities through exercise, education, experience and eduction by a mentor is very similar in both kinds of abilities.
Biofeedback expert Barbara Brown, author of New Mind, New Body, at a Los Angeles conference spoke of the laws of "super-mind" (as reported by Ferguson 1978:2, July 3, 1978):
Human beings possess an innate awareness of the state of their
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biological being, from the total physical body image down to the awareness of a single cell.
Human beings possess an innate ability to form complex abstract concepts from primal sensory data.
Human beings possess an innate ability to exert control over the direction and flow of nerve impulses in any nerve of the body of their choosing.
The human mind has the innate ability to supervene and direct the physical activities of every physiologic function of the body, within the limits of physical nature.
The mind of human beings can control the physical activity of the brain. (... The ultimate control of the brain by the mind itself is, of course, during thinking .... Thinking is voluntary control of the brain.)
All diseases of society originate in the intellectual processes of man.
The highest-order intellectual capacities of man reside in and may always reside in what we call the unconscious.
It is obvious from the foregoing that many human powers and abilities are not fully conscious, being part of the autonomic nervous system or skin-reaction. The bringing of this somatic knowledge to consciousness and, hence, to control is part of biofeedback procedure. The concept is also enlightening in clarifying the distinction between physical powers and mental abilities. It may be that this difference is merely one between prototaxic (somatic abilities), such as skin-reaction, and syntaxic (cognitive) abilities, such as verbal intelligence. The process of claiming regnancy over the latent exotic factors of intellect may merely reduce to the ability to pay more conscious attention (and hence develop control) over natural physiological powers.
The concept that not all knowledge is gathered from the senses is at least as old as Plotinus and forms the basis of most mystical belief as well as transcendentalism, as witness Ellis (Miller 1957:23):
That belief we term Transcendentalism .... maintains that man has ideas that come not through the five senses or the powers of reasoning, but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence....
Wilber (1977) quotes Kahn as follows:
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The mental functioning which expresses itself as 'logical reasoning' on the gross plane of consciousness has other plane-specific manifestations on the other 'inner' planes of consciousness. Specifically, the cognitive power of logic is described as the gross plane expression of the cognitive power which in the inner planes is referred to hierarchically as intuition, inspiration, illumination, and enlightenment.
Powell (1965:222) in a chapter on the subject declares:
Psychic powers can be developed by anyone ... Astral senses exist in all men, but are latent in most and, generally, need to be artificially forced, if they are to be used in the present state of evolution.
He declares that their possession does not necessarily mean high moral character and counsels against the dangers inherent in a premature development.
Dr. Mary Meeker, protege of Prof. Guilford and eminent explicator of the Structure of Intellect theory of intelligence, wrote to the author in a private communication (Sept. 12, 1979) as follows:
No, I do not believe, and this is only hypothetical, that precognitive, aura seeing, or other non documented metaphysical abilities are in the figural abilities dimensions.
My thought is that clairvoyance is heightened visual cognition, that clairaudience is heightened auditory cognition - that these metaphysical abilities are actual cognition abilities developed beyond that which most of us enjoy. In other words, the cognition (which I label as receptive intelligence) is better developed and more finely tuned, gifted cognition abilities.
Meeker concludes (from an unpublished article on Psychic Children):
Thus the heightened sensitivity in awareness either auditory (clairaudient) or visual (clairvoyant) may be a second level in the spiral of intelligence in which the circle starting with cognition, memory, evaluation, convergent production and divergent production, further enhance the ability to cognize at a more keen level.
That respectable scientists are reluctantly coming to new
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and open-ended conclusions regarding the incipient powers of man's mind is evident in this Brain/Mind Bulletin (July 3, 1978) report of remarks by the eminent psychologist Carl Rogers at a Los Angeles convention:
Perhaps our more primitive capabilities, our largely unused right brain, is beginning to function again, as it so often does in the so-called less-civilized societies. Perhaps this metaphoric mind can come to know a universe that is non-linear, in which the terms time and space come to have very different meanings.
Here I'm going to limit myself to my own observations and experiences. I have no explanation for which I shall describe - I simply know that I have observed at first hand, and experienced myself, phenomena I cannot explain on a rational basis or in terms of the scientific laws that I know. A few years ago I would have scoffed at the possibility of any such phenomena, but I can't quite deny the evidence of my senses.
I have observed incidents among friends of mine [that] can only be described as telepathic communication. This makes me ready to believe the scientist John Lilly, who tells of his experiences in such communication which came about quite unexpectedly. I've had some experience with clairvoyants.
How can we account for such experiences and many others like them that have been reported? Are there unknown waves in the atmosphere through which visual and psychological messages can be sent and received? I don't know. Even more mysterious to me is precognition...
I've also been forced to reconsider the possibility of reincarnation, which in the past I'll admit I thought was a ridiculous belief.
I don't know how this world of the paranormal may change us, but I believe we are perhaps opening up vast new fields of knowledge and power, a quantum leap. And every time new forces or energies have been discovered in our universe, they have changed our perception of reality and have opened new doors and new opportunities for the human being. It seems possible that this is in the process of occurring again.
Contrary to the belief of many, this expanding discovery of the psychic world is in no way anti-scientific. In the most
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basic of sciences, physics, creative discoveries are taking us closer and closer to a mystic view of life, to a recognition that the more we know, the nearer our thinking is to that of the ancient sages.
In a similar vein Orme-Johnson and Farrow (1977:703) say:
After the TM-Sidhi practices, many areas of consciousness are found to be open that were previously not available to awareness. With regular practice there arises a natural tendency for desires to meet spontaneous fulfillment from nature, a growth of ability to anticipate events, an improvement in intuition and a striking degree of harmony with the surroundings. This is amply illustrated by the study of intelligence, creativity, field independence, and behavioral flexibility by Orme-Johnson and Granieri (paper 103). In this study intelligence and creativity were found to be initially high and to increase even further during the course. In the case of field independence, students were able to complete the tests at as much as 200% of the speed the tests were designed for, necessitating major adjustments to prevent a 'ceiling effect.' It should be remembered that these tests, although well-validated, measure only a fraction of the individual's true abilities, and hardly do justice to the enormous potential offered by the state of enlightenment. At the same time they amply demonstrate the degree to which human potential has been underestimated in the past.
2.1) Animal Senses and Their Refinement
In primitive forms of an evolving organism, sensual levels so low as to be virtually non-existent, may become, because of adaptation due to survival value, developed into more and more acute receptors.
Let us, therefore, note a few examples: first of animals which have evolved far more acute forms of one of the five senses than humans possess, and then of animals which have evolved other senses. Most of these are drawn from the Jonas and Jonas book, Other Senses, Other Worlds (1976).
A German sheep-dog's nose is one million times more acute than a human's (Jonas and Jonas 1976:23); it has 44 times as many olfactory-sensory brain cells. A moth's ability in this area is a million times more acute than a dog's: "A male moth can smell the
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-sex scent signal of a female of its own kind as far away as 20 kilometers." ibid:24)
A bee's complex eye polarizes light, and the bee can remember its own path as well as calculate "the angular velocity and celestial path of the sun from moment to moment, even on a cloudy day." (ibid:63) This ability enables the bee not only to locate honey sources and return straight to the hive, but even to tell other bees about the source.
The aural powers of the dolphin are awesome. It apparently can carry on two conversations at once, as different halves of the brain pick up different signals on different frequencies, but can also receive information about food and even texture by analysis of sound vibrations (ibid: 122,130). Dolphins are not the only creatures possessing unusual sound discrimination. Bats can discriminate between sonic pulses separated by as little as .001 second (ibid: 132). Each bat seems to emit its own frequency, and bats can avoid objects in the dark by sonic radar, and can locate the source of sound by moving the ears up to 60 times per second (ibid: 133).
Jonas and Jonas report (ibid: 122):
The remarkable thing about the large cetacean brain is that its two hemispheres often work separately, and what is more, rest separately. When a dolphin sleeps one of its eyes is always open and alert, as is the brain hemisphere to which it reports."
Again, on the remarkable sensing abilities of fish (ibid:97): Lateral organs of electric fish react to a drop on voltage of .03 millionth of volt per cm (comparable to an eye which can see a single quantum of light).
Some fish, notably the sole, respond to temperature changes in the water of as little as .03C. ". . . a fish could be trained to recognize a specific temperature, say 580F within 1 dg. of accuracy, irrespective of whether the fish came from a warmer or colder environment." The Australian bush turkey maintains the heat of its eggs at a constant temperature of 330C: "The bird was so sensitive to heat differences that its tongue was within a . 1 degree of thermometer accuracy." (ibid:159) Jonas and Jonas (ibid: 129-30) describe echo-location, a property in some animals which
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enables sounds to be felt as vibration in the bones, and then to be noted directionally. In this connection Hitching (1978:148) says:
It has long been apparent that some creatures have additional ways of communicating with one another and of perceiving information. The biologist Juan Bigu del Blanco, working at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, says that among the more striking and unusual methods are 'sonar techniques (bats, etc.), electric field scanning and sensing (certain fish), temperature scanning (some snakes), sensing by means of chemicals (silkworms), sensing by movement or ritualization (monkeys, bees, etc.). There are a variety of different known methods of communication, but there are also a great number of cases in which the information transfer mechanism is far from being clear.'
Tromp (1949:6) in a scholarly examination of bioluminescence in lower animals concludes that the radiation:
.... is mainly due to luciferous bacteria. In the first group the radiation is bound to certain organs of the body, it is subject to the will-power of the organism and depends on the presence of free oxygen. However, the radiation is not a function of life only, as the light organs of certain insects, when made wet, can radiate a long time after death.
Due to the studies of Radzizewsky a.o., we know that many organic compounds occurring in living organisms, such as fats, lecithin, cholesterin, essential oils, gallic acid, glucose, etc., radiate in alkaline solutions under certain conditions at normal or slightly increased temperature if they are exposed to free oxygen (particularly if they are shaken). This explains why many marine organisms only radiate in a strong surf.
DuBois was able to isolate two protein substances, luciferin and luciferase, which when together produce light, a process responsible for light phenomena in several insects and molluscs.
A. EXAMPLES OF LUCIFEROUS ANIMALS
A few striking examples are the following:
Luciferous trails of certain millipedes;
luciferous water round the Ostracod crab pyrocypris;
pholas dactylus, a stone borer, that radiates light when two substances are brought together: a crystalline substance luciferin) and a ferment (luciferase);
red light radiated by the rib-jelly fish (salpen and cleodora);
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lilac light radiated by certain corals (gorgonides);
purple light radiated by fulgora pyrorhynchus;
a tunicate, appendicularia, that radiates red light which changes into blue and finally into green;
different insects, such as fire-flies (luciola, diaphanes, pyrocoelia and lamprophorus) that radiate light which is mostly connected with the sexual functions of those insects (in case of the European glow-worm, the non-flying female radiates a much stronger light than the flying male).
Many deep sea fish possess complicated organs in the head or other places of the body, which radiate light of different wave length. Of approximately 1,000 species of deep sea bone fish, about a ninth possess light organs which attract prey and perhaps also serve for recognizing each other, particularly during the periods of procreation. For example, thaumatolampas possesses light organs that radiate blue, red, and white light. The starfish brisinga does not possess a light organ but secretes a radiating slime that covers the whole body.
Certain fish are able to create such strong electrical potentials that they cause unconsciousness in animals or man who swim in their neighborhood. Examples are gymnotus electricus (the electric eel), which develops electrical potentials of up to 800 V, the electric ray fish (Torpedo Occidentalis), torpedo marmorata, malopterurus, etc.
Jonas and Jonas (1976:150) tell us that the heat perception of a snake operates on the principle of an infrared camera. Each membrane contains 150,000 nerve cells sensitive to heat in an area where a human would have only a few. Like a camera it gives an outline image of a creature that may be only a fraction of one degree C warmer than its environment.
The electric powers of some animals are phenomenal. We still do not understand fully the photoluminescence of some fireflies and fishes. Coe (Gaddis 1967:175) studied the electrical powers of marine life (see Scientific American, March 1963), including some electric eels which can produce charges up to 600 volts.
Another striking ability of some birds, notably homing pigeons' , and other migrating fowl, as well as some aquatic mammals, is the magnetic homing sense, also found in bees (Jonas and Jonas, 1976:152).
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An excellent discussion of the taste world of animals, also different from ours, will be found in Science 201:224, 21 July, 1978. In it V. G. Dethier points out that there are many dimensions of taste open to animals which we may not perceive.
Animals sensitive to the ultra-violet spectrum may perceive a different world than we do (just as dogs can hear high-frequency whistles to which we are deaf). Jonas and Jonas 1976:165 say:
We have already given a small indication of these possibilities: bees, for instance, are aware of a different portion of the spectrum from that visible to us, so that to them the 'reality' of the world is completely different from our 'reality.' We have also discussed how the dog's world is a world of odors utterly unlike anything we know. The bee's nervous system, of course, limited by its small size, cannot approach ours in integrative capacity; so as an individual, if not as a group, its capacities are restricted. The dog's limitations lie in its lack of hands. But these examples do give an idea of the 'other worlds' revealed by an extension of familiar senses.
Tromp (1949:103) discusses some remarkable senses of dogs:
1) Experiments by Kalischer demonstrated that a dog can differentiate between certain odors, which a man is unable to do; e.g., iso-valeric acid (a fatty acid probably occurring in the aroma of a human being) can be distinguished in a mixture with other fatty acids.
2) Experiment of Buytendijk indicated that a dog can smell iodoform in concentrations of 10-6. Quinine and ordinary salt (NaCl), scentless to man, can be smelt by dogs, even in concentrations of 10-4.
3) Experiments of Heitzenroeder and Seffrin indicated that under normal conditions dogs are not very sensitive to odors of flowers, but exceed the sensitivity of man in the case of animal odors (smell of meat, etc.). Later experiments of Henning, however, showed that this is only the result of lack of canine interest in the scent of flowers. After a previous training it was found that dogs and man are about equally sensitive to vegetable odors.
4) A similar example of specific sensitivity is indicated by the experiments of Romanes. His dog was able to follow his track, although his shoes were greased with oil of anise and 12 people had walked one after the other exactly on
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the same track before the experiment started. Tracks of a stranger could not be followed.
This brief and by no means complete catalog of some of the sensory specializations of animals indicates conclusively that when evolution has developed the proper receptors, animals can extend their sensory powers to degrees almost unbelievable. This introduction, therefore, may serve as a caution that we should not be surprised about the presence of similar powers in human beings.
2.2) A Taxonomy of Exotic Powers and Abilities
Our introduction on the phylogenic abilities of other species has been useful in showing the astonishing range of sensory abilities possessed by creatures lower than mankind in the evolutionary order. It is now time to present our taxonomy of exotic powers and abilities of mankind, which is displayed in Table 2.1. The phylogenic abilities of mankind, perhaps best represented by the Guilford Structure of Intellect Model, are ruled out of consideration by the adjective "exotic" so no more will be said about them. Instead, in the remainder of this chapter, we shall discuss ontogenic abilities, in both sensory powers and mental abilities. There are, it will be remembered, by definition, extraordinary abilities possessed by some human beings which are nevertheless seen as explainable by presently understood natural law (whereas cosmogenic are not). There is admittedly a very thin line of distinction here, but as a practical rule of thumb on where to place things, it should be possible for a positivistic materialist to read this chapter without exclaiming "humbug!", whereas the contrary is true of the next.
As one inspects the taxonomy, which is admittedly a first step in an area never before categorized in such a form, it is very possible to disagree with the author on the relative position of the powers and abilities. Indeed, the writer stipulates that much of it is arbitrary. (The numbers in parentheses are Patanjali sutra numbers, about which more will be said in the next chapter on the cosmogenic abilities).
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TABLE 2-1 TAXONOMY OF EXOTIC POWERS AND ABILITIES
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Three classes of abilities are readily distinguishable, which will be henceforth called: 1) the phylogenic, 2) the ontogenic, and 3) the cosmogenic.
The phylogenic is defined as an exotic ability inherent in the species or in the genetic ancestry, so that it is possessed to a remarkable degree (according to our view) by every member. (Note that most of the abilities of mankind would be considered in this category if viewed by another species; no species would view its own phylogenic abilities as extraordinary.) We may also regard phylogenic abilities manifested by lower evolutionary types which have specialized in different ways than mankind. The separate hemisphere activity of dolphins, the thermal pits of snakes, the temperature sensitivity of fish, the polarization of the bee's eye, and the magnetic sensitivity of migrating birds are all examples.
The ontogenic is defined as an exotic ability possessed by only a very few individuals in a species, which appears to have been due to genetic endowment or mutation and enhanced by individual effort. We may also regard ontogenic abilities as part of present evolution, moving in a transverse direction to evolutionary development of the species and, hence, which are not likely to become more common in an ascending evolutionary future. Furthermore, the explanation for such abilities does not require any modification in the present laws of physics: an example of this type of ability would be an idiot-savant.
The cosmogenic2 is defined as an exotic ability occurring ephemerally, unmerited or predicted by genetics or ordinary development. Representing possible future evolution of the race, it may or may not be manifested even in rare and unusual individuals, but may be postulated to occur at certain higher levels of development. Furthermore, its explanation requires modifications of our present understanding of the laws of physics. Examples of such abilities would be levitation and precognition, as well as other paranormal abilities (the siddhis).
It thus follows that the exotic powers of man's mind are but higher levels (or overtones) of ordinary powers, and that we can redefine phylogenic, ontogenic, and cosmogenic abilities as those powers which have been, are being, and will be "granted" to mankind, or to put it the other way, as levels which have been, are being, and will be reached by mankind.
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If any living system is to be conscious of any given vivency, it must possess receptor organs registering in that vivency, i.e., sense modalities. This sensorium may vary as to kind and as to acuity, and we must be on guard not to presuppose that they must be sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste and of the degree of acuity with which we humans are familiar.
What causes the unfoldment of latent powers? We have put the question as if they were developmental, naturally occurring at the reaching of some higher stage. But there are at least three other explanations. One is that of reincarnation, wherein such powers were exercised in a former life; another is that of siddhis training, whereby through a certain yogic procedure, the power is obtained. A third is that in the removal of personal static, the receiving capacity of the radio set (as it were) becomes improved and so distant stations are heard. Happold (1970:69) says: "In the study of contemplation, we are considering a movement of consciousness towards a higher level, as the result of the emergence and cultivation of powers which in most men and women remain latent."
It is certain that most of these exotic powers, sometimes including the siddhis, come spontaneously to those rare souls in the higher reaches of developmental progress. The fact that many Christian saints have exhibited these powers indicates that specific Hindu yogic training is not a necessary condition for them. The siddhis training, however, may encourage the more rapid access of the powers or of the developmental level which gives free access to them.
2.3) The Etheric Body
The physical body seems to be a vehicle with sensory orifices which supports the five physical senses. It appears operationally useful to posit the existence of an etheric (or astral) body which supports the function of non-physical (paranormal) senses. Interestingly enough, this paradigm of the etheric or astral body is well known as an article of belief in the East. Reserving the concept that this construct is merely a useful paradigm, we require here a summary statement of this belief, in order that later discussion may be facilitated.
Wilson (1971:544) quotes Payne:
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In Man's Latent Powers, Phoebe Payne describes man's 'etheric body' as follows: 'This body of subtle physical material acts as the vehicle for the circulation of human vitality, and is an infinitely delicate bridge between the psychic worlds and the Physical brain consciousness ... It is the special qualities of this body . . . which constitute the main difference between the psychic and the non-psychic person. The etheric counterpart interpenetrates the whole of the physical anatomy, corresponding to it cell for cell, and also extends beyond it to a distance of four to six inches according to the nature and health of the individual. This outlying portion is called the health aura. It is visible to ordinary sight under favourable conditions of lighting.... Many people can catch a glimpse of it in a half light by bringing the fingertips of the two hands near together and slowly drawing them apart, when a nebulous emanation can be sensed or seen flowing from one hand to the other ... This duplicate subtle body appears often as a fine filmy mesh completely surrounding the ordinary physical body, mainly grey in colour. To trained clairvoyant sight it is an intricate structure of delicate hues. "
According to the occultists, the etheric body or double contains seven chakra centers, which when opened give various powers. In upward order (which is the path of development), they are:
1) base of spine, seat of kundalini power
2) navel, feeling
3) spleen, travelling
4) heart, understanding
5) throat, clairaudience
6) between eyebrows, clairvoyance
7) top of the head, continuity of cosmic consciousness.
It should be emphasized that these chakra centers are believed to be in the etheric, not the physical body, and to be the basis for acupuncture points; moreover, each chakra has a characteristic color associated with it.
From the etheric body issues an energy, known as prana. This energy (also known as od or orgone) is discussed more thoroughly in section 3.5. The energy is apparently the basis for ectoplasm which is the operator in physical mediumship (to be discussed in section 3.1). The usefulness of prana and ectoplasm (its product) in explaining various psychic effects is the main reason for our adoption of the etheric body construct.
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In speaking about the interaction between the etheric and the physical levels, Tiller (White 1974:267) says:
It is really at the point of mind that one can bring about in the organization of structure in these various levels of substance. That is, through mind forces, one can create a pattern, and that pattern then acts as a force field that applies to the next level of substance .... These etheric forces, then bring about .... the organization of matter at the physical level.
To use a mathematical simile, we have the same difference here as between a function and its differential. There will be further discussion of this important principle in the 4.6 section on orthocognitive healing and in Chapter VIII.
Further on the nature of the astral level, Tiller (White 1974: 268) declares:
The astral function is largely as a containment vehicle to keep the human essence in a compact form between incarnations. ... In the case of the physical, we have a space-time frame which we know a great deal about. The etheric level is a companion level, but it operates in a different space-time frame from the physical .... That is, for the physical, as time goes on, the potential decreases and the entropy increases; whereas for the etheric, we have the reverse situation....
2.4) Non-Paranormal Human Oddities
In this section we pay brief and incomplete notice to various reports of extraordinary human powers, which while very unusual, and hardly explainable, were not regarded as supernatural either by the possessor or by those who witnessed the abilities.
In this respect, Jonas and Jonas (1976:165) conclude:
If we extend this concept and assume that any and every sense we are aware of probably has a range beyond our present comprehension both in extent and in intensity, we can see opening up before us further uncharted sense-domains for the exercise of our imaginations. Sight, for instance, raised to a greater power, might include not only keener sight but also the ability to see other things - things that are too small to be seen by our eyes, things that travel too fast, or things that are too transparent or too opaque to be registered by our senses.
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Gaddis (1967:166) notes studies which show that Eskimos can hold metal objects in hand for several seconds, while the flesh of soldiers freezes immediately. He also notes the ability of Bedouins to live in extreme heat and of peoples in the Andes and Himalayas to live at heights where oxygen is only about half our requirements.
There flourished on the island of Mauritius about the time of the American Revolution a man named Bottineau, known as the wizard of Mauritius because he had discovered and practiced the art of "a nauscopie," namely the discovering of ships, still below the horizon, by means of the effect which their motion produced upon the visible atmosphere near the the horizon. In this way he was able to discover and predict the arrival of vessels several hundred miles from landfall. The records show that from 1778 to 1782 he preannounced the arrival of 575 vessels, many four days before they came up on the horizon. The testimony to his accuracy is voluminous and irrefutable. Here in his own words is the explanation (Gould 1965:173ff):
Nauscopie is the art of ascertaining the approach of vessels ... at a great distance. The knowledge neither results from an undulation of the waves, nor from quick sight, nor from a particular sensation, but simply from observing the horizon which bears upon it certain signs indicative of the approach of vessels .... When a vessel approaches land, a meteor (in French, an atmospheric effect) appears in the atmosphere of a particular nature, visible to every eye, without any difficult effort.
The advantages of this art before the days of the wireless, and particularly during wartime can only be imagined. It is likewise interesting to note that Gould reports (p. 193) that in 1818 one of Bottineau's pupils still practiced the art on Mauritius.
The electrical wizard, Nicola Tesla, had a number of very strange powers, particularly those of visualization, sight, and hearing. In regard to these exotic powers, his biographers, Hunt and Draper (1977:20, 32, 124) say:
He was conscious of certain phenomena before his eyes which others could not see. He envisioned objects and hypotheses with such reality and clarity that he was uncertain whether they did or did not exist ...
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He always admitted that he had supersensitive sight and hearing . . . He could remember as a boy discerning objects at a distance when no one else could see them, and he recalled hearing faint crackling sounds of fire in neighbor's houses when the residents had not even been disturbed in their sleep. He became tortured with a radar-sensitivity similar to that of bats which made him conscious of objects 12 feet away in total darkness.
His hearing was so phenomenally keen that it wasn't remarkable for him to detect thunder-claps at a distance of 550 miles.
The most extraordinary "normal," (that is, non-paranormal), abilities appear in mathematics and music. Interestingly enough the geniuses who present them are almost always precocious. We tend to think of these displays as within currently accepted science, since mathematics and music are ancient arts which are amenable to scientific inquiry, though we really have no detailed understanding as to how these seemingly miraculous feats are accomplished.3
Here is an effort by Hunter to investigate a rather common prodigy, namely lightning calculation, (Hunter 1968:346):
Throughout history, there have been reports of people with exceptional ability in mental calculation. What can be learned from these reports? Perhaps the most striking thing is that they concern such a diversity of people with such widely different accomplishments. There are reports of young children, of gifted mathematicians such as Gauss and Ampere, of illiterates, and of people who are almost mentally defective. Some of those people solve a wide range of numerical problems by highly ingenious procedures and with great rapidity; others are specialists who excel only in some limited range of problems; others tackle only fairly simple problems by slow and conventional techniques, and are remarkable merely for their willingness to work without external aids; others show modest calculative accomplishments which would be unremarkable except for the person's lack of ability in any other direction. Even among those with moderately high calculative ability, there is diversity. Some rely heavily on visual imaging, some on auditory imaging, and some use little imaging of any kind. They also vary in their characteristic speed of working and in their techniques. For example, at the end of the last
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century, the French psychologist Binet examined two men who had some renown as mental calculators. He gave each of them the same problems, written on paper, and required them to write the answer but nothing else. One problem was: multiply 58,927 by 61,408. One calculator (Inaudi) completed the answer in 40 seconds, the other (Diamandi) in 275 seconds; and I have recently met a professional accountant who completed this problem in 55 seconds. Inaudi produced the digits of his answer in the left-to-right order, whereas Diamandi produced these digits in the right-to-left order; my accountant also produced the digits in right-to-left order, but he used a calculative plan quite different from that used either by Inaudi or by Diamandi. Different calculators clearly have very different calculative systems.
Here are some representative examples from Corliss (1976) quoting other sources: (cf Scripture, 1891)
Thomas Fuller, known as the Virginia Calculator, was stolen from his native Africa at the age of fourteen and sold to a planter. When he was about seventy years old, "two gentlemen, natives of Pennsylvania, viz., William Hartshorne and Samuel Coates, men of probity and respectable characters, having heard, in traveling through the neighborhood in which the slave lived, of his extraordinary powers in arithmetic, sent for him and had their curiosity sufficiently gratified by the answers which he gave to the following questions: First, upon being asked how many seconds there were in a year and a half, he answered in about two minutes, 47,304,000. Second: On being asked how many seconds a man has lived who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old, he answered in a minute and a half 2,210,500,800. One of the gentlemen who employed himself with his pen in making these calculations told him he was wrong, and that the sum was not so great as he had said - upon which the old man hastily replied: 'top, massa, you forget de leap year.' On adding the amount of the seconds of the leap year the amount of the whole in both their sums agreed exactly."
Jedediah Buxton. - Jedediah Buxton was born in 1702, at Elmton, in Derbyshire, England, where he died in 1772. Although his father was schoolmaster of the parish and his grandfather had been the vicar, his education was by some chance so neglected that he was not able to scrawl his own name. All his attainments were the result of his own pure industry; the only help he had was the learning of the multi-
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plication table in his youth; 'his mind was only stored with a few constants which facilitated his calculations; such as the number of minutes in a year, and of hair's-breadths in a mile.' He labored hard with his spade to support a family, but seems to have shown not even usual intelligence in regard to ordinary matters of life. The testimony as to his arithmetical powers is given by two witnesses. George Saxe says: 'I proposed to him the following random question: In a body whose three sides are 23,145,789 yards, 5,642,732 yards, and 54,965 yards, how many cubical 1/8ths of an inch? After once naming the several figures distinctly, one after another, in order to assure himself of the several dimensions and fix them in his mind, without more ado he fell to work amidst more than 100 of his fellow-laborers, and after leaving him about five hours, on some necessary concerns (in which time I calculated it with my pen) at my return, he told me he was ready: Upon which, taking out my pocket-book and pencil, to note down his answer, he asked which end I would begin at, for he would direct me either way ... I chose the regular method . . . and in a line of twenty-eight figures, he made no hesitation nor the least mistake."
Paranormal gifts may be distributed in exactly the same manner to humans as less exotic mental gifts, according to Elliot (Hitchings (1967:67), who says:
General Scott Elliot, the former president of the British Society of Dowsers, thinks that dowsing may be not much different from the distribution of other gifts in a community, with a handful who are geniuses, a handful who are backward, and the rest of us capable of improvement with teaching and practice. 'We can't all be Michelangelo,' he says, 'and a few of us are unlucky enough to be colorblind or unable to see at all; most of us see things with varying degrees of perception. Similarly with music, or sport, or any other art. We can't all be composers or record-breakers, but we can get better if we try. I see no reason to place dowsing in a different dimension from other human skills which we don't fully understand.'
2.5) Developmental Aspects in the Phenotype and Genotype
Since exotic factors of intellect are generally found in unusual people, and since unusual people often represent racial sports or forerunners, the sport or mutation of ability which is found in them may represent the future course or direction of
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evolution in the race as a whole. Hence the high aptitude person or genius may mirror in his individual development the racial developmental process in the phenotype.
We developed this theme (with appropriate tables) in section 6c of the Introduction, and we are elsewhere earlier on record in regard to it, (Gowan, 1972, 1974). We return to a brief discussion of it here, and we will later in chapter V discuss some of the aspects of such development, particularly as it applies to genius and precocity.
An excellent discussion of the subject will be found in Wilber (1978, 1979).
That man's latent abilities lie in a gradated series of steps is obvious to Wilson (11971:542):
It is as if human evolution is not an uphill slope, but something like a steep flight of steps. As Shaw points out in the Methuselah preface, evolution does not progress steadily, but by sudden leaps. If you are learning to ride a bicycle, you fall off fifty times, and then find yourself suddenly riding it the fifty-first time. As if each time you tried to ride it, you accumulated a little more skill which did not show immediately but went into a 'reserve supply,' until you are ready to go 'up the next step' on the stairway. The significance of this must be discussed later in the chapter, but one point can be made immediately. If we can tumble down the evolutionary stairway through boredom and defeat-proneness, we can also clamber up to new levels by a gentle, cumulative effort; no frenzied leap is required. And evidence indicates unmistakably that these higher levels are the levels upon which man's 'latent powers' cease to be latent.
In the conclusion of her book on mysticism, Underhill, (1960:444ff), avers that the mystic is the ontogenic earnest of phylogenic escalation in the species. The path he treads today is a gradated series of upward steps which all will someday follow, as they actualize their latent abilities:
It shows us, upon high levels, the psychological process to which every self which desires to rise to the perception of Reality must submit: the formula under which man's spiritual consciousness, be it strong or weak, must necessarily unfold.
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In the great mystics we see the highest and widest development of that consciousness to which the human race has yet attained. We see its growth exhibited to us on a grand scale, perceptible of all men: the stages of its slow transcendence of the sense-world marked by episodes of splendour and of terror which are hard for common men to accept or understand as a part of the organic process of life. But the germ of that same transcendent life, the spring of the amazing energy which enables the great mystic to rise to freedom and dominate his world, is latent in all of us; an integral part of our humanity. Where the mystic has a genius for the Absolute, we have each a little buried talent, some greater, some less; and the growth of this talent, this spark of the soul, once we permit its emergence, will conform in little, and according to its measure, to those laws of organic growth, those inexorable conditions of transcendence which we found to govern the Mystic Way.
Every person, then, who awakens to consciousness of a Reality which transcends the normal world of sense - however small, weak, imperfect that consciousness may be - is put upon a road which follows at low levels the path which the mystic treads at high levels. The success with which he follows this way to freedom and full life will depend on the intensity of his love and will; his capacity for self-discipline, his steadfastness and courage. It will depend on the generosity and completeness of his outgoing passion for absolute beauty, absolute goodness, or absolute truth. But if he move at all, he will move through a series of states which are, in their own small way, analogous to those experienced by the greatest contemplative on his journey towards that union with God which is the term of the spirit's ascent towards its home.
We are, then, one and all the kindred of the mystics; and it is by dwelling upon this kinship, by interpreting - so far as we may - their great declarations in the light of our little experience, that we shall learn to understand them best. Strange and far away though they seem, they are not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. They belong to us. They are our brethren; the giants, the heroes of our race. As the achievement of genius belongs not to itself only, but also to the society that brought it forth; as theology declares that the merits of the saints avail for all; so, because of the solidarity of the human family, the supernal accomplishment
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of the mystics is ours also. Their attainment is the earnest money of our eternal life.
This chapter is necessarily incomplete, as we have sketched here only an outline of ontogenic sensory modalities and abilities. Our excuse for failing to proceed further is that these matters have been written about at length in various books on aptitudes and abilities, and that further, a full account of them would vastly increase the size and scope of this book. We would much prefer to devote scarce space to the more controversial and unusual cosmogenic powers and abilities, to which we now turn.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Science 205:1027-9 (1979) reports Walcott's discovery of magnetite, a magnetic substance in pigeon brains.
2 For our word "cosmogenic" Arieti (1967:5-6) uses the word "microgenic" following Weber, because of the instantaneous aspect. In this he is followed by Wilber (1978:53), who quotes him, and expands upon this characteristic.
3 For testimony from mathematicians and musicians, see chapter V, (5.1).
CHAPTER 3
Cosmogenic Powers and Abilities
'Everything that relates, whether closely or more distantly to psychic phenomena and to the action of psychic forces in general should be studied just like any other science. There is nothing miraculous or supernatural in them, nothing that should engender or keep alive superstition. Psychic training rationally and scientifically conducted, can lead to desirable results. That is why the information gained about such training . . . constitutes useful documentary evidence worthy of our attention.'
-Alexandra David-Neel (1971:xiii)
In this chapter we come to the heart of our analysis, a discussion of the powers and abilities referred to under Table II-1. This is an awesome task because the concepts involved are revolutionary and mind shaking. The author, who is as awed by the issue as the reader, takes comfort in the fact that while this material is diametrically opposed to the conventional wisdom, some of the greatest thinkers and loftiest saints and mystics of history have said similar things.
Those readers who have attended thus far with some courtesy and perhaps even sympathy may feel that in this chapter the author has taken leave of his senses. If ultimate reality is accurately expressed by the physical world, this conclusion is well warranted. But since truth asks for no more than co-existence, the author begs such a reader's brief indulgence for a mere supposition.
Let us suppose that the Pribram-Bohm holographic model of the universe is at least tenable. (Such a model tells us that sensory reality is but a virtual image imprinted holographically on the brain when illumined by the reference beam of ultimate reality.) Then at the very least we would have some scientific grounds for admitting the possibility of what a great many otherwise truthful saints and mystics have told us (not to mention some of the greatest of modern scientists such as Heisenberg and Schroedinger), namely that the physical world is not ultimate
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reality, but is in fact junior to the normal state of consciousness. If by any chance any of these people are even a little bit right, then our whole conception of physics must undergo another revolution as far reaching as the supplanting of Ptolemaic concepts by Copernican ones, or the Newtonian laws by Einsteinian. What we are doing here, therefore, is erecting an intellectual paradigm roomy enough to accommodate some new ideas. When a young man and his wife build a house, it is wise to provide for future children and guests; we are doing the same thing. Hopefully, this explanation will lead to a relaxation in the reader's belief system long enough so that he will be able to let the form and uses of the structure, not his prejudices, determine his judgement. At least he may see, although not agree, with the author's rationale.
We now begin the investigation of a range of physical powers and mental abilities which have the following characteristics:
a) appear miraculous, i.e. neither understood nor completely accepted by science,
b) generally involve some kind of altered state of consciousness,
c) often involve some right hemisphere function,
d) are often credited to the Deity or the devil,
e) can be arranged in an ascending scale, (a taxonomy), involving the increase of holiness, or high mental health,
f) demand a revamping of our usual paradigms about the nature of physical reality,
g) involve more a transcendence than an enhancement of ontogenic and phylogenic powers, hence are outside and independent of the laws of mental measurement.
Because of these unusual characteristics, we have labeled these powers and abilities cosmogenic. They can roughly be divided into two orders: body powers, and mental abilities. We have arranged them into a taxonomy where the lower end of the series 3.0 to 3.3 are psychic effects seen in exceptional persons who are non-saintly, although saints sometimes report them. From 3.4 to 3.7 we find effects usually confined to saints. With 3.8 we begin the siddhis or extraordinary epiphenomena which apparently are developed in saints and yogic adepts; these continue through 4.8.
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In reply to those who would consider this very unstable ground from which to extract data, we point out that while any given datum may in itself be suspect, the plethora of it from all ages and cultures, especially from those persons who have otherwise lived truthful and saintly lives, must command some degree of internal consistency, and hence face validity. Furthermore the putting together of the data to make a meaningful whole would hardly be possible if the data itself were fraudulent. Let the reader then at least suspend judgment until he or she has heard the full evidence.
These abilities seem to differ also from the previous ones in that they appear to be acquired (or conferred) in an esoteric, miraculous or occult way without much reference to previous intellectual level. They are also rare, ephemeral, not tightly held, and not easy either to verify or measure. As Table II-1 indicates, they consist of two levels: physical or body powers, and mental abilities or knowledges, which have been here separated for analysis, although they often occur together.
The religious literature of many cultures connects these abilities with holiness or progression towards self-actualization. Indeed, this concordance of belief about most specifics of these powers is one of the most telling arguments for their validity.
Because the Indian tradition and religious teaching on this subject is so much more detailed than any other authority, we shall use its concepts as useful building blocks. This does not imply total acceptance of this creed; it is merely a convenience on an otherwise unlit and difficult road. Hindu teaching holds that the siddhis (or miraculous powers) may come spontaneously with advancement and enlightenment or they may be developed by certain techniques. Most religious advice counsels the adept not to pay attention to these epiphenomena of enlightenment, lest willful efforts to obtain them distract the individual from progression towards salvation. Thus the reader should keep constantly in mind that the description of these powers and methods of obtaining them does not constitute approval of the practices. This point is important enough for some expert testimony: (Weber 1958:164-5) declares:
Yoga technique on the other hand sought principally to achieve magical states and miraculous powers. Thus for
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example one sought the power to suspend gravitation and to gain the ability to float around. Moreover, one sought to gain omnipotence with power directly to realize imagined events without external action by virtue of the magical will-power of the yogin. Finally, omniscience was sought, that is clairvoyance especially of other men's thoughts.
Rama (1978:102) is another Easterner who advises against use of the siddhis. He says:
The third chapter of the Yoga Sutras explains many methods of attaining siddhis, but these siddhis create stumbling blocks in the path of enlightenment ... The path of enlightenment is different from the intentional cultivation of powers. The miracles performed by Buddha, Christ, and other great sages were spontaneous and for a purpose. They were not performed with selfish motives or to create a sensation. On the path of yoga one comes across the potentials for siddhis. A yogi without having any desire for a siddhi might get one, but one who is aware of the purpose of his life never misuses them ... Siddhis do exist but only with adepts.
Prof. Richet (1923:vii) in his usual clear and concise manner states the fundamentals of what he calls the science of metapsychics:
1) Cryptesthesia (the lucidity of former writers) is a faculty of cognition that differs from the normal sensorial faculties.
2) Telekinesis is a mechanical action that differs from all known mechanical action, being exerted at a distance and without contact on person or objects, under certain determinate conditions.
3) Ectoplasm (the materialization of former writers) is the formation of divers objects, which in most cases seem to emerge from a human body and take on the semblance of material realities - clothing, veils, and living bodies.
These make up the whole of metapsychics. It seems to me that to admit this much is to admit a great deal. To go further is to go beyond the present limits of science.
Referring to Table II-1,let us now commence a detailed
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investigation of the cosmogenic physical powers in order.
3.01) Telepathy1
Telepathy may be defined as the transmission of thoughts, ideas, images or symbols from the mind of one person to another without the usual intervening sensory percepts. It may be distinguished from clairvoyance, in that telepathy is in the form of a message, whereas clairvoyance is in the form of a vision. (It is a difference similar to that between radio and television.) Telepathy from the Greek word "tele" and "pathos," literally means "empathy at a distance."
From work elsewhere (1974:24) we quote:
"Telepathy is a kind of intuition, a 'direct knowledge of distant facts.' 'Telepathy produces full and clear impressions in a way that clairvoyance does not.' 'It is a swift process of knowing through being' (empathy)." (Garrett 1949:133).
Sinclair (1971:128) explains the methodology of telepathy as follows:
If you succeed in doing this, you will find it hard not to drop asleep. But you must distinguish between this and the state you are to maintain . . . After you have learned to induce it, you will be able to concentrate on the idea instead of the rose, and to carry this idea into sleep with you, as the idea to dominate the subconscious while you are asleep. This idea taken into sleep in this way, will often act in the subconscious with the same power as the idea suggested by the hypnotist ... You can learn to carry an idea of the restoration of health into this auto-hypnotic sleep, to act powerfully during sleep . . . But this is another matter, and not the state for telepathy - in which you must avoid dropping into a sleep. After you have practiced the exercise of concentrating on a flower and avoiding sleep - you will be able to concentrate on holding the peculiar blank state of mind which must be achieved if you are to make successful experiments in telepathy.
W. E. Thompson (letter to New York Times, 10 May 1971) says:
Imaginative artists like Blake can understand the collective condition of society because the imagination is itself the
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opening to the collective unconscious, and precisely because this consciousness is collective, imaginative people can think the same thought at the same time, even though they are separated by ordinary space.
Commenting on this Weil (1972:187) remarks:
Telepathy is nothing other than thinking the same thoughts at the same time others are thinking them - something all of us are doing all the time at a level of our unconscious experience most of us are not aware of. Become aware of it and you become telepathic ...
Myers (1961:265) says of telepathy: "Telepathy is surely a step in evolution."
Is telepathy, tele, (distance) or it is really sympathy (togetherness-feeling)? Krippner (Mitchell 1974:113) reports that Mesmer believed in a universal fluid which joined all things. What seems separated by distance in three-dimensional space, may in a higher realm be joined together directly, so that what appears to us as telepathy is merely the use of this higher property.
Krippner's fine chapter on telepathy (Mitchell, 1974:112ff) gives many convincing evidences of it, as well as a number of rigorous laboratory experiences, including the Duke research, and his own at Maimonides Dream Laboratory, N. Y. (cf Ullman, Krippner and Vaughn, Dream Telepathy, 1973). He quotes Murphy (p. 120) on evidences of fragmentation, duplication, and accretion which occur in telepathy as they do in severely censored or garbled telegraph messages. He quotes Marshall (p. 125) to the effect that "resonance between brain patterns leads to telepathy. The strength of this influence increases with the product of their complexities, and decreases with the difference in their patterns." (Readers will note the compatibility between this and the resonance and dissipative structure paradigms of Chapter One.)
We quote from earlier work: (1974:12-13)
"We are accustomed to think of the ego as being primarily attentive to the perceptual world of experience; indeed the conceptualizing of percepts furnished the brain through the five senses seems to be the main business of consciousness. So much so in
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fact, that the ego may well be thought of as the substantive of the verb to experience, and its good mental health measured by its reality-orienting aspects. Admittedly, this relationship is a complex one, but it is our task to show that it is not the only function of the ego, for there are some interesting examples of events in which the ego gains knowledge without the ordinary use of the senses.
"A parasensory event is one leading to perception or knowledge not gained through the ordinary five senses; psychic or psychedelic events are therefore parasensory. We may then undertake to catalogue such events in a psychological taxonomy as a first attempt to understand their interrelationships. Parasensory events, while more noticeable when they are not otherwise commonly explainable, are really part and parcel of ordinary experience, not something divorced from it. We will start this analysis with the mention of a possible parasensory event so commonplace and trivial that one dares suggest that it has happened to all of us on many occasions.
"Such an ordinary incident is the sudden appearance of an apparently absent person immediately subsequent to his name being mentioned in conversation. Obviously such an occurrence is not evidential for it is impossible to prove that our mention of the individual is connected with his appearance, but the phenomenon is widespread and may well be the most trivial and familiar example of a parasensory effect which will be called here a 'psychic impression.' For, if chance will not explain such occurrences, the theory here would be that in some way an anterior psychic impression is produced on the coloquitors by the imminent appearance or close proximity of the agent.
"A much more serious and evidential example of a psychic impression is the phenomenon of telepathic transmission of information regarding serious injury or death from a projector (or agent) who stands in harm's way to a percipient (often a near relative or loved one).
"We may define 'psychic impression' more exactly as a parasensory event without sensory imagery occurring to an awake percipient who suddenly and for no apparent reason is overwhelmed by strong feelings frequently resulting in action on behalf of an absent and distant agent or projector who is almost
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always in great danger of severe bodily injury or death. An example is quoted from Stevenson (1970: 111):
My daughter was away at college . . . I started to write her as usual; when about finished, my right hand started to burn, so I could not hold the pen, and the pain was terrific . . . Less than an hour later, we received a telephone call telling us that our daughter's right hand had been severely burned in the laboratory with acid at the same time I felt the burn . . .
The experience of telepathy is a rather common one, which has occurred at least once to most of us, and hence the possibility has become believable, and the rationale is more usefully sought. We shall accordingly not weary the reader with accounts of telepathic incidents, which may be found everywhere in the literature, but try for some possible explanations.
The older view is that of a universal fluid or either which connects everything to everything else. Long (1954:131) states this view as follows:
Telepathy is the sending of messages (as thought forms) along the connecting cords of invisible shadowy body substance which connect one person with another. The messages are sent by the subconscious self and received by it, to be given to the conscious self in due time.
As the subconscious spirit has control of all threads of shadowy body substance, all thought forms after they are created in the course of 'thinking,' and of all flows of the low mana or 'body electricity,' we cannot send and receive telepathic messages at will. We must give the subconscious a mental order to do the sending and receiving for us, then relax and wait for it to set to work.
We read further in Long (1954:170-1):
In her valuable book Telepathy, Eileen J. Garrett tells of the frequency with which telepathic messages are received in a form which is partly symbolic. She found that her pupils, in learning telepathy, soon became expert is grasping the meaning behind the symbols which came to them repeatedly.
Mrs. Garrett also describes the sensation experienced frequently by those who practice telepathy - the sensation of
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faint electric tingling or warmth, often accompanied by a tactile response of 'goose-flesh' when a working contact has been made. In her own case these sensations often warn her that a message is being projected to her by someone and that her attention is needed to receive it.
Deep breathing is a common preliminary to telepathic practice or other forms of psychometrizing - all these related forms depending on the movement of thought forms along a thread of connecting shadowy body stuff.
A number of psychoactive drugs promote telepathy and ESP according to Rogo (1976:60ff). These act mainly by relaxing the hold of the left hemisphere, thus placing the individual in an altered state of consciousness, where subconscious processes originating in the right hemisphere become more available to consciousness. Rogo speaks of yage, and mescaline, as well as peyote and certain mushrooms. The effects, however, are variable both as between individuals and within the same individual.
Watson (1974:256) describes a Russian experiment which monitored brain waves during a telepathic event. The receiver in Leningrad got himself into a state of "attentive relaxation" during which his brain was producing an alpha rhythm. But three seconds after the Moscow sender began sending, the alpha waves were blocked. Watson continues:
In later tests, EEG records showed similar dramatic changes in the brain patterns of the sender as well as the receiver, and the Popov group reported, 'We detected this unusual activation of the brain within one to five seconds after the beginning of telepathic transmission. We always detected a few seconds before Mikolaiev was consciously aware of receiving a telepathic message.'
The connection between telepathy and the alpha rhythm is crucial. It seems certain that both telepathy and psychokinesis occur only under certain psychological conditions - and that these are the ones marked by the production of brain waves of a particular frequency. In PK it seems to be the theta rhythm, but in telepathy it is the alpha pattern, between eight and twelve cycles per second. Subjects who score well in laboratory tests all say that they adopt a certain state of mind, which one described as 'concentrating my attention on a single point of nothingness. I think about nothing at all,
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just looking at a fixed point and emptying the mind entirely if this is possible.' Another calls the telepathic state 'concentrated passivity,' and a third sees it as 'relaxed attentiveness.'
Yoganda (1977:299) says on this matter:
The will, projected from the point between the eyebrows is the broadcasting apparatus of thought ... Man's feeling or emotional power calmly concentrated on the heart, enables it to act as a mental radio that receives the messages of other persons, far or near. In telepathy, the fine vibrations of thought in one man's mind are transmitted . . . into thought waves in the mind of the other person.
Another explanation is that of the scientist Puharich who has investigated the subject in depth. Puharich (1962:5) defines cholinergia as a state of activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, brought on by drugs, mushrooms, meditation, trance, and facilitated by the presence of negative ions in the air (see cite, ibid:9). After active experimentation he concludes (ibid:9): "I am convinced of the basic finding that mild cholinergia favors the receptive function in telepathy." (For the biochemistry of cholinergia, see cite ibid: 10, No. 3).
Puharich (1962:17) defines the opposite state of adrenergia as the excitation of the sympathetic nervous system, brought on by limbic reaction to danger, and involving fear, fight or flight. While there is less experimental evidence, Puharich (ibid:21-2), feels that this state encourages the sending function in telepathy:
It is as though the sender creates a mental vacuum toward which the receiver's mind is drawn. The sender by his need and desire prepares a mental stage; the receiver in turn populates the stage with his own symbols and images.
Stevenson (1970) in a book devoted to telepathic impressions, besides reviewing 35 new cases, tabulates 160 older published cases. In most cases the agent was dying or in great danger, and a near relative was the percipient.
Tyrrell (1961) in Science and Psychical Phenomena devotes a scholarly book to the evidence for telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, including an analysis of many cases of each type.
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This book should be read by anyone who is unsure of the reality of psychic phenomena.
For telepathy in famous people see Prince 1963:13 (Burbank) 55 (Swedenborg); 119 (John Hay) (Myers 1961:261ff). Others who have discussed the subject include Gowan 1974:24ff; Mitchell, 1974:112ff. Moss (1974:169ff) has a chapter on telepathy and clairvoyance, with many examples of each.
We have started with telepathy, because it is such a common experience, and is so well attested in the literature. Indeed, Bell's theorem in physics suggests that telepathy may be necessary in the polarity of paired particles. For if the polarity of one is changed by an experimenter, the other changes instantaneously no matter where it is. Perhaps telepathy is an earnest of a basic fundamental connectedness of all things.
3.02) Dowsing
Dowsing is the activity of sensing through the use of a wand or forked stick, the presence of underground water, oil, or minerals. Next to firewalking, no psychic ability of humans is more anciently or firmly established, since the art has been practiced everywhere since the dawn of history and flourishes today. At the same time, there is still no good comprehensive explanation for its existence. Not only are good dowsers able to locate underground water by physically walking on a terrain, but some, at least, are able to do so on a map of the same ground.
Because of the voluminous literature on the subject, (Tromp's analysis contains over 700 citations), - we shall not attempt a lengthy discussion here. An excellent review is contained in the inexpensive pocketbook Dowsing by Hitching (1978) which gives some further insight into its ramifications. A little card catalogue search in any large library, moreover, will turn up a plethora of journal articles and books on the subject. This is largely true because dowsing, alone of the psychic abilities, is a common answer to farming and industrial needs for water, and hence brings a group of hard-headed engineers and practical men into contact with a parapsychological effect which they must use although they cannot explain.
We shall regard dowsing as an excellent example of the
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human mind, when relaxed, to resonate with some collective intelligence, and so to divine hidden secrets. It is therefore part of bringing into consciousness prototaxic and somatic intelligence which is already available.
A very complete review of dowsing with over 700 citations was made by Tromp (1949:287- 363). Originally skeptical, he became convinced of the reality of dowsing after much personal experimentation. He concludes:
1) that divining phenomena exist, and number of people sensitive to these is greater than usually assumed,
2) that many factors can cause errors, and these explain most of the failures,
3) that the phenomena can be explained by normal physical and physiological laws, therefore they are not paranormal,
4) that many so-called parapsychological phenomena can also be so explained,
5) that careful analysis into such would be of great value to medicine.
Tromp (1949:324ff) made some very careful investigations of dowsing using ECGs of dowsers
a) traversing dowsing zones,
b) walking among human beings,
c) walking through artificial magnetic fields, and
d) dowsing in a moving auto.
In all, 50 ECGs are displayed in plates in the book (pp. 407-31).
In a), both dowsers and non-dowsers were found to have skin potential changes as shown by the ECG, but the dowsers had more (p. 326). The wand merely intensified the change.
In b), there was again a change in skin potential when the dowser approached a human being.
In c), there is also a change in skin potential.
The same is true in experiments d).
Hence the ECGs demonstrated the reality of dowsing phenomena. It was also found (pp. 328-330) that a large number of environmental forces also acted on the dowsing reaction, such as electrostatic conditions, sunlight, aromas etc. In general it may be concluded the Tromp believes that electrical, magnetic, and environmental acoustic and other effects all contribute to dowsing sensitivity, and that the phenomenon is therefore capable of scientific explanation. He devotes a very complete analysis, (p. 323-365) to these factors.
Hitching (1978:148-9) speculates on the method of dowsing
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transmission and reception by the human being:
But we know, from all the experiments quoted above, that this is not so - weak electromagnetic fields have an undeniable effect on living beings. Therefore, says Bigu, there are only three possible explanations:
1. Electromagnetic radiation must interact directly with the central nervous system, perhaps at the molecular level.
2. Our five known senses must respond to wider frequency ranges than they have yet been observed to do, through some mechanism that we do not yet fully understand.
3. There is a completely new kind of radiation, which science has not yet discovered but which the body instinctively recognizes.
Since the passage of electricity through a wire generates a transverse magnetic field around the wire, it is tempting to speculate that the passage of water through earth would generate a similar type of field which could be sensed by the dowser. But this explanation breaks down with regard to stationary oil or minerals.
Hitching (1978:149-51) concludes regarding the mechanism of transmission:
Although none yet provides a complete model, probably the most promising approach stems originally from the work of the Yale University professor of astronomy Harold S. Burr, who discovered as far back as 1949 that each nerve is surrounded by what he termed a 'life field' (or L-field), consisting of a measurable quantity of electricity. His work is still controversial in part, but other experimenters have repeated his results, and the American biophysicist Robert Becker in turn has suggested that each cell may work like an electrical semiconductor, with biological transistors making the connections between them.
The hypothesis was put more technically by one delegate at a congress on biocommunication held in Aspen, Colorado, in 1973: 'There is evidence for solid-state electron conduction mechanisms in living systems, which could easily be adapted to the reception of electromagnetic signals, both low-frequency and high-frequency. . . '
Another delegate had a theory of how genetic changes could come about by an exchange of information within a species or population:
'You can regard DNA molecules as radio-fre-
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quency signal generators, RNA molecules as amplifiers, the cell wall as a noise filter, and enzymes and amino acids as effectors of signals coded in various regions of the spectrum.'
Hitching (1978:154) also reports that the two sensing areas of the body are the kidneys and the brain.
Moss (1 974:94ff) discusses the use of pranic energy in dowsing, including personal experience. She notes the scholarly Utah State University study of dowsing by Professors Chadwick and Jensen called The Detection of Magnetic Fields Caused by Groundwater, which she feels is the best scientific explanation of dowsing.
We quote from Susy Smith's fine chapter on dowsing (1975: 110-111):
But when Roberts asked him, Henry Gross, 800 miles away in Maine, challenged these assumptions. Using a fresh-cut forked twig, he dowsed maps and revealed the general locations of domes of fresh water in four sources in Bermuda. Now, while there are many wells on the island, most give salty, brackish water. Only several produce palatable water for a few households. But pure fresh water gushed up where Gross had dowsed on his map in Maine.
The Bermudian article concludes: 'Kenneth Roberts had proved his point: the dowsing rod works even at long distance, provided it is in the hands of a skilled operator. The author then returned to Maine to conduct additional map-dowsing exploits with Henry.'
Another remarkable case of long-distance dowsing was published in the Revue Spirite in 1932. The previous January, Father Frastre, head of a mission station on Yule Island off the New Guinea coast, had visited Switzerland. While he was there, he called upon the celebrated dowser L'Abbe Mermet. After explaining the difficulties of surviving on the isolated island with its indifferent water supply, Frastre asked if the Abbe could find fresh springs on the island.
Meret then dowsed with his pendulum beyond the opposite edge of the photograph. Father Frastre made careful notes of the dowser's statements about the location, volume, and lime content of a stream in that direction as yet unknown to the missionaries. Soon afterward, he sailed back to Yule Island.
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Eight months later, the priest wrote the letter published in the Revue Spirite, saying that the missionaries had indeed found the stream at the location specified by Mermet and that an analysis of the water sent to Paris indicated a lime content nearly identical to that predicted by the Abbe.
Rawcliffe (1952:333-366) devotes three chapters to dowsing, tests for it, and "radiathesia." While he is antagonistic to the phenomena, he offers no explanation of incidents which he accepts as verified.
After an entire book devoted to the subject of dowsing, Barrett and Besterman (1968:275) state:
... the conclusion to which we believe an impartial student of the facts set out in this book must come. The dowser, in our opinion, is a person endowed with a subconscious supernormal faculty, which, its nature being unknown, we call, after Professor Richet, cryptesthesia.
Cryptesthesia comes from the Greek meaning "hidden perception." We would add that the dowser's rod thus joins the Ouida board, hypnotic spells, drugs, meditation, and so on, as another device for arousing the activity of the right cerebral hemisphere while the left is in abeyance, and so contacting what we have elsewhere designated (Gowan 1975:3) the "collective preconscious" or the "numinous." It is, as the above authors have said, a latent subconscious cognitive power which seems to run in families, but which is capable of some development in most people.
Some dowsers can "see" hidden underground water and minerals, not just "feel" it through the tug of the stick. Vision through opaque objects is a cosmogenic siddhi treated under section 4.3, so it is probable that dowsing is the "little brother" of a larger talent, just a general sensitivity precedes actual sight in animal protoplasm.
Hitching (1967:67) reports that dowsing for land mines was used very successfully in Vietnam, and quotes L. Matacia:
I'm damn sure I personally wouldn't go anywhere in battle without using dowsing, and it must have gotten the same way for the boys out there.
In the case of Vietnam, there was essentially the sense of need
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which is supposed to be at the back of all successful dowsing. However, at the experimental level, there have been two important scientific surveys (described in detail elsewhere in the book) which seem to have shown conclusively that most of us can dowse to a surprisingly sensitive level. Professor Yves Rocard in Paris found that nearly 70 percent and Dr. Zaboj Harvalik in Lorton, Virginia, found that nearly 90 percent of all people tested were able to obtain a dowsing reaction when asked to identify a small change in the earth's magnetic field.
Tom Graves, who conducts a course on dowsing at Kensington Institute, a further education college run by the Inner London Education Authority, is even more emphatic: 'Anyone can dowse. It's just a skill which, like any other, can be learned with practice, awareness, and a working knowledge of basic principles and mechanics - a skill which you can use as and when you need.'
Dowsing is explained by Brunler, quoted by Mann (1973: 114), as due to a biocosmic energy, or para-magnetic quality which surrounds human beings. This notion ties in with Reich's views on orgone energy (ibid) and Reichenbach's views concerning od.
Reichenbach in The Odic Force explains dowsing as due to od which is created by flowing water. The flow of the water produces pranic energy much as the flow of electricity produces a magnetic field. This energy field interacts with the human bioenergetic field to tell the dowser where water will be found.
Dowsing (called radiesthesia, or sensitivity to radiations) is widely practiced in the Soviet Union, and Ostrander and Schroeder (1970:176ff) devote a whole chapter to it. The Russians believe there is a force field of unknown origin to which living organisms react.
For recent developments in Russia where dowsing is much better accepted, we quote Benson Herbart in Parapsychological Review (9:4:15, July, 1978):
Highly detailed and technical papers on the 'biophysical effect' or 'BPE' (dowsing) continue to appear in the USSR, always for the practical use of locating underground ores, oil, and water. A.G. Bakirov, of the Polytechnic Institute of S. M. Kirov in Tomsk, authored such an article in the Newspaper of the Order of the October Revolution and of theRed Banner, claiming
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that by means of BPE, deposits of ore can be outlined, tectonic ruptures traced, and depths of deposits gauged. Chromite deposits down to a depth of 900 meters were located in the Orenburgsk region; at Letnyeye, an agglomeration of copper pyrites was revealed under a surface drift of porphyrites. Lixiviated magnesite-bearing serpentinites did not yield any BPE reaction, while ochres and nickel-bearing deposits reacted strongly in the hyperbasalt Kempircaisky massif.
The Russians favor a rod shaped like an automobile startinghandle, held at each end, which easily turns, the hands performing a cranking action. BPE reactions are measured by the number of turns made per meter walking distance. Compared to the rate for steel rods, aluminum rods operate at halfspeed and brass at quarter-speed. These relative rates apply to dowsing in cars and helicopters as well as on foot. Among the smaller countries of Eastern Europe, dowsing research is most active in Czechoslovakia.
A magnetic explanation for dowsing is given by Barnothy, 1964:281 ) :
We are not the first to have reported the sensitivity of a dowser to a magnetic field. According to a very old book, when the Abbot of Vallemont - in reality the Reverend Father Le Lorrain, S. J., Professor of Physics at College Louis le Grand - places a lodestone before a well-known dowser, 'the rod moves.' S.J. Tromp ('Psychical Physics') causes the dowser to operate with artificial magnetic fields. Joseph Wust finds magnetic anomalies on the ground where the dowsers react. However, none of these authors connects these effects with the detection of water.
It appears to us that one may provisionally conclude that the dowser does not detect still water in a pond or running water in a river, but he can detect
a. water filtering through porous media, and
b. water in permeable layers adjacent to beds of clay, since in these two cases water produces electric currents through electrofiltration potential and concentration batteries. If the medium is sufficiently conducting, and the current in the soil is sufficiently high, then there exists at the surface of the soil a small magnetic anomaly.
While the "natural" explanations of dowsing are helpful in understanding this ancient phenomenon, they emphasize the
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remarkable ability (latent in most persons) of reacting prototaxically through skin changes in potential to minute natural anomalies in electromagnetic charge. It is another example of the skin "knowing things" which do not ordinarily percolate into consciousness. The accomplished dowser may merely be an individual who has perfected his conscious attention to this somatic knowledge. Perhaps it is as Walt Whitman said, "We are all the greatest poets, but only the greatest poets are conscious of the fact." If this be true of dowsing, it may very well be true of all the other exotic factors of intellect we are studying, and especially so of healing.
3.03) Siddhis (Psychic Powers)
Anyone who begins to investigate the exotic factors of intellect and to read the literature on unusual powers of some advanced humans, has his attention immediately drawn to the Hindu "siddhis" or miraculous powers. There are several reasons for this:
1 ) There is more available material,
2) The material is more extensive and covers more powers,
3) The material is presented in a more orderly fashion,
4) Whereas other traditions (e.g., Christian) present the powers as theophanous graces, the siddhis literature presents them as abilities acquired by certain specific practices.
Under these circumstances, anyone who hopes to develop a taxonomy of the exotic factors of intellect is virtually compelled to build on the Hindu model.
Before going further, it may be well to state the author's personal views in a kind of caveat. The siddhis involve the use of universal force for personal interest in which there is great danger. The danger consists in that knowledge gives power which may come ahead of purification of selfish ego interests, always demanded in every monastic tradition. The use of universal power for selfish interests is magic and is proscribed by almost all religious leaders. Hence, many of them advise that no willful effort be made to encourage siddhis, and no particular attention be paid to them when they occur as epiphenomena of the developing consciousness, lest fixation on product, rather than attention to process occur. Our attention to them in this section is a research effort, and does not constitute a recommendation to attempt to develop them.
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There are some catalogs of these powers and abilities. Bro (1970) enumerates the powers of the American paragnost, Edgar Cayce (We interpolate the relevant section numbers in all of the following):
1) commune with dead (3. 1)
2) receive psychic impressions (3.0)
3) see auras (3.5)
4) perform automatisms (3.1)
5) act on people and things (4.4, 4.5)
6) have out-of-body experiences (3.2)
7) possess precognition (4.71)
8) possess retrocognition (4.71)
9) prophecy (4.71)
10) work wonders Al, 4.4, 4.5)
11) guide (4.77) 12) heal Al, 4A
Saraydarian (1971:220ff) gives the following list of "expanded powers":
1) intuitive response to ideas (4.77)
2) sensitivity to impressions (3.0)
3) right observation of reality on soul plane (4.4)
4) quick response to real need (4.6)
5) correct manipulation of force (4.5)
6) true comprehension of time element (4.71)
7) mental polarization (4.6)
8) fiery aspiration (4.7)
9) symbolic reading (4.72)
10) devotion to higher self (4.6)
11) continuity of consciousness, lucidity (4.8)
12) conscious contact with guru (4.9)
We give Montagu's (1950:79) nineteen signs of the physical phenomena of mysticism:
1) ecstasies (4.6)
2) stigmata (3.4)
3) levitation (3.8)
4) bilocation (3.2)
5) luminosity (3.5)
6) inedia (no need for food) (3.6)
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7) "non-somnia" (no necessity for sleep), (3.6)
8) "spiritual (precognitive) dreams (4.71)
9) visions and apparitions (4.2)
10) clairvoyance (3.2)
11) vision through opaque bodies (4.3)
12) infused knowledge (4.7)
13) discernment of spirits (4.77)
14) gift of healing (4.1, 4.4)
15) empery over nature (4.5)
16) demonical molestation (poltergeist phenomena)
17) fire of love (psychic heat), (3.3)
18) mystic marriage (4.8)
19) postmortem incorruption (3.7)
The list of siddhis according to Swami Sivananda (1971: 152) includes the following major eight:
1) Anima, (miniturization) (3.9)
2) Mahima (giantism), (3.9)
3) Laghima (levitation), (3.8)
4) Garima (the opposite of #3), (3.9)
5) Prapti (prophecy, clairvoyance, and thought-reading)
6) Prakamya (invisibility), (3.9)
7) Vashitam (empery over animals), (4.5)
8) Ishitwarn (attainment of divine power).
Minor siddhis include the following (ibid:154-5)
1-3) Independence from Bodily Functions (3.6)
4,5) Clairvoyance, clairaudience
12) Knowledge of past, present, and future (4.7)
14) Prophecy
19) Knowledge of past lives
20) Knowledge of the stars
22) Mastery of the elements (4.5)
24) Omnipotence
25) Levitation (3.8)
26) Dowsing (3.2)
It is interesting to compare Tables II-1 and III-1 first to note the very considerable correspondence, and second to note entries in one table which do not appear in the other. Since Table II-1 is mainly from Western sources, and Table III-1 from Eastern, one
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TABLE III-I PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRA BOOK III ON SUPERNORMAL POWER
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may speculate that items found in only one table are cultural rather than universal powers. For example, 3.1, 3.3, and 3.4 (physical mediumship, thermal effects, and stigmata) are not spoken of in Patanjali. In the case of the first two, it may be because they are considered rather common there; in the case of stigmata, there seems to be no parallel outside of Christianity. Similarly sutras 26 and 27 (index 4.0) (astronomical knowledge), may well have been considered an intuitional grace by the Hindus; Western astronomy has made it a science. There are a few other differences in emphasis, but over all, there is a remarkable similarity in the two tables. Almost all the Patanjali sutras are represented somewhere. We left out sutra 46 (to get a perfect adamantine body) because it "comes" naturally as a result of perfection and does not appear to require samyama. It is also to be remarked that some Christian saints acquire siddhis "en passant" or without conscious performance of samyama. Evidently at certain levels, siddhis appear spontaneously.
Let us turn to Patanjali'sYoga Sutras (Aranya 1977), Book III (on paranormal powers) for the authoritative statement on samyama, (or the mechanism for the production of the siddhis. In the following, since we will follow the text closely, the Arabic number is the page and the Roman the sutra number.
"Dharama or attention is the mind's fixation on a particular point in space:" (278-I), (e.g., the navel, the heart, the nose, the tongue). "In the case of intra-organic regions, the mind is fixed directly through intermediate feeling, but in the case of external objects (sounds, forms, etc.), the mind is fixed, not directly but through modifications of the senses." "These three, viz. dharama (fixity), dhyana (meditation) and samadhi (concentration) taken together is (sic) called samyama," (283-IV). "By this samyama the three-fold mutation is directly realized. But these are external with respect to seedless concentration," (samadhi), (287-VIII).
The three gunas are tamas (e.g., mass, inertia), rajas (e.g., activity, energy), and sattva (e.g., lightness, intelligence). The gunas are a basic triplicity, not defined by their examples, and in continual change. "The product of gunas (or three basic constituent principles) is always mutable:" (288-IV), since: "mutation is the nature of the gunas:" (303). "There is no cause:", it being a fundamental characteristic of all phenomena," for "everything
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is essentially every other thing," (308). Thus to get a mental grasp on such a slippery concept one must look at group theory in which a particular finite group (viz, the group of three, e.g., ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA) has six different modes or appearances, which may permute into one another. One cannot usefully dwell on these changes, only on the whole group.
Further reflection on this topic indicates that perhaps the gunas may appear 'in four phases and may operate independently. If so, the repetitions of four things taken three at a time would be 43 or 64, which, of course, brings us back to the I-Ching.
In this introductory section we have introduced two very common and well accepted examples of human parasensory abilities - telepathy and dowsing. We have also made an initial and crude attempt to organize the field of exotic powers and abilities into a taxonomy by building on the Hindu siddhis literature. All this has been designed to give some semblance of meaning and order to an otherwise chaotic area, and to develop in the reader a background of knowledge and a suspension of former belief so that he can, with us, examine in detail a number of the more spectacular and surprising faculties and events connected with these powers. Our method will be to proceed seriatim through the cosmogenic sector of the taxonomy of exotic powers and abilities discussing the specifics of each case in turn.
3.1) Physical Mediumship: Materializations, psychokinesis, apports
The stipulated facts in this remarkable constellation include a medium: generally a woman of child-bearing age, who goes into a trance, (a state of immobility and ego-excursion), with usual amnesia as to events of the seance which involves a group of sitters (usually in a darkened room), and a (disembodied) voice (not the medium's) called a control which acts as a master of ceremonies for the events that ensue. Hundreds of books have been written about these activities, by some very famous sitters (e.g., William James, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Balfour, to name only a few).
Under this heading we will discuss physical mediumship and possession (including communication with the dead), psycho-
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kinesis, materializations, poltergeist phenomena, apports, and some concluding remarks. Many of these areas have been very extensively treated in the literature, so we shall concentrate on explanations rather than the mere detail of phenomena.
3. 10) Mediumship and Possession
The "possessor" of the medium is called the control. Usually, this is presumed to be a departed person and, usually, identifies him/herself as such. The control possesses power (presumably drawn from the medium and/or the sitters in the seance). The medium is almost always in a cataleptic trance and usually has no memorability of what went on during the seance. With regard to these relationships, Susy Smith in a biography of the excellent medium, Mrs. Leonard, (1964:238ff) had this to say:
Mediums often speak of this condition variously as power or light. What might, perhaps, be the same thing in a denser form is called ectoplasm. Thomas says, 'This psychic emanation is an intermediary which is sufficiently akin to the substance of the Beyond to be usable by discarnates, and sufficiently akin to our matter to affect it under certain conditions. These conditions are in operation when a communicator makes use of it to levitate, say, a table in the seance room, or to speak at a trumpet-voice seance. There have been but few scientific investigations to learn its actual properties.' Drayton Thomas continues that when the late Dr. Osty was studying the medium Rudi Schneider in Paris he became convinced that Rudi could, at times, produce something which, although invisible and intangible, obscured infrared rays.
Thomas goes on: 'A group of investigators, wishing to verify this, invited Rudi to London for a series of experiments at the rooms of the Society for Physical Research. Their findings are recorded in the Proceedings for June, 1933, from which the following quotations are taken: On nearly every occasion many movements of the galvanometer coil were recorded.... These movements of the galvanometer coil, which confirm Osty's discovery, are very remarkable.... In addition, the bell in series with a selenium cell rang on two or three occasions, indicating an absorption of at least 50% of the infrared radiation. Whatever it is that affects the galvanometer, or bell circuits, appears to emanate from Rudi, since the ray absorption sometimes synchronized with his breathing and sometimes took place immediately after he said it would.
lilac light radiated by certain corals (gorgonides);
purple light radiated by fulgora pyrorhynchus;
a tunicate, appendicularia, that radiates red light which changes into blue and finally into green;
different insects, such as fire-flies (luciola, diaphanes, pyrocoelia and lamprophorus) that radiate light which is mostly connected with the sexual functions of those insects (in case of the European glow-worm, the non-flying female radiates a much stronger light than the flying male).
Many deep sea fish possess complicated organs in the head or other places of the body, which radiate light of different wave length. Of approximately 1,000 species of deep sea bone fish, about a ninth possess light organs which attract prey and perhaps also serve for recognizing each other, particularly during the periods of procreation. For example, thaumatolampas possesses light organs that radiate blue, red, and white light. The starfish brisinga does not possess a light organ but secretes a radiating slime that covers the whole body.
Certain fish are able to create such strong electrical potentials that they cause unconsciousness in animals or man who swim in their neighborhood. Examples are gymnotus electricus (the electric eel), which develops electrical potentials of up to 800 V, the electric ray fish (Torpedo Occidentalis), torpedo marmorata, malopterurus, etc.
Jonas and Jonas (1976:150) tell us that the heat perception of a snake operates on the principle of an infrared camera. Each membrane contains 150,000 nerve cells sensitive to heat in an area where a human would have only a few. Like a camera it gives an outline image of a creature that may be only a fraction of one degree C warmer than its environment.
The electric powers of some animals are phenomenal. We still do not understand fully the photoluminescence of some fireflies and fishes. Coe (Gaddis 1967:175) studied the electrical powers of marine life (see Scientific American, March 1963), including some electric eels which can produce charges up to 600 volts.
Another striking ability of some birds, notably homing pigeons' , and other migrating fowl, as well as some aquatic mammals, is the magnetic homing sense, also found in bees (Jonas and Jonas, 1976:152).
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An excellent discussion of the taste world of animals, also different from ours, will be found in Science 201:224, 21 July, 1978. In it V. G. Dethier points out that there are many dimensions of taste open to animals which we may not perceive.
Animals sensitive to the ultra-violet spectrum may perceive a different world than we do (just as dogs can hear high-frequency whistles to which we are deaf). Jonas and Jonas 1976:165 say:
We have already given a small indication of these possibilities: bees, for instance, are aware of a different portion of the spectrum from that visible to us, so that to them the 'reality' of the world is completely different from our 'reality.' We have also discussed how the dog's world is a world of odors utterly unlike anything we know. The bee's nervous system, of course, limited by its small size, cannot approach ours in integrative capacity; so as an individual, if not as a group, its capacities are restricted. The dog's limitations lie in its lack of hands. But these examples do give an idea of the 'other worlds' revealed by an extension of familiar senses.
Tromp (1949:103) discusses some remarkable senses of dogs:
1) Experiments by Kalischer demonstrated that a dog can differentiate between certain odors, which a man is unable to do; e.g., iso-valeric acid (a fatty acid probably occurring in the aroma of a human being) can be distinguished in a mixture with other fatty acids.
2) Experiment of Buytendijk indicated that a dog can smell iodoform in concentrations of 10-6. Quinine and ordinary salt (NaCl), scentless to man, can be smelt by dogs, even in concentrations of 10-4.
3) Experiments of Heitzenroeder and Seffrin indicated that under normal conditions dogs are not very sensitive to odors of flowers, but exceed the sensitivity of man in the case of animal odors (smell of meat, etc.). Later experiments of Henning, however, showed that this is only the result of lack of canine interest in the scent of flowers. After a previous training it was found that dogs and man are about equally sensitive to vegetable odors.
4) A similar example of specific sensitivity is indicated by the experiments of Romanes. His dog was able to follow his track, although his shoes were greased with oil of anise and 12 people had walked one after the other exactly on
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the same track before the experiment started. Tracks of a stranger could not be followed.
This brief and by no means complete catalog of some of the sensory specializations of animals indicates conclusively that when evolution has developed the proper receptors, animals can extend their sensory powers to degrees almost unbelievable. This introduction, therefore, may serve as a caution that we should not be surprised about the presence of similar powers in human beings.
2.2) A Taxonomy of Exotic Powers and Abilities
Our introduction on the phylogenic abilities of other species has been useful in showing the astonishing range of sensory abilities possessed by creatures lower than mankind in the evolutionary order. It is now time to present our taxonomy of exotic powers and abilities of mankind, which is displayed in Table 2.1. The phylogenic abilities of mankind, perhaps best represented by the Guilford Structure of Intellect Model, are ruled out of consideration by the adjective "exotic" so no more will be said about them. Instead, in the remainder of this chapter, we shall discuss ontogenic abilities, in both sensory powers and mental abilities. There are, it will be remembered, by definition, extraordinary abilities possessed by some human beings which are nevertheless seen as explainable by presently understood natural law (whereas cosmogenic are not). There is admittedly a very thin line of distinction here, but as a practical rule of thumb on where to place things, it should be possible for a positivistic materialist to read this chapter without exclaiming "humbug!", whereas the contrary is true of the next.
As one inspects the taxonomy, which is admittedly a first step in an area never before categorized in such a form, it is very possible to disagree with the author on the relative position of the powers and abilities. Indeed, the writer stipulates that much of it is arbitrary. (The numbers in parentheses are Patanjali sutra numbers, about which more will be said in the next chapter on the cosmogenic abilities).
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TABLE 2-1 TAXONOMY OF EXOTIC POWERS AND ABILITIES
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Three classes of abilities are readily distinguishable, which will be henceforth called: 1) the phylogenic, 2) the ontogenic, and 3) the cosmogenic.
The phylogenic is defined as an exotic ability inherent in the species or in the genetic ancestry, so that it is possessed to a remarkable degree (according to our view) by every member. (Note that most of the abilities of mankind would be considered in this category if viewed by another species; no species would view its own phylogenic abilities as extraordinary.) We may also regard phylogenic abilities manifested by lower evolutionary types which have specialized in different ways than mankind. The separate hemisphere activity of dolphins, the thermal pits of snakes, the temperature sensitivity of fish, the polarization of the bee's eye, and the magnetic sensitivity of migrating birds are all examples.
The ontogenic is defined as an exotic ability possessed by only a very few individuals in a species, which appears to have been due to genetic endowment or mutation and enhanced by individual effort. We may also regard ontogenic abilities as part of present evolution, moving in a transverse direction to evolutionary development of the species and, hence, which are not likely to become more common in an ascending evolutionary future. Furthermore, the explanation for such abilities does not require any modification in the present laws of physics: an example of this type of ability would be an idiot-savant.
The cosmogenic2 is defined as an exotic ability occurring ephemerally, unmerited or predicted by genetics or ordinary development. Representing possible future evolution of the race, it may or may not be manifested even in rare and unusual individuals, but may be postulated to occur at certain higher levels of development. Furthermore, its explanation requires modifications of our present understanding of the laws of physics. Examples of such abilities would be levitation and precognition, as well as other paranormal abilities (the siddhis).
It thus follows that the exotic powers of man's mind are but higher levels (or overtones) of ordinary powers, and that we can redefine phylogenic, ontogenic, and cosmogenic abilities as those powers which have been, are being, and will be "granted" to mankind, or to put it the other way, as levels which have been, are being, and will be reached by mankind.
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If any living system is to be conscious of any given vivency, it must possess receptor organs registering in that vivency, i.e., sense modalities. This sensorium may vary as to kind and as to acuity, and we must be on guard not to presuppose that they must be sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste and of the degree of acuity with which we humans are familiar.
What causes the unfoldment of latent powers? We have put the question as if they were developmental, naturally occurring at the reaching of some higher stage. But there are at least three other explanations. One is that of reincarnation, wherein such powers were exercised in a former life; another is that of siddhis training, whereby through a certain yogic procedure, the power is obtained. A third is that in the removal of personal static, the receiving capacity of the radio set (as it were) becomes improved and so distant stations are heard. Happold (1970:69) says: "In the study of contemplation, we are considering a movement of consciousness towards a higher level, as the result of the emergence and cultivation of powers which in most men and women remain latent."
It is certain that most of these exotic powers, sometimes including the siddhis, come spontaneously to those rare souls in the higher reaches of developmental progress. The fact that many Christian saints have exhibited these powers indicates that specific Hindu yogic training is not a necessary condition for them. The siddhis training, however, may encourage the more rapid access of the powers or of the developmental level which gives free access to them.
2.3) The Etheric Body
The physical body seems to be a vehicle with sensory orifices which supports the five physical senses. It appears operationally useful to posit the existence of an etheric (or astral) body which supports the function of non-physical (paranormal) senses. Interestingly enough, this paradigm of the etheric or astral body is well known as an article of belief in the East. Reserving the concept that this construct is merely a useful paradigm, we require here a summary statement of this belief, in order that later discussion may be facilitated.
Wilson (1971:544) quotes Payne:
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In Man's Latent Powers, Phoebe Payne describes man's 'etheric body' as follows: 'This body of subtle physical material acts as the vehicle for the circulation of human vitality, and is an infinitely delicate bridge between the psychic worlds and the Physical brain consciousness ... It is the special qualities of this body . . . which constitute the main difference between the psychic and the non-psychic person. The etheric counterpart interpenetrates the whole of the physical anatomy, corresponding to it cell for cell, and also extends beyond it to a distance of four to six inches according to the nature and health of the individual. This outlying portion is called the health aura. It is visible to ordinary sight under favourable conditions of lighting.... Many people can catch a glimpse of it in a half light by bringing the fingertips of the two hands near together and slowly drawing them apart, when a nebulous emanation can be sensed or seen flowing from one hand to the other ... This duplicate subtle body appears often as a fine filmy mesh completely surrounding the ordinary physical body, mainly grey in colour. To trained clairvoyant sight it is an intricate structure of delicate hues. "
According to the occultists, the etheric body or double contains seven chakra centers, which when opened give various powers. In upward order (which is the path of development), they are:
1) base of spine, seat of kundalini power
2) navel, feeling
3) spleen, travelling
4) heart, understanding
5) throat, clairaudience
6) between eyebrows, clairvoyance
7) top of the head, continuity of cosmic consciousness.
It should be emphasized that these chakra centers are believed to be in the etheric, not the physical body, and to be the basis for acupuncture points; moreover, each chakra has a characteristic color associated with it.
From the etheric body issues an energy, known as prana. This energy (also known as od or orgone) is discussed more thoroughly in section 3.5. The energy is apparently the basis for ectoplasm which is the operator in physical mediumship (to be discussed in section 3.1). The usefulness of prana and ectoplasm (its product) in explaining various psychic effects is the main reason for our adoption of the etheric body construct.
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In speaking about the interaction between the etheric and the physical levels, Tiller (White 1974:267) says:
It is really at the point of mind that one can bring about in the organization of structure in these various levels of substance. That is, through mind forces, one can create a pattern, and that pattern then acts as a force field that applies to the next level of substance .... These etheric forces, then bring about .... the organization of matter at the physical level.
To use a mathematical simile, we have the same difference here as between a function and its differential. There will be further discussion of this important principle in the 4.6 section on orthocognitive healing and in Chapter VIII.
Further on the nature of the astral level, Tiller (White 1974: 268) declares:
The astral function is largely as a containment vehicle to keep the human essence in a compact form between incarnations. ... In the case of the physical, we have a space-time frame which we know a great deal about. The etheric level is a companion level, but it operates in a different space-time frame from the physical .... That is, for the physical, as time goes on, the potential decreases and the entropy increases; whereas for the etheric, we have the reverse situation....
2.4) Non-Paranormal Human Oddities
In this section we pay brief and incomplete notice to various reports of extraordinary human powers, which while very unusual, and hardly explainable, were not regarded as supernatural either by the possessor or by those who witnessed the abilities.
In this respect, Jonas and Jonas (1976:165) conclude:
If we extend this concept and assume that any and every sense we are aware of probably has a range beyond our present comprehension both in extent and in intensity, we can see opening up before us further uncharted sense-domains for the exercise of our imaginations. Sight, for instance, raised to a greater power, might include not only keener sight but also the ability to see other things - things that are too small to be seen by our eyes, things that travel too fast, or things that are too transparent or too opaque to be registered by our senses.
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Gaddis (1967:166) notes studies which show that Eskimos can hold metal objects in hand for several seconds, while the flesh of soldiers freezes immediately. He also notes the ability of Bedouins to live in extreme heat and of peoples in the Andes and Himalayas to live at heights where oxygen is only about half our requirements.
There flourished on the island of Mauritius about the time of the American Revolution a man named Bottineau, known as the wizard of Mauritius because he had discovered and practiced the art of "a nauscopie," namely the discovering of ships, still below the horizon, by means of the effect which their motion produced upon the visible atmosphere near the the horizon. In this way he was able to discover and predict the arrival of vessels several hundred miles from landfall. The records show that from 1778 to 1782 he preannounced the arrival of 575 vessels, many four days before they came up on the horizon. The testimony to his accuracy is voluminous and irrefutable. Here in his own words is the explanation (Gould 1965:173ff):
Nauscopie is the art of ascertaining the approach of vessels ... at a great distance. The knowledge neither results from an undulation of the waves, nor from quick sight, nor from a particular sensation, but simply from observing the horizon which bears upon it certain signs indicative of the approach of vessels .... When a vessel approaches land, a meteor (in French, an atmospheric effect) appears in the atmosphere of a particular nature, visible to every eye, without any difficult effort.
The advantages of this art before the days of the wireless, and particularly during wartime can only be imagined. It is likewise interesting to note that Gould reports (p. 193) that in 1818 one of Bottineau's pupils still practiced the art on Mauritius.
The electrical wizard, Nicola Tesla, had a number of very strange powers, particularly those of visualization, sight, and hearing. In regard to these exotic powers, his biographers, Hunt and Draper (1977:20, 32, 124) say:
He was conscious of certain phenomena before his eyes which others could not see. He envisioned objects and hypotheses with such reality and clarity that he was uncertain whether they did or did not exist ...
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He always admitted that he had supersensitive sight and hearing . . . He could remember as a boy discerning objects at a distance when no one else could see them, and he recalled hearing faint crackling sounds of fire in neighbor's houses when the residents had not even been disturbed in their sleep. He became tortured with a radar-sensitivity similar to that of bats which made him conscious of objects 12 feet away in total darkness.
His hearing was so phenomenally keen that it wasn't remarkable for him to detect thunder-claps at a distance of 550 miles.
The most extraordinary "normal," (that is, non-paranormal), abilities appear in mathematics and music. Interestingly enough the geniuses who present them are almost always precocious. We tend to think of these displays as within currently accepted science, since mathematics and music are ancient arts which are amenable to scientific inquiry, though we really have no detailed understanding as to how these seemingly miraculous feats are accomplished.3
Here is an effort by Hunter to investigate a rather common prodigy, namely lightning calculation, (Hunter 1968:346):
Throughout history, there have been reports of people with exceptional ability in mental calculation. What can be learned from these reports? Perhaps the most striking thing is that they concern such a diversity of people with such widely different accomplishments. There are reports of young children, of gifted mathematicians such as Gauss and Ampere, of illiterates, and of people who are almost mentally defective. Some of those people solve a wide range of numerical problems by highly ingenious procedures and with great rapidity; others are specialists who excel only in some limited range of problems; others tackle only fairly simple problems by slow and conventional techniques, and are remarkable merely for their willingness to work without external aids; others show modest calculative accomplishments which would be unremarkable except for the person's lack of ability in any other direction. Even among those with moderately high calculative ability, there is diversity. Some rely heavily on visual imaging, some on auditory imaging, and some use little imaging of any kind. They also vary in their characteristic speed of working and in their techniques. For example, at the end of the last
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century, the French psychologist Binet examined two men who had some renown as mental calculators. He gave each of them the same problems, written on paper, and required them to write the answer but nothing else. One problem was: multiply 58,927 by 61,408. One calculator (Inaudi) completed the answer in 40 seconds, the other (Diamandi) in 275 seconds; and I have recently met a professional accountant who completed this problem in 55 seconds. Inaudi produced the digits of his answer in the left-to-right order, whereas Diamandi produced these digits in the right-to-left order; my accountant also produced the digits in right-to-left order, but he used a calculative plan quite different from that used either by Inaudi or by Diamandi. Different calculators clearly have very different calculative systems.
Here are some representative examples from Corliss (1976) quoting other sources: (cf Scripture, 1891)
Thomas Fuller, known as the Virginia Calculator, was stolen from his native Africa at the age of fourteen and sold to a planter. When he was about seventy years old, "two gentlemen, natives of Pennsylvania, viz., William Hartshorne and Samuel Coates, men of probity and respectable characters, having heard, in traveling through the neighborhood in which the slave lived, of his extraordinary powers in arithmetic, sent for him and had their curiosity sufficiently gratified by the answers which he gave to the following questions: First, upon being asked how many seconds there were in a year and a half, he answered in about two minutes, 47,304,000. Second: On being asked how many seconds a man has lived who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old, he answered in a minute and a half 2,210,500,800. One of the gentlemen who employed himself with his pen in making these calculations told him he was wrong, and that the sum was not so great as he had said - upon which the old man hastily replied: 'top, massa, you forget de leap year.' On adding the amount of the seconds of the leap year the amount of the whole in both their sums agreed exactly."
Jedediah Buxton. - Jedediah Buxton was born in 1702, at Elmton, in Derbyshire, England, where he died in 1772. Although his father was schoolmaster of the parish and his grandfather had been the vicar, his education was by some chance so neglected that he was not able to scrawl his own name. All his attainments were the result of his own pure industry; the only help he had was the learning of the multi-
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plication table in his youth; 'his mind was only stored with a few constants which facilitated his calculations; such as the number of minutes in a year, and of hair's-breadths in a mile.' He labored hard with his spade to support a family, but seems to have shown not even usual intelligence in regard to ordinary matters of life. The testimony as to his arithmetical powers is given by two witnesses. George Saxe says: 'I proposed to him the following random question: In a body whose three sides are 23,145,789 yards, 5,642,732 yards, and 54,965 yards, how many cubical 1/8ths of an inch? After once naming the several figures distinctly, one after another, in order to assure himself of the several dimensions and fix them in his mind, without more ado he fell to work amidst more than 100 of his fellow-laborers, and after leaving him about five hours, on some necessary concerns (in which time I calculated it with my pen) at my return, he told me he was ready: Upon which, taking out my pocket-book and pencil, to note down his answer, he asked which end I would begin at, for he would direct me either way ... I chose the regular method . . . and in a line of twenty-eight figures, he made no hesitation nor the least mistake."
Paranormal gifts may be distributed in exactly the same manner to humans as less exotic mental gifts, according to Elliot (Hitchings (1967:67), who says:
General Scott Elliot, the former president of the British Society of Dowsers, thinks that dowsing may be not much different from the distribution of other gifts in a community, with a handful who are geniuses, a handful who are backward, and the rest of us capable of improvement with teaching and practice. 'We can't all be Michelangelo,' he says, 'and a few of us are unlucky enough to be colorblind or unable to see at all; most of us see things with varying degrees of perception. Similarly with music, or sport, or any other art. We can't all be composers or record-breakers, but we can get better if we try. I see no reason to place dowsing in a different dimension from other human skills which we don't fully understand.'
2.5) Developmental Aspects in the Phenotype and Genotype
Since exotic factors of intellect are generally found in unusual people, and since unusual people often represent racial sports or forerunners, the sport or mutation of ability which is found in them may represent the future course or direction of
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evolution in the race as a whole. Hence the high aptitude person or genius may mirror in his individual development the racial developmental process in the phenotype.
We developed this theme (with appropriate tables) in section 6c of the Introduction, and we are elsewhere earlier on record in regard to it, (Gowan, 1972, 1974). We return to a brief discussion of it here, and we will later in chapter V discuss some of the aspects of such development, particularly as it applies to genius and precocity.
An excellent discussion of the subject will be found in Wilber (1978, 1979).
That man's latent abilities lie in a gradated series of steps is obvious to Wilson (11971:542):
It is as if human evolution is not an uphill slope, but something like a steep flight of steps. As Shaw points out in the Methuselah preface, evolution does not progress steadily, but by sudden leaps. If you are learning to ride a bicycle, you fall off fifty times, and then find yourself suddenly riding it the fifty-first time. As if each time you tried to ride it, you accumulated a little more skill which did not show immediately but went into a 'reserve supply,' until you are ready to go 'up the next step' on the stairway. The significance of this must be discussed later in the chapter, but one point can be made immediately. If we can tumble down the evolutionary stairway through boredom and defeat-proneness, we can also clamber up to new levels by a gentle, cumulative effort; no frenzied leap is required. And evidence indicates unmistakably that these higher levels are the levels upon which man's 'latent powers' cease to be latent.
In the conclusion of her book on mysticism, Underhill, (1960:444ff), avers that the mystic is the ontogenic earnest of phylogenic escalation in the species. The path he treads today is a gradated series of upward steps which all will someday follow, as they actualize their latent abilities:
It shows us, upon high levels, the psychological process to which every self which desires to rise to the perception of Reality must submit: the formula under which man's spiritual consciousness, be it strong or weak, must necessarily unfold.
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In the great mystics we see the highest and widest development of that consciousness to which the human race has yet attained. We see its growth exhibited to us on a grand scale, perceptible of all men: the stages of its slow transcendence of the sense-world marked by episodes of splendour and of terror which are hard for common men to accept or understand as a part of the organic process of life. But the germ of that same transcendent life, the spring of the amazing energy which enables the great mystic to rise to freedom and dominate his world, is latent in all of us; an integral part of our humanity. Where the mystic has a genius for the Absolute, we have each a little buried talent, some greater, some less; and the growth of this talent, this spark of the soul, once we permit its emergence, will conform in little, and according to its measure, to those laws of organic growth, those inexorable conditions of transcendence which we found to govern the Mystic Way.
Every person, then, who awakens to consciousness of a Reality which transcends the normal world of sense - however small, weak, imperfect that consciousness may be - is put upon a road which follows at low levels the path which the mystic treads at high levels. The success with which he follows this way to freedom and full life will depend on the intensity of his love and will; his capacity for self-discipline, his steadfastness and courage. It will depend on the generosity and completeness of his outgoing passion for absolute beauty, absolute goodness, or absolute truth. But if he move at all, he will move through a series of states which are, in their own small way, analogous to those experienced by the greatest contemplative on his journey towards that union with God which is the term of the spirit's ascent towards its home.
We are, then, one and all the kindred of the mystics; and it is by dwelling upon this kinship, by interpreting - so far as we may - their great declarations in the light of our little experience, that we shall learn to understand them best. Strange and far away though they seem, they are not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. They belong to us. They are our brethren; the giants, the heroes of our race. As the achievement of genius belongs not to itself only, but also to the society that brought it forth; as theology declares that the merits of the saints avail for all; so, because of the solidarity of the human family, the supernal accomplishment
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of the mystics is ours also. Their attainment is the earnest money of our eternal life.
This chapter is necessarily incomplete, as we have sketched here only an outline of ontogenic sensory modalities and abilities. Our excuse for failing to proceed further is that these matters have been written about at length in various books on aptitudes and abilities, and that further, a full account of them would vastly increase the size and scope of this book. We would much prefer to devote scarce space to the more controversial and unusual cosmogenic powers and abilities, to which we now turn.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Science 205:1027-9 (1979) reports Walcott's discovery of magnetite, a magnetic substance in pigeon brains.
2 For our word "cosmogenic" Arieti (1967:5-6) uses the word "microgenic" following Weber, because of the instantaneous aspect. In this he is followed by Wilber (1978:53), who quotes him, and expands upon this characteristic.
3 For testimony from mathematicians and musicians, see chapter V, (5.1).
CHAPTER 3
Cosmogenic Powers and Abilities
'Everything that relates, whether closely or more distantly to psychic phenomena and to the action of psychic forces in general should be studied just like any other science. There is nothing miraculous or supernatural in them, nothing that should engender or keep alive superstition. Psychic training rationally and scientifically conducted, can lead to desirable results. That is why the information gained about such training . . . constitutes useful documentary evidence worthy of our attention.'
-Alexandra David-Neel (1971:xiii)
In this chapter we come to the heart of our analysis, a discussion of the powers and abilities referred to under Table II-1. This is an awesome task because the concepts involved are revolutionary and mind shaking. The author, who is as awed by the issue as the reader, takes comfort in the fact that while this material is diametrically opposed to the conventional wisdom, some of the greatest thinkers and loftiest saints and mystics of history have said similar things.
Those readers who have attended thus far with some courtesy and perhaps even sympathy may feel that in this chapter the author has taken leave of his senses. If ultimate reality is accurately expressed by the physical world, this conclusion is well warranted. But since truth asks for no more than co-existence, the author begs such a reader's brief indulgence for a mere supposition.
Let us suppose that the Pribram-Bohm holographic model of the universe is at least tenable. (Such a model tells us that sensory reality is but a virtual image imprinted holographically on the brain when illumined by the reference beam of ultimate reality.) Then at the very least we would have some scientific grounds for admitting the possibility of what a great many otherwise truthful saints and mystics have told us (not to mention some of the greatest of modern scientists such as Heisenberg and Schroedinger), namely that the physical world is not ultimate
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reality, but is in fact junior to the normal state of consciousness. If by any chance any of these people are even a little bit right, then our whole conception of physics must undergo another revolution as far reaching as the supplanting of Ptolemaic concepts by Copernican ones, or the Newtonian laws by Einsteinian. What we are doing here, therefore, is erecting an intellectual paradigm roomy enough to accommodate some new ideas. When a young man and his wife build a house, it is wise to provide for future children and guests; we are doing the same thing. Hopefully, this explanation will lead to a relaxation in the reader's belief system long enough so that he will be able to let the form and uses of the structure, not his prejudices, determine his judgement. At least he may see, although not agree, with the author's rationale.
We now begin the investigation of a range of physical powers and mental abilities which have the following characteristics:
a) appear miraculous, i.e. neither understood nor completely accepted by science,
b) generally involve some kind of altered state of consciousness,
c) often involve some right hemisphere function,
d) are often credited to the Deity or the devil,
e) can be arranged in an ascending scale, (a taxonomy), involving the increase of holiness, or high mental health,
f) demand a revamping of our usual paradigms about the nature of physical reality,
g) involve more a transcendence than an enhancement of ontogenic and phylogenic powers, hence are outside and independent of the laws of mental measurement.
Because of these unusual characteristics, we have labeled these powers and abilities cosmogenic. They can roughly be divided into two orders: body powers, and mental abilities. We have arranged them into a taxonomy where the lower end of the series 3.0 to 3.3 are psychic effects seen in exceptional persons who are non-saintly, although saints sometimes report them. From 3.4 to 3.7 we find effects usually confined to saints. With 3.8 we begin the siddhis or extraordinary epiphenomena which apparently are developed in saints and yogic adepts; these continue through 4.8.
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In reply to those who would consider this very unstable ground from which to extract data, we point out that while any given datum may in itself be suspect, the plethora of it from all ages and cultures, especially from those persons who have otherwise lived truthful and saintly lives, must command some degree of internal consistency, and hence face validity. Furthermore the putting together of the data to make a meaningful whole would hardly be possible if the data itself were fraudulent. Let the reader then at least suspend judgment until he or she has heard the full evidence.
These abilities seem to differ also from the previous ones in that they appear to be acquired (or conferred) in an esoteric, miraculous or occult way without much reference to previous intellectual level. They are also rare, ephemeral, not tightly held, and not easy either to verify or measure. As Table II-1 indicates, they consist of two levels: physical or body powers, and mental abilities or knowledges, which have been here separated for analysis, although they often occur together.
The religious literature of many cultures connects these abilities with holiness or progression towards self-actualization. Indeed, this concordance of belief about most specifics of these powers is one of the most telling arguments for their validity.
Because the Indian tradition and religious teaching on this subject is so much more detailed than any other authority, we shall use its concepts as useful building blocks. This does not imply total acceptance of this creed; it is merely a convenience on an otherwise unlit and difficult road. Hindu teaching holds that the siddhis (or miraculous powers) may come spontaneously with advancement and enlightenment or they may be developed by certain techniques. Most religious advice counsels the adept not to pay attention to these epiphenomena of enlightenment, lest willful efforts to obtain them distract the individual from progression towards salvation. Thus the reader should keep constantly in mind that the description of these powers and methods of obtaining them does not constitute approval of the practices. This point is important enough for some expert testimony: (Weber 1958:164-5) declares:
Yoga technique on the other hand sought principally to achieve magical states and miraculous powers. Thus for
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example one sought the power to suspend gravitation and to gain the ability to float around. Moreover, one sought to gain omnipotence with power directly to realize imagined events without external action by virtue of the magical will-power of the yogin. Finally, omniscience was sought, that is clairvoyance especially of other men's thoughts.
Rama (1978:102) is another Easterner who advises against use of the siddhis. He says:
The third chapter of the Yoga Sutras explains many methods of attaining siddhis, but these siddhis create stumbling blocks in the path of enlightenment ... The path of enlightenment is different from the intentional cultivation of powers. The miracles performed by Buddha, Christ, and other great sages were spontaneous and for a purpose. They were not performed with selfish motives or to create a sensation. On the path of yoga one comes across the potentials for siddhis. A yogi without having any desire for a siddhi might get one, but one who is aware of the purpose of his life never misuses them ... Siddhis do exist but only with adepts.
Prof. Richet (1923:vii) in his usual clear and concise manner states the fundamentals of what he calls the science of metapsychics:
1) Cryptesthesia (the lucidity of former writers) is a faculty of cognition that differs from the normal sensorial faculties.
2) Telekinesis is a mechanical action that differs from all known mechanical action, being exerted at a distance and without contact on person or objects, under certain determinate conditions.
3) Ectoplasm (the materialization of former writers) is the formation of divers objects, which in most cases seem to emerge from a human body and take on the semblance of material realities - clothing, veils, and living bodies.
These make up the whole of metapsychics. It seems to me that to admit this much is to admit a great deal. To go further is to go beyond the present limits of science.
Referring to Table II-1,let us now commence a detailed
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investigation of the cosmogenic physical powers in order.
3.01) Telepathy1
Telepathy may be defined as the transmission of thoughts, ideas, images or symbols from the mind of one person to another without the usual intervening sensory percepts. It may be distinguished from clairvoyance, in that telepathy is in the form of a message, whereas clairvoyance is in the form of a vision. (It is a difference similar to that between radio and television.) Telepathy from the Greek word "tele" and "pathos," literally means "empathy at a distance."
From work elsewhere (1974:24) we quote:
"Telepathy is a kind of intuition, a 'direct knowledge of distant facts.' 'Telepathy produces full and clear impressions in a way that clairvoyance does not.' 'It is a swift process of knowing through being' (empathy)." (Garrett 1949:133).
Sinclair (1971:128) explains the methodology of telepathy as follows:
If you succeed in doing this, you will find it hard not to drop asleep. But you must distinguish between this and the state you are to maintain . . . After you have learned to induce it, you will be able to concentrate on the idea instead of the rose, and to carry this idea into sleep with you, as the idea to dominate the subconscious while you are asleep. This idea taken into sleep in this way, will often act in the subconscious with the same power as the idea suggested by the hypnotist ... You can learn to carry an idea of the restoration of health into this auto-hypnotic sleep, to act powerfully during sleep . . . But this is another matter, and not the state for telepathy - in which you must avoid dropping into a sleep. After you have practiced the exercise of concentrating on a flower and avoiding sleep - you will be able to concentrate on holding the peculiar blank state of mind which must be achieved if you are to make successful experiments in telepathy.
W. E. Thompson (letter to New York Times, 10 May 1971) says:
Imaginative artists like Blake can understand the collective condition of society because the imagination is itself the
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opening to the collective unconscious, and precisely because this consciousness is collective, imaginative people can think the same thought at the same time, even though they are separated by ordinary space.
Commenting on this Weil (1972:187) remarks:
Telepathy is nothing other than thinking the same thoughts at the same time others are thinking them - something all of us are doing all the time at a level of our unconscious experience most of us are not aware of. Become aware of it and you become telepathic ...
Myers (1961:265) says of telepathy: "Telepathy is surely a step in evolution."
Is telepathy, tele, (distance) or it is really sympathy (togetherness-feeling)? Krippner (Mitchell 1974:113) reports that Mesmer believed in a universal fluid which joined all things. What seems separated by distance in three-dimensional space, may in a higher realm be joined together directly, so that what appears to us as telepathy is merely the use of this higher property.
Krippner's fine chapter on telepathy (Mitchell, 1974:112ff) gives many convincing evidences of it, as well as a number of rigorous laboratory experiences, including the Duke research, and his own at Maimonides Dream Laboratory, N. Y. (cf Ullman, Krippner and Vaughn, Dream Telepathy, 1973). He quotes Murphy (p. 120) on evidences of fragmentation, duplication, and accretion which occur in telepathy as they do in severely censored or garbled telegraph messages. He quotes Marshall (p. 125) to the effect that "resonance between brain patterns leads to telepathy. The strength of this influence increases with the product of their complexities, and decreases with the difference in their patterns." (Readers will note the compatibility between this and the resonance and dissipative structure paradigms of Chapter One.)
We quote from earlier work: (1974:12-13)
"We are accustomed to think of the ego as being primarily attentive to the perceptual world of experience; indeed the conceptualizing of percepts furnished the brain through the five senses seems to be the main business of consciousness. So much so in
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fact, that the ego may well be thought of as the substantive of the verb to experience, and its good mental health measured by its reality-orienting aspects. Admittedly, this relationship is a complex one, but it is our task to show that it is not the only function of the ego, for there are some interesting examples of events in which the ego gains knowledge without the ordinary use of the senses.
"A parasensory event is one leading to perception or knowledge not gained through the ordinary five senses; psychic or psychedelic events are therefore parasensory. We may then undertake to catalogue such events in a psychological taxonomy as a first attempt to understand their interrelationships. Parasensory events, while more noticeable when they are not otherwise commonly explainable, are really part and parcel of ordinary experience, not something divorced from it. We will start this analysis with the mention of a possible parasensory event so commonplace and trivial that one dares suggest that it has happened to all of us on many occasions.
"Such an ordinary incident is the sudden appearance of an apparently absent person immediately subsequent to his name being mentioned in conversation. Obviously such an occurrence is not evidential for it is impossible to prove that our mention of the individual is connected with his appearance, but the phenomenon is widespread and may well be the most trivial and familiar example of a parasensory effect which will be called here a 'psychic impression.' For, if chance will not explain such occurrences, the theory here would be that in some way an anterior psychic impression is produced on the coloquitors by the imminent appearance or close proximity of the agent.
"A much more serious and evidential example of a psychic impression is the phenomenon of telepathic transmission of information regarding serious injury or death from a projector (or agent) who stands in harm's way to a percipient (often a near relative or loved one).
"We may define 'psychic impression' more exactly as a parasensory event without sensory imagery occurring to an awake percipient who suddenly and for no apparent reason is overwhelmed by strong feelings frequently resulting in action on behalf of an absent and distant agent or projector who is almost
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always in great danger of severe bodily injury or death. An example is quoted from Stevenson (1970: 111):
My daughter was away at college . . . I started to write her as usual; when about finished, my right hand started to burn, so I could not hold the pen, and the pain was terrific . . . Less than an hour later, we received a telephone call telling us that our daughter's right hand had been severely burned in the laboratory with acid at the same time I felt the burn . . .
The experience of telepathy is a rather common one, which has occurred at least once to most of us, and hence the possibility has become believable, and the rationale is more usefully sought. We shall accordingly not weary the reader with accounts of telepathic incidents, which may be found everywhere in the literature, but try for some possible explanations.
The older view is that of a universal fluid or either which connects everything to everything else. Long (1954:131) states this view as follows:
Telepathy is the sending of messages (as thought forms) along the connecting cords of invisible shadowy body substance which connect one person with another. The messages are sent by the subconscious self and received by it, to be given to the conscious self in due time.
As the subconscious spirit has control of all threads of shadowy body substance, all thought forms after they are created in the course of 'thinking,' and of all flows of the low mana or 'body electricity,' we cannot send and receive telepathic messages at will. We must give the subconscious a mental order to do the sending and receiving for us, then relax and wait for it to set to work.
We read further in Long (1954:170-1):
In her valuable book Telepathy, Eileen J. Garrett tells of the frequency with which telepathic messages are received in a form which is partly symbolic. She found that her pupils, in learning telepathy, soon became expert is grasping the meaning behind the symbols which came to them repeatedly.
Mrs. Garrett also describes the sensation experienced frequently by those who practice telepathy - the sensation of
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faint electric tingling or warmth, often accompanied by a tactile response of 'goose-flesh' when a working contact has been made. In her own case these sensations often warn her that a message is being projected to her by someone and that her attention is needed to receive it.
Deep breathing is a common preliminary to telepathic practice or other forms of psychometrizing - all these related forms depending on the movement of thought forms along a thread of connecting shadowy body stuff.
A number of psychoactive drugs promote telepathy and ESP according to Rogo (1976:60ff). These act mainly by relaxing the hold of the left hemisphere, thus placing the individual in an altered state of consciousness, where subconscious processes originating in the right hemisphere become more available to consciousness. Rogo speaks of yage, and mescaline, as well as peyote and certain mushrooms. The effects, however, are variable both as between individuals and within the same individual.
Watson (1974:256) describes a Russian experiment which monitored brain waves during a telepathic event. The receiver in Leningrad got himself into a state of "attentive relaxation" during which his brain was producing an alpha rhythm. But three seconds after the Moscow sender began sending, the alpha waves were blocked. Watson continues:
In later tests, EEG records showed similar dramatic changes in the brain patterns of the sender as well as the receiver, and the Popov group reported, 'We detected this unusual activation of the brain within one to five seconds after the beginning of telepathic transmission. We always detected a few seconds before Mikolaiev was consciously aware of receiving a telepathic message.'
The connection between telepathy and the alpha rhythm is crucial. It seems certain that both telepathy and psychokinesis occur only under certain psychological conditions - and that these are the ones marked by the production of brain waves of a particular frequency. In PK it seems to be the theta rhythm, but in telepathy it is the alpha pattern, between eight and twelve cycles per second. Subjects who score well in laboratory tests all say that they adopt a certain state of mind, which one described as 'concentrating my attention on a single point of nothingness. I think about nothing at all,
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just looking at a fixed point and emptying the mind entirely if this is possible.' Another calls the telepathic state 'concentrated passivity,' and a third sees it as 'relaxed attentiveness.'
Yoganda (1977:299) says on this matter:
The will, projected from the point between the eyebrows is the broadcasting apparatus of thought ... Man's feeling or emotional power calmly concentrated on the heart, enables it to act as a mental radio that receives the messages of other persons, far or near. In telepathy, the fine vibrations of thought in one man's mind are transmitted . . . into thought waves in the mind of the other person.
Another explanation is that of the scientist Puharich who has investigated the subject in depth. Puharich (1962:5) defines cholinergia as a state of activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, brought on by drugs, mushrooms, meditation, trance, and facilitated by the presence of negative ions in the air (see cite, ibid:9). After active experimentation he concludes (ibid:9): "I am convinced of the basic finding that mild cholinergia favors the receptive function in telepathy." (For the biochemistry of cholinergia, see cite ibid: 10, No. 3).
Puharich (1962:17) defines the opposite state of adrenergia as the excitation of the sympathetic nervous system, brought on by limbic reaction to danger, and involving fear, fight or flight. While there is less experimental evidence, Puharich (ibid:21-2), feels that this state encourages the sending function in telepathy:
It is as though the sender creates a mental vacuum toward which the receiver's mind is drawn. The sender by his need and desire prepares a mental stage; the receiver in turn populates the stage with his own symbols and images.
Stevenson (1970) in a book devoted to telepathic impressions, besides reviewing 35 new cases, tabulates 160 older published cases. In most cases the agent was dying or in great danger, and a near relative was the percipient.
Tyrrell (1961) in Science and Psychical Phenomena devotes a scholarly book to the evidence for telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, including an analysis of many cases of each type.
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This book should be read by anyone who is unsure of the reality of psychic phenomena.
For telepathy in famous people see Prince 1963:13 (Burbank) 55 (Swedenborg); 119 (John Hay) (Myers 1961:261ff). Others who have discussed the subject include Gowan 1974:24ff; Mitchell, 1974:112ff. Moss (1974:169ff) has a chapter on telepathy and clairvoyance, with many examples of each.
We have started with telepathy, because it is such a common experience, and is so well attested in the literature. Indeed, Bell's theorem in physics suggests that telepathy may be necessary in the polarity of paired particles. For if the polarity of one is changed by an experimenter, the other changes instantaneously no matter where it is. Perhaps telepathy is an earnest of a basic fundamental connectedness of all things.
3.02) Dowsing
Dowsing is the activity of sensing through the use of a wand or forked stick, the presence of underground water, oil, or minerals. Next to firewalking, no psychic ability of humans is more anciently or firmly established, since the art has been practiced everywhere since the dawn of history and flourishes today. At the same time, there is still no good comprehensive explanation for its existence. Not only are good dowsers able to locate underground water by physically walking on a terrain, but some, at least, are able to do so on a map of the same ground.
Because of the voluminous literature on the subject, (Tromp's analysis contains over 700 citations), - we shall not attempt a lengthy discussion here. An excellent review is contained in the inexpensive pocketbook Dowsing by Hitching (1978) which gives some further insight into its ramifications. A little card catalogue search in any large library, moreover, will turn up a plethora of journal articles and books on the subject. This is largely true because dowsing, alone of the psychic abilities, is a common answer to farming and industrial needs for water, and hence brings a group of hard-headed engineers and practical men into contact with a parapsychological effect which they must use although they cannot explain.
We shall regard dowsing as an excellent example of the
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human mind, when relaxed, to resonate with some collective intelligence, and so to divine hidden secrets. It is therefore part of bringing into consciousness prototaxic and somatic intelligence which is already available.
A very complete review of dowsing with over 700 citations was made by Tromp (1949:287- 363). Originally skeptical, he became convinced of the reality of dowsing after much personal experimentation. He concludes:
1) that divining phenomena exist, and number of people sensitive to these is greater than usually assumed,
2) that many factors can cause errors, and these explain most of the failures,
3) that the phenomena can be explained by normal physical and physiological laws, therefore they are not paranormal,
4) that many so-called parapsychological phenomena can also be so explained,
5) that careful analysis into such would be of great value to medicine.
Tromp (1949:324ff) made some very careful investigations of dowsing using ECGs of dowsers
a) traversing dowsing zones,
b) walking among human beings,
c) walking through artificial magnetic fields, and
d) dowsing in a moving auto.
In all, 50 ECGs are displayed in plates in the book (pp. 407-31).
In a), both dowsers and non-dowsers were found to have skin potential changes as shown by the ECG, but the dowsers had more (p. 326). The wand merely intensified the change.
In b), there was again a change in skin potential when the dowser approached a human being.
In c), there is also a change in skin potential.
The same is true in experiments d).
Hence the ECGs demonstrated the reality of dowsing phenomena. It was also found (pp. 328-330) that a large number of environmental forces also acted on the dowsing reaction, such as electrostatic conditions, sunlight, aromas etc. In general it may be concluded the Tromp believes that electrical, magnetic, and environmental acoustic and other effects all contribute to dowsing sensitivity, and that the phenomenon is therefore capable of scientific explanation. He devotes a very complete analysis, (p. 323-365) to these factors.
Hitching (1978:148-9) speculates on the method of dowsing
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transmission and reception by the human being:
But we know, from all the experiments quoted above, that this is not so - weak electromagnetic fields have an undeniable effect on living beings. Therefore, says Bigu, there are only three possible explanations:
1. Electromagnetic radiation must interact directly with the central nervous system, perhaps at the molecular level.
2. Our five known senses must respond to wider frequency ranges than they have yet been observed to do, through some mechanism that we do not yet fully understand.
3. There is a completely new kind of radiation, which science has not yet discovered but which the body instinctively recognizes.
Since the passage of electricity through a wire generates a transverse magnetic field around the wire, it is tempting to speculate that the passage of water through earth would generate a similar type of field which could be sensed by the dowser. But this explanation breaks down with regard to stationary oil or minerals.
Hitching (1978:149-51) concludes regarding the mechanism of transmission:
Although none yet provides a complete model, probably the most promising approach stems originally from the work of the Yale University professor of astronomy Harold S. Burr, who discovered as far back as 1949 that each nerve is surrounded by what he termed a 'life field' (or L-field), consisting of a measurable quantity of electricity. His work is still controversial in part, but other experimenters have repeated his results, and the American biophysicist Robert Becker in turn has suggested that each cell may work like an electrical semiconductor, with biological transistors making the connections between them.
The hypothesis was put more technically by one delegate at a congress on biocommunication held in Aspen, Colorado, in 1973: 'There is evidence for solid-state electron conduction mechanisms in living systems, which could easily be adapted to the reception of electromagnetic signals, both low-frequency and high-frequency. . . '
Another delegate had a theory of how genetic changes could come about by an exchange of information within a species or population:
'You can regard DNA molecules as radio-fre-
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quency signal generators, RNA molecules as amplifiers, the cell wall as a noise filter, and enzymes and amino acids as effectors of signals coded in various regions of the spectrum.'
Hitching (1978:154) also reports that the two sensing areas of the body are the kidneys and the brain.
Moss (1 974:94ff) discusses the use of pranic energy in dowsing, including personal experience. She notes the scholarly Utah State University study of dowsing by Professors Chadwick and Jensen called The Detection of Magnetic Fields Caused by Groundwater, which she feels is the best scientific explanation of dowsing.
We quote from Susy Smith's fine chapter on dowsing (1975: 110-111):
But when Roberts asked him, Henry Gross, 800 miles away in Maine, challenged these assumptions. Using a fresh-cut forked twig, he dowsed maps and revealed the general locations of domes of fresh water in four sources in Bermuda. Now, while there are many wells on the island, most give salty, brackish water. Only several produce palatable water for a few households. But pure fresh water gushed up where Gross had dowsed on his map in Maine.
The Bermudian article concludes: 'Kenneth Roberts had proved his point: the dowsing rod works even at long distance, provided it is in the hands of a skilled operator. The author then returned to Maine to conduct additional map-dowsing exploits with Henry.'
Another remarkable case of long-distance dowsing was published in the Revue Spirite in 1932. The previous January, Father Frastre, head of a mission station on Yule Island off the New Guinea coast, had visited Switzerland. While he was there, he called upon the celebrated dowser L'Abbe Mermet. After explaining the difficulties of surviving on the isolated island with its indifferent water supply, Frastre asked if the Abbe could find fresh springs on the island.
Meret then dowsed with his pendulum beyond the opposite edge of the photograph. Father Frastre made careful notes of the dowser's statements about the location, volume, and lime content of a stream in that direction as yet unknown to the missionaries. Soon afterward, he sailed back to Yule Island.
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Eight months later, the priest wrote the letter published in the Revue Spirite, saying that the missionaries had indeed found the stream at the location specified by Mermet and that an analysis of the water sent to Paris indicated a lime content nearly identical to that predicted by the Abbe.
Rawcliffe (1952:333-366) devotes three chapters to dowsing, tests for it, and "radiathesia." While he is antagonistic to the phenomena, he offers no explanation of incidents which he accepts as verified.
After an entire book devoted to the subject of dowsing, Barrett and Besterman (1968:275) state:
... the conclusion to which we believe an impartial student of the facts set out in this book must come. The dowser, in our opinion, is a person endowed with a subconscious supernormal faculty, which, its nature being unknown, we call, after Professor Richet, cryptesthesia.
Cryptesthesia comes from the Greek meaning "hidden perception." We would add that the dowser's rod thus joins the Ouida board, hypnotic spells, drugs, meditation, and so on, as another device for arousing the activity of the right cerebral hemisphere while the left is in abeyance, and so contacting what we have elsewhere designated (Gowan 1975:3) the "collective preconscious" or the "numinous." It is, as the above authors have said, a latent subconscious cognitive power which seems to run in families, but which is capable of some development in most people.
Some dowsers can "see" hidden underground water and minerals, not just "feel" it through the tug of the stick. Vision through opaque objects is a cosmogenic siddhi treated under section 4.3, so it is probable that dowsing is the "little brother" of a larger talent, just a general sensitivity precedes actual sight in animal protoplasm.
Hitching (1967:67) reports that dowsing for land mines was used very successfully in Vietnam, and quotes L. Matacia:
I'm damn sure I personally wouldn't go anywhere in battle without using dowsing, and it must have gotten the same way for the boys out there.
In the case of Vietnam, there was essentially the sense of need
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which is supposed to be at the back of all successful dowsing. However, at the experimental level, there have been two important scientific surveys (described in detail elsewhere in the book) which seem to have shown conclusively that most of us can dowse to a surprisingly sensitive level. Professor Yves Rocard in Paris found that nearly 70 percent and Dr. Zaboj Harvalik in Lorton, Virginia, found that nearly 90 percent of all people tested were able to obtain a dowsing reaction when asked to identify a small change in the earth's magnetic field.
Tom Graves, who conducts a course on dowsing at Kensington Institute, a further education college run by the Inner London Education Authority, is even more emphatic: 'Anyone can dowse. It's just a skill which, like any other, can be learned with practice, awareness, and a working knowledge of basic principles and mechanics - a skill which you can use as and when you need.'
Dowsing is explained by Brunler, quoted by Mann (1973: 114), as due to a biocosmic energy, or para-magnetic quality which surrounds human beings. This notion ties in with Reich's views on orgone energy (ibid) and Reichenbach's views concerning od.
Reichenbach in The Odic Force explains dowsing as due to od which is created by flowing water. The flow of the water produces pranic energy much as the flow of electricity produces a magnetic field. This energy field interacts with the human bioenergetic field to tell the dowser where water will be found.
Dowsing (called radiesthesia, or sensitivity to radiations) is widely practiced in the Soviet Union, and Ostrander and Schroeder (1970:176ff) devote a whole chapter to it. The Russians believe there is a force field of unknown origin to which living organisms react.
For recent developments in Russia where dowsing is much better accepted, we quote Benson Herbart in Parapsychological Review (9:4:15, July, 1978):
Highly detailed and technical papers on the 'biophysical effect' or 'BPE' (dowsing) continue to appear in the USSR, always for the practical use of locating underground ores, oil, and water. A.G. Bakirov, of the Polytechnic Institute of S. M. Kirov in Tomsk, authored such an article in the Newspaper of the Order of the October Revolution and of theRed Banner, claiming
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that by means of BPE, deposits of ore can be outlined, tectonic ruptures traced, and depths of deposits gauged. Chromite deposits down to a depth of 900 meters were located in the Orenburgsk region; at Letnyeye, an agglomeration of copper pyrites was revealed under a surface drift of porphyrites. Lixiviated magnesite-bearing serpentinites did not yield any BPE reaction, while ochres and nickel-bearing deposits reacted strongly in the hyperbasalt Kempircaisky massif.
The Russians favor a rod shaped like an automobile startinghandle, held at each end, which easily turns, the hands performing a cranking action. BPE reactions are measured by the number of turns made per meter walking distance. Compared to the rate for steel rods, aluminum rods operate at halfspeed and brass at quarter-speed. These relative rates apply to dowsing in cars and helicopters as well as on foot. Among the smaller countries of Eastern Europe, dowsing research is most active in Czechoslovakia.
A magnetic explanation for dowsing is given by Barnothy, 1964:281 ) :
We are not the first to have reported the sensitivity of a dowser to a magnetic field. According to a very old book, when the Abbot of Vallemont - in reality the Reverend Father Le Lorrain, S. J., Professor of Physics at College Louis le Grand - places a lodestone before a well-known dowser, 'the rod moves.' S.J. Tromp ('Psychical Physics') causes the dowser to operate with artificial magnetic fields. Joseph Wust finds magnetic anomalies on the ground where the dowsers react. However, none of these authors connects these effects with the detection of water.
It appears to us that one may provisionally conclude that the dowser does not detect still water in a pond or running water in a river, but he can detect
a. water filtering through porous media, and
b. water in permeable layers adjacent to beds of clay, since in these two cases water produces electric currents through electrofiltration potential and concentration batteries. If the medium is sufficiently conducting, and the current in the soil is sufficiently high, then there exists at the surface of the soil a small magnetic anomaly.
While the "natural" explanations of dowsing are helpful in understanding this ancient phenomenon, they emphasize the
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remarkable ability (latent in most persons) of reacting prototaxically through skin changes in potential to minute natural anomalies in electromagnetic charge. It is another example of the skin "knowing things" which do not ordinarily percolate into consciousness. The accomplished dowser may merely be an individual who has perfected his conscious attention to this somatic knowledge. Perhaps it is as Walt Whitman said, "We are all the greatest poets, but only the greatest poets are conscious of the fact." If this be true of dowsing, it may very well be true of all the other exotic factors of intellect we are studying, and especially so of healing.
3.03) Siddhis (Psychic Powers)
Anyone who begins to investigate the exotic factors of intellect and to read the literature on unusual powers of some advanced humans, has his attention immediately drawn to the Hindu "siddhis" or miraculous powers. There are several reasons for this:
1 ) There is more available material,
2) The material is more extensive and covers more powers,
3) The material is presented in a more orderly fashion,
4) Whereas other traditions (e.g., Christian) present the powers as theophanous graces, the siddhis literature presents them as abilities acquired by certain specific practices.
Under these circumstances, anyone who hopes to develop a taxonomy of the exotic factors of intellect is virtually compelled to build on the Hindu model.
Before going further, it may be well to state the author's personal views in a kind of caveat. The siddhis involve the use of universal force for personal interest in which there is great danger. The danger consists in that knowledge gives power which may come ahead of purification of selfish ego interests, always demanded in every monastic tradition. The use of universal power for selfish interests is magic and is proscribed by almost all religious leaders. Hence, many of them advise that no willful effort be made to encourage siddhis, and no particular attention be paid to them when they occur as epiphenomena of the developing consciousness, lest fixation on product, rather than attention to process occur. Our attention to them in this section is a research effort, and does not constitute a recommendation to attempt to develop them.
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There are some catalogs of these powers and abilities. Bro (1970) enumerates the powers of the American paragnost, Edgar Cayce (We interpolate the relevant section numbers in all of the following):
1) commune with dead (3. 1)
2) receive psychic impressions (3.0)
3) see auras (3.5)
4) perform automatisms (3.1)
5) act on people and things (4.4, 4.5)
6) have out-of-body experiences (3.2)
7) possess precognition (4.71)
8) possess retrocognition (4.71)
9) prophecy (4.71)
10) work wonders Al, 4.4, 4.5)
11) guide (4.77) 12) heal Al, 4A
Saraydarian (1971:220ff) gives the following list of "expanded powers":
1) intuitive response to ideas (4.77)
2) sensitivity to impressions (3.0)
3) right observation of reality on soul plane (4.4)
4) quick response to real need (4.6)
5) correct manipulation of force (4.5)
6) true comprehension of time element (4.71)
7) mental polarization (4.6)
8) fiery aspiration (4.7)
9) symbolic reading (4.72)
10) devotion to higher self (4.6)
11) continuity of consciousness, lucidity (4.8)
12) conscious contact with guru (4.9)
We give Montagu's (1950:79) nineteen signs of the physical phenomena of mysticism:
1) ecstasies (4.6)
2) stigmata (3.4)
3) levitation (3.8)
4) bilocation (3.2)
5) luminosity (3.5)
6) inedia (no need for food) (3.6)
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7) "non-somnia" (no necessity for sleep), (3.6)
8) "spiritual (precognitive) dreams (4.71)
9) visions and apparitions (4.2)
10) clairvoyance (3.2)
11) vision through opaque bodies (4.3)
12) infused knowledge (4.7)
13) discernment of spirits (4.77)
14) gift of healing (4.1, 4.4)
15) empery over nature (4.5)
16) demonical molestation (poltergeist phenomena)
17) fire of love (psychic heat), (3.3)
18) mystic marriage (4.8)
19) postmortem incorruption (3.7)
The list of siddhis according to Swami Sivananda (1971: 152) includes the following major eight:
1) Anima, (miniturization) (3.9)
2) Mahima (giantism), (3.9)
3) Laghima (levitation), (3.8)
4) Garima (the opposite of #3), (3.9)
5) Prapti (prophecy, clairvoyance, and thought-reading)
6) Prakamya (invisibility), (3.9)
7) Vashitam (empery over animals), (4.5)
8) Ishitwarn (attainment of divine power).
Minor siddhis include the following (ibid:154-5)
1-3) Independence from Bodily Functions (3.6)
4,5) Clairvoyance, clairaudience
12) Knowledge of past, present, and future (4.7)
14) Prophecy
19) Knowledge of past lives
20) Knowledge of the stars
22) Mastery of the elements (4.5)
24) Omnipotence
25) Levitation (3.8)
26) Dowsing (3.2)
It is interesting to compare Tables II-1 and III-1 first to note the very considerable correspondence, and second to note entries in one table which do not appear in the other. Since Table II-1 is mainly from Western sources, and Table III-1 from Eastern, one
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TABLE III-I PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRA BOOK III ON SUPERNORMAL POWER
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may speculate that items found in only one table are cultural rather than universal powers. For example, 3.1, 3.3, and 3.4 (physical mediumship, thermal effects, and stigmata) are not spoken of in Patanjali. In the case of the first two, it may be because they are considered rather common there; in the case of stigmata, there seems to be no parallel outside of Christianity. Similarly sutras 26 and 27 (index 4.0) (astronomical knowledge), may well have been considered an intuitional grace by the Hindus; Western astronomy has made it a science. There are a few other differences in emphasis, but over all, there is a remarkable similarity in the two tables. Almost all the Patanjali sutras are represented somewhere. We left out sutra 46 (to get a perfect adamantine body) because it "comes" naturally as a result of perfection and does not appear to require samyama. It is also to be remarked that some Christian saints acquire siddhis "en passant" or without conscious performance of samyama. Evidently at certain levels, siddhis appear spontaneously.
Let us turn to Patanjali'sYoga Sutras (Aranya 1977), Book III (on paranormal powers) for the authoritative statement on samyama, (or the mechanism for the production of the siddhis. In the following, since we will follow the text closely, the Arabic number is the page and the Roman the sutra number.
"Dharama or attention is the mind's fixation on a particular point in space:" (278-I), (e.g., the navel, the heart, the nose, the tongue). "In the case of intra-organic regions, the mind is fixed directly through intermediate feeling, but in the case of external objects (sounds, forms, etc.), the mind is fixed, not directly but through modifications of the senses." "These three, viz. dharama (fixity), dhyana (meditation) and samadhi (concentration) taken together is (sic) called samyama," (283-IV). "By this samyama the three-fold mutation is directly realized. But these are external with respect to seedless concentration," (samadhi), (287-VIII).
The three gunas are tamas (e.g., mass, inertia), rajas (e.g., activity, energy), and sattva (e.g., lightness, intelligence). The gunas are a basic triplicity, not defined by their examples, and in continual change. "The product of gunas (or three basic constituent principles) is always mutable:" (288-IV), since: "mutation is the nature of the gunas:" (303). "There is no cause:", it being a fundamental characteristic of all phenomena," for "everything
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is essentially every other thing," (308). Thus to get a mental grasp on such a slippery concept one must look at group theory in which a particular finite group (viz, the group of three, e.g., ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA) has six different modes or appearances, which may permute into one another. One cannot usefully dwell on these changes, only on the whole group.
Further reflection on this topic indicates that perhaps the gunas may appear 'in four phases and may operate independently. If so, the repetitions of four things taken three at a time would be 43 or 64, which, of course, brings us back to the I-Ching.
In this introductory section we have introduced two very common and well accepted examples of human parasensory abilities - telepathy and dowsing. We have also made an initial and crude attempt to organize the field of exotic powers and abilities into a taxonomy by building on the Hindu siddhis literature. All this has been designed to give some semblance of meaning and order to an otherwise chaotic area, and to develop in the reader a background of knowledge and a suspension of former belief so that he can, with us, examine in detail a number of the more spectacular and surprising faculties and events connected with these powers. Our method will be to proceed seriatim through the cosmogenic sector of the taxonomy of exotic powers and abilities discussing the specifics of each case in turn.
3.1) Physical Mediumship: Materializations, psychokinesis, apports
The stipulated facts in this remarkable constellation include a medium: generally a woman of child-bearing age, who goes into a trance, (a state of immobility and ego-excursion), with usual amnesia as to events of the seance which involves a group of sitters (usually in a darkened room), and a (disembodied) voice (not the medium's) called a control which acts as a master of ceremonies for the events that ensue. Hundreds of books have been written about these activities, by some very famous sitters (e.g., William James, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Balfour, to name only a few).
Under this heading we will discuss physical mediumship and possession (including communication with the dead), psycho-
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kinesis, materializations, poltergeist phenomena, apports, and some concluding remarks. Many of these areas have been very extensively treated in the literature, so we shall concentrate on explanations rather than the mere detail of phenomena.
3. 10) Mediumship and Possession
The "possessor" of the medium is called the control. Usually, this is presumed to be a departed person and, usually, identifies him/herself as such. The control possesses power (presumably drawn from the medium and/or the sitters in the seance). The medium is almost always in a cataleptic trance and usually has no memorability of what went on during the seance. With regard to these relationships, Susy Smith in a biography of the excellent medium, Mrs. Leonard, (1964:238ff) had this to say:
Mediums often speak of this condition variously as power or light. What might, perhaps, be the same thing in a denser form is called ectoplasm. Thomas says, 'This psychic emanation is an intermediary which is sufficiently akin to the substance of the Beyond to be usable by discarnates, and sufficiently akin to our matter to affect it under certain conditions. These conditions are in operation when a communicator makes use of it to levitate, say, a table in the seance room, or to speak at a trumpet-voice seance. There have been but few scientific investigations to learn its actual properties.' Drayton Thomas continues that when the late Dr. Osty was studying the medium Rudi Schneider in Paris he became convinced that Rudi could, at times, produce something which, although invisible and intangible, obscured infrared rays.
Thomas goes on: 'A group of investigators, wishing to verify this, invited Rudi to London for a series of experiments at the rooms of the Society for Physical Research. Their findings are recorded in the Proceedings for June, 1933, from which the following quotations are taken: On nearly every occasion many movements of the galvanometer coil were recorded.... These movements of the galvanometer coil, which confirm Osty's discovery, are very remarkable.... In addition, the bell in series with a selenium cell rang on two or three occasions, indicating an absorption of at least 50% of the infrared radiation. Whatever it is that affects the galvanometer, or bell circuits, appears to emanate from Rudi, since the ray absorption sometimes synchronized with his breathing and sometimes took place immediately after he said it would.
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We quote from work elsewhere (1974:193-8) where the subject is discussed extensively:
"The possession of a human being by a demon or disincarnate spirit smacks so much of witchcraft, primitive animism, and outmoded superstition that it is particularly objectionable to Western researchers as an explanation or topic for psychological analysis. The alternative psychoanalytically-oriented construct that repressed and despised aspects of the psyche become so numerous and so strong in the subconscious that they take over the conscious persona is also a possibility, provided we credit the collective preconscious with enlarged powers. Nevertheless, the first construct appears useful in understanding noted cases of mediumship, which appears to be some kind of a way station between the frightening dissociation of schizophrenia, and the professional benign control of dissociation by a medical hypnotist.
"Myers, the great authority on mediumship, devotes a chapter to the subject in his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, and notes the close relationship of trance possession to motor automatisms in the following definition (1961:345):
Possession is a more developed form of motor automatism in which the automatists own personality does for the time altogether disappear, while there is a more or less complete substitution of personality; writing or speech being given by a spirit through the entranced organism (i.o.).
"This kind of trance activity has been known since ancient times; the Bible, in particular, is full of such accounts. Socrates believed that this was the source of creative genius. The key question then generally asked is: 'What (good or evil spirit) is controlling the medium?' While possession has some similarities to the creative inspiration, automatic writing, and peak-experience and satori, it differs in a most important respect, namely that the individual is not only not conscious, but the spirit seems to have vacated the consciousness, leaving it at the mercy of whatever comes along.
"Possession is not the same as the conscious excursion of the spirit in ecstasy, rapture, OOB experience, or other mystical adventure, for here the consciousness while sometimes out of the body, and certainly somewhat dissociated, is still able later to
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relate what has happened to it during the interval when the body lay cataleptic. The same conscious awareness is not reported in possession .2
"While most mediums, especially those of a spiritualistic bent, seem to turn up little but banality in their control utterances, (as if the gigantic computer associated with the collective preconscious had executed a 'print dump' order), there are a few mediums who have reported significant veridictical material. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the data collected under the membership of 'Mrs. Piper' (Myers, 1961:347).
"It is significant that her 'sitters' and the alleged disincarnate spirits attending her either were or had been men of distinction in psychical research. Apparently the keenness of the intellects of the sitters and the controls in these instances may do much to improve the quality of the communication, since it is not only the preconscious of the medium which is being tapped. Mrs. Garrett, (1968) another noted psychic, reported that after it was discovered that she had mediumistic powers, she found it necessary to 'be developed' by sitting with Hewitt McKenzie, another eminent psychic researcher. We are unsure as to whether there is a gradual education of the uncontrolled 'not-me' aspects of the preconscious, to a more docile aspect, or whether the 'education' is merely a change of locus within the vast area of the preconscious, (as when several users pool their stored memory drum data on a giant computer). Or it may be that parts of the persona become more personalized and discreet, resulting in a fragmentary personality, or two or more persons. It was William James' conclusion (Myers 1961:382) that Mrs. Piper 'has supernormal powers.' Myers himself was one of her 'sitters' and believed in the genuineness of her phenomena; it is interesting that after his death, he was one of the alleged controls in the phenomena of the next medium, Mrs. Leonard.
"Another noted mediumship far above the usual was that of Mrs. Leonard (Smith 1964). As Smith says in the opening lines of the book (1964:11), 'A great medium is a rare phenomenon, rarer than a great painter or a piano virtuoso.' Mrs. Leonard apparently developed her psychic powers so that her sittings (some of which were with Sir Oliver Lodge) had unusual 'power' and clarity, and her control, a discarnate entity named 'Feda' was very accurate. We cannot in this short space give adequate
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examples of this ability, but we shall discuss one of the most unusual of Mrs. Leonard's powers - that of 'direct voice.' Direct voice occurs when (on rare occasions) the supposed disincarnate 'deceased' speaks with his own voice through the medium, instead of communicating with the control who then speaks through the medium. There is nothing much in the fact that this happens, but what is significant is that the content of the D.V. messages reveals an entirely different personality than that of the control. In the direct voice protocols (Smith 1964:238), the 'direct voice' supplies words when Feda asks, corrects Feda in content and pronunciation, contradicts Feda, expostulates with Feda, is unheard, misheard, or only partly heard by the control. Some examples:
Feda: It's like being put in charge of a department of boars.
D.V.: Borstal.
Feda: Admiral Idea, he says.
D.V.: Admirable.
Feda: A man once said Feda was a spectrum.
D.V.: Spectre.
Feda: What do you call it - an empty sone?
D.V.: Zone.
No one can read these pages without being powerfully impressed with the conclusion that the direct voice communicator and Feda the control are two distinct entities, and that of the two the communicator is more sophisticated and educated. It is as if the medium were a piano, and there are two players, one much more skilled than the other. The direct voice communicator knows where to find the words in the medium's mind that Feda does not. In other words, he has a bigger vocabulary - certainly one of the prime aspects of personality survival. Smith (1964:229) also provides an explanation of how and why 'direct voice' occurs, and its relationship to the whole mediumistic seance.
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"A third and final example of an unusually 'high' control for a medium is the recent 'Seth Material' from the mediumship of Jane Roberts (1970, 1972). If we are to believe Seth, he is a highly evolved entity, far above the usual table-rapping type; certainly his material, while somewhat formal and platitudinous, is generally in keeping with his claims. Seth's statements however, like those of other mediums, can be interpreted in one way as communication from the beyond and can also in another way be represented as communication from parts of the preconscious within.
"Roberts (1970:53) quotes the control Seth saying: 'I do depend upon Robert's willingness to dissociate. There is no doubt that he is unaware at times of his surroundings during sessions.'
"And again in the preface Roberts (1970:viii) quotes from The World of Psychic Phenomena by F.S. Edsall as follows: 'The development of trance personalities or controls seems to depend on subconscious experiences related to the medium's background or environment.'
"in appraising the work of mediums, we should note that in a dissociated way, they are also creative, for through their dissociation, elemental energies become focused. Muldoon and Carrington (1951:20) point up this parallelism in stating "With mediums the imagination becomes a creative power of the first order.'
"Among the automatisms exhibited by mediums and others, the facility of automatic writing deserves some passing attention. In automatic writing, the medium does not usually lose consciousness, and the 'possession' extends only to the hand doing the writing. A great deal of trash has been produced in this way, but it must be admitted that Blake, Madame Guyon (see Underhill 1960:66), Rulman Merswin, and St. Teresa (Underhill 1960:194) were outstanding exceptions. In some celebrated cases (Coleridge, Wordsworth), it becomes difficult to distinguish the seizure of poetic inspiration of genius from automatic script. We can only conclude that automatic writing is a feature of the continuum of psychic development, and not a characteristic of any particular stage.
In line with Van Rhijn's hypothesis, we can posit the close
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connection between dissociation and illness. Dissociation produces illness; indeed, we may almost say that dissociation is illness. Those thoughts and actions which cannot be handled with full symbolic cognition, nor yet acted out through archetypes and sign, must eventually become externalized on the body, which as illness or disease is their residual manner of manifesting.
"Roberts (1970:30) says:
In his discussion on health, Seth has always maintained that illness is the result of dissociated and inhibited emotions. The psyche attempts to get rid of them by projecting them into a specific area of the body ... If really large areas of the self are inhibited, a secondary personality can be formed, grouped around those qualities distrusted and denied by the primary ego ...
"Again Roberts (1970:170) speaking of illness in trance, says:
All illness is almost always the result of another action that cannot be followed through. When the lines to the original action are released and the channels opened, the illness will vanish.
"Let us assume for the moment that mediumistic utterances can be taken at their face value, and let us examine critically the content of the messages in contrast to material on similar subjects produced by prophets, mystics, religious leaders, and 'third-force' writers. One might assume that those who purport to speak from the other side of the veil might have some startling disclosures, some irresistible proselyting abilities, or some grand eloquence and majesty unequalled by mortal rivals. But this is not the case. The most eloquent descriptions of the afterlife, of man and his destiny, of the relation of man to the universe have not been written by spirits, speaking through a medium, but by inspired humans, in an advanced stage of development. The trance utterances, to be sure, give some hope that consciousness may survive physical death, but this doctrine is taught by many religions, and can be adduced, as we have seen in this book, by psychological analysis. Despite the elevated quality of the material produced through the mediumship of Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Leonard, and Mrs. Roberts, it certainly cannot compare with the New Testament, Paradise Lost, or the writings of Blake, Whitman, Emerson, or Maslow. Everyone is entitled to
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make of this what he will, but to this writer, these facts are eloquent concerning the restraints imposed by mediumship. And this brings us back to the central fact of possession, that while there may be benefits, there are also severe debits.
"Edmunds (1968:21) explains it as follows:
This accounts for the limited value of the information usually given out by a medium, although she may sincerely believe she is contacting a high spiritual source, for it will almost invariably be found that the new information unknown to others practically never comes through, but is limited to the total contents of the medium's and the sitter's minds.
"We have focused on mediumship because it is the most progressive and possibly useful aspect of possession. In reviewing the pros and cons of mediumship, one must ask oneself what has been accomplished. Perhaps some good has been done if any persons are persuaded that life is not as circumscribed by the counting house as Scrooge imagined it to be before being visited by a trio of ghosts. But what has happened to the medium? Has the experience facilitated or complicated her development? The grave loss of control of her own organism can hardly be desirable. Why are an overwhelming preponderance of mediums women? Is there some sexual aspect at work here? What would happen otherwise to the medium? Is this some sanctioned expression of the dissociated elements of the self which otherwise might later explode into schizophrenia? In our analysis of the developmental forcing of schizophrenia we referred to the rupturing of a placenta. Certainly there has been a similar rupture of a placental envelope in these cases.
"We have reviewed examples of noted mediumship where (if one cares to believe the allegations) the medium was controlled by high disincarnate types, whose words make sense and give some larger meaning, but such cases are in the minority. Being a medium seems like hitchhiking a ride: you may be lucky and get to your destination, but you may also put yourself at the mercy of undesirable elements. The medium in effect allows her spirit to be invaded for profit, as the prostitute does her body. No one who values the regnancy or integrity of the human being can be happy at either outcome though men may, for expedience, accept the ministrations of both."
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Possession type mediumship has been considered by the Church since classical times as possession by demons. But many mediums claim that the possession is by departed spirits, and some (e.g. Mrs. Roberts, the "Seth" writer) claim that their control is a high disincarnate spirit. A further possibility, not often advocated by mediums, is that the whole range of phenomena of physical mediumship can be looked upon as the manifestations of the etheric (astral) body. We must also note that while mediums seem "possessed" and go into trances during their manifestations, shamans appear to "possess" their spirits in the manner of wizards or magicians, and seldom go "under" during the exercise of their powers. There seems to be a continuum connecting these two positions, with one grading into the other.
For more on mediums see Mitchell 1974:75ff, Smith 1964 (Mrs. P. Leonard); Twigg's autobiography (1972) and Podmore's two volumes on mediums (1902).
The pranic energy to accomplish feats is evidently communicated in some cases by touch. Smith, quoting Drayton Thomas (1964:239-40), says:
I was first personally impressed by the reality of an emanation when having a table sitting with Mrs. Leonard. My wife and Mrs. Leonard placed their hands lightly on the bamboo table while I took down the letters as they were spelled out by tilts. Then my wife and I exchanged places. Messages of an evidential character were thus produced. When Mrs. Leonard suggested that my wife and I should sit at the table we did so, but no movements followed. Mrs. Leonard then placed her fingers lightly upon the exact center of the table, where it would have been difficult, or probably impossible, for her to move it by pressure. The result was immediate; for the tilts commenced and continued until the medium gradually withdrew her hand. As she did so, the table slowed down and quickly ceased all movement. Again the medium's hand was placed on it as before and again the movements continued. It was a clear demonstration that something essential to the table movement proceeded from Mrs. Leonard and that neither my wife nor I could produce this mysterious something . . .
It would seem that this substance calls for further research. It is tempting to suggest that it will eventually be found to play an important part in the processes of physical life, in the baffling regions of sensation and perception, and in all forms of psychic phenomena.
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It may be a substance which links the material with the immaterial and facilitates their interaction. One may even conceive of it as consisting of many grades, some of which interact with matter while others more easily interact with the substance of the realms awaiting our habitation after departure from the earthly body.
Attempting to explain ectoplasm Stern (1976:50) says:
In Jung's presence, an electrical engineer had measured the degree of ionization in the vicinity of the medium's body. He found that the ionization was 60 times greater than normal at the point where the ectoplasmic emanation had occurred, but was normal near the other areas of the medium's body.
Our guess is that this large degree of ionization was caused by the flow of prana, (cf section 3.5), the basic vital force producing ectoplasm.
Tyrrell (1961:165-375) devotes two sections of a large book to a scholarly investigation of mediums and seances. He studies the case of Mrs. Piper, book-tests, and cross correspondences, - among the best of the evidential material. He also devotes a chapter to the possibility of survival after death, as supported by seance communications. Others who have discussed survival include LeShan (1966:232ff), Mitchell (1974:397ff), and Huxley. (White 1972:39) describes the research of Dr. Osis who found upon a survey over 800 doctor's reports of deathbed phenomena involving luminous visions.
3.11) Psychokinesis: (the moving of objects by mind-force).
While psychokinesis occurs with poltergeist phenomena and in possession trance, as well as with trained mediums, it is one of the best documented of the psychic effects, as it can be observed in light and under rigorous conditions of control. Often called PK, it usually consists of the moving of a compass needle or other small objects (such as a match box) on a smooth table (cf. Ostander and Schroeder 1970:420) also, (Krippner 1975: 135ff).
Psychokinesis is considered by some investigators to be a half-way step toward materialization. The object is moved by some (usually invisible) condensation of the aura, or an ecto-
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plasmic pseudopod, or some other etheric exteriorization of the medium, which though invisible, is capable of exerting force. Some quasi-magnetic effects are also noted. The following notices are examples of these concepts.
Dingwall (1962b:181) reports on the physical manifestations of Pallidino, who "drew pieces of furniture toward her, made them float in air and apparently increased or decreased their weight." On another occasion (ibid:195) she materialized a face and upper torso of a young woman for "about twenty seconds."
Dingwall (1962b:205) on another occasion tells of the materialization of human hands, and the transportation of the table and objects on it through the air. Another especially evidential example of PK occurred in light sufficient to see the movement of a table toward and away from the medium at her command (ibid:206).
Gaddis (1976:174ff) discusses the researches of M. R. Coe into PK effects as caused by static electricity (Fate, July 1959). Coe discovered that humans can cause small strips of aluminum foil to move on a very smooth surface by moving hands near them. Best results were obtained with untired operators under conditions of low temperature and humidity, (both of which favor electrostatic conduction). Coe also (ibid:177) found that after training he was able to produce large bluish-white sparks when flying at an altitude of 21,000 feet. (Those with knowledge of physics will at once think of the Crookes tube - he modern neon light - in which luminosity is aided by a partial vacuum.) Coe felt that maybe this is why psychic phenomena are so prevalent in the altitudes of Tibet.
In talking about the remarkable effects produced by the medium, R. Schindler, with psychokinesis, Mann (1973:148) says: "Schindler usually produced a 'substance' sufficiently condensed to be opaque to infrared light."
In the same place, Mann theorizes that the aura of the medium acts as a force field to accomplish the PK effect and describes a Russian demonstrator who accomplished psychokinesis when her "brain and heart pulsed in rhythm with these vibrations in her force field" (quoting Ostrander and Schroeder). Such pulsations may have caused the object to move as if magnetized.
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As Doyle, (1926:246-7) remarks:
The playing upon musical instruments, especially an accordion, under circumstances when it was impossible to reach the notes, was another of the phenomena which was very thoroughly examined and then certified by Crookes and his distinguished assistants. Granting that the medium has himself the knowledge which would enable him to play the instrument, the author is not prepared to admit that such a phenomenon is an absolute proof of independent intelligence. When once the existence of an etheric body is granted, with limbs which correspond with our own, there is no obvious reason why a partial detachment should not take place, and why the etheric fingers should not be placed upon the keys while the material ones remain upon the medium's lap. The problem resolves itself, then, into the simpler proposition that the medium's brain can command his etheric fingers, and that those fingers can be supplied with sufficient force to press down the keys. Very many psychic phenomena, the reading with blindfolded eyes, the touching of distant objects, and so forth, may, in the opinion of the author, be referred to the etheric body and may be classed rather under a higher and subtler materialism than under Spiritualism.
Long (1954:61) quotes the famous Sir William Crookes on his experiences with PK:
'The instances in which heavy bodies, such as tables, chairs, sofas, etc., have been moved, when the medium was not touching them are very numerous. I will briefly mention a few of the most striking. My own chair has been twisted partly around, whilst my feet were off the floor. A chair was seen by all present to move slowly up to the table from a far corner, when all were watching it; on another occasion an armchair moved to where we were sitting, and then moved slowly back again (a distance of about three feet) at my request. On three successive evenings, a small table moved slowly across the room, under conditions which I had specially pre-arranged, so as to answer any objection which might be raised to the evidence.'
Schmidt (Mitchell 1974:179ff) devotes a summary chapter to psychokinesis, especially to the North Carolina laboratory experiments on controlling the fall of dice, in which p= 1/400. More modern PK experiments have involved computers and radioactive decay, but psychics tend to tire more easily in these mecha-
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nistic experiments because of the lack of emotion involved. While this kind of statistical PK effect can be demonstrated, it is not very startling and does not seem heuristic.
Schmidt (ibid:189) speculates that PK may affect only the statistical laws of physics and not the conservation laws. It might be that humans have some entropy-reducing power which collapses the state vector of an event and so disqualifies the law of averages from operating, thus apparently producing a miracle. Such a power would give man domination over events and allow him to interfere in his own future. While there is no hard evidence that the mind has this power, a number of saints, gurus, and other advanced humans have indicated that it may be so.
Krippner (1975) has many accounts of PK effects, personally observed. With regard to the Russian Kulagina, he quotes Pratt as follows, (p. 138):
The block slid about one-half inch forward toward Kulagina, but angled toward her left, then it moved again in the same way about five seconds later. Both Keil and I saw both motions of the block . . . She was not expecting the objects to be placed before her, so she could not have made preparation in advance.
Krippner also describes (p. 199ff) PK effects which he found in Prague under the heading of "psychotronic energy." Similar to Reich's "orgone energy" this type of psychic energy appears capable of influencing a magnet, and of other PK effects. These are described by Krippner in seven different demonstrations, in which some kind of energy field appears to be generated by the human body which is capable of affecting objects. Similar descriptions may also be found in Ostrander and Schroeber (1970).
Krippner (1975:197) describes some remarkable examples of psychokinesis during his Russian visit. He also describes the research of Pushkin. Pushkin wrote:
Our preliminary work with ... Ermolaev indicates the presence of psychokinetic phenomena. In a typical experiment, Ermolaev concentrates on a number of objects resting upon a table - a matchbox, a tennis ball, a few pencils. After a period of concentration, Ermolaev directs his attention on one of the objects and it moves from its resting place.
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At times, Ermolaev would lift up a spherical object, such as a tennis ball, squeeze it between his palms, and slowly move his hands apart. On several occasions, the object would remain suspended in space. The distance between Ermolaev's hands could extend as far as eight inches and the object would still remain suspended. Further, it was noted that the greater the surface of the object, the longer it remained suspended in the air.
Pushkin explained these phenomena on the basis of the biogravity hypothesis of Alexander Dubrov. If living systems can produce and control gravitational waves, these waves could move the items on the table and keep the ball suspended in the air. A ball with a greater surface area would remain suspended for a longer period of time because there would be more surface for the gravitational waves to act upon than in the case of balls with less of a surface area. Pushkin noted that autogravity may help to stabilize one's perceptual world, then concluded:
According to the general theory of relativity, gravitation originates in systems in which space has been distorted. Ermolaev is able to distort space to such an extent that a temporary gravitational field is produced in which objects obey his perceptions of them.
Moss (1974:114ff) sees psychokinesis as the transmission of bioenergy, prana, through space to make objects move.
For other citations on psychokinesis see Mitchell 1974: 179ff, and Watson, 1974-131ff).
3.12) Materializations
While there are other minor forms of materializations, such as slate writing, etc., we shall devote what space is available to the materialization of a human figure, and its basis in ectoplasm. For ectoplasm, a viscous, sticky substance, extruded from the medium during trance seems to be the basis for all physical phenomena. It can perhaps be viewed like a tulpa as an exteriorization of energy from the body brought on by trance or thought forms.
Holzer (1975:33-4) says that materialization is performed by drawing ectoplasm out of the body of the medium and the sitters. He claims that this is a "gray or whitish albumen substance"
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with a density from "smoke-like to solidity." Moreover it feels "cold and clammy." Light rays of higher frequency than red interfere with the vibratory aspects of ectoplasm, and so are inimical to it. Materialization, according to Holzer, requires complete cooperation between the entranced medium and the departed, who must hold his thought steady in order to animate the ectoplasm; this can only be done for a few minutes at most.
Turvey, (1911, 0969:55) says of this substance:
I seem to make use of the medium's psychic force ... which appears to draw from his wrists or knees as a sort of red sticky matter (part of his energy body). At any rate that is what happened when on one occasion I lifted a bed with two people on it ...
Doyle (1926:124-5) discourses upon ectoplasm in a learned chapter from which we can only quote the following:
Apart from such speculations, the solid knowledge of ectoplasm, which we have now acquired, gives us at last a firm material basis for psychic research. When spirit descends into matter it needs such a material basis, or it is unable to impress our material senses.
This new precise knowledge has been useful in giving us some rational explanation of those rapping sounds which were among the first phenomena to attract attention. It would be premature to say that they can only be produced in one way, but it may at least be stated that the usual method of their production is by the extension of a rod of ectoplasm, which may or may not be visible, and by its percussion on some solid object. It is probably that these rods may be the conveyors of strength rather than strong in themselves, as a small copper wire may carry the electric discharge which will disintegrate a battleship. In one of Crawford's admirable experiments, finding that the rods were coming from the chest of his medium, he soaked her blouse with liquid carmine, and then asked for raps upon the opposite wall. The wall was found to be studded with spots of red, the ectoplasmic protrusion having carried with it in each case some of the stain through which it passed. In the same way table-tilting, when genuine, would appear to be due to an accumulation of ectoplasm upon the surface, collected from the various sitters and afterwards used by the presiding intelligence. Crawford surmised that the
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extrusions must often possess suckers or claws at the end, so as to grip or to raise, and the author subsequently collected several photographs of these formations which show clearly a serrated edge at the end that would fulfill such a purpose.
Crawford paid great attention also to the correspondence between the weight of the ectoplasm emitted and the loss of weight in the medium. His experiments seemed to show that everyone is a medium, that everyone loses weight at a materializing seance, and that the chief medium only differs from the others in that she is so constituted that she can put out a larger ectoplasmic flow.
In Crawford's experiments it was usual for the medium to lose as much as 10 or 15 pounds in a single sitting - the weight being restored to her immediately the ectoplasm was retracted. On one occasion the enormous loss of 52 pounds was recorded.
Doyle (1926:115ff) describes further the enlightening experiments made by Dr. W. J. Crawford of Queens University, Belfast, in regard to the nature of ectoplasm and its use in various psychic manifestations:
To understand fully the conclusions he arrived at, his books must be read, but here we may say briefly that he demonstrated that levitations of the table, raps on the floor of the room, and movements of objects in the seance room, where due to the action of 'psychic rods,' or, as he came to call them in his last book, 'psychic structures,' emanating from the medium's body. When the table is levitated these 'rods ' are operated in two ways. If the table is a light one, the rod or structure does not touch the floor, but is 'a cantilever firmly fixed to the medium's body at one end, and gripping the under surface or legs of the table with the free or working end.' In the case of a heavy table, the reaction instead of being thrown on the medium is applied to the floor of the room, forming a kind of strut between the under surface of the levitated table and the floor. The medium was placed in a weighing scale, and when the table was levitated an increase in her weight was observed.
Doyle (1926:118) commenting on the ectoplasm experiments says:
I have compared the whitish, cloud-like appearance of the matter in the structure with photographs of materialization phenomena in all stages obtained with many different mediums
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all over the world, and the conclusion I have come to is that this material very closely resembles, if it is not identical with, the material used in all such materialization phenomena. In fact, it is not too much to say that this whitish, translucent, nebulous matter is the basis of all psychic phenomena of the physical order. Without it in some degree no physical phenomena are possible. It is what gives consistence to the structures of all kinds erected by the operators in the seance chamber; it is, when properly manipulated and applied, that which enables the structures to come into contact with the ordinary forms of matter with which we are acquainted.
Describing the formation of ectoplasm, Doyle (1962:118-9) quotes a report of Dr. Geley:
A substance emanates from the body of the medium (through the pores and other natural orifices); it externalizes itself, and is amorphous ... in the first instance. This substance takes various forms ... We may distinguish 1) the substance as a substratum of materialization, and 2) its organized development. Its appearance is generally announced by the presence of fluid, white, and luminous flakes ... The substance itself emanates from the whole body of the medium ... The substance occurs in various forms, sometimes as ductile dough, . . sometimes as numerous thin threads ... sometimes as a membrane, as a fabric, or as a woven material ... In some cases it completely envelopes the medium as a mantle ... It may increase or decrease in succession ... It is cold, sometimes viscous and sticky ... and is mobile ... The substance is sensitive to light. Every impression received through the ectoplasm reacts on the medium and vice versa.
Turvey (1969:43), a medium, describes this vital force as red sticky matter." Compare this with the following quotation about aka the shadowy body of the subconscious) from Long's discussion of Kahuna practices (1954:138-9):
It is of such a nature that it sticks to whatever we touch ... and when removed from the contact, draws out a long invisible thread of itself, which connects with the thing contacted ... This substance is an ideal conductor of vital electrical force ... When heavily charged ... it becomes rigid and firm enough to be used as a 'hand' or instrument to move and affect physical objects.
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Further, (ibid: 127):
When I had associated the shadowy body or aka with the subconscious spirit, and had considered the several root meanings of a-ka, I discovered that the thing that was 'sticky' was the shadowy body . . . The root ka means a cord ...
The reader who wishes further information on materializations will find an excellent chapter in Long (1967:201-223), which describe the way Hawaiian kahunas produce the effect. The chapter discusses full and partial materializations of both humans and animals, changes in normal size, and both permanent and ephemeral materialized clothing.
Richet (1923), the famous French explorer of the psychic, was responsible for coining the word "ectoplasm," the sticky (cf "aka"), ropy, materialized substance which emanated from the medium's body during trance, and forms itself into both inanimate objects and phantoms, melting away back into the body of the medium. Richet had many seances with Palladino, one of which (1923.496) was dignified by Mme. Curie. In subdued light Richet felt the ectoplasm form itself into a real hand which melted away in his grasp. He says of these phenomena (p. 499):
We can assign three phases to these exteriorized phenomena, a first stage in which they are invisible, a second in which they begin to become visible, but are still more or less amorphous, and a third stage in which they take on the semblance of a living organism surrounded by veils which at first mask the imperfections of form, but become thinner as the underlying form becomes more dense.
In another seance with Pallidino, an Italian professor experienced the "crucial test of an ectoplasmic hand melting away in his grasp" (p. 500). In still another case, wax models of ectoplasmic hands were obtained (p. 543, 545). "By reason of the narrowness of the wrists, these moulds could not be obtained from living hands, for the whole hand would have had to be withdrawn through the narrow opening . . . In the moulds here considered ... they were produced by a materialization followed by dematerialization . . ."
In Richet's view ( 923:442) "Telekinesis is the first phase of materialization." (Telekinesis is his word for PK.) All of the objective (material) manifestations of psychic power are connected:
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First raps and noise, then telekinesis leading to levitation, then extrusion of ectoplasm which now becomes visible ending in animate forms. In some cases of levitation of small objects (scissors, ball, cf photograph), Richet (1923:425-8) a thread appears. But this is ectoplasmic thread (much like the "silver cord" of OBE); if "cut with scissors, its continuity is immediately restored" (p. 428). It "seems to be thinner than ordinary thread" and "starts from the fingers." Richet also quotes (ibid) Palladino, who having levitated a glass exclaimed: "The thread, look at the thread! Peretti took the thread and pulled it; it broke, and suddenly disappeared."
Richet (ibid:430) reports the experiments of Crawford (Experiments in Psychical Science, Watkins, London, 1919) who concluded after careful experiments with weight distribution between a medium and a levitated table that the total weight remained constant, and that ectoplasm extruded from the medium accomplished the feat. He said, "It is invisible, though it has weight, gives sensation on contact, and makes an imprint on plastic or colored substances." In another experiment, Richet (ibid: 511) describes ectoplasm as:
A whitish substance, that creeps as if alive, with damp, cold, protoplasmic extensions that are transformed under the eyes of the experimenters into a hand, fingers, a head or even an entire figure.
On p. 523, after noting his coining of the word, he describes ectoplasm as a "kind of gelatinous protoplasm, formless at first, that exudes from the body of the medium and takes form later." On p. 523, he again describes it as "a whitish steam, perhaps luminous, taking the shape of gauze or muslin. . . "
Johnson (1953:244) in a chapter on materializations and physical mediumship describes Osty's experiments with the medium Rudi Schneider in an investigation of psychokinesis. The object to be moved was protected by an infra-red beam, which would ring a bell, which would activate a flashlight photograph:
The bell did ring, sometimes for a half-minute or more... the photo showed the medium sitting in his usual position, fully controlled. Whatever obstructed the beam was not a solid obstacle... A significant fact was observed. When the beam was partially obscured, the galvanometer spot of light moved
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in sympathy with the respiratory rate of the entranced medium . . . Some invisible substance with appreciable infra-red absorption appeared to be produced, and its production was shown to be associated with the physiological process of respiration in the medium.
This testimony again points to the formation of an invisible ectoplasm.
Some of the startling materializations during experiments with the medium Kluski are described by Smith (1975:231):
But all these were just preliminaries. In the main event, according to the witnesses, entire spirit forms were seen walking or floating around the room. These were occasionally captured on photographs by using magnesium flares for lighting. When the photographs were developed, they showed both the materializations and the medium, and this is important. But if you still think Kluski was somehow managing to impersonate these other entities, listen to this: Soon, in walked a lion, then a Neanderthal man, and then an elderly Assyrian priest. They were followed by dogs; cats; squirrels; a mink; and a large bird of prey which the photographer managed to catch in a picture, sitting on top of the medium's shoulder. The dogs jumped up on the laps of sitters and licked their faces.
Smith adds that Prof. Richet, in order to prove that the actual materializations did take place and were not hallucinations, made paraffin wax models of hands, which could not be removed except by dematerialization; these were found to be genuine.
Richet (1923:524) gives a particularly telling illustration of the stability and, hence, the reliability of ectoplasmic materialization by comparing two accounts of work with the same medium thirteen years apart:
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To confirm the authenticity of the phenomena, I cannot do better than reproduce side by side the notes taken by me in 1906 and those published by Geley in 1920. 1 have changed nothing in either. We experimented quite separately with Marthe, I in 1906 and Geley in 1910. We did not communicate our notes to each other
C. RicHET's NOTES (1906).
On the ground a small white tract which grows, makes an ovoid mass, and puts forth a prolongation. This mounts on the arm of the chair. At this moment there are visible two horns like those of a snail which seem to direct the movements. A lower mass, X, on the ground; and an upper mass, B, united to the former, which has climbed over the arm of the chair. I can look at this formation from a very short distance. The stem is greyish white, with swellings like an empty snake-skin. The mass X is on Marthe's knees, while the mass B spreads itself on the floor like an amoeba. The mass X is greyish, gelatinous, and barely visible. It is then on Marthe's knees. Little by little it seems to split into digits at its end. It is like the embryo of a hand, ill-formed but clear enough to enable me to say that it is a left hand seen from the back. Fresh progress: the little finger separates almost completely: then the following changes, very quick but very clear: a hand with closed fingers, seen from the back, with a little finger extended, an ill-formed thumb, and higher up a swelling that resembles the carpal bones. I think I see the creases in the skin.
GELEY's NOTES. "FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS TO THE CONSCIOUS," 1919.
"From the mouth of Eva there descends to her knees a cord of white substance of the thickness of two fingers; this ribbon takes under our eyes varying forms, that of a large perforated membrane, with swellings and vacant spaces; it gathers itself together, retracts, swells, and narrows again. Here and there from the mass appear temporary protrusions, and these for a few seconds assume the form of fingers, the outline of hands, and then reenter the mass. Finally the cord retracts on itself, lengthens to the knees, its end rises, detaches itself from the medium and moves towards me. I then see the extremity thicken like a swelling, and this terminal swelling expands into a perfectly modelled hand. I touch it; it gives a normal sensation; I feel the bones, and the fingers with their nails. Then the hand contracts, diminishes, and disappears in the end of the cord." (Page 57, English translation.)
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Although generally ectoplasm melts away, there appear exceptional circumstances where this is not so. R ichet (1923:509) tells of a seance where Richet cut the hair of an apparition, which had previously promised that he should do this. The hair upon examination turned out to be human hair.
Richet makes an admirable reporter of the psychic, because while he is willing to admit that such phenomena exist, he is careful not to admit any cases not scrupulously investigated. In his conclusion (1923:623) he rejects three hypotheses:
1) that they are due to activities of the dead,
2) that they are due to activities of angels or spirits,
3) that they are due to unknown powers of the human body and mind.
In fine, he states that though the effects are real, he has no hypothesis to account for them.
But perhaps Prof. R ichet was too hasty in rejecting hypothesis three. The theme of this book is that the powers of man are unlimited, and surely unlimited power implies all the manifestations for which the good Professor was at a loss to account. Or to look at it another way, if the concept of individual and separate human personality is at bottom an illusion (as is the concept of time and space), then when phenomena eventuate in ultimate reality, we must not be surprised that they present an enhanced and transcended aspect of intelligence which seems more divine than human. As is usual with dilemmas, the problem is in the erroneous assumptions which (while they may hold in the partial realm of sensuous reality) do not hold in the plenum of ultimate reality.
Perhaps we can make some progress in understanding these extraordinary phenomena by looking at them in the light of the Pribram-Bohm hologram theory, which states that what we perceive is but a virtual image of a hologram already imprinted on the brain. It is thus possible to imagine a meta-event or paraprocedure (these words are not adequate since the situation is outside time and space) in which there is a brief theophany of some aspect of ultimate reality. This opening, however, falls upon minds unprepared for it, - that is upon a clouded hologram in the brain - and what has to happen in the physical world of
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effect is a "saving of appearances," - a perturbed re-arrangement of' matter, something like the awkward execution of a sudden military order by troops not quite accustomed to it.
3.13) Poltergeist Phenomena
Poltergeist phenomena (raps, knocks, fires, general vandalism without physical agent), appear associated with lonely children near or at the age of adolescence. While scary, they do not last long, and often disappear when a better and more loving relationship is established in the home. They are quite similar to the molestation of budding saints, often ascribed to demonic forces.
Persinger and Lafreniere (1977:108) catalog a number of instances. Sample cases included:
1) - 1790/Wizzard's Clip, West Virginia/object movements, animals drop dead, apports.
2) - 1820/__, Tennessee/peak of the "Bell Witch" period; object movements, voices, death associated with unusual forces.
3) - October, 1873/Menomonie, Wisconsin/objects move; dresses ripped to thin shreds.
4) - June, 1880/Essex, England/beds move; furniture moves, shadows seen.
5) - August, 1883/Cedarville, Georgia/objects move, pebbles move in presence of fifteen-year-old girl; dishes smashed; raps heard.
6) - September, 1889/Clarendon, Quebec, Canada/rocks move, fires, hair pulled, objects move.
7) - March, 1892/Chicago, Illinois/objects moved, jewels smashed, curtains ripped; nine-year-old girl sick.
8) - February, 1905/parts of England/outbreak of several poltergeist activities.
9) -December, 1921 /Budapest, Hungary/fires break out; furniture moved in presence of thirteen-year-old boy.
10) - February, 1952/Johannesburg, South Africa/bed sheets shredded; objects moved in house, household attacked by "force."
11) - February, 1958/Seaford, Long Island, New York/ objects move; bottles pop off caps, etc.
12) - January, 1963/Edmonton, Alberta, Canada/objects move; blankets move; pounding sound.
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13) - 1972/Detroit, Michigan/drawers moved; holes in wall; knocking sounds.
From work elsewhere (1974:22) we quote:
"Closely allied to the former, these consist of rappings, knocks, occasional apports or stones, and sometimes mischievous tricks. In this case, the generalized preconscious seems to be stirred up by the growing pains of a somewhat abnormal preadolescent child, just on the throes of adolescence. (The Periodic Developmental Stage Column I possibilities of psychic manifestations should be noted.) The onset of adolescent sexual function usually ends such activities.
"Garrett (1949:147-155) regards poltergeist phenomena as a crude type of haunting, where the dissociated phantasm tries to get the attention of an adolescent through knocking and other psychic manifestations to bring his suit to the attention of the living. Often some long forgotten fancied wrong produces the phenomena, and the passage noted is eloquent on the necessity of gentle forgiveness and release (instead of horror and fright) on the part of the human participant. (It is a little like giving alms to a beggar). When Garrett questioned a phantasm as to why it manifested to an adolescent, the phantasm replied that the adolescent was nicer than other members of the family, and more likely to pay attention to the phenomena. Garrett (1949:156), after commenting sagely on the pitiable state of phantasm she 'exorcised,' sums up the 'not-me' or dissociated aspects of the situation: "
Dissociation has been considered an abnormality and a destructive condition in the lives and personalities of many sensitive individuals. But it would be well to remember that every normal person has his moments of dissociation in fantasy and daydream. Is it possible that such dissociation can continue after death? And if this is so, would it not help to clear up some of the mystery attached to the phantom and to hauntings?
Poltergeist phenomena often involve spontaneous fires. Persinger and Lafreniere (1977:106) catalog some of these:
Incidents concerned with spontaneous or sudden fires involved sixty-three cases. Only those cases that involved no
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obvious or reasonably obvious source were considered. The frequent association of the phenomenon with a teenage human subject was also apparent in these events. Sample cases involved:
1) - August, 1856/Bedford, England/forty unexplained fires in short period.
2) - May, 1878/Bridgewater, England/fires repeatedly start near twelve-year-old female, sounds.
3) - August, 1887/Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada/ forty fires in house in short period; child found in flames.
4) - 1905/parts of England/spontaneous fire episodes; noises, explosions in surrounding area.
5) - August, 1929/Antigua, West Indies/girls' clothes flame; no burns found on body.
6) -1939/Borley Rectory, England/famous "Borley Rectory" burns down following episode of spontaneous fires.
7) - 28 March, 1953/Silver Springs, Maryland/accordion catches on fire while eleven-year-old female playing.
8) - August, 1957/Stephenville, Newfoundland, Canada/ many fires erupt in closets, drawers.
9) -August, 1958/Talladega, Alabama/fires near ceiling of house, reddish-blue in color.
10) - 1966/Columbia, South Carolina/bed found on fire; no reason or source.
Gaddis (1967:181ff) has a whole chapter on poltergeist fires which contains numerous accounts of such spontaneous occurrences. Again the prevalence of a teenage agent, often forlorn and alienated, is noted.
It is possible to look at poltergeist phenomena as extreme cases of unstressing, where the energy is exteriorized. (For more on unstressing, see Gowan (1974:123; 1975:31). While this most ordinarily occurs with an alienated youth, it can also occur with a budding saint, as the penalty to be paid for over-rapid progress in spiritual grace, which leaves mis-stored physical energy, (often sexual), unspent. Consider some descriptions of the trials of the Cure of Ars, who believed that these disturbances were due to the Devil himself, (Farges 1926:347):
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Sometimes he would knock nails into the floor as with the heavy blows of a hammer, then he would split the wood, plane the boards or saw the paneling, or else bore all night ... or again drum on the table, on the mantelpiece, on the water jug, giving preference to objects that made the largest sound.
Sometimes in the lower room the Cure would hear as it were a large escaped horse prancing; it would rise to the ceiling and then descend heavily with its four hooves on the floor. At other times there was a noise as of a large flock of sheep passing over his head. It was impossible to sleep . . . One night when the Cure was more put out than usual he said: 'My God, I would willingly sacrifice a few hours of sleep for the conversion of sinners.' The infernal flock immediately departed, silence reigned, and the poor Cure was able to sleep. We have these details from M.Vianney himself.
After amusing himself by making a terrible din on the stairs, the Devil would enter, catch hold of the curtains of the bed, and shake them with fury, as though he wanted to drag them down . . . It often happened that the evil spirit knocked like someone wanting to come in; a moment later without the door opening, he was in the room, moving the chairs, upsetting the furniture, rummaging everywhere, calling to the Cure in a mocking voice: 'Vianney, Vianney' adding to his name, outrageous adjectives and threats ...
The poltergeist nature of Vianney's molestation is also described by Johnson (1953:256) who ascribes it to dammed-up psychic energy brought on by the Cure's unremitting mortifications and sexual abstinence.
In work elsewhere (Gowan 1975:145) we quoted Gaddis (1967:203): on the causes of poltergeist phenomena:
Such stresses within the subconscious mind, if unrelieved and sufficiently intense, can result in a psychological state known as dissociation ... When these conditions exist, a person can commit acts, including destructive acts representing his repressed frustrations and desires, and then return to his normal self with no conscious memory of what has been done. In poltergeist phenomena we are witnessing the projection and dramatization of subconscious repressed tensions and conflicts ...
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"Another researcher who believed in the 'poltergeist psychosis' was Fodor (1948), (1959) who 'cured' many such cases by offering love and understanding to the adolescent agent (Gaddis, 1967:205).
"A thorough account of the subject was made by Owens (1964) in Can We Explain the Poltergeist? Some of the reported phenomena make it look as though in some manner the numinous influence (which in concert with the adolescent agent appears to produce the phenomena) does so by increasing the rate of oxidation of inanimate objects in the surround. This increase in oxidation furnishes the heat energy which is then employed in tricks involving mechanical energy, and occasionally in the instances of spontaneous combustion when the oxidation rate is very high.
'In the Parapsychology Review for November-December, 1973, (4:6:4:2), the statement is made that when the psychic Rudi Schneider was stripped and searched as a matter of routine during his performances, it was found that during every exhibition of telekinesis, he had had an orgasm. This fact is extremely suggestive. In particular it points to the chakra center in the genital area as connected with apports, and one is immediately reminded that poltergeist phenomena (also prominently connected with apports) is almost always characterized by the presence of a pubescent adolescent, for whom masturbatory activity would be quite probable. Is it possible that orgasm in trance is the cause of telekinesis?"
The relationship between sexual awakening and poltergeist phenomena is also discussed by Johnson (1963:255-6) who gives a number of instances. He quotes Price in an interview with the husband of a young Austrian medium:
. . . who informed him that at the height of his wife's sexual excitement in their early married life, ornaments would sometimes fall off the mantelpiece in their bedroom; also that during menstruation the physical phenomena of mediumship did not occur ...[obviously this is not necessarily a psychic phenomenon! - JCG]
Poltergeist phenomena can be looked upon as an inversion of the 'two-fluid theory' at nearly total disorder. (We may recall that in this theory, when the entropy is very small, the fluid divides into one part which contains all the entropy and another
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We quote from work elsewhere (1974:193-8) where the subject is discussed extensively:
"The possession of a human being by a demon or disincarnate spirit smacks so much of witchcraft, primitive animism, and outmoded superstition that it is particularly objectionable to Western researchers as an explanation or topic for psychological analysis. The alternative psychoanalytically-oriented construct that repressed and despised aspects of the psyche become so numerous and so strong in the subconscious that they take over the conscious persona is also a possibility, provided we credit the collective preconscious with enlarged powers. Nevertheless, the first construct appears useful in understanding noted cases of mediumship, which appears to be some kind of a way station between the frightening dissociation of schizophrenia, and the professional benign control of dissociation by a medical hypnotist.
"Myers, the great authority on mediumship, devotes a chapter to the subject in his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, and notes the close relationship of trance possession to motor automatisms in the following definition (1961:345):
Possession is a more developed form of motor automatism in which the automatists own personality does for the time altogether disappear, while there is a more or less complete substitution of personality; writing or speech being given by a spirit through the entranced organism (i.o.).
"This kind of trance activity has been known since ancient times; the Bible, in particular, is full of such accounts. Socrates believed that this was the source of creative genius. The key question then generally asked is: 'What (good or evil spirit) is controlling the medium?' While possession has some similarities to the creative inspiration, automatic writing, and peak-experience and satori, it differs in a most important respect, namely that the individual is not only not conscious, but the spirit seems to have vacated the consciousness, leaving it at the mercy of whatever comes along.
"Possession is not the same as the conscious excursion of the spirit in ecstasy, rapture, OOB experience, or other mystical adventure, for here the consciousness while sometimes out of the body, and certainly somewhat dissociated, is still able later to
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relate what has happened to it during the interval when the body lay cataleptic. The same conscious awareness is not reported in possession .2
"While most mediums, especially those of a spiritualistic bent, seem to turn up little but banality in their control utterances, (as if the gigantic computer associated with the collective preconscious had executed a 'print dump' order), there are a few mediums who have reported significant veridictical material. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the data collected under the membership of 'Mrs. Piper' (Myers, 1961:347).
"It is significant that her 'sitters' and the alleged disincarnate spirits attending her either were or had been men of distinction in psychical research. Apparently the keenness of the intellects of the sitters and the controls in these instances may do much to improve the quality of the communication, since it is not only the preconscious of the medium which is being tapped. Mrs. Garrett, (1968) another noted psychic, reported that after it was discovered that she had mediumistic powers, she found it necessary to 'be developed' by sitting with Hewitt McKenzie, another eminent psychic researcher. We are unsure as to whether there is a gradual education of the uncontrolled 'not-me' aspects of the preconscious, to a more docile aspect, or whether the 'education' is merely a change of locus within the vast area of the preconscious, (as when several users pool their stored memory drum data on a giant computer). Or it may be that parts of the persona become more personalized and discreet, resulting in a fragmentary personality, or two or more persons. It was William James' conclusion (Myers 1961:382) that Mrs. Piper 'has supernormal powers.' Myers himself was one of her 'sitters' and believed in the genuineness of her phenomena; it is interesting that after his death, he was one of the alleged controls in the phenomena of the next medium, Mrs. Leonard.
"Another noted mediumship far above the usual was that of Mrs. Leonard (Smith 1964). As Smith says in the opening lines of the book (1964:11), 'A great medium is a rare phenomenon, rarer than a great painter or a piano virtuoso.' Mrs. Leonard apparently developed her psychic powers so that her sittings (some of which were with Sir Oliver Lodge) had unusual 'power' and clarity, and her control, a discarnate entity named 'Feda' was very accurate. We cannot in this short space give adequate
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examples of this ability, but we shall discuss one of the most unusual of Mrs. Leonard's powers - that of 'direct voice.' Direct voice occurs when (on rare occasions) the supposed disincarnate 'deceased' speaks with his own voice through the medium, instead of communicating with the control who then speaks through the medium. There is nothing much in the fact that this happens, but what is significant is that the content of the D.V. messages reveals an entirely different personality than that of the control. In the direct voice protocols (Smith 1964:238), the 'direct voice' supplies words when Feda asks, corrects Feda in content and pronunciation, contradicts Feda, expostulates with Feda, is unheard, misheard, or only partly heard by the control. Some examples:
Feda: It's like being put in charge of a department of boars.
D.V.: Borstal.
Feda: Admiral Idea, he says.
D.V.: Admirable.
Feda: A man once said Feda was a spectrum.
D.V.: Spectre.
Feda: What do you call it - an empty sone?
D.V.: Zone.
No one can read these pages without being powerfully impressed with the conclusion that the direct voice communicator and Feda the control are two distinct entities, and that of the two the communicator is more sophisticated and educated. It is as if the medium were a piano, and there are two players, one much more skilled than the other. The direct voice communicator knows where to find the words in the medium's mind that Feda does not. In other words, he has a bigger vocabulary - certainly one of the prime aspects of personality survival. Smith (1964:229) also provides an explanation of how and why 'direct voice' occurs, and its relationship to the whole mediumistic seance.
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"A third and final example of an unusually 'high' control for a medium is the recent 'Seth Material' from the mediumship of Jane Roberts (1970, 1972). If we are to believe Seth, he is a highly evolved entity, far above the usual table-rapping type; certainly his material, while somewhat formal and platitudinous, is generally in keeping with his claims. Seth's statements however, like those of other mediums, can be interpreted in one way as communication from the beyond and can also in another way be represented as communication from parts of the preconscious within.
"Roberts (1970:53) quotes the control Seth saying: 'I do depend upon Robert's willingness to dissociate. There is no doubt that he is unaware at times of his surroundings during sessions.'
"And again in the preface Roberts (1970:viii) quotes from The World of Psychic Phenomena by F.S. Edsall as follows: 'The development of trance personalities or controls seems to depend on subconscious experiences related to the medium's background or environment.'
"in appraising the work of mediums, we should note that in a dissociated way, they are also creative, for through their dissociation, elemental energies become focused. Muldoon and Carrington (1951:20) point up this parallelism in stating "With mediums the imagination becomes a creative power of the first order.'
"Among the automatisms exhibited by mediums and others, the facility of automatic writing deserves some passing attention. In automatic writing, the medium does not usually lose consciousness, and the 'possession' extends only to the hand doing the writing. A great deal of trash has been produced in this way, but it must be admitted that Blake, Madame Guyon (see Underhill 1960:66), Rulman Merswin, and St. Teresa (Underhill 1960:194) were outstanding exceptions. In some celebrated cases (Coleridge, Wordsworth), it becomes difficult to distinguish the seizure of poetic inspiration of genius from automatic script. We can only conclude that automatic writing is a feature of the continuum of psychic development, and not a characteristic of any particular stage.
In line with Van Rhijn's hypothesis, we can posit the close
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connection between dissociation and illness. Dissociation produces illness; indeed, we may almost say that dissociation is illness. Those thoughts and actions which cannot be handled with full symbolic cognition, nor yet acted out through archetypes and sign, must eventually become externalized on the body, which as illness or disease is their residual manner of manifesting.
"Roberts (1970:30) says:
In his discussion on health, Seth has always maintained that illness is the result of dissociated and inhibited emotions. The psyche attempts to get rid of them by projecting them into a specific area of the body ... If really large areas of the self are inhibited, a secondary personality can be formed, grouped around those qualities distrusted and denied by the primary ego ...
"Again Roberts (1970:170) speaking of illness in trance, says:
All illness is almost always the result of another action that cannot be followed through. When the lines to the original action are released and the channels opened, the illness will vanish.
"Let us assume for the moment that mediumistic utterances can be taken at their face value, and let us examine critically the content of the messages in contrast to material on similar subjects produced by prophets, mystics, religious leaders, and 'third-force' writers. One might assume that those who purport to speak from the other side of the veil might have some startling disclosures, some irresistible proselyting abilities, or some grand eloquence and majesty unequalled by mortal rivals. But this is not the case. The most eloquent descriptions of the afterlife, of man and his destiny, of the relation of man to the universe have not been written by spirits, speaking through a medium, but by inspired humans, in an advanced stage of development. The trance utterances, to be sure, give some hope that consciousness may survive physical death, but this doctrine is taught by many religions, and can be adduced, as we have seen in this book, by psychological analysis. Despite the elevated quality of the material produced through the mediumship of Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Leonard, and Mrs. Roberts, it certainly cannot compare with the New Testament, Paradise Lost, or the writings of Blake, Whitman, Emerson, or Maslow. Everyone is entitled to
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make of this what he will, but to this writer, these facts are eloquent concerning the restraints imposed by mediumship. And this brings us back to the central fact of possession, that while there may be benefits, there are also severe debits.
"Edmunds (1968:21) explains it as follows:
This accounts for the limited value of the information usually given out by a medium, although she may sincerely believe she is contacting a high spiritual source, for it will almost invariably be found that the new information unknown to others practically never comes through, but is limited to the total contents of the medium's and the sitter's minds.
"We have focused on mediumship because it is the most progressive and possibly useful aspect of possession. In reviewing the pros and cons of mediumship, one must ask oneself what has been accomplished. Perhaps some good has been done if any persons are persuaded that life is not as circumscribed by the counting house as Scrooge imagined it to be before being visited by a trio of ghosts. But what has happened to the medium? Has the experience facilitated or complicated her development? The grave loss of control of her own organism can hardly be desirable. Why are an overwhelming preponderance of mediums women? Is there some sexual aspect at work here? What would happen otherwise to the medium? Is this some sanctioned expression of the dissociated elements of the self which otherwise might later explode into schizophrenia? In our analysis of the developmental forcing of schizophrenia we referred to the rupturing of a placenta. Certainly there has been a similar rupture of a placental envelope in these cases.
"We have reviewed examples of noted mediumship where (if one cares to believe the allegations) the medium was controlled by high disincarnate types, whose words make sense and give some larger meaning, but such cases are in the minority. Being a medium seems like hitchhiking a ride: you may be lucky and get to your destination, but you may also put yourself at the mercy of undesirable elements. The medium in effect allows her spirit to be invaded for profit, as the prostitute does her body. No one who values the regnancy or integrity of the human being can be happy at either outcome though men may, for expedience, accept the ministrations of both."
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Possession type mediumship has been considered by the Church since classical times as possession by demons. But many mediums claim that the possession is by departed spirits, and some (e.g. Mrs. Roberts, the "Seth" writer) claim that their control is a high disincarnate spirit. A further possibility, not often advocated by mediums, is that the whole range of phenomena of physical mediumship can be looked upon as the manifestations of the etheric (astral) body. We must also note that while mediums seem "possessed" and go into trances during their manifestations, shamans appear to "possess" their spirits in the manner of wizards or magicians, and seldom go "under" during the exercise of their powers. There seems to be a continuum connecting these two positions, with one grading into the other.
For more on mediums see Mitchell 1974:75ff, Smith 1964 (Mrs. P. Leonard); Twigg's autobiography (1972) and Podmore's two volumes on mediums (1902).
The pranic energy to accomplish feats is evidently communicated in some cases by touch. Smith, quoting Drayton Thomas (1964:239-40), says:
I was first personally impressed by the reality of an emanation when having a table sitting with Mrs. Leonard. My wife and Mrs. Leonard placed their hands lightly on the bamboo table while I took down the letters as they were spelled out by tilts. Then my wife and I exchanged places. Messages of an evidential character were thus produced. When Mrs. Leonard suggested that my wife and I should sit at the table we did so, but no movements followed. Mrs. Leonard then placed her fingers lightly upon the exact center of the table, where it would have been difficult, or probably impossible, for her to move it by pressure. The result was immediate; for the tilts commenced and continued until the medium gradually withdrew her hand. As she did so, the table slowed down and quickly ceased all movement. Again the medium's hand was placed on it as before and again the movements continued. It was a clear demonstration that something essential to the table movement proceeded from Mrs. Leonard and that neither my wife nor I could produce this mysterious something . . .
It would seem that this substance calls for further research. It is tempting to suggest that it will eventually be found to play an important part in the processes of physical life, in the baffling regions of sensation and perception, and in all forms of psychic phenomena.
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It may be a substance which links the material with the immaterial and facilitates their interaction. One may even conceive of it as consisting of many grades, some of which interact with matter while others more easily interact with the substance of the realms awaiting our habitation after departure from the earthly body.
Attempting to explain ectoplasm Stern (1976:50) says:
In Jung's presence, an electrical engineer had measured the degree of ionization in the vicinity of the medium's body. He found that the ionization was 60 times greater than normal at the point where the ectoplasmic emanation had occurred, but was normal near the other areas of the medium's body.
Our guess is that this large degree of ionization was caused by the flow of prana, (cf section 3.5), the basic vital force producing ectoplasm.
Tyrrell (1961:165-375) devotes two sections of a large book to a scholarly investigation of mediums and seances. He studies the case of Mrs. Piper, book-tests, and cross correspondences, - among the best of the evidential material. He also devotes a chapter to the possibility of survival after death, as supported by seance communications. Others who have discussed survival include LeShan (1966:232ff), Mitchell (1974:397ff), and Huxley. (White 1972:39) describes the research of Dr. Osis who found upon a survey over 800 doctor's reports of deathbed phenomena involving luminous visions.
3.11) Psychokinesis: (the moving of objects by mind-force).
While psychokinesis occurs with poltergeist phenomena and in possession trance, as well as with trained mediums, it is one of the best documented of the psychic effects, as it can be observed in light and under rigorous conditions of control. Often called PK, it usually consists of the moving of a compass needle or other small objects (such as a match box) on a smooth table (cf. Ostander and Schroeder 1970:420) also, (Krippner 1975: 135ff).
Psychokinesis is considered by some investigators to be a half-way step toward materialization. The object is moved by some (usually invisible) condensation of the aura, or an ecto-
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plasmic pseudopod, or some other etheric exteriorization of the medium, which though invisible, is capable of exerting force. Some quasi-magnetic effects are also noted. The following notices are examples of these concepts.
Dingwall (1962b:181) reports on the physical manifestations of Pallidino, who "drew pieces of furniture toward her, made them float in air and apparently increased or decreased their weight." On another occasion (ibid:195) she materialized a face and upper torso of a young woman for "about twenty seconds."
Dingwall (1962b:205) on another occasion tells of the materialization of human hands, and the transportation of the table and objects on it through the air. Another especially evidential example of PK occurred in light sufficient to see the movement of a table toward and away from the medium at her command (ibid:206).
Gaddis (1976:174ff) discusses the researches of M. R. Coe into PK effects as caused by static electricity (Fate, July 1959). Coe discovered that humans can cause small strips of aluminum foil to move on a very smooth surface by moving hands near them. Best results were obtained with untired operators under conditions of low temperature and humidity, (both of which favor electrostatic conduction). Coe also (ibid:177) found that after training he was able to produce large bluish-white sparks when flying at an altitude of 21,000 feet. (Those with knowledge of physics will at once think of the Crookes tube - he modern neon light - in which luminosity is aided by a partial vacuum.) Coe felt that maybe this is why psychic phenomena are so prevalent in the altitudes of Tibet.
In talking about the remarkable effects produced by the medium, R. Schindler, with psychokinesis, Mann (1973:148) says: "Schindler usually produced a 'substance' sufficiently condensed to be opaque to infrared light."
In the same place, Mann theorizes that the aura of the medium acts as a force field to accomplish the PK effect and describes a Russian demonstrator who accomplished psychokinesis when her "brain and heart pulsed in rhythm with these vibrations in her force field" (quoting Ostrander and Schroeder). Such pulsations may have caused the object to move as if magnetized.
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As Doyle, (1926:246-7) remarks:
The playing upon musical instruments, especially an accordion, under circumstances when it was impossible to reach the notes, was another of the phenomena which was very thoroughly examined and then certified by Crookes and his distinguished assistants. Granting that the medium has himself the knowledge which would enable him to play the instrument, the author is not prepared to admit that such a phenomenon is an absolute proof of independent intelligence. When once the existence of an etheric body is granted, with limbs which correspond with our own, there is no obvious reason why a partial detachment should not take place, and why the etheric fingers should not be placed upon the keys while the material ones remain upon the medium's lap. The problem resolves itself, then, into the simpler proposition that the medium's brain can command his etheric fingers, and that those fingers can be supplied with sufficient force to press down the keys. Very many psychic phenomena, the reading with blindfolded eyes, the touching of distant objects, and so forth, may, in the opinion of the author, be referred to the etheric body and may be classed rather under a higher and subtler materialism than under Spiritualism.
Long (1954:61) quotes the famous Sir William Crookes on his experiences with PK:
'The instances in which heavy bodies, such as tables, chairs, sofas, etc., have been moved, when the medium was not touching them are very numerous. I will briefly mention a few of the most striking. My own chair has been twisted partly around, whilst my feet were off the floor. A chair was seen by all present to move slowly up to the table from a far corner, when all were watching it; on another occasion an armchair moved to where we were sitting, and then moved slowly back again (a distance of about three feet) at my request. On three successive evenings, a small table moved slowly across the room, under conditions which I had specially pre-arranged, so as to answer any objection which might be raised to the evidence.'
Schmidt (Mitchell 1974:179ff) devotes a summary chapter to psychokinesis, especially to the North Carolina laboratory experiments on controlling the fall of dice, in which p= 1/400. More modern PK experiments have involved computers and radioactive decay, but psychics tend to tire more easily in these mecha-
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nistic experiments because of the lack of emotion involved. While this kind of statistical PK effect can be demonstrated, it is not very startling and does not seem heuristic.
Schmidt (ibid:189) speculates that PK may affect only the statistical laws of physics and not the conservation laws. It might be that humans have some entropy-reducing power which collapses the state vector of an event and so disqualifies the law of averages from operating, thus apparently producing a miracle. Such a power would give man domination over events and allow him to interfere in his own future. While there is no hard evidence that the mind has this power, a number of saints, gurus, and other advanced humans have indicated that it may be so.
Krippner (1975) has many accounts of PK effects, personally observed. With regard to the Russian Kulagina, he quotes Pratt as follows, (p. 138):
The block slid about one-half inch forward toward Kulagina, but angled toward her left, then it moved again in the same way about five seconds later. Both Keil and I saw both motions of the block . . . She was not expecting the objects to be placed before her, so she could not have made preparation in advance.
Krippner also describes (p. 199ff) PK effects which he found in Prague under the heading of "psychotronic energy." Similar to Reich's "orgone energy" this type of psychic energy appears capable of influencing a magnet, and of other PK effects. These are described by Krippner in seven different demonstrations, in which some kind of energy field appears to be generated by the human body which is capable of affecting objects. Similar descriptions may also be found in Ostrander and Schroeber (1970).
Krippner (1975:197) describes some remarkable examples of psychokinesis during his Russian visit. He also describes the research of Pushkin. Pushkin wrote:
Our preliminary work with ... Ermolaev indicates the presence of psychokinetic phenomena. In a typical experiment, Ermolaev concentrates on a number of objects resting upon a table - a matchbox, a tennis ball, a few pencils. After a period of concentration, Ermolaev directs his attention on one of the objects and it moves from its resting place.
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At times, Ermolaev would lift up a spherical object, such as a tennis ball, squeeze it between his palms, and slowly move his hands apart. On several occasions, the object would remain suspended in space. The distance between Ermolaev's hands could extend as far as eight inches and the object would still remain suspended. Further, it was noted that the greater the surface of the object, the longer it remained suspended in the air.
Pushkin explained these phenomena on the basis of the biogravity hypothesis of Alexander Dubrov. If living systems can produce and control gravitational waves, these waves could move the items on the table and keep the ball suspended in the air. A ball with a greater surface area would remain suspended for a longer period of time because there would be more surface for the gravitational waves to act upon than in the case of balls with less of a surface area. Pushkin noted that autogravity may help to stabilize one's perceptual world, then concluded:
According to the general theory of relativity, gravitation originates in systems in which space has been distorted. Ermolaev is able to distort space to such an extent that a temporary gravitational field is produced in which objects obey his perceptions of them.
Moss (1974:114ff) sees psychokinesis as the transmission of bioenergy, prana, through space to make objects move.
For other citations on psychokinesis see Mitchell 1974: 179ff, and Watson, 1974-131ff).
3.12) Materializations
While there are other minor forms of materializations, such as slate writing, etc., we shall devote what space is available to the materialization of a human figure, and its basis in ectoplasm. For ectoplasm, a viscous, sticky substance, extruded from the medium during trance seems to be the basis for all physical phenomena. It can perhaps be viewed like a tulpa as an exteriorization of energy from the body brought on by trance or thought forms.
Holzer (1975:33-4) says that materialization is performed by drawing ectoplasm out of the body of the medium and the sitters. He claims that this is a "gray or whitish albumen substance"
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with a density from "smoke-like to solidity." Moreover it feels "cold and clammy." Light rays of higher frequency than red interfere with the vibratory aspects of ectoplasm, and so are inimical to it. Materialization, according to Holzer, requires complete cooperation between the entranced medium and the departed, who must hold his thought steady in order to animate the ectoplasm; this can only be done for a few minutes at most.
Turvey, (1911, 0969:55) says of this substance:
I seem to make use of the medium's psychic force ... which appears to draw from his wrists or knees as a sort of red sticky matter (part of his energy body). At any rate that is what happened when on one occasion I lifted a bed with two people on it ...
Doyle (1926:124-5) discourses upon ectoplasm in a learned chapter from which we can only quote the following:
Apart from such speculations, the solid knowledge of ectoplasm, which we have now acquired, gives us at last a firm material basis for psychic research. When spirit descends into matter it needs such a material basis, or it is unable to impress our material senses.
This new precise knowledge has been useful in giving us some rational explanation of those rapping sounds which were among the first phenomena to attract attention. It would be premature to say that they can only be produced in one way, but it may at least be stated that the usual method of their production is by the extension of a rod of ectoplasm, which may or may not be visible, and by its percussion on some solid object. It is probably that these rods may be the conveyors of strength rather than strong in themselves, as a small copper wire may carry the electric discharge which will disintegrate a battleship. In one of Crawford's admirable experiments, finding that the rods were coming from the chest of his medium, he soaked her blouse with liquid carmine, and then asked for raps upon the opposite wall. The wall was found to be studded with spots of red, the ectoplasmic protrusion having carried with it in each case some of the stain through which it passed. In the same way table-tilting, when genuine, would appear to be due to an accumulation of ectoplasm upon the surface, collected from the various sitters and afterwards used by the presiding intelligence. Crawford surmised that the
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extrusions must often possess suckers or claws at the end, so as to grip or to raise, and the author subsequently collected several photographs of these formations which show clearly a serrated edge at the end that would fulfill such a purpose.
Crawford paid great attention also to the correspondence between the weight of the ectoplasm emitted and the loss of weight in the medium. His experiments seemed to show that everyone is a medium, that everyone loses weight at a materializing seance, and that the chief medium only differs from the others in that she is so constituted that she can put out a larger ectoplasmic flow.
In Crawford's experiments it was usual for the medium to lose as much as 10 or 15 pounds in a single sitting - the weight being restored to her immediately the ectoplasm was retracted. On one occasion the enormous loss of 52 pounds was recorded.
Doyle (1926:115ff) describes further the enlightening experiments made by Dr. W. J. Crawford of Queens University, Belfast, in regard to the nature of ectoplasm and its use in various psychic manifestations:
To understand fully the conclusions he arrived at, his books must be read, but here we may say briefly that he demonstrated that levitations of the table, raps on the floor of the room, and movements of objects in the seance room, where due to the action of 'psychic rods,' or, as he came to call them in his last book, 'psychic structures,' emanating from the medium's body. When the table is levitated these 'rods ' are operated in two ways. If the table is a light one, the rod or structure does not touch the floor, but is 'a cantilever firmly fixed to the medium's body at one end, and gripping the under surface or legs of the table with the free or working end.' In the case of a heavy table, the reaction instead of being thrown on the medium is applied to the floor of the room, forming a kind of strut between the under surface of the levitated table and the floor. The medium was placed in a weighing scale, and when the table was levitated an increase in her weight was observed.
Doyle (1926:118) commenting on the ectoplasm experiments says:
I have compared the whitish, cloud-like appearance of the matter in the structure with photographs of materialization phenomena in all stages obtained with many different mediums
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all over the world, and the conclusion I have come to is that this material very closely resembles, if it is not identical with, the material used in all such materialization phenomena. In fact, it is not too much to say that this whitish, translucent, nebulous matter is the basis of all psychic phenomena of the physical order. Without it in some degree no physical phenomena are possible. It is what gives consistence to the structures of all kinds erected by the operators in the seance chamber; it is, when properly manipulated and applied, that which enables the structures to come into contact with the ordinary forms of matter with which we are acquainted.
Describing the formation of ectoplasm, Doyle (1962:118-9) quotes a report of Dr. Geley:
A substance emanates from the body of the medium (through the pores and other natural orifices); it externalizes itself, and is amorphous ... in the first instance. This substance takes various forms ... We may distinguish 1) the substance as a substratum of materialization, and 2) its organized development. Its appearance is generally announced by the presence of fluid, white, and luminous flakes ... The substance itself emanates from the whole body of the medium ... The substance occurs in various forms, sometimes as ductile dough, . . sometimes as numerous thin threads ... sometimes as a membrane, as a fabric, or as a woven material ... In some cases it completely envelopes the medium as a mantle ... It may increase or decrease in succession ... It is cold, sometimes viscous and sticky ... and is mobile ... The substance is sensitive to light. Every impression received through the ectoplasm reacts on the medium and vice versa.
Turvey (1969:43), a medium, describes this vital force as red sticky matter." Compare this with the following quotation about aka the shadowy body of the subconscious) from Long's discussion of Kahuna practices (1954:138-9):
It is of such a nature that it sticks to whatever we touch ... and when removed from the contact, draws out a long invisible thread of itself, which connects with the thing contacted ... This substance is an ideal conductor of vital electrical force ... When heavily charged ... it becomes rigid and firm enough to be used as a 'hand' or instrument to move and affect physical objects.
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Further, (ibid: 127):
When I had associated the shadowy body or aka with the subconscious spirit, and had considered the several root meanings of a-ka, I discovered that the thing that was 'sticky' was the shadowy body . . . The root ka means a cord ...
The reader who wishes further information on materializations will find an excellent chapter in Long (1967:201-223), which describe the way Hawaiian kahunas produce the effect. The chapter discusses full and partial materializations of both humans and animals, changes in normal size, and both permanent and ephemeral materialized clothing.
Richet (1923), the famous French explorer of the psychic, was responsible for coining the word "ectoplasm," the sticky (cf "aka"), ropy, materialized substance which emanated from the medium's body during trance, and forms itself into both inanimate objects and phantoms, melting away back into the body of the medium. Richet had many seances with Palladino, one of which (1923.496) was dignified by Mme. Curie. In subdued light Richet felt the ectoplasm form itself into a real hand which melted away in his grasp. He says of these phenomena (p. 499):
We can assign three phases to these exteriorized phenomena, a first stage in which they are invisible, a second in which they begin to become visible, but are still more or less amorphous, and a third stage in which they take on the semblance of a living organism surrounded by veils which at first mask the imperfections of form, but become thinner as the underlying form becomes more dense.
In another seance with Pallidino, an Italian professor experienced the "crucial test of an ectoplasmic hand melting away in his grasp" (p. 500). In still another case, wax models of ectoplasmic hands were obtained (p. 543, 545). "By reason of the narrowness of the wrists, these moulds could not be obtained from living hands, for the whole hand would have had to be withdrawn through the narrow opening . . . In the moulds here considered ... they were produced by a materialization followed by dematerialization . . ."
In Richet's view ( 923:442) "Telekinesis is the first phase of materialization." (Telekinesis is his word for PK.) All of the objective (material) manifestations of psychic power are connected:
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First raps and noise, then telekinesis leading to levitation, then extrusion of ectoplasm which now becomes visible ending in animate forms. In some cases of levitation of small objects (scissors, ball, cf photograph), Richet (1923:425-8) a thread appears. But this is ectoplasmic thread (much like the "silver cord" of OBE); if "cut with scissors, its continuity is immediately restored" (p. 428). It "seems to be thinner than ordinary thread" and "starts from the fingers." Richet also quotes (ibid) Palladino, who having levitated a glass exclaimed: "The thread, look at the thread! Peretti took the thread and pulled it; it broke, and suddenly disappeared."
Richet (ibid:430) reports the experiments of Crawford (Experiments in Psychical Science, Watkins, London, 1919) who concluded after careful experiments with weight distribution between a medium and a levitated table that the total weight remained constant, and that ectoplasm extruded from the medium accomplished the feat. He said, "It is invisible, though it has weight, gives sensation on contact, and makes an imprint on plastic or colored substances." In another experiment, Richet (ibid: 511) describes ectoplasm as:
A whitish substance, that creeps as if alive, with damp, cold, protoplasmic extensions that are transformed under the eyes of the experimenters into a hand, fingers, a head or even an entire figure.
On p. 523, after noting his coining of the word, he describes ectoplasm as a "kind of gelatinous protoplasm, formless at first, that exudes from the body of the medium and takes form later." On p. 523, he again describes it as "a whitish steam, perhaps luminous, taking the shape of gauze or muslin. . . "
Johnson (1953:244) in a chapter on materializations and physical mediumship describes Osty's experiments with the medium Rudi Schneider in an investigation of psychokinesis. The object to be moved was protected by an infra-red beam, which would ring a bell, which would activate a flashlight photograph:
The bell did ring, sometimes for a half-minute or more... the photo showed the medium sitting in his usual position, fully controlled. Whatever obstructed the beam was not a solid obstacle... A significant fact was observed. When the beam was partially obscured, the galvanometer spot of light moved
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in sympathy with the respiratory rate of the entranced medium . . . Some invisible substance with appreciable infra-red absorption appeared to be produced, and its production was shown to be associated with the physiological process of respiration in the medium.
This testimony again points to the formation of an invisible ectoplasm.
Some of the startling materializations during experiments with the medium Kluski are described by Smith (1975:231):
But all these were just preliminaries. In the main event, according to the witnesses, entire spirit forms were seen walking or floating around the room. These were occasionally captured on photographs by using magnesium flares for lighting. When the photographs were developed, they showed both the materializations and the medium, and this is important. But if you still think Kluski was somehow managing to impersonate these other entities, listen to this: Soon, in walked a lion, then a Neanderthal man, and then an elderly Assyrian priest. They were followed by dogs; cats; squirrels; a mink; and a large bird of prey which the photographer managed to catch in a picture, sitting on top of the medium's shoulder. The dogs jumped up on the laps of sitters and licked their faces.
Smith adds that Prof. Richet, in order to prove that the actual materializations did take place and were not hallucinations, made paraffin wax models of hands, which could not be removed except by dematerialization; these were found to be genuine.
Richet (1923:524) gives a particularly telling illustration of the stability and, hence, the reliability of ectoplasmic materialization by comparing two accounts of work with the same medium thirteen years apart:
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To confirm the authenticity of the phenomena, I cannot do better than reproduce side by side the notes taken by me in 1906 and those published by Geley in 1920. 1 have changed nothing in either. We experimented quite separately with Marthe, I in 1906 and Geley in 1910. We did not communicate our notes to each other
C. RicHET's NOTES (1906).
On the ground a small white tract which grows, makes an ovoid mass, and puts forth a prolongation. This mounts on the arm of the chair. At this moment there are visible two horns like those of a snail which seem to direct the movements. A lower mass, X, on the ground; and an upper mass, B, united to the former, which has climbed over the arm of the chair. I can look at this formation from a very short distance. The stem is greyish white, with swellings like an empty snake-skin. The mass X is on Marthe's knees, while the mass B spreads itself on the floor like an amoeba. The mass X is greyish, gelatinous, and barely visible. It is then on Marthe's knees. Little by little it seems to split into digits at its end. It is like the embryo of a hand, ill-formed but clear enough to enable me to say that it is a left hand seen from the back. Fresh progress: the little finger separates almost completely: then the following changes, very quick but very clear: a hand with closed fingers, seen from the back, with a little finger extended, an ill-formed thumb, and higher up a swelling that resembles the carpal bones. I think I see the creases in the skin.
GELEY's NOTES. "FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS TO THE CONSCIOUS," 1919.
"From the mouth of Eva there descends to her knees a cord of white substance of the thickness of two fingers; this ribbon takes under our eyes varying forms, that of a large perforated membrane, with swellings and vacant spaces; it gathers itself together, retracts, swells, and narrows again. Here and there from the mass appear temporary protrusions, and these for a few seconds assume the form of fingers, the outline of hands, and then reenter the mass. Finally the cord retracts on itself, lengthens to the knees, its end rises, detaches itself from the medium and moves towards me. I then see the extremity thicken like a swelling, and this terminal swelling expands into a perfectly modelled hand. I touch it; it gives a normal sensation; I feel the bones, and the fingers with their nails. Then the hand contracts, diminishes, and disappears in the end of the cord." (Page 57, English translation.)
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Although generally ectoplasm melts away, there appear exceptional circumstances where this is not so. R ichet (1923:509) tells of a seance where Richet cut the hair of an apparition, which had previously promised that he should do this. The hair upon examination turned out to be human hair.
Richet makes an admirable reporter of the psychic, because while he is willing to admit that such phenomena exist, he is careful not to admit any cases not scrupulously investigated. In his conclusion (1923:623) he rejects three hypotheses:
1) that they are due to activities of the dead,
2) that they are due to activities of angels or spirits,
3) that they are due to unknown powers of the human body and mind.
In fine, he states that though the effects are real, he has no hypothesis to account for them.
But perhaps Prof. R ichet was too hasty in rejecting hypothesis three. The theme of this book is that the powers of man are unlimited, and surely unlimited power implies all the manifestations for which the good Professor was at a loss to account. Or to look at it another way, if the concept of individual and separate human personality is at bottom an illusion (as is the concept of time and space), then when phenomena eventuate in ultimate reality, we must not be surprised that they present an enhanced and transcended aspect of intelligence which seems more divine than human. As is usual with dilemmas, the problem is in the erroneous assumptions which (while they may hold in the partial realm of sensuous reality) do not hold in the plenum of ultimate reality.
Perhaps we can make some progress in understanding these extraordinary phenomena by looking at them in the light of the Pribram-Bohm hologram theory, which states that what we perceive is but a virtual image of a hologram already imprinted on the brain. It is thus possible to imagine a meta-event or paraprocedure (these words are not adequate since the situation is outside time and space) in which there is a brief theophany of some aspect of ultimate reality. This opening, however, falls upon minds unprepared for it, - that is upon a clouded hologram in the brain - and what has to happen in the physical world of
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effect is a "saving of appearances," - a perturbed re-arrangement of' matter, something like the awkward execution of a sudden military order by troops not quite accustomed to it.
3.13) Poltergeist Phenomena
Poltergeist phenomena (raps, knocks, fires, general vandalism without physical agent), appear associated with lonely children near or at the age of adolescence. While scary, they do not last long, and often disappear when a better and more loving relationship is established in the home. They are quite similar to the molestation of budding saints, often ascribed to demonic forces.
Persinger and Lafreniere (1977:108) catalog a number of instances. Sample cases included:
1) - 1790/Wizzard's Clip, West Virginia/object movements, animals drop dead, apports.
2) - 1820/__, Tennessee/peak of the "Bell Witch" period; object movements, voices, death associated with unusual forces.
3) - October, 1873/Menomonie, Wisconsin/objects move; dresses ripped to thin shreds.
4) - June, 1880/Essex, England/beds move; furniture moves, shadows seen.
5) - August, 1883/Cedarville, Georgia/objects move, pebbles move in presence of fifteen-year-old girl; dishes smashed; raps heard.
6) - September, 1889/Clarendon, Quebec, Canada/rocks move, fires, hair pulled, objects move.
7) - March, 1892/Chicago, Illinois/objects moved, jewels smashed, curtains ripped; nine-year-old girl sick.
8) - February, 1905/parts of England/outbreak of several poltergeist activities.
9) -December, 1921 /Budapest, Hungary/fires break out; furniture moved in presence of thirteen-year-old boy.
10) - February, 1952/Johannesburg, South Africa/bed sheets shredded; objects moved in house, household attacked by "force."
11) - February, 1958/Seaford, Long Island, New York/ objects move; bottles pop off caps, etc.
12) - January, 1963/Edmonton, Alberta, Canada/objects move; blankets move; pounding sound.
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13) - 1972/Detroit, Michigan/drawers moved; holes in wall; knocking sounds.
From work elsewhere (1974:22) we quote:
"Closely allied to the former, these consist of rappings, knocks, occasional apports or stones, and sometimes mischievous tricks. In this case, the generalized preconscious seems to be stirred up by the growing pains of a somewhat abnormal preadolescent child, just on the throes of adolescence. (The Periodic Developmental Stage Column I possibilities of psychic manifestations should be noted.) The onset of adolescent sexual function usually ends such activities.
"Garrett (1949:147-155) regards poltergeist phenomena as a crude type of haunting, where the dissociated phantasm tries to get the attention of an adolescent through knocking and other psychic manifestations to bring his suit to the attention of the living. Often some long forgotten fancied wrong produces the phenomena, and the passage noted is eloquent on the necessity of gentle forgiveness and release (instead of horror and fright) on the part of the human participant. (It is a little like giving alms to a beggar). When Garrett questioned a phantasm as to why it manifested to an adolescent, the phantasm replied that the adolescent was nicer than other members of the family, and more likely to pay attention to the phenomena. Garrett (1949:156), after commenting sagely on the pitiable state of phantasm she 'exorcised,' sums up the 'not-me' or dissociated aspects of the situation: "
Dissociation has been considered an abnormality and a destructive condition in the lives and personalities of many sensitive individuals. But it would be well to remember that every normal person has his moments of dissociation in fantasy and daydream. Is it possible that such dissociation can continue after death? And if this is so, would it not help to clear up some of the mystery attached to the phantom and to hauntings?
Poltergeist phenomena often involve spontaneous fires. Persinger and Lafreniere (1977:106) catalog some of these:
Incidents concerned with spontaneous or sudden fires involved sixty-three cases. Only those cases that involved no
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obvious or reasonably obvious source were considered. The frequent association of the phenomenon with a teenage human subject was also apparent in these events. Sample cases involved:
1) - August, 1856/Bedford, England/forty unexplained fires in short period.
2) - May, 1878/Bridgewater, England/fires repeatedly start near twelve-year-old female, sounds.
3) - August, 1887/Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada/ forty fires in house in short period; child found in flames.
4) - 1905/parts of England/spontaneous fire episodes; noises, explosions in surrounding area.
5) - August, 1929/Antigua, West Indies/girls' clothes flame; no burns found on body.
6) -1939/Borley Rectory, England/famous "Borley Rectory" burns down following episode of spontaneous fires.
7) - 28 March, 1953/Silver Springs, Maryland/accordion catches on fire while eleven-year-old female playing.
8) - August, 1957/Stephenville, Newfoundland, Canada/ many fires erupt in closets, drawers.
9) -August, 1958/Talladega, Alabama/fires near ceiling of house, reddish-blue in color.
10) - 1966/Columbia, South Carolina/bed found on fire; no reason or source.
Gaddis (1967:181ff) has a whole chapter on poltergeist fires which contains numerous accounts of such spontaneous occurrences. Again the prevalence of a teenage agent, often forlorn and alienated, is noted.
It is possible to look at poltergeist phenomena as extreme cases of unstressing, where the energy is exteriorized. (For more on unstressing, see Gowan (1974:123; 1975:31). While this most ordinarily occurs with an alienated youth, it can also occur with a budding saint, as the penalty to be paid for over-rapid progress in spiritual grace, which leaves mis-stored physical energy, (often sexual), unspent. Consider some descriptions of the trials of the Cure of Ars, who believed that these disturbances were due to the Devil himself, (Farges 1926:347):
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Sometimes he would knock nails into the floor as with the heavy blows of a hammer, then he would split the wood, plane the boards or saw the paneling, or else bore all night ... or again drum on the table, on the mantelpiece, on the water jug, giving preference to objects that made the largest sound.
Sometimes in the lower room the Cure would hear as it were a large escaped horse prancing; it would rise to the ceiling and then descend heavily with its four hooves on the floor. At other times there was a noise as of a large flock of sheep passing over his head. It was impossible to sleep . . . One night when the Cure was more put out than usual he said: 'My God, I would willingly sacrifice a few hours of sleep for the conversion of sinners.' The infernal flock immediately departed, silence reigned, and the poor Cure was able to sleep. We have these details from M.Vianney himself.
After amusing himself by making a terrible din on the stairs, the Devil would enter, catch hold of the curtains of the bed, and shake them with fury, as though he wanted to drag them down . . . It often happened that the evil spirit knocked like someone wanting to come in; a moment later without the door opening, he was in the room, moving the chairs, upsetting the furniture, rummaging everywhere, calling to the Cure in a mocking voice: 'Vianney, Vianney' adding to his name, outrageous adjectives and threats ...
The poltergeist nature of Vianney's molestation is also described by Johnson (1953:256) who ascribes it to dammed-up psychic energy brought on by the Cure's unremitting mortifications and sexual abstinence.
In work elsewhere (Gowan 1975:145) we quoted Gaddis (1967:203): on the causes of poltergeist phenomena:
Such stresses within the subconscious mind, if unrelieved and sufficiently intense, can result in a psychological state known as dissociation ... When these conditions exist, a person can commit acts, including destructive acts representing his repressed frustrations and desires, and then return to his normal self with no conscious memory of what has been done. In poltergeist phenomena we are witnessing the projection and dramatization of subconscious repressed tensions and conflicts ...
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"Another researcher who believed in the 'poltergeist psychosis' was Fodor (1948), (1959) who 'cured' many such cases by offering love and understanding to the adolescent agent (Gaddis, 1967:205).
"A thorough account of the subject was made by Owens (1964) in Can We Explain the Poltergeist? Some of the reported phenomena make it look as though in some manner the numinous influence (which in concert with the adolescent agent appears to produce the phenomena) does so by increasing the rate of oxidation of inanimate objects in the surround. This increase in oxidation furnishes the heat energy which is then employed in tricks involving mechanical energy, and occasionally in the instances of spontaneous combustion when the oxidation rate is very high.
'In the Parapsychology Review for November-December, 1973, (4:6:4:2), the statement is made that when the psychic Rudi Schneider was stripped and searched as a matter of routine during his performances, it was found that during every exhibition of telekinesis, he had had an orgasm. This fact is extremely suggestive. In particular it points to the chakra center in the genital area as connected with apports, and one is immediately reminded that poltergeist phenomena (also prominently connected with apports) is almost always characterized by the presence of a pubescent adolescent, for whom masturbatory activity would be quite probable. Is it possible that orgasm in trance is the cause of telekinesis?"
The relationship between sexual awakening and poltergeist phenomena is also discussed by Johnson (1963:255-6) who gives a number of instances. He quotes Price in an interview with the husband of a young Austrian medium:
. . . who informed him that at the height of his wife's sexual excitement in their early married life, ornaments would sometimes fall off the mantelpiece in their bedroom; also that during menstruation the physical phenomena of mediumship did not occur ...[obviously this is not necessarily a psychic phenomenon! - JCG]
Poltergeist phenomena can be looked upon as an inversion of the 'two-fluid theory' at nearly total disorder. (We may recall that in this theory, when the entropy is very small, the fluid divides into one part which contains all the entropy and another
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which is completely free of it). So here, oppositely, one part (the adolescent subject) preserves a semblance of order by exteriorizing a psychic entity of total disorder. In this process the disturbed and unloved adolescent becomes an inferior and spontaneous medium, which catalyses the display of low grade psychic energy.
Others who have discussed poltergeist phenomena include Brown (1972:141-57) in the Stafford poltergeist; Fodor (1964: 168-9), Johnson (1953:241); Mitchell (1974:375ff); Osborn (1966:68ff), and Watson (1973:150ff).
As we go to press, we note a new annotated bibliography on poltergeists: M. Goss, Poltergeists, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, N.J., 1979.
3.14) Apports
Apports are small objects either materialized or teleported such as ashes, stones, flowers, etc. Again, there is an extensive literature on the subject, and some of it is evidentiary. Apports, particularly small stones, are frequently experienced in poltergeist phenomena.
As Long (1954:196) tells us:
An apport is something which is dissolved into invisible form at one spot, is carried to a desired place, and solidified to the original state. Spirits of the dead are usually associated with the process.
Living creatures have been frequently used as apports, and have ranged from tiny insects through birds, fish, beasts, and men. Hot objects have been apported, and remained hot upon their arrival.
After summarizing a number of cases, Long (1954:200) concludes:
There is no injury done plants, insects, animals or people when they are used as apports, even when brought from a distance and passed through sealed doors into the seance room. By comparison, the use of the same processes to heal a broken bone is but a trifling matter.
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Yogananda (1977:212) reports that astrally produced objects, such as apports, are evanescent and eventually disappear. Melting of matter into the astral may produce a rumbling sound (ibid: 217).
Persinger and La Freniere (1977:102-3) report:
A significant number of apport cases are involved with stones, buckshot or other objects appearing at about ceiling level and falling. Thirty-eight events were placed in this subcategory. Events were only placed in this category if they predominantly involved the appearance or disappearance of objects. If other classic poltergeist symptoms were evident, the event was classified in the previous subcategory. The geographic distribution of these cases in conjunction with spontaneous fire and opening door/window episodes is shown in Figure 33. Sample cases involved were:
1) - 09 December, 1873/Bristol, England/couple report floor opening; almost engulfed into dark void from which came voices.
2) - January, 1888/Caldwell County, North Carolina/ large-stones fall inside closed room.
3) - March, 1929/Newton, New Jersey/buckshot falls from ceiling of garage for days.
4) - 1952/San Bernardino, California/bracelet of unknown metal appears/disappears.
5) - December, 1962/Toledo, Ohio/objects appear/disappear.
6) - May, 1970/Oakland, California/rings disappear from fingers, clocks disappear.
A curious feature concerning apports is that they appear to rematerialize at about ten feet above the ground. As a result they fall the remainder of the distance with only moderate speed. This effect augurs for a certain intelligent consideration in their production.
Susy Smith (1975:214-5) tries for some explanations:
As an answer to the question asked by the title of his writings, 'How Are Apports Brought into the Seance Room?' Bentley states:
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An apport is something which can be dissolved into its essential particles at one place, carried to another spot, and reassembled into its original form. Spiritual discarnate beings are usually associated with this process.
An electrical current of sufficiently high voltage can break down an atom and transform certain elements into others. So, at superconscious levels, can spirit beings release the electro-vital force in man to transmute visible matter into invisible elements and back again to the visible. Spirit can control temperature changes and can use living creatures - fish, birds, beasts, and man - as apports, as well as minerals and inanimate matter ...
Another hypothesis to explain penetration of matter through matter is that, since matter is made up largely of empty space, perhaps the atoms could somehow become aligned such that two objects could pass through each other. But atomic physics gives no clue as to what this 'somehow' might be.
Yet another hypothesis is the concept of the 'fourth dimension,' which goes back to the 1870s when the German physicist and astronomer Johann C. F. Zollner first postulated it to explain apports witnessed at sittings with the American medium Henry Slade. Zollner was a professor at the University of Leipzig who sought proof of life after death in experiments outside his own professional world of physics and astronomy. He defined apparent telekinetic (PK) happenings in the presence of mediums as a form of 'matter passing through matter,' suggesting that 'in the presence of spiritualistic mediums there must have been operative so-called catalytic forces, hitherto concealed from us, which were able to release and convert into active force a small part of the potential energy laid up in all bodies.'
Long (1954:199) gives further indication of the apportation process in the following:
One of the most famous and most studied mediums of the past century was Mme. d'Esperance. A spirit called 'Yolande' frequently appeared, fully materialized as a pretty Arab girl, in good light and produced apports so that the sitters could observe all that was to be seen in the process. On June 28, 1890, she brought as an apport a rare golden lily measuring more than seven feet from roots to top and carrying eleven perfect flowers. Toward the end of the sitting she tried to dematerialize the plant to take it away, but the force was too
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weak by then and she failed. She asked that it be kept in a dark closet until she could try again. The plant had been borrowed, so she said, and had to be returned. At half after nine on July 5th, the plant was removed from the dark closet and placed in the center of the circle of sitters. Almost instantly it vanished. Another spirit, not Yolande, explained that the plant, in its invisible form, had been brought into the room at the first sitting fully an hour before it was solidified and became visible.
That energy is necessary both for dematerialization and rematerialization of apports is evident from the following furnished by Long (1954:197):
Ernesto Bozzano, one of the most famous Psychical Research leaders, reported an apport case which will well illustrate the matters under discussion.
'In March, 1904, in a sitting in the house of Cavaliere Peretti, in which the medium was an intimate friend of ours, gifted with remarkable physical mediumship, and with whom apports could be obtained at command, I begged the communicating spirit to bring me a small block of pyrites which was lying on my writing table over a mile away. The spirit replied (through the mouth of the entranced medium) that the power was almost exhausted, but that all the same he would make the attempt. Soon after the medium sustained the usual spasmodic twitchings which signified the arrival of an apport, but without hearing the fall of any object on the table or on the floor. We asked for an explanation from the spirit-operator, who informed us that although he had managed to disintegrate a portion of the object desired, and had brought it into the room, there was not enough power for him to be able to reintegrate it. He added, 'Light the light.' We did so, and found, to our great surprise, that the table, the clothes and hair of the sitters, as well as the furniture and carpet of the room, were covered with the thinnest layer of brilliant impalpable pyrites. When I returned home after the sitting I found the little block of pyrites lying on my writing table. Missing from it was a large fragment, about one-third of the whole piece, which had been scooped out.'
3.15) Conclusion
The section on physical mediumship details phenomena which is perhaps the most crude and physical, the most researched
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and published, and perhaps the most evidential with which we shall have to deal. It establishes rather clearly the necessity for the construct of an etheric force-body as a dual of the physical body, and either the survival of such a vehicle after death or the accessibility of such a vehicle out of time past. This vortex of force or energy which constitutes the etheric body is generally invisible, though it has an often visible aura, and can, under suitable circumstances, materialize ectoplasm, - a sticky viscous substance which has a damp and clammy feel.
From the simple fact that psychic effects in seances last only a short time, it is obvious that a) they consume energy, drawn mostly from the medium, b) the energy is rather limited, and c) when it is depleted, the effects cease, (as indeed the controls have often stated). The energy here is prana, about which more will be said in section 3.5.
Consider the prescience of the North American Reviewer (April 1855, as quoted by Podmore 1902:290), in attempting a theory to account for some of the phenomena of physical mediumship: "it is probably . . . the right hemisphere of the brain which in the trance state acts independently of its usual controlling centers in the left hemisphere .
After a long book filled with instances, the hard-headed and methodical Richet (1923-579) sums up:
Cryptesthesia, telekinesis, ectoplasms, and premonition seem to me founded on granite; that is to say, on hundreds of exact observations and hundreds of rigorous experiments. The thing is a certainty; and even though among these thousands of observations there may be defects, gaps, errors, and illusions, sometimes mistakes of testimony, occasionally trickeries, more often casual coincidence, still more often ill-considered assertions, still the thing is certain. It is not possible that all these observers should never have made mistakes, but the whole constitutes a sheaf of testimony so large and homogeneous, that no criticism of details, however acute, will be able to disintegrate and disperse. Therefore:
1 ) There is in us a faculty of cognition that differs radically from the usual sensorial faculties (Cryptesthesia).
2) There are, even in full light, movements of objects without contact (Telekinesis).
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3) Hands, bodies, and objects seem to take shape in their entirety from a cloud and take all the semblance of life (Ectoplasms).
4) There occur premonitions that can be explained neither by chance nor perspicacity, and are sometimes verified in minute detail.
He concludes that "Metapsychic science will go much farther than I have ventured to think."
3.2) Time and Space Distortions
Our physical bodies and our ordinary state of consciousness are locked in the prison of space and time. Every mystic tells us that this prison is to be transcended, and indeed the great Einstein declares (N. Y. Times, March 29, 1972, p. 24, Column 6):
A human being is a Part of the whole, called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures ...
While this section will seem incomprehensible to men of conventional thinking, ultimate reality beyond the holographic image is outside of both time and space, and therefore this section represents dawning efforts of consciousness to become aware in those realms. Such efforts lead to a number of spectacular powers including out-of-body experiences (OBE's), bilocation, clairvoyance, precognition, teleportation, and other time-warps.
3.21) The Out-of-Body Experience, (OBE)
A very considerable literature has grown up detailing the first-hand experiences of those who have been able to detach consciousness from the body. Among the most famous are those of Sylvan Muldoon (Muldoon 1970), and Monroe (1971). The most authoritative writer on the subject is Crookall (1964, 1966, 1970), although Muldoon teamed with the psychic writer Carrington to produce Phenomena of Astral Projection (1971).
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In general it may be said that the vehicle for the OBE is the etheric, astral or energy body; sometimes this vehicle gains consciousness, and sometimes not, so that there are incidents of phantasms of the living when the paragnost is not conscious that the etheric body is visible to a distant witness.
One of the best summaries of OOB experiments is that of Rogo (1976:72-93), who devotes a chapter to a very detailed and scholarly review of the field. He is particularly explicit concerning the very careful analyses of Crookall, and the various kinds of OOB experiences. He concludes (p. 91-2) that there are three direct effects of OOB experiments on psychical research:
1) the study of apparitions,
2) the survival of death, and
3) the nature of consciousness.
For further particulars in regard to OBE experiences we quote from work elsewhere (1974:17ff):
"Despite the spectacular nature of such phenomena, and despite their relative rarity as contrasted to the earlier-noted experiences, these phantasms of the living are quite well documented in psychic research. One of the best evidential examples is the so-called 'Elsie projections' (Fox 1962:56- 63), wherein a young man while asleep appears to his inamorata, Elsie, in her bedroom. Prince (1963:30-1) tells of a similar projection vouched for by none other than William James, and another case (1963: 166) in which Gilbert Parker is the guarantor. Much of the psychic material of Castanada (1972) in the 'Don Juan' protocols, can be explained along these lines. F. W. H. Myers (1961) in Personality and Its Survival After Death, represents (1903) the earliest accounts of the British investigators. Other sources for similar phenomena are Sylvan Muldoon (1970), The Projection of The Astral Body, and G. N. M. Tyrrell, Science and Psychical Phenomena (1961).
"We believe that in some way, either through accident, illness, or learned knack, the projector, while in the hypnogogic state just preceding deep sleep, and having a desire to appear, connects somehow with the generalized preconscious, and is able to affect the sensorium of the percipient - sometime (and this is more difficult to explain), even the sensoriums of several perci-
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pients at the same time. The projector is always asleep at these times and is not aware of the projection until it is later confirmed, and the projection itself does not speak or show other signs of consciousness.
"We now come to the last in the continuum of related phenomena, which can be called the conscious out-of-body experience. This episode, the rarest and yet the most spectacular of the series, occurs when the percipient is alive and awake (or at least not asleep) and is conscious that he is projected, (that is, he has consciousness of being in another place than that where his body is); he can describe this location, so that frequently it can afterwards be identified evidentially, and very often he can communicate with and show other conscious awareness of the percipient. In some (perhaps advanced?) cases, the projector can consciously will and affect his projection. At other times, the projector is also the percipient; in these, there seems to be clear and distinct differences between such experiments and the purely subjective revery of imagining oneself at a distant spot.
"This conscious legerdemain is known as 'astral projection;' the projected consciousness often being known as the 'astral body,' the 'Etheric body,' or simply as 'the double.' In all cases of such projection it appears to be connected to the physical body by an infinitely extensible 'silver cord.' There also appears to be momentary unconsciousness when the projector leaves the physical body, and a 'click phenomenon' upon his return.
"The most authoritative writer on this subject is Crookall (1964, 1966, 1970), an investigator who has amassed a great deal of corroboratory evidence. He believes (1970) that the etheric double is released in two stages: the first stage involves quitting the physical body with the vehicle of vitality. Doubles of this type (1970:127) are never seen by the projector who does not have consciousness but only by others. The projector is usually mediumistic, in a dreamy, slightly dissociated condition, and the double, which is not an instrument of consciousness, is perceived as solid and lifelike, not luminous, subtle or tenuous. The conscious vehicle is the product of a second unveiling, quitting the vehicle of vitality, in which case there is a click, pop, or repercussion when the double re-enters the physical (1970:125).
"Crookall records comments by other investigators on the
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subject. He quotes Myers (1970:19) as saying 'Astral projection is the most significant of all psychical phenomena.' Crookall (1966:81) describes the OOB experience of Mrs. Garrett (a famous medium) and alleges that it 'proves' that the 'psychical body is an object and not as some orthodox investigators believe, no more than a mental image of the physical.
"Garrett (1949:26) says: 'I can project a part of myself into distant places and into the presence of people I know.' She also says (p. 171 ) 'Paranormal faculties are of general distribution throughout the human race, requiring only to be developed to become more active and positive.'
"Crookall (1966:19) points out that persons who experience OOB 'May lack the vitality to keep physical and psychical bodies in gear.' This 'half-dead' condition 'as well as prolonged fasting' tend to physical collapse 'with the exterioration of the psychical body.' Crookall believes this is because the physical body is vibrating too slowly for their coincidence. But Crookall is quick to point out that mystics in good health may suffer from the opposite condition, 'that the psychical body is vibrating too rapidly for the physical' and this may cause an OOB experience also.
"Crookall is not the only witness for these strange activities. Lady David-Neel, after extensive investigations in Tibet, found that the monks there had very realistic explanations of the 'double' (1971:28):
During life in the normal state this 'double' is closely united with the material body. Nevertheless, certain circumstances may cause their separation. The double can then leave the material body and show itself in different places, or being itself invisible, it can accomplish various peregrinations. With some people this separation of the double from the body happens involuntarily, but the Tibetans say that those who have trained themselves for the purpose can effect it at will. The separation is not complete for a strand subsists connecting the two forms.
"She concludes that this silver cord is only severed sometime after death.
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"Monroe, R. A. in Journeys out of the Body (1971:171), says that the psychical body 'has weight as we understand it. It is subject to gravitational attraction, although much less than the physical body.'
"(p. 178) 'The relationship between the second body and electricity and electromagnetic fields is quite significant.'
"(p. 171) 'The early penetration into the second state thought and action are dominated almost entirely by the unconscious subjective mind.'
" (p. 222) He notes the 'click phenomenon' upon rejoining the physical body.
"Muldoon and Carrington in The Phenomena of Astral Projection (1970) discuss this subject thoroughly. A section of their introduction reads as follows. (1951 :x):
Many times in talking to people about the psychic phenomena and the nature of phantoms especially, we have been surprised to find that they confuse in their minds such entirely different manifestations as apparitions and materializations, and will say: A saw a materialization' when what they really mean is that they saw an apparition. Of course this is a great mistake. One is a semi-solid or solid form, while the other is usually subjective, having no space-occupying quality . . . We have tried to show in several places in this book, how it is that phantom forms may vary greatly in the degree of their objectivity, and that the degree of this objectivity may even vary from moment to moment. That is why a phantom may be visible one moment and vanish the next ... The evanescent and fluidic character of all these manifestations should ever be kept in mind; and if this were done, much of the controversy regarding the degree of objectivity of phantasms would be done away with.
"in discussing two evidential cases (1951:112-3) they point out the 'great importance of suppressed desire' and also (1951: 114) note the 'click' phenomenon, upon return.
"Muldoon was himself capable of astral projection, and his books are enlivened by personal accounts. Carrington, as a topflight psychic investigator, made an admirable co-author. In an
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earlier book (1929:65), they laid down the fundamental law of astral projection:
If the subconscious will becomes possessed of the idea to move the body, and the physical counterpart is incapacitated, the subconscious will move the astral body independent of the physical.
"Muldoon identifies the connecting link between the conscious and the preconscious as 'passive will.' He says: with respect to projections (1929:239):
You can never force the passive will successfully, for the instant you try to force passive will, it becomes active will. You must just have the desire to project so strongly within you that it produces passive will, which in turn builds up the stress of the desire, and convinces the subconscious mind that the visions you imagine concerning projection are perfectly reasonable and possible.
"This section is quoted because this is a clear statement of the manner in which the union between the individual consciousness and the generalized preconscious is established, and therefore is of more universal application than astral projection alone."
The force and reach of the generalized preconscious is also understood by these authors, as witness the following remarkable passages (1929:250-1):
The crypto-conscious mind is the intelligence which elevates the astral body, throws it under and frees it from the spell of catalepsy, turns the body in the air . . . and performs various maneuvers. The crypto-conscious mind can execute an endless number of the most dextrous and clever capers with the astral body, controlling it as a hypnotist might control his subject; yet the curious part is that one can be conscious all the time he is under the influence of the crypto-conscious will ...
With many mediums the crypto-conscious mind operating this hidden force does curious things, such as producing physical manifestations. The power is in the medium, and is directed by the crypto conscious mind, while 'spirits' are credited with producing the phenomena. Even the medium himself does not realize that the intelligence behind the mani-
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festations is the crypto-conscious mind.
Wilson (1971:543) describes the OBE experiments of Fox:
In 1902, Fox had a dream, during the course of which it struck him suddenly that he must be dreaming. He went on dreaming; but the knowledge that this was only a dream produced a feeling of great clarity, and the scenery of the dream became unusually vivid and beautiful. He tried to develop this knack of 'self-awareness' in dreams; it happened infrequently, but when it did, he always experienced the same feeling of clarity and beauty.
He also discovered that once he was 'in control' of the dream, he could float through brick walls, levitate and so on. What was happening was, in fact, the reverse of a nightmare, where your legs refuse to run. He gradually became fairly expert at inducing these dreams, but observed that if he tried to prolong them, he experienced a pain in his head. He assumed this to be in the pineal gland, the unused 'eye' in the center of the brain, which occult tradition declares to be the doorway to 'other' states of being. If he ignored the pain and continued the dream, the result was a feeling of 'bilocation,' as if he had left his body and was floating above it, although still aware of his body.
Eventually he discovered that if he tried determinedly he could overcome the pain. When this happened, there was a kind of 'click' in his head - which he identified with the opening of the pineal 'door' - and he then felt himself to be wholly located in the scenery of his dream, which, as before, would appear far more beautiful than normal. These dreams were followed by a return to his body, and another dream to the effect that he was back in bed and walking up. (Broad points out that another observer, the Dutch physicist van Eedeen, also had false awakening dreams after 'lucid dreams' similar to Fox's.)
Fox then attempted to induce these states while awake, lying on a bed and putting himself into a trance. He would feel his body becoming numb, and the room would seem to take on a golden colour. He had then to use his imagination, and picture himself hurtling towards the 'pineal doorway.' If he was successful, he felt himself passing out of the body, and the golden colour increased; he would experience a sense of great clarity and beauty, just as in his dreams. Sometimes he was unsuccessful, and would then experience a depressing
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sense of his 'astral body' fading and the golden colour dying away. Once he had passed the 'pineal doorway,' he would be able to float over scenery which was sometimes familiar, sometimes not, and see people at their ordinary occupations although they did not seem to see him. Sometimes they seemed to sense his presence, and were frightened.
Bilocation is the name given to the phenomenon of a person being in two places at the same time. It will quickly be grasped that bilocation is the end product of the travels by the etheric body while the physical body is asleep or in a cataleptic trance. The Germans have even a word for this effect: "Doppelganger" or 'doublegoer.' It will also be appreciated that some instances of bilocation might be explained by teleportation.
Muldoon and Carrington (1951:18) recount the famous case of the Italian monk Liguori, who on the morning of 21 Sept. 1774 at Arienzo, four days journey from Rome, fell into a cataleptic sleep and upon awakening stated that he had been present at the death of the Pope. He was seen at the deathbed where he led prayers for the Pontiff.
One of the best books on OOB experiences is that of Whiteman (1961). Not only did the author have "separation" experiences himself, but he was cognitive enough to arrange them into a discriminative taxonomy, and to formulate a theory that it is mainly through such experiences that accession to increasing orders of grace occur in incipient sainthood. His views are too complex for easy summarization, but the reader who wishes guidance in such matters is advised to consult this experienced guide. These experiences, he reports (1961:49), begin with "lucid dreams" and then progress to partial and then full conscious separation of the consciousness from the body.
Numerous examples of "doppelgangers" or etheric doubles will be found in the chapter on this topic by Catherine Crowe (Garrison, 1973:119-42). These are mostly unconscious out of body experiences connected with death. For other material on out-of-body experiences, consult Black (1975), Mitchell (1974: 349), Moss (1974:269), and Watson (1974:159).
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3.22) Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance is from the French "to see clearly" but which unfortunately is often given other meanings:
1) "Traveling clairvoyance," to see at a distance as a result of a conscious out-of-body excursion there;
2) "Pure clairvoyance" to know facts without necessity of the OBE, hence, similar to the higher powers of chapter 4;
3) "Infused knowledge" of section 4.7;
4) Sometimes mistakenly used for precognition or psychometry.
In this discussion we shall follow the excellent example of Stanford (Mitchell, 1974:133ff) in his fine chapter on the subject from which we quote his definition (p. 134): "If a person or animal behaves as though it had extrasensory knowledge of some currently existing object or current physical event that is unknown to any other organism, we term this clairvoyance."
Clairvoyance is thus separated from telepathy which involves extra-sensory communication between two organisms. Stanford notes that sometimes psychometry, dowsing, radiesthesia, and automatic writing can be classified as clairvoyance, though we shall attempt to treat them separately. The problem of separating clairvoyance from precognition is more complicated, since to validate clairvoyance the order of the cards in the pack (for example), heretofore unknown, must he examined, and it is possible that the clairvoyant has read the future knowledge of the examiner.
Stanford quotes Jephson (p. 137), a researcher, that the faculty: ". . . is widespread, and that we can experiment with it as we can with other senses and that it is bound ... by . . . known psychological laws . . Stanford also notes the remarkable Rhine experiments in clairvoyance. In the Peirce-Pratt series the "p" log characteristic was -8 (C. R.3 = 5.6); the Columbia University "M" study yielded a log characteristic of -7 (C.R. = 5.3); a Colorado study produced a C.R. of 29; the "C.J." study produced a C.R. of 37, and we are left to imagine what the log characteristics of the probability must have been like. (A log characteristic of -1 means 1 decimal place.) These chances are, therefore, bordering on the impossible.
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Powell (1965:232-235), writing from an occult viewpoint, declares that there are four ways by which clairvoyance is produced:
1) by means of an astral current or "Tube," somewhat analogous to magnetization of polarization;
2) by projection of a thought form;
3) by travelling to the location in the astral body (travelling clairvoyance), and
4) by travelling in the mental body.
From work elsewhere (1974:24) we quote: "Probably the most famous example of clairvoyance is the incident in which Swedenborg, while in Gothenburg, clairvoyantly saw and described the progress of the great Stockholm fire. The account (Prince 1963:48) goes on:
About six o'clock Swedenborg went out and returned to the company pale and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm... and was spreading very fast. He was restless and went out often. He said that the home of one of his friends, whom he named, was in ashes, and that his own was in danger. At eight o'clock after he had been out again, he joyfully exclaimed, 'Thank God, the fire is extinguished, the third door from my house.'
There was, of course, in those times, no direct contact between the two cities, but subsequent news confirmed Swedenborg's vision in every detail. It is interesting that Swedenborg went outdoors to experience these continuing clairvoyant visions.
"Prince (1963:104) also describes the clairvoyant visions of Lord Balfour when looking into a crystal ball. These were confirmed by witnesses."
Traveling clairvoyance (which cannot be separated from a conscious OBE experience) is well attested. Slater Brown in The Heydey of Spiritualism (1972:29-49) devotes a chapter to some rather evidential cases.
3.23) Precognition
If there is one special extrasensory phenomenon which challenges materialistic thought most outrageously, that effect is
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precognition. For if precognition is a fact, either the law of cause and effect is violated, or else we live in a deterministic universe. Despite its seeming impossibility, the phenomenon of prediction and precognition has been known since the most ancient times in every culture. The Bible and the Classics from the Witch of Endor, the Delphic Oracle, and the alienated Cassandra are full of it, and even Caesar had his Ides of March soothsayer.
Dean (1974:154ff) has an authoritative chapter on precognition. After a brief history of the ancient origins, and the astounding examples of prophets, from Ezekiel to Nostradamus and Cayce, Dean gives some famous examples of precognitive dreams, including the precognitive dream of Mark Twain, regarding his brother's tragic death.
Incidentally, precognitive dreams of famous people are more apt to be recorded because the famous are more often involved in historical events which are recorded. Prince (1963:20, 68, 70, 73, 98, 101, 106, 110, 114, 121, 134, 136, 190, 201, 202, 216, 255, 257) records 17 cases of such precognition among famous witnesses regarding historical events. (There is no reason to believe that ordinary people do not have precognitive dreams, only that they are not so often recorded.) Two astounding examples of precognition (the announcement of the moons of Venus by Swift, 150 years before they were scientifically discovered, and the novel about the sinking of the Titan(ic) fourteen years before it happened, are cited by Krippner (1972).
Garrett (1949:138-9) quotes a good example of precognition:
There is an element of surprise and adventure about the experience of precognition which would appear to free itself from all conscious direction, even from personality itself, for when any action becomes automatic and effortless, it ceases to evoke consciousness. One enters into a place of participation which has no connection in time and space with conscious direction, or conscious telepathic communication. The experience remains as 'real' as any other and suggests that there must be a timeless and spaceless communion between our intuitive selves and the great eternal laws of nature.
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In his book Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling wrote, 'I am in no way 'Psychic.' Yet he records a dream which was purely precognitive. 'I dreamt that I stood, in my best clothes, which I do not wear as a rule, one in a line of similarly habited men, in some vast hall, floored with rough jointed stone slabs. Opposite me, the width of the hall, was another line of persons and the impression of a crowd behind them. On my left some ceremony was taking place that I wanted to see but could not unless I stepped out of my line because the fat stomach of my neighbor on my left barred my vision. At the ceremony's close, both lines of spectators broke up and moved forward and met, and the great space filled with people. Then a man came up behind me, slipped his hand beneath my arm, and said: 'I want a word with you.' I forgot the rest: but it had been a perfectly clear dream, and it stuck in my memory. Six weeks or more later, I attended in my capacity of a member of the War Graves Commission a ceremony at Westminster Abbey, where the Prince of Wales dedicated a plaque to 'The Million Dead' of the Great War. We commissioners lined up facing, across the width of Abbey Nave, more members of the Ministry and a big body of the public behind them, all in black clothes. I could see nothing of the ceremony because the stomach of the man on my left barred my vision. Then, my eye was caught by the cracks of the stone flooring, and I said to myself: 'But here is where I have been!' We broke up, both lines flowed forward and met, and the Nave filled with a crowd, through which a man came up and slipped his hand upon my arm, saying, 'I want a word with you, please.'
From work elsewhere (1974:25) we quote: "Because we are 'clutched into' time, precognition, of all the powers, seems the most mysterious. But the collective preconscious does not exist in our time, but in the eternal now and, consequently, it has access to future as well as past. Prince (1963:136) tells the famous story of Goethe's predictive vision of himself in later life. Riding a horse when about twenty, he saw himself on horseback on the path coming toward him dressed 'in a suit such as I had never worn.' He did wear the suit later when riding over the same route.
"Premonitions figure strongly in precognition, especially premonitions of death, such as the dream Lincoln had before his assassination. A similar premonition (Prince, 1963:256) caused
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Schumann to change the title of a composition to 'The Funeral Fantasy.' Premonitions are often about imminent events, and as such bear a striking relationship to psychic impressions, for they are about an event about to occur in a different time, while the psychic event is about an event to occur in a different space."
Moss (1974:199) has a chapter on precognitions, and gives many examples including the precognitive dream of President Lincoln. Precognition was the subject of an entire chapter in Maeterlinck's book on the paranormal (1975:87ff). He cites a number of verified cases.
For precognition and knowledge of the future in famous people, see Prince 1963:68 (James Otis), 70, 73, 98, 101, 106 (Chauncey Depew) 110, 114 (Carl Shurtz), 121 (Susan B. Anthony), 134-6, (Goethe) 190, 201, 202, 216 (Fulton Oursler), 255 (Saint Saens), 251 (Schumann), Fodor (1964:21). Others who have discussed precognition include Gowan (1974:25); Mitchell (1974:170ff); Osborn (1961), and Smith (1964:1 57ff).
One of the objections many rationalists have to precognition is that it requires (they believe) a deterministic universe. But this may not be the case. The objective of many precognitive dreams, it seems, is to get the dreamer to take evasive action which will forestall the disaster, so that the dream actually is precognitive only if not acted upon. It may be that the psychic force impelling the manifestation of one or more accidents is determined in the realm of possibilities, but the actual manifestation is at least partly under the control of foresighted reaction to the imminent event.
Dean (1974:163) reports that Mrs. Rhine, in sifting 1,427 precognitive cases, found only three successful interventions. Serious and shocking events predominated over happy ones by a 4 to 1 ratio, death being the commonest event. Emotional shock seems to be a factor in generating precognition experiences. Close personal relationships are conducive to precognitive dreams. The time interval is usually short - a few days or hours. Dean then details (pp. 165-67) a large number of successful precognition experiments carried out in the laboratory. Strange as it seems, precognition is evidently a factor in human ability.
If precognition works at all, it must involve the human being with some intelligence which is outside time. Elsewhere
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(Gowan 1974:134ff; 1975:3ff) it has been pointed out that the collective preconscious and the numinous element have access to this out-of-time knowledge, and it is also known (ibid:361) that in the Adamic Ecstasy state (4.7) this condition occurs. A full discussion of this matter involves us in the matter of time itself, which we defer until section 3.24.
3.24) Teleportation and Time-Warp
There have been a number of first-person accounts in the literature about teleportation (or more accurately supernormally fast movement of automobiles over distances, not possible to cover normally in the elapsed time recorded). One was reported in FATE (Jan. 1977) p. 34ff, from Rhodesia and involved a UFO. Another concerned several incidents in or near Niagara Falls, NY, about 1972, as reported in FATE, March 1977, p. 61ff. Neither of these cases is strongly evidentiary, because of unsupported personal testimony, and the possibility of hallucination. They are only two of a fair amount of such cases in which automobiles are felt to be travelling "off the road" or "through time" or in some other strange manner, which usually results in disorientation in the passengers.
A classic case, often repeated in the literature, is recounted by Glesmer (n.d.p. 9):
On the morning of October 25, 1593, a soldier disappeared from Manilla in the Philippine Islands. Instantaneously, he appeared on the plaza before the palace in Mexico City. Gil Perez was of the regiment which was guarding the walled citadel of Manilla. The soldier said the governor of the Philippines had been killed the night before. The authorities were puzzled why the soldier could travel 9,000 miles in one night. Perez said the teleportation took 'less time than it takes a cock to crow.' Two months later news arrived from the Philippines that the governor had indeed been killed. Passengers of the ship that brought this news had seen Perez in Manilla the day before he appeared in Mexico City.
Smith (1975:230) reports of the medium Kluski: "Another time, when the meeting was terminated, the medium was found to have disappeared from the locked, sealed room. He was
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later located in another room some distance away, still in an unconscious trance state."
Holzer (1975:36) describes the teleportation of Ms. Guppy, a medium, in front of witnesses of over a mile apart, as well as lesser examples.
Uri Geller (1975:267-8), the psychic, gives a first-person account of his teleportation from the sidewalks of New York to Ossining, more than 30 miles away, on Nov. 9, 1973:
So a very few minutes past 6:00, 1 was starting to jog about a block away from the apartment (which was east of Second Avenue)... I clearly remember approaching the canopy of the building right next to ours... Then I remember having the feeling that I was running backwards for a couple of steps ... Then I had the feeling that I was being sucked upward. There was no sensation in my body. I closed my eyes, and, I think, opened them almost immediately. When I did, I found myself being propelled in the air a foot or so away from a porch screen, over the top of a rhododendron bush, about to crash through the screen at a point eight or ten feet off the ground. I crashed through the screen and landed on a circular glass-top table... I was conscious all through this, but slightly dazed when I hit the table and floor... But what shocked me was that I recognized the porch and the table, because I knew them so well. This was Andrija's (Puharich) screen porch at Ossining.
It was 6:15 when Dr. Pulharich heard the crash of Uri's landing through the screen; fortunately, while shaken up, he was not injured.
A postulate of plane geometry states that, "A straight line is the shortest distance between two points." This is true in an Euclidian three-dimensional world. For us this "d" is a constant, but in the ordinary physical world, it is actually the maximum the two points can be apart when there is no psychic influence. Under any psychic effect, this distance shortens, and in ultimate reality becomes zero. The same thing is true of time, except that it works oppositely. Mathematically:
do = max. If D is assumed to be variable under psychic influence then dD/dt = a measure of the strength of P (the psychic influence).
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In cases of teleportation and supernaturally excessive speed which have been reported in the literature, it is incorrect to think that the speed is excessive. What has happened is that the distance has become shorter and the time longer.
In Hobbs' physical world of the ordinary state of consciousness, things are "loose and separate." In the etheric realm, time and distance do not apply, and everything seems connected to everything else.
Time-Warp: Under this heading we include only those distortions of time in which some thing or event (such as a journey) is accomplished in significantly less time than it would normally take to accomplish it. We thus rule out a number of other phenomena such as "deja vu" experience, physical immersion in past time (such as the English girls' visit to the court of Versailles), mystic Adamic ecstasy experiences which are out of time (such as George Fox's Lichfield experience (cf Gowan 1975:365), also infra sect. 4.7), all precognition, (cf supra 3.22), and all psychometry (cf infra 4.01).
Frankly, we do not feel competent to discuss this subject thoroughly at the present time, and with the present language, which is one of tensed verbs. What is needed at the start is a means of communication which is "untimed," and where there is an "untimed" tense which means, in effect, "is, was, and ever will be." We have tried elsewhere to use an integral sign with the verb "to be," (viz. S is), to indicate this concept, but it is clumsy. Some others, who have tackled this formidable problem with perhaps some success are Bentov (1977:42ff), Ouspensky (1945) and Arnot (1941). The views of these people are too involved to quote, and we urge reading them in the original. We continue, however, with some of the less difficult aspects of this vexing subject.
One of the best documented aspects of time-warp is accelerated mental process. Elsewhere (1975:136-7) it was said: "While not directly a part of healing, accelerated mental process (AMP) is connected to it by the speeding-up of reaction time. Only in this case it is a mental rather than a physical speed-up that is involved. AMP is another example of the fact that our sense of time is part of the OSC and that in an ASC something peculiar seems to happen to it.
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"Cooper and Erickson (1959:157-8) in their definitive study, note that time distortion can be demonstrated in a majority of subjects under hypnosis: 'The experiences are continuous. Thought under time distortion... can take place with extreme rapidity... recovery of materials from the unconscious (and) ... creative thought can be facilitated.' Other experiments have shown that a slowing down of time can also occur. Both distortions can have therapeutic applications.
"Aaronson (1968) describes a study done with six males in which time distortion under hypnosis was observed.
"Accelerated mental process is not only interesting for the remarkable effects it produces, and the light it throws on the prodigious activities of certain creative geniuses, but also for the implications it has regarding the relativistic nature of clock time. It is one thing to try to understand Einstein's relativity theories; it is much more immediate that time distortion can occur in an ASC as well as at very high speeds. It suggests that the speed of light is a boundary not only for our physical universe but for the OSC upon which a knowledge of it depends."
Readers wishing more information on accelerated mental process (AMP) should consult Cooper and Erickson (1954), Mc Cord and Sherrill (1961), Krippner (1972), and Huxley (1962: 210) as quoted by Gowan, Khatena, and Torrance (1979:159).
Jean Houston in a summary of AMP (1973:265-6) says:
We found that it is possible to greatly increase the rate of thought or amount of subjective experience beyond what is ordinarily possible within a unit of clock-measured time. That is to say, under certain conditions of altered consciousness a person might experience within a few minutes, as measured by the clock, such a wealth of ideas or images that it will seem that hours, days, or even longer must have passed for him to have experienced so much. Only a few minutes of objective (clock) time have elapsed; the change has been on the level of subjective experiential time and the explanation lies in the phenomenon of accelerated mental process (AMP).
It has long been known that AMP occurs spontaneously under conditions of dreaming sleep (the 'hours long' dream
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that takes only a few seconds or minutes of clock time). Then there are the cases related to great emotional stress. A man falling from a bridge, and expecting to die, but who by some chance is saved from death, may later recount that during the fall his whole lifetime flashed (as images) before his eyes, or that he relived his entire lifetime or at least relived all significant events, so that it seemed his whole lifetime was lived through, and lived through without any haste, events all seeming to happen at the same rate as they happen during everyday working experience. This last-mentioned kind of experience is also an experience of images, but it is an experience in which the person participates fully, as a dreamer may participate in some of his dreams. The Swiss Alpine Club has recorded hundreds of such experiences reported by mountain climbers who have fallen, expecting to die, but who survived.
Persons who have taken psychedelic drugs sometimes experience the accelerated mind phenomena, only to discover that all of the mental experience occurred within just a minute or two of time as measured by the clock.
It is important to note that in all of the above mentioned experiences of AMP, imagery plays a predominant role. This would seem to be in part because imagistic thinking does not seem to be bound by the time-inhibited mechanisms which retard the flow of verbal thought.
Those who have speculated on the significance of time have often postulated a second time dimension which we do not intuit. For example, Dunne (1931) in An Experiment with Time hypothesized such a second time dimension. While there are advantages in this approach, there are also some difficulties. It may be only an easy crutch for not having to visualize a realm outside time and space.
Dunne was not the only man to do this. We regret that the citation for the following quote is missing:
Adrian Dobbs, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician and physicist, has hypothesized a second time dimension inhabited by imaginary particles called psitrons. As far as the incredibly complex theory can be simplified, an individual's actual state would be surrounded in imaginary time by a number of possibilities which, even if they don't happen eventually, influence the actual course of events. The
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psitron - for which distance in space is irrelevant - travels between matter and mind or mind and mind. When it impinges on 'critically poised' neurons in the brain, it can trigger off a 'chain reaction' of neural events.
As Floyd declares (White 1974:302): "When the brain waves are still, time stands still, and when time stands still, the illusion of motion becomes impossible and with the impossibility of that illusion, the fundamental illusion of separate selfhood is in double jeopardy."
Roberts (1974:327) through "Seth" gives a good explanation of the "bottleneck" aspect of the conscious mind, holding us into consciousness of the present, although past and future are also there. Of our bodies and consciousness Seth says: "(they) are relatively free in time. They exist in a multidimensionality with which rational consciousness is not yet equipped to deal."
As Zukav (1979:240) states: "If, at the quantum level, the flow of time has no meaning, and if consciousness is fundamentally a similar process, and if we can become aware of these processes within ourselves, then it is also conceivable that we can experience timelessness."
Time is a very difficult subject to discuss accurately. This is due, not only to the fact that we don't have a proper intuition of it, (as we do of space), but also that our language involves tensed verbs, which are completely inadequate to express out-of-time constructs. Outside of mathematics, the poet is the best at getting outside time. Eliot's "Four Quartets" is a fine example of such poetry.
In a recent book on Timewarps, Gribbin (1979) speculates widely on physics (especially the newer particle physics) in support of his theory that time is not uniform, but can be compressed or expanded. Gribbin also evokes a concept of parallel universes to substitute for our view of a etheric plenum from which we select only one out of an infinity of possibilities for manifestation here. Leading him to the world of psychic phenomena, this parallel universe view helps him to explain the psychic realm as part "of the road not taken."
A similar construct of the variability of time was held by the brilliant Australian physicist, Arnot (1941), except that he
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believed that time was constantly expanding, just as the spatial dimensions of the universe were in process of expansion. His theories are too complicated for analysis here, but deserve more attention than they have received. For a theosophist similar view, see Pearson's Space, Time, and Self (1957). We acknowledge frustration in having to leave this important area unresolved.
3-3) Endo and Exothermic Reactions
The unifying factor in this category is the apparently paranormal ability of the human body in the transfer of heat energy, both in suppressing the transfer and in accelerating it. We shall examine several different aspects of this transfer: 1) firewalking, 2) kundalini fire and psychic heat, 3) spontaneous human combustion (SHC), 4) the ubiquitous "cold-wind" effect in hauntings and seances, and miscellaneous effects.
3.31) Firewalking
Despite the flagrantly spectacular nature of the phenomenon, and the large amount of energy in heat (as compared with mechanical or electrical energy) no other psychic effect (with the possible exception of dowsing) is more firmly documented than firewalking. It is found in all ages and cultures, and has been photographed and even participated in by a host of impeccable witnesses. Elsewhere (1975:142-3) in a table based largely on Gaddis (1967) we have noted over 30 different firewalks involving nearly one thousand participants in total. This table is reproduced here as Table III-2.
Dr. Bridgham's account of his walk across a red-hot lava flow in the company of three kahunas is given in detail in Long (1954:31-7) from which we quote:
When the flow started, related Dr. Brigham, I was in South Kona, at Napoopoo. I waited a few days to see whether it promised to be a long one. When it continued steadily, I sent a message to my three kahuna friends, who had promised to let me do some fire-walking under their protection; ...
When the rocks we threw on the lava surface showed that it had hardened enough to bear our weight, the kahunas arose and clambered down the side of the wall. It was far worse than a bake oven when we got to the bottom. The lava was blackening on the surface, .
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The matter was settled at once by deciding that the oldest kahuna should go first, I second and the others side by side. Without a moment of hesitation the oldest man trotted out on that terrifically hot surface. I was watching him with my mouth open and he was nearly across - a distance of about a hundred and fifty feet - when someone gave me a shove that resulted in my having a choice of falling on my face on the lava or catching a running stride.
I still do not know what madness seized me, but I ran. The heat was unbelievable. I held my breath and my mind seemed to stop functioning. I was young then and could do my hundred-yard dash with the best. Did I run! I flew! I would have broken all records, .
I looked down at my feet and found my socks burning at the edges of the curled leather uppers of my boots. I beat out the smouldering fire in the cotton fabric and looked up to find my three kahunas rocking with laughter as they pointed to the heel and sole of my left boot which lay smoking and burned to a crisp on the lava.
I laughed too, I was never so relieved in my life as I was to find that I was safe and that there was not a blister on my feet - not even where I had beaten out the fire in the socks.
There is a little more that I can tell of this experience. I had a sensation of intense heat on my face and body, but almost no sensation in my feet. When I touched them with my hands they were hot on the bottoms, but they did not feel so except to my hands. None of the kahunas had a blister, although the ti leaves which they had tied on their feet had burned away long since.
Long (1954:50ff) also describes another fire-walk in India:
What are the whips for? I asked. Are they to keep the firewalkers out of the water?
You'll see in a moment, was the hurried answer. Seems that when they step out of the fire into the water, the priests have to beat them to keep their minds off their hot feet for a second. I asked the priest but didn't understand what he tried to tell me - something about an old custom.
Do neither the whips nor the fire hurt them? I demanded.
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TABLE III GADDIS DOCUMENTATION (1967) OF "MASTERY OVER FIRE"
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The whips do lay their backs open sometimes. But keep your eyes on the picture. See? They are all praying now. Making a lot of funny gibberish. Praying to Agni to protect the pure and burn the impure.
The camera flashed around and caught another candidate just as he stepped into the coals. He was a thin, middle-aged man. His face was turned to the waiting priests and his hands were clenched and swinging at his sides. With long rapid strides he began his ordeal.
Clasping his hands and lifting his face as if in appeal to Heaven, he walked calmly into the bed of fire. I caught my breath. With a firm, steady stride he went wading through the coals toward the priests who waited at the far end.
I scarcely breathed as I watched. His feet were leaving black tracks which closed over and were lost in a moment after he had passed. On and on he went, never changing his pace. Made slightly misty and unreal by the heat waves rising all about him, he seemed more an apparition than a man. As I stared, my amazement was tinged with doubt. What I was seeing was an impossibility. But the end of that dreadful pacing came at last. The old man stepped from the living fire into the water and was instantly taken by the arms on either side by two priests. Their cruel whips flashed three times, cutting into the bare brown back. The old man writhed with pain. Two more priests took him and hurried him off to a bench beside the wall. They examined a foot each, nodded, and hurried back to their places.
The sedulous reader who wishes more on fire walking will find an excellent chapter on the subject by Long (1954:29-58) which includes five cases. Finally we quote from work elsewhere (1975:137-44):
"One of the best documented paranormal properties of the trance state is imperviousness of the human body (especially the hands and feet) to fire. It appears to occur in every society of the world, and in all ages and cultures from the most ancient to modern times. Since the documentation is large and impressive, and the firm establishment of one paranormal property of trance or ASC makes more believable others less frequent and well documented, we devote a detailed analysis to this phenomenon. If we are to remain scientific, such analysis suggests that our present laws of physics are but special cases of more general laws,
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and that we can begin to define the conditions (such as trance) under which the larger laws take over from the special laws of the ordinary state.
"Unlike some other paranormal effects, mastery over fire, especially as seen in fire-walking, has been vouched for by the most impeccable witnesses - in many cases western men of science, who often were not only eye-witnesses to the phenomenon, but in some cases were even tem- porarily granted the power to participate themselves. The list includes bishops, medical doctors, scholars like Joseph Campbell, and Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society. Certainly an effect so well documented, and so much at variance with our usual concepts of physical reality, deserves careful consideration.
"Probably the best Western materials on fire-walking are the bulletins by Price (1936) and Brown (1938) from the University of London on fire walking conducted in England under scientific auspices in 1935 and 1937. These reports contain extensive bibliographies, besides thorough accounts of the firewalks supported by pictures. McDougall himself witnessed the 1935 tests where Kuda Bux walked a twenty-foot trench four times without any hurt or blistering. (This reference is to Prof. Wm. McDougall of Harvard and Duke.) Reports of this feat appeared in Nature (September 21, 28, 1935) and The Lancet (September 28, 1935).
1 ) Bishop Poppo of Hamburg walked through a bonfire dressed in a sheet of wax to prove to the heathen Danes of the power of God.
2) Copres, an Egyptian Christian monk, was unharmed by fire, while his adversary, a Manichean, was burned. St. Francis of Assisi offered to undergo ordeal by fire before the Sultan of Egypt to prove Christianity superior to Mohammadism.
4) Petrus Igneus (Florence 1067) walked between burning pyres.
5) Petrus Bartholomeus (1098) did the same.
6) Queen Emma walked across nine red hot plowshares in Winchester cathedral in 1043.
7) Empress Kunegunde in a trance did the same in Bamberg in 1007.
"Godwin (1968:169-170) gives excellent accounts of fire
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walking with pictures. Godwin (1968:165) states: 'There is no doubt fire-walking began as a religious rite.'
"Fire-walking occurs not only in widely diverse spots such as India, Micronesia, but also in the U.S.A. In 1935, Kuda Bux performed this feat at Rockefeller Center, New York. The only explanation for this mystifying phenomenon is that fire-walkers are either in religious trance, or have been able to achieve a mind concentration of 'onepointedness' during which extraordinary control over the environment can be achieved.
"Eliade (1964:372) notes that in Fiji, shamanistic powers such as walking on hot coals are transmitted by heredity in families. There are numerous western observations of this rite which on occasion includes other members of the tribe and even outsiders. Insensibility to fire has been documented in numerous Polynesian prophets.
"One of the earliest reliable accounts of fire-walking is given by Lang (1901:270ff) who devotes a chapter full of references to it in various localities in the Pacific.
"Fire walking in Ceylon has been the subject of magazine articles (Feinberg, L. Atlantic Monthly, May, 1959) and (Gilbert Grosvenor National Geographic, April, 1966). Each of these accounts is well authenticated by Westerners, with illustrations".
In NAC's New Zealand 2:1:p.8-9, (Dec. 1975), - (Ed. Note: This is the complimentary house organ on the New Zealand National Aircraft Corporation's domestic flights) -- There is an article by Joan Ellams on "The Firewalkers of Beqa" from which we copy:
Without coming to any apparent harm members of the Sawau tribe have been walking across searing hot boulders for generations. And the scientific 'experts' are still scratching their heads. Any number of suggestions have been put forward as to how it's done, but up to now the whole thing remains as mysterious as ever.
The ceremony springs from a fable and has no religious significance. Those taking part do not spend their time before the
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event either in prayer or in contemplation; they sit together in a small leafy hut and chat about their impending walk across the 'lovo' (oven).
The only rules laid down for success are that two weeks before the event those taking part segregate themselves completely from all females and leave any form of coconut out of their diet. They believe implicitly that failure to observe this taboo renders the culprit liable to severe burns.
Roughly, the ritual is divided into the following parts: first, the preparation of the pit. This is some three to four meters wide, and one to two deep. It is lined with large river stones and a huge log fire is built over them, not less than six to eight hours before the ceremony. It has been suggested that the stones quickly lose their heat, but examination has shown that this is not so. They are normal, fine-grained, igneous rock and retain heat for a considerable time.
Just before the heating time is up, the chief and tribal priest silently lead the 10 or 12 men around the circumference of the pit. They are very careful to keep their eyes averted as they are forbidden to look at the stones before they actually step on them. Their black fuzzy hair and dark skins glisten with coconut oil and around their waists are long, colourful skirts of dyed pandanus leaves. Their regalia is completed with garlands of flowers around their necks and coronets of leaves in their hair.
Then the chief gives final directions to the men of the village for the preparation of the firewalkers' arena. Armed with long poles, loops of strong green vines lashed to the ends, young men clear the burning logs from the stones. They chant in unison 'O-vulo-vulo' while they heave on the vines. A long tree-fern trunk called Waqa-bala-bala, said to contain the spirit god, is then laid across the pit, after which a large vine is dragged across the stones to level them in preparation for the walkers.
The chief takes a few trial steps on the stones to test their firmness and then calls for bundles of leaves and long swamp grass to be placed around the edge of the pit.
Those too close at hand step quickly back from the edge, for the air above the white stones shimmers with the intensity of the heat.
(page 156)
At last all is ready and as the chief gives a great shout of 'Vulo 0' the firewalkers burst from their place of concealment and trotting in single file approach the pit.
They walk quickly but firmly across the stones. They show no signs of flinching or appear to be affected by the heat in any way. When the leader reaches the point at which he entered, a sudden shout goes up and the waiting attendants hurl bundles of leaves and grass on to the stones in the arena. The group huddle in the center of the pit with their arms around each other and amidst volumes of steam from smouldering leaves, chant a wild, passionate song.
Around the ankle of each of the walkers is a band of tinder dry tree-fern leaves and it is significant that although a handkerchief tossed on to the stones will burst into flames, this band of fern leaves does not ignite. These bands are carefully taken off and buried in the oven together with four special baskets of roots called visili. After four days have passed the roots are recovered from the oven by the firewalkers and are ground up and mixed with water. Dalo (taro) roots are then cooked in the liquid and eaten by those who took part. It is after this that the ceremony is finally considered complete.
Becla is on the New Zealand dependency of Fiji. The article contains two photographs of the firewalk.
Godwin (1968:145-71) devotes a very complete chapter, including half-a-dozen photographs and his own eye-witness account to incidents of fire-walking on several continents.
Concerning the ability of the adept Home to control fire, Susy Smith (1973:102-3) reports:
By any standard, Adare's account is fantastic. He declared that when controlled by spirits, the entranced Home went to the fireplace, poked up the coals, and putting his hand in, drew out a hot burning ember about twice the size of an orange. This he carried about the room to show off.
Adare continues: We all examined it. He then put it back in the fireplace and showed us his hands; they were not in the least blackened or scorched ... then kneeling down, he placed his face right among the burning coals, moving it about as though bathing it in water ... Presently, he took the same lump of coal he had previously handled and came over to us,
(page 157)
blowing upon it to make it brighter. He then walked slowly round the table, and said, 'I want to see which of you will be the best subject. Ah! Adare will be the easiest, because he has been most with Dan.' Mr. Jencken held out his hand, saying, 'Put it in mine.' Horne said, 'No, no, touch it and see.' He touched it with the tip of his finger and burnt himself. Home then held it within four or five inches of Mr. Saal's and Mr. Hurt's hands, and they could not endure the heat. He came to me and said, 'Now, if you are not afraid, hold out your hand.' I did so, and having made two rapid passes over my hand, he placed the coal in it. I must have held it for half a minute, long enough to have burned my hand fearfully but the coal felt scarcely warm. Home then took it away, laughed, and seemed much pleased.
A statement quoted from the Countess M. de Pomar said that another person present, Lady Comm, extended her hands, saying, 'I will take it without fear, for I have faith.' She held the coal for at least a minute without feeling any pain, and it was then placed on a sheet of paper which immediately began to blaze and had a great hole burned in it.
The ever careful Richet (1923:487) reports of Home:
The same astounding experiment was repeated on April 3d at Astley House. This seance was remarkable; it is corroborated by Mr. S. C. Hall. A lighted coal was placed on Mr. Hall's head, and his white hair was combed over the coal, and left four or five minutes: the hair was not burned: a few moments later this coal was so hot that one could not bear one's face near it.
Puharich (1962:87-88) reports:
There are many contemporary instances of individuals who have gone through the ordeal of fire. Joseph Campbell, the eminent scholar, related to me that he experienced fire-walking in the great Shinto temple in Kyoto, Japan. He was observing monks performing the fire - walking ceremony, standing in his bare feet while the ceremony was going on. He relates that one of the monks took him by the hand and requested him to walk over the glowing coals. Following the monk and stepping quickly, and as he thought, lightly, over the coals, he was able to pass through the long pit without suffering any burns. In fact, he says that the sensation on the soles of his feet was one of coolness, rather than of heat.
(page 158)
For an up-to-date example of firewalking in America, we have the case of Vernon Craig of Wooster, Ohio, who in August 1979 walked a 25 foot firebed heated to 1,500 degrees in Hollywood, to break his previous record of 1,494 degrees in 1976. The Los Angeles Times (August 2, 1979) part 1, page 20, carries a photograph of this feat.
For a more naturalistic explanation of firewalking, we reproduce part of a letter of one J. Walker, writing in the Scientific American: 237:2:131 (Aug. 1977):
Of all the demonstrations of the Leidenfrost effect, the most remarkable to me is when people walk on hot coals or lava. The Guinness Book of World Records describes a 25-foot walk over coals measured to be at 1,200 degrees F. Unverified stories of longer walks constantly emerge from the South Pacific and the Far East. In none of these cases is there any reason to invoke unusual powers. Although somehow shutting off pain information to the brain, having a deep-seated religious faith, or just being dumb enough to try the stunt might help, the primary protection to the walker's feet comes from the natural moisture on them. Each step places parts of a foot in contact with the coals, and moisture at those places partially vaporizes to give momentary protection. Sweating between footfalls can replenish some of the moisture, but eventually most of it is depleted and the foot begins to warm up perceptibly. The walk usually ends then unless the walker has an unusual tolerance for pain. A thick layer of ash and heavily calloused feet might also lengthen the walk somewhat, but running does not help because the feet are then slammed down into the coals.
Having always been amazed by stories about people walking on hot coals, and having now become a firm believer in the Leidenfrost effect, I set up a five-foot bed of hot wood coals for such a walk.
I had to try it myself. Clutching my faded copy of Halliday and Resnick's Physics in one hand, I strode over the five feet of hot coals. Apparently I am a true believer in physics. I have to report, however, that my feet did get a bit hot. On well, I am almost a true believer.
Another naturalistic explanation of fire control comes from Puharich (1962:88) who reports an article by Dr. M. R. Coe in
(page 159)
True for Aug. 1957 in which he was able (with suitable precautions) to handle very hot objects briefly, due, he claims to "microglobules" caused by sweat "on the surface of the skin" which serves as a heat barrier.
In The Odic Force, Reichenbach describes od (or pranic energy) as "feeling cool"; (cf. Sri Aurobindo's "cool wind" in Satprem). Now od, according to Reichenbach, is produced by any chemical reaction. Can it be that fire, which produces much od (pranic energy) can be the ultimate cause of cooling the feet of adepts in fire-walking?
Powell (1965:160) in accounting for firewalking, declares: "The feat of handling fire without injury may be performed by covering the hand with the thinnest layer of etheric substance, so manipulated as to be impervious to heat. . . "
He also accounts for psychic heat, thus: (ibid): "The production of fire is also within the resources of the astral plane... There are at least three ways in which this could be done: (1) to set up and maintain the requisite rate of vibration, when combustion must ensue. . .[no mention of the other two ways in the OIO book - JAG]
3.32) Psychic Heat
While those not in a state of grace may walk on fire, the production of psychic heat seems confined to true mystics and yogis; indeed, there is considerable reason for believing that it is a "siddhi." While the production of such heat is mentioned by Western mystics Richard Rolle, George Fox, and ascribed to Good King Wenceslas, it is in the East that it flourishes.
Gaddis (1967:165ff) devotes some time to psychic heat, citing Father Thurston on a number of saints who radiated so much heat that it was noticeable to others. This heat appeared to be generated near the heart. Padre Pio, the nearly contemporary Italian saint is said to have broken clinical thermometers in this manner.
Gaddis also points out that eastern mystics exhibit the same evidence, called tumo, whose development depends upon "visualization of fire and certain breathing exercises at high altitudes."
(page 160)
It is always helpful for western minds to have some explanation of rationale and method, so, for what it is worth, we append the following quotations from Evans-Wentz (1958:1 56ff):
The first of these is known as tummo signifying a peculiar bodily heat or warmth... generated by yogic means .... The word, tummo, refers to a secret practice of extracting prana from the inexhaustible store of pranic energy in Nature and storing it in the human body-battery, then employing it to transmute the generative fluid into a subtle fiery energy whereby a psycho-physical heat is produced... (p. 157) The yogin must employ every elaborate visualizations, meditations, postures, breathings, directing of thought, training of the psychic nerve system, and physical exercises... It is highly desirable .... to obtain initiation and guidance from a master of the art. A lengthy probationary period is usually necessary... The yogin must also observe the strictest sexual continence, for it is chiefly upon the yogically transmuted sex energy that proficiency in tummo depends.
On pages 171-209 there are very detailed instructions for the practice of the psychic-heat yoga, which include posturing the body, calm and forced breathing, and meditative mental imagery. It is sufficient here to know that such accounts exist, and that they are compatible with the states intuitively attained by Western saints who possessed no such detailed instructions.
The specifics of the sheet-drying ceremonies are reported by Puharich (1962:89):
The candidate is taken out on a frozen river, and several holes are cut in the ice at a distance one from another. The candidate is required to dive through one hole, pass under the ice, and come up at the next hole; come out, dive again, and come out the third hole, and so on, all together nine times. In Tibet the candidate for initiation undergoes a similar trial, sitting by a hole cut in a frozen lake. He sits absolutely naked and watersoaked sheets are thrown over his body. Because of the extreme cold, the sheets freeze immediately. The candidate must then generate enough body heat, called Tumo, to dry out the sheet. Success in this test is measured by the number of sheets which the candidate can dry. Some candidates have been reported to dry as many as nine or ten sheets under these frigid environmental conditions.
(page 161)
The thermal powers of yogis are detailed by Swami Sivananada Radha (1971:155-6):
1) A yogi generates psychic heat in the body through the practice of Bhastrike Pranayama.
2) He can bear extremes of climates without discomfort.
3) A yogi covers his body with a sheet dipped in very cold water, and dries it by the yoga heat given off by his body. A few adepts have dried as many as thirty sheets in a single night.
4) A perfect yogi cremates his body in the end by the yogic heat generated by his power of yoga.
Considering that the evaporation of 1 gram of water takes 540 gram calories (to say nothing about any freezing or temperature elevation during the process), and that wetting a sheet adds about 1 kilogram of water to it, the drying of such a sheet would require 540 kilogram calories of heat or an amount sufficient to raise 540 liters of water 1 degree centigrade. This is about half a ton of water and, hence, represents a very considerable amount of heat.
The Eastern explanation for this effect is that psychic heat is evolved from the kundalini fire as it ascends the chakras. Since there is a wide occult literature on kundalini, this is not the place to go further into such explanations. One might note in passing that such an explanation, if valid, would also account for the heat necessary to produce the mysterious "SHC" deaths to which we now turn.
3.33) Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC)
Spontaneous Human Combustion is a rare and grisly experience in which the victim burns to death internally. Generally, the subject is female, over fifty, sedentary, often alcoholic or despondent, and alone. A puzzling aspect is that while the fire is hot enough to reduce most of the body, including large bones to ashes, typically the room including nearby objects is not set afire. In a typical case (Fate, Jan. 1978:69):
Of Mrs. Reeser all that remained were a few small pieces of charred backbone, a skull which, strangely, had shrunk uniformly to the size of an orange, and her wholly untouched left
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foot still wearing its slipper. The heat necessary for such damage had to be incredible, yet the room was little affected. The ceiling, draperies and walls from a point exactly four feet above the floor were coated with smelly oily soot... The carpet where the chair had rested was not even burned through...
For another similar example see Fate Apr. 1977:66ff. In this case, Dr. Bentley, an aged cripple, was completely incinerated, except for his right leg. The bathrobe did not burn, and there was "a sweet odor, like perfume" in the physician's room in place of the stench one would expect. In Fate (Dec. 1978, p. 113) letters tell of the similar end of Mr. Krook, a character in Dickens Bleak House, and mention a book by Michael Harrison Fire from Heaven (Pan Books, London, 1977), which details more modern English cases.
The Wallaces (1977:434) list the following cases of SHC: Countess Cornelia de Barde, Mr. H., Mrs. Patrick Rooney, Euspasia Johnson, Phyllis Newcombe, Mary Reiser, Anna Martin, and Billy T. Peterson.
Persinger and La Frieniere (1977:107) report:
This phenomenon not only challenges our assumptions concerning the combustion characteristics of human material, but evokes interesting problems concerning heat and matter. In classic cases of SHC, the victim generally is seen to 'burst into flames' and then quickly burn to ashes. It is claimed, in such episodes, that even the fires of the crematorium could not do the job as efficiently within the particular time interval involved. Correlative phenomena of SHC are also interesting and puzzling. While the body of the SHC victim can be severely charred or reduced to carbon, the bed sheets or clothes may be untouched or only mildly singed.
Some cases designated as SHC instances were witnessed by groups of people while others are inferred following discovery of charred remains of the victim. Of the seventy-four cases of SHC included in this subcategory, the majority of victims were late middle-aged or older. In thirty of the reports which contained the specific age information of the subject, 90 percent were greater than fifty years of age. Sixty-five of the cases specified the sex of the victim, who was female 74 percent of the time. Severe burning episodes in which other factors could possibly be established or involved, were not included as SHCs.
(page 163)
Less than 5 percent of the cases involved poltergeist-like correlative events. The spatial distribution of SHC reports in the United States is shown in Figure 34. Sample cases involved:
1 .02 March, 1773/Coventry, England/fifty-year-old female; SHC.
2. 01 August, 1869/Paris, France/SHC; floor burned around body; victim's bed clothes not burned.
3. 12 May, 1890/Ayer, Massachusetts/female SHC; clothes not scorched.
4. 16 December, 1906/London, England/widow, SHC; sitting in bedroom; clothes not burned.
5. January and February, 1905/parts of England/three SHCs within month.
6. 30 July, 1938/Norfolk Broads, England/SHC; woman on cruiser at time of incident; clothes burnt.
7. 18 September, 1952/(Algiers) New Orleans, Louisiana/SHC; man.
8. 18 May, 1957/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania/SHC, sixty-eight year old female.
9. - October, 1964/Dallas, Texas/woman, seventy-five years old; burns, car not touched.
10. - January, 1968/Ballinger, Texas/SHC; house with possible history of SHC.
Gaddis (1967:217-70) with his usual thoroughness devotes five chapters to the SHC phenomenon. His material is far too extensive to incorporate here. He quotes Dr. Jacobs (ibid:219) on some conclusions:
1 . SHC occurs only in living humans;
2. Generally an older person;
3. More often a woman than a man;
4. Subject usually alone at time;
5. Subject has led an idle life;
6. Subject corpulent or intemperate.
7. Generally there was a light or inflammable substance in room.
8. The combustion was rapid, completed in seven hours.[?]
9. Room filled with thick vapor; walls covered with soot.
10. Trunk and torso destroyed; head and legs often remained.
11. SHC generally occurs in winter and in northern regions.
Gaddis gives an excellent description of the combustion process (ibid:220), and estimates that there are 40 females to every male victim; he also points out the presence of alcohol in practically all cases. He also gives brief descriptions of over 20 SHC cases.
(page 164)
It seems evident that the SHC starts inside the body, perhaps in the vicinity of the lower spine. (Believers in kundalini fire will find this point of interest.) There are four times as many cases in December and January as in warmer months (Persinger and Lafreniere 1977:118). Sanderson (1978:71) believes this is due to overprotection against cold, causing sweating, which releases the vitamin B-10 (inositol), a phosphagen which is easily combustible.
Rama (1978:449ff) devoted a chapter to yogic methods of "casting off the body," which include a) allowing oneself to freeze to death while in samadhi, b) retaining the breath under water, c) consciously opening the fontanelle at top of head, d) taking the body of another (p. 454ff), and e) spontaneous human combustion, about which Rama (11978:452) remarks:
There is another very rare way of casting off the body. By meditating on the solar plexus, the actual internal flame of fire burns the body in a fraction of a second, and everything is reduced to ashes. This knowledge was imparted by Yama, the king of death to his beloved disciple Nachiketa, in the Kathopanishad. Now all over the world, instances of spontaneous combustion are often heard about, and people wonder about such occurrences. But the ancient scriptures, such as Mahakala Nidhi explain this method systematically.
3.34) The "Cold-Wind" Effect
Witnesses at seances and hauntings have often reported that just before the phenomena take place they feel a "cold-wind."
Elsewhere (1974:22) we report: "Tyrrell (1961:70) notes another fairly frequent characteristic of apparitions is that the percipient experiences a feeling of cold. He comments: 'One can see no reason for these cold feelings.' It is very surprising that a man of Tyrrell's scientific background could have missed the significance of this effect. Something is obviously drawing energy from the immediate environment, and this energy (heat) loss is immediately felt as cold."
If this is true, then we have an explanation of where the energy to produce the effect comes from. It is apparently taken out of the air (and perhaps the participants); and hence, they feel this energy loss as a temperature drop.
(page 165)
Schmeidler (1973) reported that when psychic Ingo Swann was asked to change the temperature inside a distant thermos, significant continuous changes on automatic temperature recorders were repeatedly produced. She states (ibid:338):
A by-product of this hypothesis ... offers a ready explanation for the 'cold breeze' so often described in seances in which physical effects are produced. The coldness might represent an energy loss in one area which compensates for the extra energy at work in another.
Susy Smith (1975:28-9) discusses other aspects of the Swann test:
Ingo Swann is a gifted psychic and also a talented new-age artist. His extraordinary psi abilities include being able to go out of his body at will. He is very cognizant of the needs of the parapsychologists to evaluate phenomena statistically and has cooperated in a number of laboratory experiments. Dr. Schmeidler tells of laboratory experimentation with Ingo at City College where PK changes in continuous, automatic recordings of graphite become hotter or cooler from three to ten feet away - were repeatedly produced. Experimental controls included insulating the target thermistor in a thermos that was 25 feet from the subject, and counterbalancing 'hot' versus 'cold' instructions in a rigid preset design.
Results of the testing were that seven of Ingo's ten scores are statistically significant, and five are highly significant. Each of the significant differences is in the direction specified by instructions; that is, the recordings show more change toward hotter temperatures in the test periods with 'make it hotter' instructions than in the test periods with 'make it colder' instructions.
Ingo's scores demonstrate a significant PK effect with the procedure used, although few of the changes were dramatic; the maximum temperature change within a single forty-five second test period only once was greater than one degree.
Smith (1975:224) says of the psychic Rudy Schneider who was then being investigated by the psychic researcher, Price:
However, there was one manifestation he was sure they could not have produced - indeed, they would probably not have
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thought of trying to produce - and that was a recorded loss of temperature in the locked room filled with sitters. The thermometer went down eleven degrees, and this was very encouraging to Price as he had observed the same dramatic effect at other seances and knew it was a typical phenomenon.
There are other rarer thermal effects of paranormal powers, but we wish to concentrate on the most documented. It is evident that in every chemical reaction, (and every biophysical function is a chemical reaction), there is either a net gain or loss in thermal energy; apparently this principle applies to paranormal effects as well as ordinary ones.
It is obvious that we are here in the presence of the same kind of "discrepancy" which led Einstein to abandon Newtonian physics and discover the theory of relativity. In short, present views about the reactive nature of mankind as a creature, are no more adequate to explain his relation to ultimate reality than was the ether theory of light able to explain the constancy of its speed. We have enough evidence in firewalking to attest that under special conditions man has the power to effect psychic transformation of energy, and this understanding is far more important in the long run than the quaint antics of playing with fire.
3.4) Stigmata
The Stigmata is a very rare but well documented phenomenon consisting of the marks of the crucified Jesus on the body of the pious respondent. St. Francis of Assisi was the first and greatest stigmatist, and we can do no better than listen to his biographer.
Bishop (1974:168-9) says:
He was granted his apotheosis an hour before dawn on 14 September 1224, a holy day in the Franciscan calendar. It was the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. Francis lay in one of the rocky interstices of the mountain caves. The spot is now the Chapel of the Stigmata. As Brother Leo reported, Francis prayed and was assured that God would permit him to share His Son's sufferings.
(page 167)
And the fervor of his devotion increased so much that he totally transformed himself into Him who let himself be crucified through abundance of love . . . Suddenly appeared to him a seraph with six wings, bearing enfolded in them a very beautiful image of a crucified man, his hands and feet outflung as on a cross, with features clearly resembling those of Lord Jesus. Two wings covered the seraph's head; two, descending to his feet, veiled the rest of his body; the other two were unfolded for flight.
The vision faded; and Francis discovered on his hands and feet the marks of nails, and on his right side a blood-dripping wound, such as he had just seen in vision.
His hands and feet seemed to be pierced in the middle by nails, whose heads, protruding out of the flesh, were in the palms of the hands and on the upper part of the feet, while the points emerged from the back of the hands and the soles of the feet. They seemed to be bent back, clinched, so that one could easily have passed a finger, as in a ring, under the bent part, which came completely out of the flesh. The heads of the nails were black and round. Similarly, on his right side appeared the wound of a lance thrust, not scabbed but red and bloody. Afterwards blood often dripped from the holy breast of Saint Francis, staining his robe and his drawers. Thus when his comrades noticed - he had told them nothing - that he kept his hands and feet covered and that he could not put his feet to the ground, and that when they washed his gown and drawers for him they found them all bloody, they were certain that he had manifestly imprinted on his hands and feet and even on his side the image and resemblance of the crucified Christ.
Since the presence of the stigmata could hardly be dissembled, Francis decided to acknowledge them, for the edification of his close friends and followers. He exhibited them first to Leo, who acted as his nurse and bathed the oozing wound in the side. Saint Bonaventure says that more than fifty, among them Pope Alexander IV, were privileged to see and touch the holy imprints. But Francis was shy of revealing his sweet torture to the general. He kept his hands and feet bandaged, and hid himself to wash his wounds. When someone sought to kiss his hands he would extend only the tips of his fingers, or his sleeve.
(page 168)
There have been a few other cases; those before Francis' time were doubtful; since however, there have been some validated instances.
Bishop (1974:171-2) notes:
We can hardly accept these cases - and some others less decisive - as establishing an 'influence,' or setting a precedent for Francis to follow consciously. They offer no traceable connection; they occurred at a great distance, and lack the Franciscan mystical spirit. All contemporary writers regarded Francis's stigmatization as something unique, unheard of. But the publicity attending his spiritual adventure inspired a swarm of imitators, created a vogue. A modern investigator turned up 31 cases by the end of the thirteenth century, 22 in the fourteenth, 25 in the fifteenth - 321 in all, before 1894. Of these 40 were men, 281 women. All modern critics agree that the investigator was too lenient in admitting doubtful or insufficiently documented examples; but on the other hand there were probably many obscure cases that were never documented at all.
There was Theresa Neumann of Konnersreuth in Bavaria, who first displayed the stigmata on Good Friday of 1926. She was a visionary, possessed of a dual or multiple personality. There is Padre Pic, a Capuchin friar of Foggia, who was apparently still living in 1955. The wound in his side is said to have yielded a cupful of blood daily. There was a case in Montreal, some fifty years ago. The eminent physician Jonathan Campbell Meakins, physician-in-chief of the Royal victoria Hospital and president of the American College of Physicians, told me that he examined the stigmatized woman in the hospital and could find no material explanation of her state. There were no doubt others, protected from reporters and photographers by families unwilling to divulge secrets, whether alarming or precious.
When Yogananda (1977:422) visited Theresa Neumann, she showed him healed nail-hole scars in both sides of both hands.
Susy Smith (1975:52ff) has a fine chapter on "Stigmatization" from which we reproduce the case of Louise Lateau:
(page 169)
One of the most exhaustively studied stigmatics in the history of this inexplicable phenomenon is Louise Lateau, a Belgian peasant girl whose case attracted more than one hundred doctors and many eminent Catholic churchmen to the tiny village of Bois d'Haine in the province of Hainault. She was born there in 1850 and lived a relatively ordinary life until she was 18. Then, after she suffered for a time from an ill-defined illness involving intense neuralgic pains, the stigmata first appeared on April 24, 1868. Bleeding wounds showed in the palms of her hands and on her feet, as if nails had been driven through them. Blood flowed from her side as from a spear wound and droplets of blood circled her brow. Her stigmata appeared between midnight and 1:00 a.m. every Friday morning and lasted for 24 hours. By every Saturday, the stigmata were dry and painless and remained so until the next Thursday midnight when they again began to bleed and hurt.
None of the doctors of churchmen who examined Louise ever had an explanation for the phenomena nor did they find any indication of trickery. Finally, at the request of religious authorities, she spent twenty weeks under the supervision of a Dr. Lefebvre, an eminent Louvain specialist in nervous diseases. During this time, the fall of 1868, many of his medical colleagues also examined the girl and witnessed the appearance of the stigmata at regular intervals.
A few years later a Dr. Warlomont, who believed Louise herself might be inducing the bleeding in some manner, conducted further experiments, sealing Louise's hands in gloves each Thursday. Nevertheless, when the seals were broken on Friday afternoon, her hands were found to have bled as usual. Dr. Warlomont then devised a glass cylinder in which her arm was sealed in such a way that it was impossible to get at her hand. When her hand was thus encased in the cylinder on Thursday, January 21, 1875, there was no sign of bleeding; but on Friday when the apparatus was examined in the presence of medical witnesses, some of them anti-clerical skeptics, the hand was found to have bled.
Smith (1975:56) concludes:
Father Thurston found certain similarities in nearly all the cases: first there is a background of illness, then a vivid realization and concentration on the wounds of Christ for some time before any bleeding appears. Some of the stigmatists have
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ardently desired them, feeling that it brought them closer to Christ to share his suffering. 'Whenever we have the opportunity of studying the subject's frame of mind,' Father Thurston says, 'we see the intensity of the mental impression. One would be such as is revealed to us in some of these stigmatics.'
Rawcliffe (1952:243ff) devotes a chapter to the stigmata. While generally an unbeliever, his account is factual, and contains excellent sources. He cannot either deny or account for some of the instances. He follows this report with another fine chapter on possible psychosomatic causes.
On the other side is Montague (1950:79) who gives 19 signs of the physical phenomena of mysticism, very prominent of which is the stigmata, to which this orthodox author gives much attention.
Smith (1975:56-7) also describes the case of a modern Protestant girl:
The most recent case, Cloretta Robertson - of the Easter bleeding syndrome - had stigmata just as many saints have had it; but she does not conform to the pattern at all. The 10-year-old Protestant daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Robertson of Oakland, experienced stigmata over a 19-day period before Easter in 1972, but as far as has been published, has not experienced it since; and, although she bled, she had no actual wounds.
In this case the girl had been much affected by watching a story about the Crucifixion on television.
The Wallaces (1977:435) list the following as having the stigmata: St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Peter de Casca, St. Veronica Juliana, Anna Emmerich, Maria von Morl, Louise Lateau, St. Gemma Calgani, Padre Pio, and Therese Neumann.
Smith (1975:56) reports:
Stigmatist St. Veronica Giuliani Of the Capuchin Order, who lived from 1660 to 1727, seemed to be the victim of a sadist because her stigmata always opened and bled at the command of Father Crivelli ...
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The best known modern stigmatist is the late Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, Italy, the only well-attested example of complete stigmatization in a male since the time of St. Francis.
Father Thurston has accounts of him from eyewitnesses. One witness was Monsignor Kenealy, Archbishop of Simla, who visited him in 1920.
Certainly if proof is wanted that the mind affects the body, there is no more dramatic illustration of it than stigmatization. That specific and bloody images visualized by the mind can be realized on the body indicates beyond doubt that it is the mind which produces anomalies such as disease which are then externalized on the body.
It should be pointed out that the stigmata are exclusively a phenomenon of Christian mysticism, - the only effect which is not found in Oriental mysticism. We hazard the guess that this may be due, at least in part, to the unique personal love of Christian mystics for the body of Jesus.
One may point out that all of the powers so far considered from 3.0 to 3.3 involved some empery over time and space, - in essence the ability of the mind to dominate these variables at will. If consciousness breaks out of its space-time barrier, all of these remarkable effects are possible, and indeed most of them are obvious consequences. It may be useful, however, to indicate to those naive in physics that a speedup in chemical reaction time will support spontaneous combustion, as a slowing down of time will support greater heat dissipation.
By contrast, the next set of four powers relate to the developing independence of the body from that of being a reactive animal form, to that of being a temple of the spirit, and hence increasingly free of physical constraints.
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3.5) Electromagnetic Properties: Prana
In Man, God and Universe I. K. Taimni (1969:383) declares that "Prana is the material instrument of the Second Logos or
Vishnu. It enables raw material created by the Third Logos to be worked into living vehicles which have in them the capacity for growth." Prana, therefore, is bioenergy, known under other names in the West, such as "od," "orgone," and "mana." It tends to give off electrons and photons in electrical and chemical reactions, and this property accounts both for the healthful "negative ions" and for the bioluminescence caused by photon emission in living energy exchanges.
In section 2.3 we described the occult hypothesis about the etheric body. Prana is the substance constituting this body, which sometimes becomes visible or nearly so due to the emanation of pranic energy in the form of auras. Without necessarily adopting the eastern views of the etheric body, we will use the concept of prana as a useful stereotype for the bioenergy which has been given such diverse names in the West.
Odic or pranic energy seems to have some "big-brother" relationship with electromagnetic energy and ionization; in particular the former seems to produce the latter under favorable circumstances. There are four areas of interest: luminosity, auras, magnetic effects and electrical effects. We shall look into each in turn. A further area is Kirlian photography, but these phenomena have received so much attention in the literature, (Moss 1974, Krippner 1975, Krippner and Villoldo 1976, Krippner and Rubin, 1973), that we will merely incorporate this material by reference.
Wilson (1971:536ff) describes the early experiments of Baron von Reichenbach and others:
He tried magnetising other substances; crystals were an obvious choice. These affected his patients in the same way. He then tried the effect of unmagnetized crystals, and to his surprise, these also worked. He bought a huge crystal, and drew it gently down the patient's arm; she felt a pleasant sensation like a cool breeze. Drawn upward, it produced a warmth that was not entirely pleasant. He tried it on a fellow experimental scientist, and to his surprise, this completely healthy man unmistakably felt the action of the crystal. The obvious inference was that magnets and crystals both conduct electromagnetic force; but this quickly proved incorrect. So what was the force they both seemed to possess? Reichenbach decided to call it 'odic force' or odyle. And as he went on to try more and more substances - zinc, sulphur,
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alum, salt, copper - he found that all seemed to have some degree of odic force, although the colors were often quite distinctive. His experiments with the 'odic force' of precious and semi-precious stones seemed to confirm the occult and alchemical tradition about their nature, although this aspect did not interest Reichenbach in the least, for there was nothing of the occultist about him.
Human beings possess odic force in an unusual degree, he discovered; it can be seen as a kind of light streaming from the finger ends. And not only by 'sick sensitives;' Reichenbach discovered that about a third of all people seem to be more or less sensitive to the odic force.
Von Reichenbach (1851 r 1965:41) says of the odic manifestation:
Some sensitives, esp. sick persons, can see a flame issuing from the ends of a magnet; it emits a red light which acts upon photo negs; it may be concentrated by a lens, but is without heat; similarity to aurora is noticed.
With regard to crystals and od (ibid:82) he declares:
Crystals also emit this force, mainly at the axes; it does not attract iron but will attract the hand of a sensitive, does not affect a magnet nor induce current; it may be charged by contact.
He also notes, (ibid: 132)
The sun's rays also carry this odic power; affecting sensitives; the outer ends of the spectrum octave exert the most force, the higher wavelengths feel cool, the lower ones feel hot; the moon also possesses this power; heat is a source of it, so is friction and light.
Further he notes that odic light increases (like ionization) with a decrease in atmospheric pressure (ibid:381).
We quote Wilson (1971:538ff) on the work of Reich:
In the year 1939 an eminent Freudian psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, startled and enraged his colleagues by announcing that he had discovered a new form of energy unknown to physics:
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the vital energy which regulates the health of living creatures. The case of Wilhelm Reich is so strange that it is worth considering at some length; it recalls Reichenbach in many ways.
Reich rediscovered the 'astral light' and called it orgone energy. This is a blue energy which permeates the whole universe, and which forms a field around living beings - Reichenbach's odyle, Pheobe Payne's 'aura.' The reason that the physical contact between child and mother relieves anxiety, for example, is that their orgone fields unite like two drops of water.
In the sexual orgasm, orgone energy becomes concentrated in the genitals; it is the tingling feeling experienced in sexual excitement. Living matter is made up of 'bions,' which are tiny cells pulsating with orgone energy.
Objects could become charged with this blue energy, and would then influence an electroscope. He finally concluded that this new, unknown energy comes from the sun, and that organic substances have the power to absorb this energy and retain it.
He constructed a box to prevent the energy escaping. It had to have metal walls - because organic matter absorbs orgone energy - and layers of organic matter outside, which would absorb any energy that managed to get through the metal. He observed bluish light around the dishes of the culture in this box. And then, to his amazement, he observed the same blue light in the box when the cultures had been removed.
But perhaps the most accessible work on Reich is that of his biographer Mann (1973). Since this book is recent and available, we will incorporate it by reference. Reich felt that this orgone energy could heal sickness, including cancer, and ran into trouble with the U. S. government regarding orgone energy as a cure for cancer, was imprisoned, and died there in 1957.
Summarizing the work of Reichenbach, Reich and others, Reich's biographer, Mann (1973:116) says of the energy known as od or orgone, that it is non-electrical, but
1) seems to be associated with magnets,
2) is polarized,
3) is released from the fingertips,
4) is related to breathing, and can be passed by touching,
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5) comes originally from the sun, and
6) is absorbed by water and can affect plant life.
Another researcher who found that sensitives could see the pranic light associated with magnetic fields (as did those of von Reichenbach) was Coblenz (1954:59). He also reports (ibid.: 223), that there are instances of light emission from the fingers of automatic writers.
We guess that pranic energy is somehow associated with the oxygen atom, and this is why it is so easily stored in water, and in the human body (which is mostly water), and why it is inspired into the body with each breath.
Mann (1973:150ff) devotes a whole chapter to this bioplasmic energy, giving an excellent summary of human electromagnetic energies and auras. He reports (p. 150) on the work of Dr. W. W. Coblenz who in 1954 wrote Man's Place in a Superphysical World ,in which he studied the effects of magnets on the etheric body, reporting: "The magnets had an aura which operated to interfere with the tests on auric light emanating from my body." Another investigator, J.C. Maby in the 1966 book The Physical Properties of Radiesthesia, summarized the work of the masters Mesmer, Charcot, Reichenbach, as well as more recent investigators such as Albert Abrams, W. E. Boyd, Ruth Drown, and George de la Warr. He believed that the unknown energies studied by these people were physical and supernatural. He noted that the radiations from the human being are stronger when the person is emotionally aroused, and invented a machine to pick up this energy release.
Mann quotes Maby (p. 151) as follows:
I find that an imaginative person can project energy capable of affecting either the radio electrometer or a radioactive preparation in conjunction with a Geiger counter . . . by visual concentration alone ... in a way that suggests waves ... in the micro-Hertzian region of the spectrum ...
Krippner (1975:175) describes the research of Prof. H. S. Burr, late of Yale University, who tried to understand electrodynamic biological energy fields by measuring the difference in voltage between two points on the surface of a living organism:
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Burr referred to the electrodynamic fields identified by these measurements as 'life-fields' or 'L-fields.' Noting that L-fields could be used to assess drug effects and the depth of hypnosis, Burr stated: 'L-field measurements are not only useful in diagnosing local conditions; they can also be used to assess the general state of the body as a whole, for these pure voltage differences - independent of any current flow or changes in skin resistance - reveal the state of the whole human force field . . . And, as the force field extends beyond the surface of the skin, it is sometimes possible to measure field-voltages with the electrodes a short distance from the surface of the skin - not in contact with it.' This indicated to Burr that the L-field was a 'true' field that was measured.
Burr maintained that L-fields help determine the growth of an organism, just as Andrade hypothesized that there was a 'biological organizing model' around each organism.
We have devoted some time to a discussion of pranic energy4 because it appears to be a very useful construct in energy transfers between the psychic realm and ours. Indeed, we may guess that pranic energy is the electricity and magnetism of the astral realm, and this is the reason why it shares so many commonalities with our electromagnetic spectrum. The operation of pranic energy of manifesting in the physical world in living organisms appears to involve the emission of both electrons, (ionization), and photons, (luminescence). We shall now turn our attention to some of these applications.
3.5 1) Luminosity and Auras *
Energy exchanges are associated with chemical and/or electrical reactions, and these may produce free electrons, (ionization), or photons, (light). The more vigorously such a reaction proceeds, more electrons and higher energy photons will be produced. But the production of these two products in turn results in luminosity and auras. So whenever there is a heavy discharge of pranic energy, or any other kind of energy exchange between the etheric and physical bodies (as in illness) such effects may be seen. These phenomena include the auras surrounding saints, transfiguration phenomena, (as in the shining face of Moses and Jesus), and certain signs of morbidity and grave illness in some kinds of sickness.
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Arbman (1963:316), a learned Swedish author, whose works are unfortunately rare in the U.S., devoted an entire section of his large work to "The origin and nature of ecstatic psychic light-phenomena," which includes a much fuller discussion of the subject than we have space for here.5
Mystic experience is commonly one of a vision of supernal light. Whiteman, (1961:27ff), commences his book on mystic experience with a chapter entitled "The Vision of Archetypal Light," with many examples of this occurrence. Leuba (1972:255) calls this apprehension of light or luminosity in the surround "photism" (for further details see chapter VI).
Bioluminescence is by no means exclusively a psychic phenomenon. Rare cases of it are reported by Drs. G. M. Gould and E. L. Pyle in their Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (New York: Sydenham Publ. Co. 1937) according to Gaddis (1967:163):
(They) list the following examples: luminous perspiration, two cases of luminous breath, issuing from the mouths of patients shortly before death; two cases of phthisis in which the heads of the victims were surrounded by phosphorescent lights; and a victim of psoriasis who was enveloped in a luminous aura for several days. In another case a woman suffering from cancer of the breast showed a luminosity ...
Gaddis (ibid: 164) also reports an account in Annales des Sciences Psychiques, (July 1905) by one Dr. Charles Fere, who tells of two cases of auras about the heads and hands of two women patients who were hysterical. He also tells of an asthma patient who had a bluish flow emanate from her breasts.
He also notes Fodor's reference (Encyclopedia of Psychic Sciences, p. 209) to the research of Prof. Dubois of luminous wounds in "billious, nervous, red-haired and alcoholic patients." Luciferin and luciferase, constituents of ATP, and utilized by fireflies, were found in the supporations.
Tromp (1949) conducted an exhaustive investigation into electromagnetic effects in and around living organisms.' His chapter on this subject alone contains 286 pages, giving summary reports of many investigators. On pages 22-25 he discusses the
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Gurwitsch effect - (mitogenic radiation in the ultra-violet at 2000 angstroms) in association with the growth of plant and animal tissue. It appears weak and intermittent, being given off at certain critical times in developmental process. He postulates three possible explanations for this radiation: a) oxidation, b) glycolysis (splitting of glucose into lactic acid), and c) proteolysis (breaking down of proteins), all suspected of contributing to the ensuing bioluminescence.
Dingwall (1 926b;1 95) reports of the medium Pallidino that on one occasion she materialized dancing lights like fireflies. "One of these lights actually settled in the palm of M. Omati, an engineer by profession, who was able to examine it carefully. He experienced no sensation of heat, and the surrounding skin was hardly illuminated."
On another occasion (ibid:206) lights appeared "twice over her head, once in her lap, and once at the side of the curtain furtherest from her. They were of three kinds, a steady blue-green light, a yellow light, and a small sparkling light."
Bayless (1973:73ff) devotes a chapter to luminous manifestations. The most common of these are seen at or around the time of death. Also, not rare, are luminous discs and lights during seances. He also discusses self luminous apparitions of the dead. Another excellent source book on mysterious lights is Gaddis (1967) which contains several chapters on this subject.
Hunt and Draper, (1964:184) quote Tesla as follows:
In some instances I have seen all the air around me filled with tongues of living flame. Their intensity, instead of diminishing, increased with time.
This luminous phenomena (sic) still manifest themselves from time to time as when a new idea opening up possibilities strikes me, but they are no longer exciting, being relatively of small intensity. When I close my eyes I invariably observe first a background of very dark uniform blue, not unlike the sky on a clear but starless night. In a few seconds this field becomes animated with innumerable scintillating flakes of green, arranged in several layers and advancing towards me. Then there appears to the right, a beautiful pattern of two systems of parallel and closely spaced lines at right angles to
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one another in all sorts of colors with yellow-green and gold predominating. Immediately thereafter, the lines grow brighter and the whole thing is thickly sprinkled with dots of twinkling light. This picture moves slowly across the field of vision and in about ten seconds vanishes to the left leaving behind a ground of rather unpleasant and inert gray which quickly gives way to a billowing sea of clouds seemingly trying to mould themselves in living shapes.
Farges (1926:547) describes the official Catholic position on "luminous effluvia:"
Ecstasy, occasionally ascensional, is perhaps still more often luminous. Benedict XIV states, in fact, that there would be no end to the enumeration of all the case of supernatural splendour with which the saints were irradiated, if such were desired.
Varieties. - Sometimes it is the head or the face alone that gives forth a luminous aureole, but often the whole body also is surrounded with light. Ecstatics have been seen, although more rarely, to light up the whole church or cell during their nocturnal ecstasies; so much so as to suggest a fire, which others have run out to extinguish. Instances of fiery rays escaping from their eyes or hands are also cited.
He notes that prototypes of such irradiations are the shining face of Moses coming down from the mount (Exodus 34) and the transfiguration of Jesus of Mt. Tabor when his face shone like the sun (Matthew 17).
Mann (1973:143ff) in his work on Reich, devotes a chapter to the human aura. He cites the work of Kilner (1911) who described the human aura thus (Mann, 1973:145):
If someone was placed against a dark background in twilight a slightly luminous mist, oval in form, was seen around his body. It had three distinct zones. The first was a dark edging, half a centimeter wide, surrounding the body; this was the 'etheric double.' Outside this was the interior aura, dense and streaked perpendicularly to the body; this was from three to eight centimeters in width. Finally came the exterior aura which had no definite contour.
Kilner claimed to find a link between the aura and the conscious mind, as it nearly disappeared in trance, and did so at
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death. Though Kilner used dyed screens for perceiving the aura, Mann (1973:146) feels that his "success was probably attributable to his unwitting possession of clairvoyant powers." Other healers including Cayce, Garrett, and Worrall also see auras and use them to heal and diagnose disease; Cayce wrote a book on the subject.
The human aura, as well as the aura surrounding all living things (e.g., a leaf) has been photographed by Kirlian Photography (Moss, 1976:56). In one case described by Moss a leaf was cut, and then photographed; the missing piece showed in the photograph; hence, the aura showed the still intact etheric leaf.
On Sept. 15, 1979, the writer attended a workshop on the human aura by Dr. Valerie Hunt, of UCLA, Rev. Rosalyn Bruyere, a local aura reader, and Emelie Conrad, a shaman. The meeting was held in Beverly Hills. The following are notes gleaned from the proceedings, mostly from Rev. Bruyere. She conceives that the aura is an electromagnetic phenomenon - one is literally seeing ionization; and that high altitudes and dry weather conditions due to increase in negative ions, decrease the auric level and increase seratonin and melatonin discharge in the body. If your depth perception is accurate, it is easier to see auras, because you look at the person directly not his background. Most Westerners produce yellow aura when in the left hemisphere and blue in the right, while Easterners produce orange and purple. Shamans and schizophrenics, however, produce two white horned plumes of aura from the right and left frontal lobes: psychics and shamans, hence, are healed schizophrenics. The auric field is a transaction between the human system and the cosmos.
3.52) Electrical and Magnetic Properties
While electrical discharges from humans are rare, there have been instances. Persinger and Lafreniere (1977:108) in their catalog of Fortean events turned up twenty instances of humans having either electrical or magnetic properties including an 1877 case where a 17 year old girl showed high voltage discharge following illness, and a Washington, D.C. man gave out paralyzing electric shocks when touched. There was also the Maryland youth who became magnetized and attracted iron objects.
It may be remembered that the Pentecostal experience of the Disciples (Acts 3) was accompanied by "tongues of fire." But
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this rare phenomenon can also happen on more secular occasions, as witness Richet (1923:487) describing a seance with Home:
Other strange things were seen - a form like a bird flying and whistling in the room, tongues and jets of fire from Home's head; then as it were the blast of a strong wind, 'the most weird thing I ever heard.'
It is possible that this is an example of "St. Elmo's fire" a heavy brush discharge of static electricity which glows like a fire. Moses' "burning bush" could also have been of this kind. These phenomena are akin to those of "ball lightning" whose causes are still poorly understood, and whose behavior is rather mysterious.
But heavy ionization of ordinary air during thunderstorms can cause remarkable static-electric effects. Consider the following such description from a Pike's Peak storm in Gaddis (1967:46-8):
The hair and whiskers of observers were electrified. When charged with the electrical fluid, parts of the bodies of the men became luminous... The observer on placing his hands... where the electrical excitement was abundant, did not discover the slightest sensation of heat, but his hands became instantly aflame . . . The flames issued from his fingers with a rushing noise... The hair on his head stood erect and the pricking sensation on his bareheaded scalp was extremely painful... The peculiar smell of electrical odor (ozone-JCG) was noted.
All this, due to the rarefied air at the mountain top, is very similar to the electrical glow inside a neon tube.
Apparently luminosity is also produced in persons suffering from a serious disease under certain conditions. Gaddis (1967: 178ff) devotes several pages to accounts of this sort. Among others he notes the report of Ransom in Electrical Experimenter (June 1920) concerning victims of botulism who developed magnetic powers while ill. Fodor (Psychiatric Quarterly, April 1948) tells of PIK powers associated with cholera, and Coe adds that some other botulism patients glowed in the dark. Gaddis (1967:169) also tells of "human magnets, "- persons who attract metal objects. He (1967:169) also describes infants who seem to be born with an electric charge. A half-dozen cases of such infants or children are described; in some cases luminosity was also exhibited. Gaddis (1967:168) notes that some unusual persons seem to store up high
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amounts of static electricity, and consequently frequently start fires by sparks.
Tiller in "Energy Fields and the Body" (White, 1974:277), says:
I propose that the manifesting of psychoenergetic phenomena is associated with taking the primary energies in the body and making them coherent. In my modeling, I suspect that if we took all the energy in a single human body and made it completely coherent, there would be at least enough energy to create our entire universe at the physical (incoherent) level. You see, the basic energy is already there; it is just that it is in an incoherent form, and our job is to make it coherent. This we do by developing atunement with nature through our meditation, our thoughts, and our actions - i.e., it takes work.
If this line of reasoning is plausible, the sudden increase in coherence in a biological system caused by the possible infusion of cosmic energy could have caused a "spillover" discharge of energy (much like synchrotron radiation), as in the case of the "burning bush" of Moses.
After a careful examination of the biological effects of magnetic fields Barthnody (1964:277) concludes:
There remains no reasonable doubt that living systems are extraordinarily sensitive to magnetic fields. By extremely simple experiments it is possible to prove that highly diverse types of animals and plants may have their orientation modified by artificial fields of the order of strength of the geomagnetic field. This has already been established in our laboratory not only for the snails and flatworms, but also for the fruit fly Drosophila and the unicellular Paramecium. The colonial flagellate Volvox also is sensitive to very weak magnetic fields (personal communication from Dr. John D. Palmer). The nature of the organismic response is, however, far from simple. The systematic and periodic alterations in the strength and character of biological response suggest a highly differentiated response mechanism within the organism and belie any conclusion that the responsiveness is adventitious. To the contrary, the nature of the response properties suggest that the organism is normally integrated with its geomagnetic environment to a striking degree.
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Concluding Remarks: It is quite obvious from the rather unorganized material in this section and the lack of an over-riding rationale, that we are not in possession of all the facts regarding the electromagnetic properties of pranic energy. (The singular behavior of "ball-lightning" is enough evidence of that.) Despite the work of Burr, Reich, and Tesla, we still are much in the dark regarding fundamental relationships in this area. One guess is that pranic energy is to electromagnetic energy as the etheric body is to the physical body.
3.6) Independence from Physical Functions
One of the most interesting signs of saintly development is that it gradually seems to free the body from the routine performance of animal functions. Such changes are not found in nonsaintly paragnosts. Of the five principal functions (breathing, eating, excretion, sleeping, and sex), enough has been written elsewhere about dimunition in breathing and sex activity so that these changes will not be pursued further here. There is no information on excretion, so we will be confined to reductions in eating (inedia) and in sleeping (non-somnia). It is well known that such reductions take place naturally as part of monastic life, but we are interested in rare cases where there is alleged to have been a cessation of such function altogether.
3.61) A Note on Chastity
We have deleted discussion on cessation of breathing, excretion, and sexual activity as unprofitable. But we would like to append a short note on continence.
Others who have discussed poltergeist phenomena include Brown (1972:141-57) in the Stafford poltergeist; Fodor (1964: 168-9), Johnson (1953:241); Mitchell (1974:375ff); Osborn (1966:68ff), and Watson (1973:150ff).
As we go to press, we note a new annotated bibliography on poltergeists: M. Goss, Poltergeists, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, N.J., 1979.
3.14) Apports
Apports are small objects either materialized or teleported such as ashes, stones, flowers, etc. Again, there is an extensive literature on the subject, and some of it is evidentiary. Apports, particularly small stones, are frequently experienced in poltergeist phenomena.
As Long (1954:196) tells us:
An apport is something which is dissolved into invisible form at one spot, is carried to a desired place, and solidified to the original state. Spirits of the dead are usually associated with the process.
Living creatures have been frequently used as apports, and have ranged from tiny insects through birds, fish, beasts, and men. Hot objects have been apported, and remained hot upon their arrival.
After summarizing a number of cases, Long (1954:200) concludes:
There is no injury done plants, insects, animals or people when they are used as apports, even when brought from a distance and passed through sealed doors into the seance room. By comparison, the use of the same processes to heal a broken bone is but a trifling matter.
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Yogananda (1977:212) reports that astrally produced objects, such as apports, are evanescent and eventually disappear. Melting of matter into the astral may produce a rumbling sound (ibid: 217).
Persinger and La Freniere (1977:102-3) report:
A significant number of apport cases are involved with stones, buckshot or other objects appearing at about ceiling level and falling. Thirty-eight events were placed in this subcategory. Events were only placed in this category if they predominantly involved the appearance or disappearance of objects. If other classic poltergeist symptoms were evident, the event was classified in the previous subcategory. The geographic distribution of these cases in conjunction with spontaneous fire and opening door/window episodes is shown in Figure 33. Sample cases involved were:
1) - 09 December, 1873/Bristol, England/couple report floor opening; almost engulfed into dark void from which came voices.
2) - January, 1888/Caldwell County, North Carolina/ large-stones fall inside closed room.
3) - March, 1929/Newton, New Jersey/buckshot falls from ceiling of garage for days.
4) - 1952/San Bernardino, California/bracelet of unknown metal appears/disappears.
5) - December, 1962/Toledo, Ohio/objects appear/disappear.
6) - May, 1970/Oakland, California/rings disappear from fingers, clocks disappear.
A curious feature concerning apports is that they appear to rematerialize at about ten feet above the ground. As a result they fall the remainder of the distance with only moderate speed. This effect augurs for a certain intelligent consideration in their production.
Susy Smith (1975:214-5) tries for some explanations:
As an answer to the question asked by the title of his writings, 'How Are Apports Brought into the Seance Room?' Bentley states:
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An apport is something which can be dissolved into its essential particles at one place, carried to another spot, and reassembled into its original form. Spiritual discarnate beings are usually associated with this process.
An electrical current of sufficiently high voltage can break down an atom and transform certain elements into others. So, at superconscious levels, can spirit beings release the electro-vital force in man to transmute visible matter into invisible elements and back again to the visible. Spirit can control temperature changes and can use living creatures - fish, birds, beasts, and man - as apports, as well as minerals and inanimate matter ...
Another hypothesis to explain penetration of matter through matter is that, since matter is made up largely of empty space, perhaps the atoms could somehow become aligned such that two objects could pass through each other. But atomic physics gives no clue as to what this 'somehow' might be.
Yet another hypothesis is the concept of the 'fourth dimension,' which goes back to the 1870s when the German physicist and astronomer Johann C. F. Zollner first postulated it to explain apports witnessed at sittings with the American medium Henry Slade. Zollner was a professor at the University of Leipzig who sought proof of life after death in experiments outside his own professional world of physics and astronomy. He defined apparent telekinetic (PK) happenings in the presence of mediums as a form of 'matter passing through matter,' suggesting that 'in the presence of spiritualistic mediums there must have been operative so-called catalytic forces, hitherto concealed from us, which were able to release and convert into active force a small part of the potential energy laid up in all bodies.'
Long (1954:199) gives further indication of the apportation process in the following:
One of the most famous and most studied mediums of the past century was Mme. d'Esperance. A spirit called 'Yolande' frequently appeared, fully materialized as a pretty Arab girl, in good light and produced apports so that the sitters could observe all that was to be seen in the process. On June 28, 1890, she brought as an apport a rare golden lily measuring more than seven feet from roots to top and carrying eleven perfect flowers. Toward the end of the sitting she tried to dematerialize the plant to take it away, but the force was too
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weak by then and she failed. She asked that it be kept in a dark closet until she could try again. The plant had been borrowed, so she said, and had to be returned. At half after nine on July 5th, the plant was removed from the dark closet and placed in the center of the circle of sitters. Almost instantly it vanished. Another spirit, not Yolande, explained that the plant, in its invisible form, had been brought into the room at the first sitting fully an hour before it was solidified and became visible.
That energy is necessary both for dematerialization and rematerialization of apports is evident from the following furnished by Long (1954:197):
Ernesto Bozzano, one of the most famous Psychical Research leaders, reported an apport case which will well illustrate the matters under discussion.
'In March, 1904, in a sitting in the house of Cavaliere Peretti, in which the medium was an intimate friend of ours, gifted with remarkable physical mediumship, and with whom apports could be obtained at command, I begged the communicating spirit to bring me a small block of pyrites which was lying on my writing table over a mile away. The spirit replied (through the mouth of the entranced medium) that the power was almost exhausted, but that all the same he would make the attempt. Soon after the medium sustained the usual spasmodic twitchings which signified the arrival of an apport, but without hearing the fall of any object on the table or on the floor. We asked for an explanation from the spirit-operator, who informed us that although he had managed to disintegrate a portion of the object desired, and had brought it into the room, there was not enough power for him to be able to reintegrate it. He added, 'Light the light.' We did so, and found, to our great surprise, that the table, the clothes and hair of the sitters, as well as the furniture and carpet of the room, were covered with the thinnest layer of brilliant impalpable pyrites. When I returned home after the sitting I found the little block of pyrites lying on my writing table. Missing from it was a large fragment, about one-third of the whole piece, which had been scooped out.'
3.15) Conclusion
The section on physical mediumship details phenomena which is perhaps the most crude and physical, the most researched
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and published, and perhaps the most evidential with which we shall have to deal. It establishes rather clearly the necessity for the construct of an etheric force-body as a dual of the physical body, and either the survival of such a vehicle after death or the accessibility of such a vehicle out of time past. This vortex of force or energy which constitutes the etheric body is generally invisible, though it has an often visible aura, and can, under suitable circumstances, materialize ectoplasm, - a sticky viscous substance which has a damp and clammy feel.
From the simple fact that psychic effects in seances last only a short time, it is obvious that a) they consume energy, drawn mostly from the medium, b) the energy is rather limited, and c) when it is depleted, the effects cease, (as indeed the controls have often stated). The energy here is prana, about which more will be said in section 3.5.
Consider the prescience of the North American Reviewer (April 1855, as quoted by Podmore 1902:290), in attempting a theory to account for some of the phenomena of physical mediumship: "it is probably . . . the right hemisphere of the brain which in the trance state acts independently of its usual controlling centers in the left hemisphere .
After a long book filled with instances, the hard-headed and methodical Richet (1923-579) sums up:
Cryptesthesia, telekinesis, ectoplasms, and premonition seem to me founded on granite; that is to say, on hundreds of exact observations and hundreds of rigorous experiments. The thing is a certainty; and even though among these thousands of observations there may be defects, gaps, errors, and illusions, sometimes mistakes of testimony, occasionally trickeries, more often casual coincidence, still more often ill-considered assertions, still the thing is certain. It is not possible that all these observers should never have made mistakes, but the whole constitutes a sheaf of testimony so large and homogeneous, that no criticism of details, however acute, will be able to disintegrate and disperse. Therefore:
1 ) There is in us a faculty of cognition that differs radically from the usual sensorial faculties (Cryptesthesia).
2) There are, even in full light, movements of objects without contact (Telekinesis).
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3) Hands, bodies, and objects seem to take shape in their entirety from a cloud and take all the semblance of life (Ectoplasms).
4) There occur premonitions that can be explained neither by chance nor perspicacity, and are sometimes verified in minute detail.
He concludes that "Metapsychic science will go much farther than I have ventured to think."
3.2) Time and Space Distortions
Our physical bodies and our ordinary state of consciousness are locked in the prison of space and time. Every mystic tells us that this prison is to be transcended, and indeed the great Einstein declares (N. Y. Times, March 29, 1972, p. 24, Column 6):
A human being is a Part of the whole, called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures ...
While this section will seem incomprehensible to men of conventional thinking, ultimate reality beyond the holographic image is outside of both time and space, and therefore this section represents dawning efforts of consciousness to become aware in those realms. Such efforts lead to a number of spectacular powers including out-of-body experiences (OBE's), bilocation, clairvoyance, precognition, teleportation, and other time-warps.
3.21) The Out-of-Body Experience, (OBE)
A very considerable literature has grown up detailing the first-hand experiences of those who have been able to detach consciousness from the body. Among the most famous are those of Sylvan Muldoon (Muldoon 1970), and Monroe (1971). The most authoritative writer on the subject is Crookall (1964, 1966, 1970), although Muldoon teamed with the psychic writer Carrington to produce Phenomena of Astral Projection (1971).
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In general it may be said that the vehicle for the OBE is the etheric, astral or energy body; sometimes this vehicle gains consciousness, and sometimes not, so that there are incidents of phantasms of the living when the paragnost is not conscious that the etheric body is visible to a distant witness.
One of the best summaries of OOB experiments is that of Rogo (1976:72-93), who devotes a chapter to a very detailed and scholarly review of the field. He is particularly explicit concerning the very careful analyses of Crookall, and the various kinds of OOB experiences. He concludes (p. 91-2) that there are three direct effects of OOB experiments on psychical research:
1) the study of apparitions,
2) the survival of death, and
3) the nature of consciousness.
For further particulars in regard to OBE experiences we quote from work elsewhere (1974:17ff):
"Despite the spectacular nature of such phenomena, and despite their relative rarity as contrasted to the earlier-noted experiences, these phantasms of the living are quite well documented in psychic research. One of the best evidential examples is the so-called 'Elsie projections' (Fox 1962:56- 63), wherein a young man while asleep appears to his inamorata, Elsie, in her bedroom. Prince (1963:30-1) tells of a similar projection vouched for by none other than William James, and another case (1963: 166) in which Gilbert Parker is the guarantor. Much of the psychic material of Castanada (1972) in the 'Don Juan' protocols, can be explained along these lines. F. W. H. Myers (1961) in Personality and Its Survival After Death, represents (1903) the earliest accounts of the British investigators. Other sources for similar phenomena are Sylvan Muldoon (1970), The Projection of The Astral Body, and G. N. M. Tyrrell, Science and Psychical Phenomena (1961).
"We believe that in some way, either through accident, illness, or learned knack, the projector, while in the hypnogogic state just preceding deep sleep, and having a desire to appear, connects somehow with the generalized preconscious, and is able to affect the sensorium of the percipient - sometime (and this is more difficult to explain), even the sensoriums of several perci-
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pients at the same time. The projector is always asleep at these times and is not aware of the projection until it is later confirmed, and the projection itself does not speak or show other signs of consciousness.
"We now come to the last in the continuum of related phenomena, which can be called the conscious out-of-body experience. This episode, the rarest and yet the most spectacular of the series, occurs when the percipient is alive and awake (or at least not asleep) and is conscious that he is projected, (that is, he has consciousness of being in another place than that where his body is); he can describe this location, so that frequently it can afterwards be identified evidentially, and very often he can communicate with and show other conscious awareness of the percipient. In some (perhaps advanced?) cases, the projector can consciously will and affect his projection. At other times, the projector is also the percipient; in these, there seems to be clear and distinct differences between such experiments and the purely subjective revery of imagining oneself at a distant spot.
"This conscious legerdemain is known as 'astral projection;' the projected consciousness often being known as the 'astral body,' the 'Etheric body,' or simply as 'the double.' In all cases of such projection it appears to be connected to the physical body by an infinitely extensible 'silver cord.' There also appears to be momentary unconsciousness when the projector leaves the physical body, and a 'click phenomenon' upon his return.
"The most authoritative writer on this subject is Crookall (1964, 1966, 1970), an investigator who has amassed a great deal of corroboratory evidence. He believes (1970) that the etheric double is released in two stages: the first stage involves quitting the physical body with the vehicle of vitality. Doubles of this type (1970:127) are never seen by the projector who does not have consciousness but only by others. The projector is usually mediumistic, in a dreamy, slightly dissociated condition, and the double, which is not an instrument of consciousness, is perceived as solid and lifelike, not luminous, subtle or tenuous. The conscious vehicle is the product of a second unveiling, quitting the vehicle of vitality, in which case there is a click, pop, or repercussion when the double re-enters the physical (1970:125).
"Crookall records comments by other investigators on the
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subject. He quotes Myers (1970:19) as saying 'Astral projection is the most significant of all psychical phenomena.' Crookall (1966:81) describes the OOB experience of Mrs. Garrett (a famous medium) and alleges that it 'proves' that the 'psychical body is an object and not as some orthodox investigators believe, no more than a mental image of the physical.
"Garrett (1949:26) says: 'I can project a part of myself into distant places and into the presence of people I know.' She also says (p. 171 ) 'Paranormal faculties are of general distribution throughout the human race, requiring only to be developed to become more active and positive.'
"Crookall (1966:19) points out that persons who experience OOB 'May lack the vitality to keep physical and psychical bodies in gear.' This 'half-dead' condition 'as well as prolonged fasting' tend to physical collapse 'with the exterioration of the psychical body.' Crookall believes this is because the physical body is vibrating too slowly for their coincidence. But Crookall is quick to point out that mystics in good health may suffer from the opposite condition, 'that the psychical body is vibrating too rapidly for the physical' and this may cause an OOB experience also.
"Crookall is not the only witness for these strange activities. Lady David-Neel, after extensive investigations in Tibet, found that the monks there had very realistic explanations of the 'double' (1971:28):
During life in the normal state this 'double' is closely united with the material body. Nevertheless, certain circumstances may cause their separation. The double can then leave the material body and show itself in different places, or being itself invisible, it can accomplish various peregrinations. With some people this separation of the double from the body happens involuntarily, but the Tibetans say that those who have trained themselves for the purpose can effect it at will. The separation is not complete for a strand subsists connecting the two forms.
"She concludes that this silver cord is only severed sometime after death.
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"Monroe, R. A. in Journeys out of the Body (1971:171), says that the psychical body 'has weight as we understand it. It is subject to gravitational attraction, although much less than the physical body.'
"(p. 178) 'The relationship between the second body and electricity and electromagnetic fields is quite significant.'
"(p. 171) 'The early penetration into the second state thought and action are dominated almost entirely by the unconscious subjective mind.'
" (p. 222) He notes the 'click phenomenon' upon rejoining the physical body.
"Muldoon and Carrington in The Phenomena of Astral Projection (1970) discuss this subject thoroughly. A section of their introduction reads as follows. (1951 :x):
Many times in talking to people about the psychic phenomena and the nature of phantoms especially, we have been surprised to find that they confuse in their minds such entirely different manifestations as apparitions and materializations, and will say: A saw a materialization' when what they really mean is that they saw an apparition. Of course this is a great mistake. One is a semi-solid or solid form, while the other is usually subjective, having no space-occupying quality . . . We have tried to show in several places in this book, how it is that phantom forms may vary greatly in the degree of their objectivity, and that the degree of this objectivity may even vary from moment to moment. That is why a phantom may be visible one moment and vanish the next ... The evanescent and fluidic character of all these manifestations should ever be kept in mind; and if this were done, much of the controversy regarding the degree of objectivity of phantasms would be done away with.
"in discussing two evidential cases (1951:112-3) they point out the 'great importance of suppressed desire' and also (1951: 114) note the 'click' phenomenon, upon return.
"Muldoon was himself capable of astral projection, and his books are enlivened by personal accounts. Carrington, as a topflight psychic investigator, made an admirable co-author. In an
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earlier book (1929:65), they laid down the fundamental law of astral projection:
If the subconscious will becomes possessed of the idea to move the body, and the physical counterpart is incapacitated, the subconscious will move the astral body independent of the physical.
"Muldoon identifies the connecting link between the conscious and the preconscious as 'passive will.' He says: with respect to projections (1929:239):
You can never force the passive will successfully, for the instant you try to force passive will, it becomes active will. You must just have the desire to project so strongly within you that it produces passive will, which in turn builds up the stress of the desire, and convinces the subconscious mind that the visions you imagine concerning projection are perfectly reasonable and possible.
"This section is quoted because this is a clear statement of the manner in which the union between the individual consciousness and the generalized preconscious is established, and therefore is of more universal application than astral projection alone."
The force and reach of the generalized preconscious is also understood by these authors, as witness the following remarkable passages (1929:250-1):
The crypto-conscious mind is the intelligence which elevates the astral body, throws it under and frees it from the spell of catalepsy, turns the body in the air . . . and performs various maneuvers. The crypto-conscious mind can execute an endless number of the most dextrous and clever capers with the astral body, controlling it as a hypnotist might control his subject; yet the curious part is that one can be conscious all the time he is under the influence of the crypto-conscious will ...
With many mediums the crypto-conscious mind operating this hidden force does curious things, such as producing physical manifestations. The power is in the medium, and is directed by the crypto conscious mind, while 'spirits' are credited with producing the phenomena. Even the medium himself does not realize that the intelligence behind the mani-
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festations is the crypto-conscious mind.
Wilson (1971:543) describes the OBE experiments of Fox:
In 1902, Fox had a dream, during the course of which it struck him suddenly that he must be dreaming. He went on dreaming; but the knowledge that this was only a dream produced a feeling of great clarity, and the scenery of the dream became unusually vivid and beautiful. He tried to develop this knack of 'self-awareness' in dreams; it happened infrequently, but when it did, he always experienced the same feeling of clarity and beauty.
He also discovered that once he was 'in control' of the dream, he could float through brick walls, levitate and so on. What was happening was, in fact, the reverse of a nightmare, where your legs refuse to run. He gradually became fairly expert at inducing these dreams, but observed that if he tried to prolong them, he experienced a pain in his head. He assumed this to be in the pineal gland, the unused 'eye' in the center of the brain, which occult tradition declares to be the doorway to 'other' states of being. If he ignored the pain and continued the dream, the result was a feeling of 'bilocation,' as if he had left his body and was floating above it, although still aware of his body.
Eventually he discovered that if he tried determinedly he could overcome the pain. When this happened, there was a kind of 'click' in his head - which he identified with the opening of the pineal 'door' - and he then felt himself to be wholly located in the scenery of his dream, which, as before, would appear far more beautiful than normal. These dreams were followed by a return to his body, and another dream to the effect that he was back in bed and walking up. (Broad points out that another observer, the Dutch physicist van Eedeen, also had false awakening dreams after 'lucid dreams' similar to Fox's.)
Fox then attempted to induce these states while awake, lying on a bed and putting himself into a trance. He would feel his body becoming numb, and the room would seem to take on a golden colour. He had then to use his imagination, and picture himself hurtling towards the 'pineal doorway.' If he was successful, he felt himself passing out of the body, and the golden colour increased; he would experience a sense of great clarity and beauty, just as in his dreams. Sometimes he was unsuccessful, and would then experience a depressing
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sense of his 'astral body' fading and the golden colour dying away. Once he had passed the 'pineal doorway,' he would be able to float over scenery which was sometimes familiar, sometimes not, and see people at their ordinary occupations although they did not seem to see him. Sometimes they seemed to sense his presence, and were frightened.
Bilocation is the name given to the phenomenon of a person being in two places at the same time. It will quickly be grasped that bilocation is the end product of the travels by the etheric body while the physical body is asleep or in a cataleptic trance. The Germans have even a word for this effect: "Doppelganger" or 'doublegoer.' It will also be appreciated that some instances of bilocation might be explained by teleportation.
Muldoon and Carrington (1951:18) recount the famous case of the Italian monk Liguori, who on the morning of 21 Sept. 1774 at Arienzo, four days journey from Rome, fell into a cataleptic sleep and upon awakening stated that he had been present at the death of the Pope. He was seen at the deathbed where he led prayers for the Pontiff.
One of the best books on OOB experiences is that of Whiteman (1961). Not only did the author have "separation" experiences himself, but he was cognitive enough to arrange them into a discriminative taxonomy, and to formulate a theory that it is mainly through such experiences that accession to increasing orders of grace occur in incipient sainthood. His views are too complex for easy summarization, but the reader who wishes guidance in such matters is advised to consult this experienced guide. These experiences, he reports (1961:49), begin with "lucid dreams" and then progress to partial and then full conscious separation of the consciousness from the body.
Numerous examples of "doppelgangers" or etheric doubles will be found in the chapter on this topic by Catherine Crowe (Garrison, 1973:119-42). These are mostly unconscious out of body experiences connected with death. For other material on out-of-body experiences, consult Black (1975), Mitchell (1974: 349), Moss (1974:269), and Watson (1974:159).
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3.22) Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance is from the French "to see clearly" but which unfortunately is often given other meanings:
1) "Traveling clairvoyance," to see at a distance as a result of a conscious out-of-body excursion there;
2) "Pure clairvoyance" to know facts without necessity of the OBE, hence, similar to the higher powers of chapter 4;
3) "Infused knowledge" of section 4.7;
4) Sometimes mistakenly used for precognition or psychometry.
In this discussion we shall follow the excellent example of Stanford (Mitchell, 1974:133ff) in his fine chapter on the subject from which we quote his definition (p. 134): "If a person or animal behaves as though it had extrasensory knowledge of some currently existing object or current physical event that is unknown to any other organism, we term this clairvoyance."
Clairvoyance is thus separated from telepathy which involves extra-sensory communication between two organisms. Stanford notes that sometimes psychometry, dowsing, radiesthesia, and automatic writing can be classified as clairvoyance, though we shall attempt to treat them separately. The problem of separating clairvoyance from precognition is more complicated, since to validate clairvoyance the order of the cards in the pack (for example), heretofore unknown, must he examined, and it is possible that the clairvoyant has read the future knowledge of the examiner.
Stanford quotes Jephson (p. 137), a researcher, that the faculty: ". . . is widespread, and that we can experiment with it as we can with other senses and that it is bound ... by . . . known psychological laws . . Stanford also notes the remarkable Rhine experiments in clairvoyance. In the Peirce-Pratt series the "p" log characteristic was -8 (C. R.3 = 5.6); the Columbia University "M" study yielded a log characteristic of -7 (C.R. = 5.3); a Colorado study produced a C.R. of 29; the "C.J." study produced a C.R. of 37, and we are left to imagine what the log characteristics of the probability must have been like. (A log characteristic of -1 means 1 decimal place.) These chances are, therefore, bordering on the impossible.
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Powell (1965:232-235), writing from an occult viewpoint, declares that there are four ways by which clairvoyance is produced:
1) by means of an astral current or "Tube," somewhat analogous to magnetization of polarization;
2) by projection of a thought form;
3) by travelling to the location in the astral body (travelling clairvoyance), and
4) by travelling in the mental body.
From work elsewhere (1974:24) we quote: "Probably the most famous example of clairvoyance is the incident in which Swedenborg, while in Gothenburg, clairvoyantly saw and described the progress of the great Stockholm fire. The account (Prince 1963:48) goes on:
About six o'clock Swedenborg went out and returned to the company pale and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm... and was spreading very fast. He was restless and went out often. He said that the home of one of his friends, whom he named, was in ashes, and that his own was in danger. At eight o'clock after he had been out again, he joyfully exclaimed, 'Thank God, the fire is extinguished, the third door from my house.'
There was, of course, in those times, no direct contact between the two cities, but subsequent news confirmed Swedenborg's vision in every detail. It is interesting that Swedenborg went outdoors to experience these continuing clairvoyant visions.
"Prince (1963:104) also describes the clairvoyant visions of Lord Balfour when looking into a crystal ball. These were confirmed by witnesses."
Traveling clairvoyance (which cannot be separated from a conscious OBE experience) is well attested. Slater Brown in The Heydey of Spiritualism (1972:29-49) devotes a chapter to some rather evidential cases.
3.23) Precognition
If there is one special extrasensory phenomenon which challenges materialistic thought most outrageously, that effect is
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precognition. For if precognition is a fact, either the law of cause and effect is violated, or else we live in a deterministic universe. Despite its seeming impossibility, the phenomenon of prediction and precognition has been known since the most ancient times in every culture. The Bible and the Classics from the Witch of Endor, the Delphic Oracle, and the alienated Cassandra are full of it, and even Caesar had his Ides of March soothsayer.
Dean (1974:154ff) has an authoritative chapter on precognition. After a brief history of the ancient origins, and the astounding examples of prophets, from Ezekiel to Nostradamus and Cayce, Dean gives some famous examples of precognitive dreams, including the precognitive dream of Mark Twain, regarding his brother's tragic death.
Incidentally, precognitive dreams of famous people are more apt to be recorded because the famous are more often involved in historical events which are recorded. Prince (1963:20, 68, 70, 73, 98, 101, 106, 110, 114, 121, 134, 136, 190, 201, 202, 216, 255, 257) records 17 cases of such precognition among famous witnesses regarding historical events. (There is no reason to believe that ordinary people do not have precognitive dreams, only that they are not so often recorded.) Two astounding examples of precognition (the announcement of the moons of Venus by Swift, 150 years before they were scientifically discovered, and the novel about the sinking of the Titan(ic) fourteen years before it happened, are cited by Krippner (1972).
Garrett (1949:138-9) quotes a good example of precognition:
There is an element of surprise and adventure about the experience of precognition which would appear to free itself from all conscious direction, even from personality itself, for when any action becomes automatic and effortless, it ceases to evoke consciousness. One enters into a place of participation which has no connection in time and space with conscious direction, or conscious telepathic communication. The experience remains as 'real' as any other and suggests that there must be a timeless and spaceless communion between our intuitive selves and the great eternal laws of nature.
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In his book Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling wrote, 'I am in no way 'Psychic.' Yet he records a dream which was purely precognitive. 'I dreamt that I stood, in my best clothes, which I do not wear as a rule, one in a line of similarly habited men, in some vast hall, floored with rough jointed stone slabs. Opposite me, the width of the hall, was another line of persons and the impression of a crowd behind them. On my left some ceremony was taking place that I wanted to see but could not unless I stepped out of my line because the fat stomach of my neighbor on my left barred my vision. At the ceremony's close, both lines of spectators broke up and moved forward and met, and the great space filled with people. Then a man came up behind me, slipped his hand beneath my arm, and said: 'I want a word with you.' I forgot the rest: but it had been a perfectly clear dream, and it stuck in my memory. Six weeks or more later, I attended in my capacity of a member of the War Graves Commission a ceremony at Westminster Abbey, where the Prince of Wales dedicated a plaque to 'The Million Dead' of the Great War. We commissioners lined up facing, across the width of Abbey Nave, more members of the Ministry and a big body of the public behind them, all in black clothes. I could see nothing of the ceremony because the stomach of the man on my left barred my vision. Then, my eye was caught by the cracks of the stone flooring, and I said to myself: 'But here is where I have been!' We broke up, both lines flowed forward and met, and the Nave filled with a crowd, through which a man came up and slipped his hand upon my arm, saying, 'I want a word with you, please.'
From work elsewhere (1974:25) we quote: "Because we are 'clutched into' time, precognition, of all the powers, seems the most mysterious. But the collective preconscious does not exist in our time, but in the eternal now and, consequently, it has access to future as well as past. Prince (1963:136) tells the famous story of Goethe's predictive vision of himself in later life. Riding a horse when about twenty, he saw himself on horseback on the path coming toward him dressed 'in a suit such as I had never worn.' He did wear the suit later when riding over the same route.
"Premonitions figure strongly in precognition, especially premonitions of death, such as the dream Lincoln had before his assassination. A similar premonition (Prince, 1963:256) caused
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Schumann to change the title of a composition to 'The Funeral Fantasy.' Premonitions are often about imminent events, and as such bear a striking relationship to psychic impressions, for they are about an event about to occur in a different time, while the psychic event is about an event to occur in a different space."
Moss (1974:199) has a chapter on precognitions, and gives many examples including the precognitive dream of President Lincoln. Precognition was the subject of an entire chapter in Maeterlinck's book on the paranormal (1975:87ff). He cites a number of verified cases.
For precognition and knowledge of the future in famous people, see Prince 1963:68 (James Otis), 70, 73, 98, 101, 106 (Chauncey Depew) 110, 114 (Carl Shurtz), 121 (Susan B. Anthony), 134-6, (Goethe) 190, 201, 202, 216 (Fulton Oursler), 255 (Saint Saens), 251 (Schumann), Fodor (1964:21). Others who have discussed precognition include Gowan (1974:25); Mitchell (1974:170ff); Osborn (1961), and Smith (1964:1 57ff).
One of the objections many rationalists have to precognition is that it requires (they believe) a deterministic universe. But this may not be the case. The objective of many precognitive dreams, it seems, is to get the dreamer to take evasive action which will forestall the disaster, so that the dream actually is precognitive only if not acted upon. It may be that the psychic force impelling the manifestation of one or more accidents is determined in the realm of possibilities, but the actual manifestation is at least partly under the control of foresighted reaction to the imminent event.
Dean (1974:163) reports that Mrs. Rhine, in sifting 1,427 precognitive cases, found only three successful interventions. Serious and shocking events predominated over happy ones by a 4 to 1 ratio, death being the commonest event. Emotional shock seems to be a factor in generating precognition experiences. Close personal relationships are conducive to precognitive dreams. The time interval is usually short - a few days or hours. Dean then details (pp. 165-67) a large number of successful precognition experiments carried out in the laboratory. Strange as it seems, precognition is evidently a factor in human ability.
If precognition works at all, it must involve the human being with some intelligence which is outside time. Elsewhere
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(Gowan 1974:134ff; 1975:3ff) it has been pointed out that the collective preconscious and the numinous element have access to this out-of-time knowledge, and it is also known (ibid:361) that in the Adamic Ecstasy state (4.7) this condition occurs. A full discussion of this matter involves us in the matter of time itself, which we defer until section 3.24.
3.24) Teleportation and Time-Warp
There have been a number of first-person accounts in the literature about teleportation (or more accurately supernormally fast movement of automobiles over distances, not possible to cover normally in the elapsed time recorded). One was reported in FATE (Jan. 1977) p. 34ff, from Rhodesia and involved a UFO. Another concerned several incidents in or near Niagara Falls, NY, about 1972, as reported in FATE, March 1977, p. 61ff. Neither of these cases is strongly evidentiary, because of unsupported personal testimony, and the possibility of hallucination. They are only two of a fair amount of such cases in which automobiles are felt to be travelling "off the road" or "through time" or in some other strange manner, which usually results in disorientation in the passengers.
A classic case, often repeated in the literature, is recounted by Glesmer (n.d.p. 9):
On the morning of October 25, 1593, a soldier disappeared from Manilla in the Philippine Islands. Instantaneously, he appeared on the plaza before the palace in Mexico City. Gil Perez was of the regiment which was guarding the walled citadel of Manilla. The soldier said the governor of the Philippines had been killed the night before. The authorities were puzzled why the soldier could travel 9,000 miles in one night. Perez said the teleportation took 'less time than it takes a cock to crow.' Two months later news arrived from the Philippines that the governor had indeed been killed. Passengers of the ship that brought this news had seen Perez in Manilla the day before he appeared in Mexico City.
Smith (1975:230) reports of the medium Kluski: "Another time, when the meeting was terminated, the medium was found to have disappeared from the locked, sealed room. He was
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later located in another room some distance away, still in an unconscious trance state."
Holzer (1975:36) describes the teleportation of Ms. Guppy, a medium, in front of witnesses of over a mile apart, as well as lesser examples.
Uri Geller (1975:267-8), the psychic, gives a first-person account of his teleportation from the sidewalks of New York to Ossining, more than 30 miles away, on Nov. 9, 1973:
So a very few minutes past 6:00, 1 was starting to jog about a block away from the apartment (which was east of Second Avenue)... I clearly remember approaching the canopy of the building right next to ours... Then I remember having the feeling that I was running backwards for a couple of steps ... Then I had the feeling that I was being sucked upward. There was no sensation in my body. I closed my eyes, and, I think, opened them almost immediately. When I did, I found myself being propelled in the air a foot or so away from a porch screen, over the top of a rhododendron bush, about to crash through the screen at a point eight or ten feet off the ground. I crashed through the screen and landed on a circular glass-top table... I was conscious all through this, but slightly dazed when I hit the table and floor... But what shocked me was that I recognized the porch and the table, because I knew them so well. This was Andrija's (Puharich) screen porch at Ossining.
It was 6:15 when Dr. Pulharich heard the crash of Uri's landing through the screen; fortunately, while shaken up, he was not injured.
A postulate of plane geometry states that, "A straight line is the shortest distance between two points." This is true in an Euclidian three-dimensional world. For us this "d" is a constant, but in the ordinary physical world, it is actually the maximum the two points can be apart when there is no psychic influence. Under any psychic effect, this distance shortens, and in ultimate reality becomes zero. The same thing is true of time, except that it works oppositely. Mathematically:
do = max. If D is assumed to be variable under psychic influence then dD/dt = a measure of the strength of P (the psychic influence).
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In cases of teleportation and supernaturally excessive speed which have been reported in the literature, it is incorrect to think that the speed is excessive. What has happened is that the distance has become shorter and the time longer.
In Hobbs' physical world of the ordinary state of consciousness, things are "loose and separate." In the etheric realm, time and distance do not apply, and everything seems connected to everything else.
Time-Warp: Under this heading we include only those distortions of time in which some thing or event (such as a journey) is accomplished in significantly less time than it would normally take to accomplish it. We thus rule out a number of other phenomena such as "deja vu" experience, physical immersion in past time (such as the English girls' visit to the court of Versailles), mystic Adamic ecstasy experiences which are out of time (such as George Fox's Lichfield experience (cf Gowan 1975:365), also infra sect. 4.7), all precognition, (cf supra 3.22), and all psychometry (cf infra 4.01).
Frankly, we do not feel competent to discuss this subject thoroughly at the present time, and with the present language, which is one of tensed verbs. What is needed at the start is a means of communication which is "untimed," and where there is an "untimed" tense which means, in effect, "is, was, and ever will be." We have tried elsewhere to use an integral sign with the verb "to be," (viz. S is), to indicate this concept, but it is clumsy. Some others, who have tackled this formidable problem with perhaps some success are Bentov (1977:42ff), Ouspensky (1945) and Arnot (1941). The views of these people are too involved to quote, and we urge reading them in the original. We continue, however, with some of the less difficult aspects of this vexing subject.
One of the best documented aspects of time-warp is accelerated mental process. Elsewhere (1975:136-7) it was said: "While not directly a part of healing, accelerated mental process (AMP) is connected to it by the speeding-up of reaction time. Only in this case it is a mental rather than a physical speed-up that is involved. AMP is another example of the fact that our sense of time is part of the OSC and that in an ASC something peculiar seems to happen to it.
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"Cooper and Erickson (1959:157-8) in their definitive study, note that time distortion can be demonstrated in a majority of subjects under hypnosis: 'The experiences are continuous. Thought under time distortion... can take place with extreme rapidity... recovery of materials from the unconscious (and) ... creative thought can be facilitated.' Other experiments have shown that a slowing down of time can also occur. Both distortions can have therapeutic applications.
"Aaronson (1968) describes a study done with six males in which time distortion under hypnosis was observed.
"Accelerated mental process is not only interesting for the remarkable effects it produces, and the light it throws on the prodigious activities of certain creative geniuses, but also for the implications it has regarding the relativistic nature of clock time. It is one thing to try to understand Einstein's relativity theories; it is much more immediate that time distortion can occur in an ASC as well as at very high speeds. It suggests that the speed of light is a boundary not only for our physical universe but for the OSC upon which a knowledge of it depends."
Readers wishing more information on accelerated mental process (AMP) should consult Cooper and Erickson (1954), Mc Cord and Sherrill (1961), Krippner (1972), and Huxley (1962: 210) as quoted by Gowan, Khatena, and Torrance (1979:159).
Jean Houston in a summary of AMP (1973:265-6) says:
We found that it is possible to greatly increase the rate of thought or amount of subjective experience beyond what is ordinarily possible within a unit of clock-measured time. That is to say, under certain conditions of altered consciousness a person might experience within a few minutes, as measured by the clock, such a wealth of ideas or images that it will seem that hours, days, or even longer must have passed for him to have experienced so much. Only a few minutes of objective (clock) time have elapsed; the change has been on the level of subjective experiential time and the explanation lies in the phenomenon of accelerated mental process (AMP).
It has long been known that AMP occurs spontaneously under conditions of dreaming sleep (the 'hours long' dream
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that takes only a few seconds or minutes of clock time). Then there are the cases related to great emotional stress. A man falling from a bridge, and expecting to die, but who by some chance is saved from death, may later recount that during the fall his whole lifetime flashed (as images) before his eyes, or that he relived his entire lifetime or at least relived all significant events, so that it seemed his whole lifetime was lived through, and lived through without any haste, events all seeming to happen at the same rate as they happen during everyday working experience. This last-mentioned kind of experience is also an experience of images, but it is an experience in which the person participates fully, as a dreamer may participate in some of his dreams. The Swiss Alpine Club has recorded hundreds of such experiences reported by mountain climbers who have fallen, expecting to die, but who survived.
Persons who have taken psychedelic drugs sometimes experience the accelerated mind phenomena, only to discover that all of the mental experience occurred within just a minute or two of time as measured by the clock.
It is important to note that in all of the above mentioned experiences of AMP, imagery plays a predominant role. This would seem to be in part because imagistic thinking does not seem to be bound by the time-inhibited mechanisms which retard the flow of verbal thought.
Those who have speculated on the significance of time have often postulated a second time dimension which we do not intuit. For example, Dunne (1931) in An Experiment with Time hypothesized such a second time dimension. While there are advantages in this approach, there are also some difficulties. It may be only an easy crutch for not having to visualize a realm outside time and space.
Dunne was not the only man to do this. We regret that the citation for the following quote is missing:
Adrian Dobbs, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician and physicist, has hypothesized a second time dimension inhabited by imaginary particles called psitrons. As far as the incredibly complex theory can be simplified, an individual's actual state would be surrounded in imaginary time by a number of possibilities which, even if they don't happen eventually, influence the actual course of events. The
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psitron - for which distance in space is irrelevant - travels between matter and mind or mind and mind. When it impinges on 'critically poised' neurons in the brain, it can trigger off a 'chain reaction' of neural events.
As Floyd declares (White 1974:302): "When the brain waves are still, time stands still, and when time stands still, the illusion of motion becomes impossible and with the impossibility of that illusion, the fundamental illusion of separate selfhood is in double jeopardy."
Roberts (1974:327) through "Seth" gives a good explanation of the "bottleneck" aspect of the conscious mind, holding us into consciousness of the present, although past and future are also there. Of our bodies and consciousness Seth says: "(they) are relatively free in time. They exist in a multidimensionality with which rational consciousness is not yet equipped to deal."
As Zukav (1979:240) states: "If, at the quantum level, the flow of time has no meaning, and if consciousness is fundamentally a similar process, and if we can become aware of these processes within ourselves, then it is also conceivable that we can experience timelessness."
Time is a very difficult subject to discuss accurately. This is due, not only to the fact that we don't have a proper intuition of it, (as we do of space), but also that our language involves tensed verbs, which are completely inadequate to express out-of-time constructs. Outside of mathematics, the poet is the best at getting outside time. Eliot's "Four Quartets" is a fine example of such poetry.
In a recent book on Timewarps, Gribbin (1979) speculates widely on physics (especially the newer particle physics) in support of his theory that time is not uniform, but can be compressed or expanded. Gribbin also evokes a concept of parallel universes to substitute for our view of a etheric plenum from which we select only one out of an infinity of possibilities for manifestation here. Leading him to the world of psychic phenomena, this parallel universe view helps him to explain the psychic realm as part "of the road not taken."
A similar construct of the variability of time was held by the brilliant Australian physicist, Arnot (1941), except that he
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believed that time was constantly expanding, just as the spatial dimensions of the universe were in process of expansion. His theories are too complicated for analysis here, but deserve more attention than they have received. For a theosophist similar view, see Pearson's Space, Time, and Self (1957). We acknowledge frustration in having to leave this important area unresolved.
3-3) Endo and Exothermic Reactions
The unifying factor in this category is the apparently paranormal ability of the human body in the transfer of heat energy, both in suppressing the transfer and in accelerating it. We shall examine several different aspects of this transfer: 1) firewalking, 2) kundalini fire and psychic heat, 3) spontaneous human combustion (SHC), 4) the ubiquitous "cold-wind" effect in hauntings and seances, and miscellaneous effects.
3.31) Firewalking
Despite the flagrantly spectacular nature of the phenomenon, and the large amount of energy in heat (as compared with mechanical or electrical energy) no other psychic effect (with the possible exception of dowsing) is more firmly documented than firewalking. It is found in all ages and cultures, and has been photographed and even participated in by a host of impeccable witnesses. Elsewhere (1975:142-3) in a table based largely on Gaddis (1967) we have noted over 30 different firewalks involving nearly one thousand participants in total. This table is reproduced here as Table III-2.
Dr. Bridgham's account of his walk across a red-hot lava flow in the company of three kahunas is given in detail in Long (1954:31-7) from which we quote:
When the flow started, related Dr. Brigham, I was in South Kona, at Napoopoo. I waited a few days to see whether it promised to be a long one. When it continued steadily, I sent a message to my three kahuna friends, who had promised to let me do some fire-walking under their protection; ...
When the rocks we threw on the lava surface showed that it had hardened enough to bear our weight, the kahunas arose and clambered down the side of the wall. It was far worse than a bake oven when we got to the bottom. The lava was blackening on the surface, .
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The matter was settled at once by deciding that the oldest kahuna should go first, I second and the others side by side. Without a moment of hesitation the oldest man trotted out on that terrifically hot surface. I was watching him with my mouth open and he was nearly across - a distance of about a hundred and fifty feet - when someone gave me a shove that resulted in my having a choice of falling on my face on the lava or catching a running stride.
I still do not know what madness seized me, but I ran. The heat was unbelievable. I held my breath and my mind seemed to stop functioning. I was young then and could do my hundred-yard dash with the best. Did I run! I flew! I would have broken all records, .
I looked down at my feet and found my socks burning at the edges of the curled leather uppers of my boots. I beat out the smouldering fire in the cotton fabric and looked up to find my three kahunas rocking with laughter as they pointed to the heel and sole of my left boot which lay smoking and burned to a crisp on the lava.
I laughed too, I was never so relieved in my life as I was to find that I was safe and that there was not a blister on my feet - not even where I had beaten out the fire in the socks.
There is a little more that I can tell of this experience. I had a sensation of intense heat on my face and body, but almost no sensation in my feet. When I touched them with my hands they were hot on the bottoms, but they did not feel so except to my hands. None of the kahunas had a blister, although the ti leaves which they had tied on their feet had burned away long since.
Long (1954:50ff) also describes another fire-walk in India:
What are the whips for? I asked. Are they to keep the firewalkers out of the water?
You'll see in a moment, was the hurried answer. Seems that when they step out of the fire into the water, the priests have to beat them to keep their minds off their hot feet for a second. I asked the priest but didn't understand what he tried to tell me - something about an old custom.
Do neither the whips nor the fire hurt them? I demanded.
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TABLE III GADDIS DOCUMENTATION (1967) OF "MASTERY OVER FIRE"
(page 151 -152)
The whips do lay their backs open sometimes. But keep your eyes on the picture. See? They are all praying now. Making a lot of funny gibberish. Praying to Agni to protect the pure and burn the impure.
The camera flashed around and caught another candidate just as he stepped into the coals. He was a thin, middle-aged man. His face was turned to the waiting priests and his hands were clenched and swinging at his sides. With long rapid strides he began his ordeal.
Clasping his hands and lifting his face as if in appeal to Heaven, he walked calmly into the bed of fire. I caught my breath. With a firm, steady stride he went wading through the coals toward the priests who waited at the far end.
I scarcely breathed as I watched. His feet were leaving black tracks which closed over and were lost in a moment after he had passed. On and on he went, never changing his pace. Made slightly misty and unreal by the heat waves rising all about him, he seemed more an apparition than a man. As I stared, my amazement was tinged with doubt. What I was seeing was an impossibility. But the end of that dreadful pacing came at last. The old man stepped from the living fire into the water and was instantly taken by the arms on either side by two priests. Their cruel whips flashed three times, cutting into the bare brown back. The old man writhed with pain. Two more priests took him and hurried him off to a bench beside the wall. They examined a foot each, nodded, and hurried back to their places.
The sedulous reader who wishes more on fire walking will find an excellent chapter on the subject by Long (1954:29-58) which includes five cases. Finally we quote from work elsewhere (1975:137-44):
"One of the best documented paranormal properties of the trance state is imperviousness of the human body (especially the hands and feet) to fire. It appears to occur in every society of the world, and in all ages and cultures from the most ancient to modern times. Since the documentation is large and impressive, and the firm establishment of one paranormal property of trance or ASC makes more believable others less frequent and well documented, we devote a detailed analysis to this phenomenon. If we are to remain scientific, such analysis suggests that our present laws of physics are but special cases of more general laws,
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and that we can begin to define the conditions (such as trance) under which the larger laws take over from the special laws of the ordinary state.
"Unlike some other paranormal effects, mastery over fire, especially as seen in fire-walking, has been vouched for by the most impeccable witnesses - in many cases western men of science, who often were not only eye-witnesses to the phenomenon, but in some cases were even tem- porarily granted the power to participate themselves. The list includes bishops, medical doctors, scholars like Joseph Campbell, and Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society. Certainly an effect so well documented, and so much at variance with our usual concepts of physical reality, deserves careful consideration.
"Probably the best Western materials on fire-walking are the bulletins by Price (1936) and Brown (1938) from the University of London on fire walking conducted in England under scientific auspices in 1935 and 1937. These reports contain extensive bibliographies, besides thorough accounts of the firewalks supported by pictures. McDougall himself witnessed the 1935 tests where Kuda Bux walked a twenty-foot trench four times without any hurt or blistering. (This reference is to Prof. Wm. McDougall of Harvard and Duke.) Reports of this feat appeared in Nature (September 21, 28, 1935) and The Lancet (September 28, 1935).
1 ) Bishop Poppo of Hamburg walked through a bonfire dressed in a sheet of wax to prove to the heathen Danes of the power of God.
2) Copres, an Egyptian Christian monk, was unharmed by fire, while his adversary, a Manichean, was burned. St. Francis of Assisi offered to undergo ordeal by fire before the Sultan of Egypt to prove Christianity superior to Mohammadism.
4) Petrus Igneus (Florence 1067) walked between burning pyres.
5) Petrus Bartholomeus (1098) did the same.
6) Queen Emma walked across nine red hot plowshares in Winchester cathedral in 1043.
7) Empress Kunegunde in a trance did the same in Bamberg in 1007.
"Godwin (1968:169-170) gives excellent accounts of fire
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walking with pictures. Godwin (1968:165) states: 'There is no doubt fire-walking began as a religious rite.'
"Fire-walking occurs not only in widely diverse spots such as India, Micronesia, but also in the U.S.A. In 1935, Kuda Bux performed this feat at Rockefeller Center, New York. The only explanation for this mystifying phenomenon is that fire-walkers are either in religious trance, or have been able to achieve a mind concentration of 'onepointedness' during which extraordinary control over the environment can be achieved.
"Eliade (1964:372) notes that in Fiji, shamanistic powers such as walking on hot coals are transmitted by heredity in families. There are numerous western observations of this rite which on occasion includes other members of the tribe and even outsiders. Insensibility to fire has been documented in numerous Polynesian prophets.
"One of the earliest reliable accounts of fire-walking is given by Lang (1901:270ff) who devotes a chapter full of references to it in various localities in the Pacific.
"Fire walking in Ceylon has been the subject of magazine articles (Feinberg, L. Atlantic Monthly, May, 1959) and (Gilbert Grosvenor National Geographic, April, 1966). Each of these accounts is well authenticated by Westerners, with illustrations".
In NAC's New Zealand 2:1:p.8-9, (Dec. 1975), - (Ed. Note: This is the complimentary house organ on the New Zealand National Aircraft Corporation's domestic flights) -- There is an article by Joan Ellams on "The Firewalkers of Beqa" from which we copy:
Without coming to any apparent harm members of the Sawau tribe have been walking across searing hot boulders for generations. And the scientific 'experts' are still scratching their heads. Any number of suggestions have been put forward as to how it's done, but up to now the whole thing remains as mysterious as ever.
The ceremony springs from a fable and has no religious significance. Those taking part do not spend their time before the
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event either in prayer or in contemplation; they sit together in a small leafy hut and chat about their impending walk across the 'lovo' (oven).
The only rules laid down for success are that two weeks before the event those taking part segregate themselves completely from all females and leave any form of coconut out of their diet. They believe implicitly that failure to observe this taboo renders the culprit liable to severe burns.
Roughly, the ritual is divided into the following parts: first, the preparation of the pit. This is some three to four meters wide, and one to two deep. It is lined with large river stones and a huge log fire is built over them, not less than six to eight hours before the ceremony. It has been suggested that the stones quickly lose their heat, but examination has shown that this is not so. They are normal, fine-grained, igneous rock and retain heat for a considerable time.
Just before the heating time is up, the chief and tribal priest silently lead the 10 or 12 men around the circumference of the pit. They are very careful to keep their eyes averted as they are forbidden to look at the stones before they actually step on them. Their black fuzzy hair and dark skins glisten with coconut oil and around their waists are long, colourful skirts of dyed pandanus leaves. Their regalia is completed with garlands of flowers around their necks and coronets of leaves in their hair.
Then the chief gives final directions to the men of the village for the preparation of the firewalkers' arena. Armed with long poles, loops of strong green vines lashed to the ends, young men clear the burning logs from the stones. They chant in unison 'O-vulo-vulo' while they heave on the vines. A long tree-fern trunk called Waqa-bala-bala, said to contain the spirit god, is then laid across the pit, after which a large vine is dragged across the stones to level them in preparation for the walkers.
The chief takes a few trial steps on the stones to test their firmness and then calls for bundles of leaves and long swamp grass to be placed around the edge of the pit.
Those too close at hand step quickly back from the edge, for the air above the white stones shimmers with the intensity of the heat.
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At last all is ready and as the chief gives a great shout of 'Vulo 0' the firewalkers burst from their place of concealment and trotting in single file approach the pit.
They walk quickly but firmly across the stones. They show no signs of flinching or appear to be affected by the heat in any way. When the leader reaches the point at which he entered, a sudden shout goes up and the waiting attendants hurl bundles of leaves and grass on to the stones in the arena. The group huddle in the center of the pit with their arms around each other and amidst volumes of steam from smouldering leaves, chant a wild, passionate song.
Around the ankle of each of the walkers is a band of tinder dry tree-fern leaves and it is significant that although a handkerchief tossed on to the stones will burst into flames, this band of fern leaves does not ignite. These bands are carefully taken off and buried in the oven together with four special baskets of roots called visili. After four days have passed the roots are recovered from the oven by the firewalkers and are ground up and mixed with water. Dalo (taro) roots are then cooked in the liquid and eaten by those who took part. It is after this that the ceremony is finally considered complete.
Becla is on the New Zealand dependency of Fiji. The article contains two photographs of the firewalk.
Godwin (1968:145-71) devotes a very complete chapter, including half-a-dozen photographs and his own eye-witness account to incidents of fire-walking on several continents.
Concerning the ability of the adept Home to control fire, Susy Smith (1973:102-3) reports:
By any standard, Adare's account is fantastic. He declared that when controlled by spirits, the entranced Home went to the fireplace, poked up the coals, and putting his hand in, drew out a hot burning ember about twice the size of an orange. This he carried about the room to show off.
Adare continues: We all examined it. He then put it back in the fireplace and showed us his hands; they were not in the least blackened or scorched ... then kneeling down, he placed his face right among the burning coals, moving it about as though bathing it in water ... Presently, he took the same lump of coal he had previously handled and came over to us,
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blowing upon it to make it brighter. He then walked slowly round the table, and said, 'I want to see which of you will be the best subject. Ah! Adare will be the easiest, because he has been most with Dan.' Mr. Jencken held out his hand, saying, 'Put it in mine.' Horne said, 'No, no, touch it and see.' He touched it with the tip of his finger and burnt himself. Home then held it within four or five inches of Mr. Saal's and Mr. Hurt's hands, and they could not endure the heat. He came to me and said, 'Now, if you are not afraid, hold out your hand.' I did so, and having made two rapid passes over my hand, he placed the coal in it. I must have held it for half a minute, long enough to have burned my hand fearfully but the coal felt scarcely warm. Home then took it away, laughed, and seemed much pleased.
A statement quoted from the Countess M. de Pomar said that another person present, Lady Comm, extended her hands, saying, 'I will take it without fear, for I have faith.' She held the coal for at least a minute without feeling any pain, and it was then placed on a sheet of paper which immediately began to blaze and had a great hole burned in it.
The ever careful Richet (1923:487) reports of Home:
The same astounding experiment was repeated on April 3d at Astley House. This seance was remarkable; it is corroborated by Mr. S. C. Hall. A lighted coal was placed on Mr. Hall's head, and his white hair was combed over the coal, and left four or five minutes: the hair was not burned: a few moments later this coal was so hot that one could not bear one's face near it.
Puharich (1962:87-88) reports:
There are many contemporary instances of individuals who have gone through the ordeal of fire. Joseph Campbell, the eminent scholar, related to me that he experienced fire-walking in the great Shinto temple in Kyoto, Japan. He was observing monks performing the fire - walking ceremony, standing in his bare feet while the ceremony was going on. He relates that one of the monks took him by the hand and requested him to walk over the glowing coals. Following the monk and stepping quickly, and as he thought, lightly, over the coals, he was able to pass through the long pit without suffering any burns. In fact, he says that the sensation on the soles of his feet was one of coolness, rather than of heat.
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For an up-to-date example of firewalking in America, we have the case of Vernon Craig of Wooster, Ohio, who in August 1979 walked a 25 foot firebed heated to 1,500 degrees in Hollywood, to break his previous record of 1,494 degrees in 1976. The Los Angeles Times (August 2, 1979) part 1, page 20, carries a photograph of this feat.
For a more naturalistic explanation of firewalking, we reproduce part of a letter of one J. Walker, writing in the Scientific American: 237:2:131 (Aug. 1977):
Of all the demonstrations of the Leidenfrost effect, the most remarkable to me is when people walk on hot coals or lava. The Guinness Book of World Records describes a 25-foot walk over coals measured to be at 1,200 degrees F. Unverified stories of longer walks constantly emerge from the South Pacific and the Far East. In none of these cases is there any reason to invoke unusual powers. Although somehow shutting off pain information to the brain, having a deep-seated religious faith, or just being dumb enough to try the stunt might help, the primary protection to the walker's feet comes from the natural moisture on them. Each step places parts of a foot in contact with the coals, and moisture at those places partially vaporizes to give momentary protection. Sweating between footfalls can replenish some of the moisture, but eventually most of it is depleted and the foot begins to warm up perceptibly. The walk usually ends then unless the walker has an unusual tolerance for pain. A thick layer of ash and heavily calloused feet might also lengthen the walk somewhat, but running does not help because the feet are then slammed down into the coals.
Having always been amazed by stories about people walking on hot coals, and having now become a firm believer in the Leidenfrost effect, I set up a five-foot bed of hot wood coals for such a walk.
I had to try it myself. Clutching my faded copy of Halliday and Resnick's Physics in one hand, I strode over the five feet of hot coals. Apparently I am a true believer in physics. I have to report, however, that my feet did get a bit hot. On well, I am almost a true believer.
Another naturalistic explanation of fire control comes from Puharich (1962:88) who reports an article by Dr. M. R. Coe in
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True for Aug. 1957 in which he was able (with suitable precautions) to handle very hot objects briefly, due, he claims to "microglobules" caused by sweat "on the surface of the skin" which serves as a heat barrier.
In The Odic Force, Reichenbach describes od (or pranic energy) as "feeling cool"; (cf. Sri Aurobindo's "cool wind" in Satprem). Now od, according to Reichenbach, is produced by any chemical reaction. Can it be that fire, which produces much od (pranic energy) can be the ultimate cause of cooling the feet of adepts in fire-walking?
Powell (1965:160) in accounting for firewalking, declares: "The feat of handling fire without injury may be performed by covering the hand with the thinnest layer of etheric substance, so manipulated as to be impervious to heat. . . "
He also accounts for psychic heat, thus: (ibid): "The production of fire is also within the resources of the astral plane... There are at least three ways in which this could be done: (1) to set up and maintain the requisite rate of vibration, when combustion must ensue. . .[no mention of the other two ways in the OIO book - JAG]
3.32) Psychic Heat
While those not in a state of grace may walk on fire, the production of psychic heat seems confined to true mystics and yogis; indeed, there is considerable reason for believing that it is a "siddhi." While the production of such heat is mentioned by Western mystics Richard Rolle, George Fox, and ascribed to Good King Wenceslas, it is in the East that it flourishes.
Gaddis (1967:165ff) devotes some time to psychic heat, citing Father Thurston on a number of saints who radiated so much heat that it was noticeable to others. This heat appeared to be generated near the heart. Padre Pio, the nearly contemporary Italian saint is said to have broken clinical thermometers in this manner.
Gaddis also points out that eastern mystics exhibit the same evidence, called tumo, whose development depends upon "visualization of fire and certain breathing exercises at high altitudes."
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It is always helpful for western minds to have some explanation of rationale and method, so, for what it is worth, we append the following quotations from Evans-Wentz (1958:1 56ff):
The first of these is known as tummo signifying a peculiar bodily heat or warmth... generated by yogic means .... The word, tummo, refers to a secret practice of extracting prana from the inexhaustible store of pranic energy in Nature and storing it in the human body-battery, then employing it to transmute the generative fluid into a subtle fiery energy whereby a psycho-physical heat is produced... (p. 157) The yogin must employ every elaborate visualizations, meditations, postures, breathings, directing of thought, training of the psychic nerve system, and physical exercises... It is highly desirable .... to obtain initiation and guidance from a master of the art. A lengthy probationary period is usually necessary... The yogin must also observe the strictest sexual continence, for it is chiefly upon the yogically transmuted sex energy that proficiency in tummo depends.
On pages 171-209 there are very detailed instructions for the practice of the psychic-heat yoga, which include posturing the body, calm and forced breathing, and meditative mental imagery. It is sufficient here to know that such accounts exist, and that they are compatible with the states intuitively attained by Western saints who possessed no such detailed instructions.
The specifics of the sheet-drying ceremonies are reported by Puharich (1962:89):
The candidate is taken out on a frozen river, and several holes are cut in the ice at a distance one from another. The candidate is required to dive through one hole, pass under the ice, and come up at the next hole; come out, dive again, and come out the third hole, and so on, all together nine times. In Tibet the candidate for initiation undergoes a similar trial, sitting by a hole cut in a frozen lake. He sits absolutely naked and watersoaked sheets are thrown over his body. Because of the extreme cold, the sheets freeze immediately. The candidate must then generate enough body heat, called Tumo, to dry out the sheet. Success in this test is measured by the number of sheets which the candidate can dry. Some candidates have been reported to dry as many as nine or ten sheets under these frigid environmental conditions.
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The thermal powers of yogis are detailed by Swami Sivananada Radha (1971:155-6):
1) A yogi generates psychic heat in the body through the practice of Bhastrike Pranayama.
2) He can bear extremes of climates without discomfort.
3) A yogi covers his body with a sheet dipped in very cold water, and dries it by the yoga heat given off by his body. A few adepts have dried as many as thirty sheets in a single night.
4) A perfect yogi cremates his body in the end by the yogic heat generated by his power of yoga.
Considering that the evaporation of 1 gram of water takes 540 gram calories (to say nothing about any freezing or temperature elevation during the process), and that wetting a sheet adds about 1 kilogram of water to it, the drying of such a sheet would require 540 kilogram calories of heat or an amount sufficient to raise 540 liters of water 1 degree centigrade. This is about half a ton of water and, hence, represents a very considerable amount of heat.
The Eastern explanation for this effect is that psychic heat is evolved from the kundalini fire as it ascends the chakras. Since there is a wide occult literature on kundalini, this is not the place to go further into such explanations. One might note in passing that such an explanation, if valid, would also account for the heat necessary to produce the mysterious "SHC" deaths to which we now turn.
3.33) Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC)
Spontaneous Human Combustion is a rare and grisly experience in which the victim burns to death internally. Generally, the subject is female, over fifty, sedentary, often alcoholic or despondent, and alone. A puzzling aspect is that while the fire is hot enough to reduce most of the body, including large bones to ashes, typically the room including nearby objects is not set afire. In a typical case (Fate, Jan. 1978:69):
Of Mrs. Reeser all that remained were a few small pieces of charred backbone, a skull which, strangely, had shrunk uniformly to the size of an orange, and her wholly untouched left
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foot still wearing its slipper. The heat necessary for such damage had to be incredible, yet the room was little affected. The ceiling, draperies and walls from a point exactly four feet above the floor were coated with smelly oily soot... The carpet where the chair had rested was not even burned through...
For another similar example see Fate Apr. 1977:66ff. In this case, Dr. Bentley, an aged cripple, was completely incinerated, except for his right leg. The bathrobe did not burn, and there was "a sweet odor, like perfume" in the physician's room in place of the stench one would expect. In Fate (Dec. 1978, p. 113) letters tell of the similar end of Mr. Krook, a character in Dickens Bleak House, and mention a book by Michael Harrison Fire from Heaven (Pan Books, London, 1977), which details more modern English cases.
The Wallaces (1977:434) list the following cases of SHC: Countess Cornelia de Barde, Mr. H., Mrs. Patrick Rooney, Euspasia Johnson, Phyllis Newcombe, Mary Reiser, Anna Martin, and Billy T. Peterson.
Persinger and La Frieniere (1977:107) report:
This phenomenon not only challenges our assumptions concerning the combustion characteristics of human material, but evokes interesting problems concerning heat and matter. In classic cases of SHC, the victim generally is seen to 'burst into flames' and then quickly burn to ashes. It is claimed, in such episodes, that even the fires of the crematorium could not do the job as efficiently within the particular time interval involved. Correlative phenomena of SHC are also interesting and puzzling. While the body of the SHC victim can be severely charred or reduced to carbon, the bed sheets or clothes may be untouched or only mildly singed.
Some cases designated as SHC instances were witnessed by groups of people while others are inferred following discovery of charred remains of the victim. Of the seventy-four cases of SHC included in this subcategory, the majority of victims were late middle-aged or older. In thirty of the reports which contained the specific age information of the subject, 90 percent were greater than fifty years of age. Sixty-five of the cases specified the sex of the victim, who was female 74 percent of the time. Severe burning episodes in which other factors could possibly be established or involved, were not included as SHCs.
(page 163)
Less than 5 percent of the cases involved poltergeist-like correlative events. The spatial distribution of SHC reports in the United States is shown in Figure 34. Sample cases involved:
1 .02 March, 1773/Coventry, England/fifty-year-old female; SHC.
2. 01 August, 1869/Paris, France/SHC; floor burned around body; victim's bed clothes not burned.
3. 12 May, 1890/Ayer, Massachusetts/female SHC; clothes not scorched.
4. 16 December, 1906/London, England/widow, SHC; sitting in bedroom; clothes not burned.
5. January and February, 1905/parts of England/three SHCs within month.
6. 30 July, 1938/Norfolk Broads, England/SHC; woman on cruiser at time of incident; clothes burnt.
7. 18 September, 1952/(Algiers) New Orleans, Louisiana/SHC; man.
8. 18 May, 1957/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania/SHC, sixty-eight year old female.
9. - October, 1964/Dallas, Texas/woman, seventy-five years old; burns, car not touched.
10. - January, 1968/Ballinger, Texas/SHC; house with possible history of SHC.
Gaddis (1967:217-70) with his usual thoroughness devotes five chapters to the SHC phenomenon. His material is far too extensive to incorporate here. He quotes Dr. Jacobs (ibid:219) on some conclusions:
1 . SHC occurs only in living humans;
2. Generally an older person;
3. More often a woman than a man;
4. Subject usually alone at time;
5. Subject has led an idle life;
6. Subject corpulent or intemperate.
7. Generally there was a light or inflammable substance in room.
8. The combustion was rapid, completed in seven hours.[?]
9. Room filled with thick vapor; walls covered with soot.
10. Trunk and torso destroyed; head and legs often remained.
11. SHC generally occurs in winter and in northern regions.
Gaddis gives an excellent description of the combustion process (ibid:220), and estimates that there are 40 females to every male victim; he also points out the presence of alcohol in practically all cases. He also gives brief descriptions of over 20 SHC cases.
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It seems evident that the SHC starts inside the body, perhaps in the vicinity of the lower spine. (Believers in kundalini fire will find this point of interest.) There are four times as many cases in December and January as in warmer months (Persinger and Lafreniere 1977:118). Sanderson (1978:71) believes this is due to overprotection against cold, causing sweating, which releases the vitamin B-10 (inositol), a phosphagen which is easily combustible.
Rama (1978:449ff) devoted a chapter to yogic methods of "casting off the body," which include a) allowing oneself to freeze to death while in samadhi, b) retaining the breath under water, c) consciously opening the fontanelle at top of head, d) taking the body of another (p. 454ff), and e) spontaneous human combustion, about which Rama (11978:452) remarks:
There is another very rare way of casting off the body. By meditating on the solar plexus, the actual internal flame of fire burns the body in a fraction of a second, and everything is reduced to ashes. This knowledge was imparted by Yama, the king of death to his beloved disciple Nachiketa, in the Kathopanishad. Now all over the world, instances of spontaneous combustion are often heard about, and people wonder about such occurrences. But the ancient scriptures, such as Mahakala Nidhi explain this method systematically.
3.34) The "Cold-Wind" Effect
Witnesses at seances and hauntings have often reported that just before the phenomena take place they feel a "cold-wind."
Elsewhere (1974:22) we report: "Tyrrell (1961:70) notes another fairly frequent characteristic of apparitions is that the percipient experiences a feeling of cold. He comments: 'One can see no reason for these cold feelings.' It is very surprising that a man of Tyrrell's scientific background could have missed the significance of this effect. Something is obviously drawing energy from the immediate environment, and this energy (heat) loss is immediately felt as cold."
If this is true, then we have an explanation of where the energy to produce the effect comes from. It is apparently taken out of the air (and perhaps the participants); and hence, they feel this energy loss as a temperature drop.
(page 165)
Schmeidler (1973) reported that when psychic Ingo Swann was asked to change the temperature inside a distant thermos, significant continuous changes on automatic temperature recorders were repeatedly produced. She states (ibid:338):
A by-product of this hypothesis ... offers a ready explanation for the 'cold breeze' so often described in seances in which physical effects are produced. The coldness might represent an energy loss in one area which compensates for the extra energy at work in another.
Susy Smith (1975:28-9) discusses other aspects of the Swann test:
Ingo Swann is a gifted psychic and also a talented new-age artist. His extraordinary psi abilities include being able to go out of his body at will. He is very cognizant of the needs of the parapsychologists to evaluate phenomena statistically and has cooperated in a number of laboratory experiments. Dr. Schmeidler tells of laboratory experimentation with Ingo at City College where PK changes in continuous, automatic recordings of graphite become hotter or cooler from three to ten feet away - were repeatedly produced. Experimental controls included insulating the target thermistor in a thermos that was 25 feet from the subject, and counterbalancing 'hot' versus 'cold' instructions in a rigid preset design.
Results of the testing were that seven of Ingo's ten scores are statistically significant, and five are highly significant. Each of the significant differences is in the direction specified by instructions; that is, the recordings show more change toward hotter temperatures in the test periods with 'make it hotter' instructions than in the test periods with 'make it colder' instructions.
Ingo's scores demonstrate a significant PK effect with the procedure used, although few of the changes were dramatic; the maximum temperature change within a single forty-five second test period only once was greater than one degree.
Smith (1975:224) says of the psychic Rudy Schneider who was then being investigated by the psychic researcher, Price:
However, there was one manifestation he was sure they could not have produced - indeed, they would probably not have
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thought of trying to produce - and that was a recorded loss of temperature in the locked room filled with sitters. The thermometer went down eleven degrees, and this was very encouraging to Price as he had observed the same dramatic effect at other seances and knew it was a typical phenomenon.
There are other rarer thermal effects of paranormal powers, but we wish to concentrate on the most documented. It is evident that in every chemical reaction, (and every biophysical function is a chemical reaction), there is either a net gain or loss in thermal energy; apparently this principle applies to paranormal effects as well as ordinary ones.
It is obvious that we are here in the presence of the same kind of "discrepancy" which led Einstein to abandon Newtonian physics and discover the theory of relativity. In short, present views about the reactive nature of mankind as a creature, are no more adequate to explain his relation to ultimate reality than was the ether theory of light able to explain the constancy of its speed. We have enough evidence in firewalking to attest that under special conditions man has the power to effect psychic transformation of energy, and this understanding is far more important in the long run than the quaint antics of playing with fire.
3.4) Stigmata
The Stigmata is a very rare but well documented phenomenon consisting of the marks of the crucified Jesus on the body of the pious respondent. St. Francis of Assisi was the first and greatest stigmatist, and we can do no better than listen to his biographer.
Bishop (1974:168-9) says:
He was granted his apotheosis an hour before dawn on 14 September 1224, a holy day in the Franciscan calendar. It was the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. Francis lay in one of the rocky interstices of the mountain caves. The spot is now the Chapel of the Stigmata. As Brother Leo reported, Francis prayed and was assured that God would permit him to share His Son's sufferings.
(page 167)
And the fervor of his devotion increased so much that he totally transformed himself into Him who let himself be crucified through abundance of love . . . Suddenly appeared to him a seraph with six wings, bearing enfolded in them a very beautiful image of a crucified man, his hands and feet outflung as on a cross, with features clearly resembling those of Lord Jesus. Two wings covered the seraph's head; two, descending to his feet, veiled the rest of his body; the other two were unfolded for flight.
The vision faded; and Francis discovered on his hands and feet the marks of nails, and on his right side a blood-dripping wound, such as he had just seen in vision.
His hands and feet seemed to be pierced in the middle by nails, whose heads, protruding out of the flesh, were in the palms of the hands and on the upper part of the feet, while the points emerged from the back of the hands and the soles of the feet. They seemed to be bent back, clinched, so that one could easily have passed a finger, as in a ring, under the bent part, which came completely out of the flesh. The heads of the nails were black and round. Similarly, on his right side appeared the wound of a lance thrust, not scabbed but red and bloody. Afterwards blood often dripped from the holy breast of Saint Francis, staining his robe and his drawers. Thus when his comrades noticed - he had told them nothing - that he kept his hands and feet covered and that he could not put his feet to the ground, and that when they washed his gown and drawers for him they found them all bloody, they were certain that he had manifestly imprinted on his hands and feet and even on his side the image and resemblance of the crucified Christ.
Since the presence of the stigmata could hardly be dissembled, Francis decided to acknowledge them, for the edification of his close friends and followers. He exhibited them first to Leo, who acted as his nurse and bathed the oozing wound in the side. Saint Bonaventure says that more than fifty, among them Pope Alexander IV, were privileged to see and touch the holy imprints. But Francis was shy of revealing his sweet torture to the general. He kept his hands and feet bandaged, and hid himself to wash his wounds. When someone sought to kiss his hands he would extend only the tips of his fingers, or his sleeve.
(page 168)
There have been a few other cases; those before Francis' time were doubtful; since however, there have been some validated instances.
Bishop (1974:171-2) notes:
We can hardly accept these cases - and some others less decisive - as establishing an 'influence,' or setting a precedent for Francis to follow consciously. They offer no traceable connection; they occurred at a great distance, and lack the Franciscan mystical spirit. All contemporary writers regarded Francis's stigmatization as something unique, unheard of. But the publicity attending his spiritual adventure inspired a swarm of imitators, created a vogue. A modern investigator turned up 31 cases by the end of the thirteenth century, 22 in the fourteenth, 25 in the fifteenth - 321 in all, before 1894. Of these 40 were men, 281 women. All modern critics agree that the investigator was too lenient in admitting doubtful or insufficiently documented examples; but on the other hand there were probably many obscure cases that were never documented at all.
There was Theresa Neumann of Konnersreuth in Bavaria, who first displayed the stigmata on Good Friday of 1926. She was a visionary, possessed of a dual or multiple personality. There is Padre Pic, a Capuchin friar of Foggia, who was apparently still living in 1955. The wound in his side is said to have yielded a cupful of blood daily. There was a case in Montreal, some fifty years ago. The eminent physician Jonathan Campbell Meakins, physician-in-chief of the Royal victoria Hospital and president of the American College of Physicians, told me that he examined the stigmatized woman in the hospital and could find no material explanation of her state. There were no doubt others, protected from reporters and photographers by families unwilling to divulge secrets, whether alarming or precious.
When Yogananda (1977:422) visited Theresa Neumann, she showed him healed nail-hole scars in both sides of both hands.
Susy Smith (1975:52ff) has a fine chapter on "Stigmatization" from which we reproduce the case of Louise Lateau:
(page 169)
One of the most exhaustively studied stigmatics in the history of this inexplicable phenomenon is Louise Lateau, a Belgian peasant girl whose case attracted more than one hundred doctors and many eminent Catholic churchmen to the tiny village of Bois d'Haine in the province of Hainault. She was born there in 1850 and lived a relatively ordinary life until she was 18. Then, after she suffered for a time from an ill-defined illness involving intense neuralgic pains, the stigmata first appeared on April 24, 1868. Bleeding wounds showed in the palms of her hands and on her feet, as if nails had been driven through them. Blood flowed from her side as from a spear wound and droplets of blood circled her brow. Her stigmata appeared between midnight and 1:00 a.m. every Friday morning and lasted for 24 hours. By every Saturday, the stigmata were dry and painless and remained so until the next Thursday midnight when they again began to bleed and hurt.
None of the doctors of churchmen who examined Louise ever had an explanation for the phenomena nor did they find any indication of trickery. Finally, at the request of religious authorities, she spent twenty weeks under the supervision of a Dr. Lefebvre, an eminent Louvain specialist in nervous diseases. During this time, the fall of 1868, many of his medical colleagues also examined the girl and witnessed the appearance of the stigmata at regular intervals.
A few years later a Dr. Warlomont, who believed Louise herself might be inducing the bleeding in some manner, conducted further experiments, sealing Louise's hands in gloves each Thursday. Nevertheless, when the seals were broken on Friday afternoon, her hands were found to have bled as usual. Dr. Warlomont then devised a glass cylinder in which her arm was sealed in such a way that it was impossible to get at her hand. When her hand was thus encased in the cylinder on Thursday, January 21, 1875, there was no sign of bleeding; but on Friday when the apparatus was examined in the presence of medical witnesses, some of them anti-clerical skeptics, the hand was found to have bled.
Smith (1975:56) concludes:
Father Thurston found certain similarities in nearly all the cases: first there is a background of illness, then a vivid realization and concentration on the wounds of Christ for some time before any bleeding appears. Some of the stigmatists have
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ardently desired them, feeling that it brought them closer to Christ to share his suffering. 'Whenever we have the opportunity of studying the subject's frame of mind,' Father Thurston says, 'we see the intensity of the mental impression. One would be such as is revealed to us in some of these stigmatics.'
Rawcliffe (1952:243ff) devotes a chapter to the stigmata. While generally an unbeliever, his account is factual, and contains excellent sources. He cannot either deny or account for some of the instances. He follows this report with another fine chapter on possible psychosomatic causes.
On the other side is Montague (1950:79) who gives 19 signs of the physical phenomena of mysticism, very prominent of which is the stigmata, to which this orthodox author gives much attention.
Smith (1975:56-7) also describes the case of a modern Protestant girl:
The most recent case, Cloretta Robertson - of the Easter bleeding syndrome - had stigmata just as many saints have had it; but she does not conform to the pattern at all. The 10-year-old Protestant daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Robertson of Oakland, experienced stigmata over a 19-day period before Easter in 1972, but as far as has been published, has not experienced it since; and, although she bled, she had no actual wounds.
In this case the girl had been much affected by watching a story about the Crucifixion on television.
The Wallaces (1977:435) list the following as having the stigmata: St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Peter de Casca, St. Veronica Juliana, Anna Emmerich, Maria von Morl, Louise Lateau, St. Gemma Calgani, Padre Pio, and Therese Neumann.
Smith (1975:56) reports:
Stigmatist St. Veronica Giuliani Of the Capuchin Order, who lived from 1660 to 1727, seemed to be the victim of a sadist because her stigmata always opened and bled at the command of Father Crivelli ...
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The best known modern stigmatist is the late Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, Italy, the only well-attested example of complete stigmatization in a male since the time of St. Francis.
Father Thurston has accounts of him from eyewitnesses. One witness was Monsignor Kenealy, Archbishop of Simla, who visited him in 1920.
Certainly if proof is wanted that the mind affects the body, there is no more dramatic illustration of it than stigmatization. That specific and bloody images visualized by the mind can be realized on the body indicates beyond doubt that it is the mind which produces anomalies such as disease which are then externalized on the body.
It should be pointed out that the stigmata are exclusively a phenomenon of Christian mysticism, - the only effect which is not found in Oriental mysticism. We hazard the guess that this may be due, at least in part, to the unique personal love of Christian mystics for the body of Jesus.
One may point out that all of the powers so far considered from 3.0 to 3.3 involved some empery over time and space, - in essence the ability of the mind to dominate these variables at will. If consciousness breaks out of its space-time barrier, all of these remarkable effects are possible, and indeed most of them are obvious consequences. It may be useful, however, to indicate to those naive in physics that a speedup in chemical reaction time will support spontaneous combustion, as a slowing down of time will support greater heat dissipation.
By contrast, the next set of four powers relate to the developing independence of the body from that of being a reactive animal form, to that of being a temple of the spirit, and hence increasingly free of physical constraints.
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3.5) Electromagnetic Properties: Prana
In Man, God and Universe I. K. Taimni (1969:383) declares that "Prana is the material instrument of the Second Logos or
Vishnu. It enables raw material created by the Third Logos to be worked into living vehicles which have in them the capacity for growth." Prana, therefore, is bioenergy, known under other names in the West, such as "od," "orgone," and "mana." It tends to give off electrons and photons in electrical and chemical reactions, and this property accounts both for the healthful "negative ions" and for the bioluminescence caused by photon emission in living energy exchanges.
In section 2.3 we described the occult hypothesis about the etheric body. Prana is the substance constituting this body, which sometimes becomes visible or nearly so due to the emanation of pranic energy in the form of auras. Without necessarily adopting the eastern views of the etheric body, we will use the concept of prana as a useful stereotype for the bioenergy which has been given such diverse names in the West.
Odic or pranic energy seems to have some "big-brother" relationship with electromagnetic energy and ionization; in particular the former seems to produce the latter under favorable circumstances. There are four areas of interest: luminosity, auras, magnetic effects and electrical effects. We shall look into each in turn. A further area is Kirlian photography, but these phenomena have received so much attention in the literature, (Moss 1974, Krippner 1975, Krippner and Villoldo 1976, Krippner and Rubin, 1973), that we will merely incorporate this material by reference.
Wilson (1971:536ff) describes the early experiments of Baron von Reichenbach and others:
He tried magnetising other substances; crystals were an obvious choice. These affected his patients in the same way. He then tried the effect of unmagnetized crystals, and to his surprise, these also worked. He bought a huge crystal, and drew it gently down the patient's arm; she felt a pleasant sensation like a cool breeze. Drawn upward, it produced a warmth that was not entirely pleasant. He tried it on a fellow experimental scientist, and to his surprise, this completely healthy man unmistakably felt the action of the crystal. The obvious inference was that magnets and crystals both conduct electromagnetic force; but this quickly proved incorrect. So what was the force they both seemed to possess? Reichenbach decided to call it 'odic force' or odyle. And as he went on to try more and more substances - zinc, sulphur,
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alum, salt, copper - he found that all seemed to have some degree of odic force, although the colors were often quite distinctive. His experiments with the 'odic force' of precious and semi-precious stones seemed to confirm the occult and alchemical tradition about their nature, although this aspect did not interest Reichenbach in the least, for there was nothing of the occultist about him.
Human beings possess odic force in an unusual degree, he discovered; it can be seen as a kind of light streaming from the finger ends. And not only by 'sick sensitives;' Reichenbach discovered that about a third of all people seem to be more or less sensitive to the odic force.
Von Reichenbach (1851 r 1965:41) says of the odic manifestation:
Some sensitives, esp. sick persons, can see a flame issuing from the ends of a magnet; it emits a red light which acts upon photo negs; it may be concentrated by a lens, but is without heat; similarity to aurora is noticed.
With regard to crystals and od (ibid:82) he declares:
Crystals also emit this force, mainly at the axes; it does not attract iron but will attract the hand of a sensitive, does not affect a magnet nor induce current; it may be charged by contact.
He also notes, (ibid: 132)
The sun's rays also carry this odic power; affecting sensitives; the outer ends of the spectrum octave exert the most force, the higher wavelengths feel cool, the lower ones feel hot; the moon also possesses this power; heat is a source of it, so is friction and light.
Further he notes that odic light increases (like ionization) with a decrease in atmospheric pressure (ibid:381).
We quote Wilson (1971:538ff) on the work of Reich:
In the year 1939 an eminent Freudian psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, startled and enraged his colleagues by announcing that he had discovered a new form of energy unknown to physics:
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the vital energy which regulates the health of living creatures. The case of Wilhelm Reich is so strange that it is worth considering at some length; it recalls Reichenbach in many ways.
Reich rediscovered the 'astral light' and called it orgone energy. This is a blue energy which permeates the whole universe, and which forms a field around living beings - Reichenbach's odyle, Pheobe Payne's 'aura.' The reason that the physical contact between child and mother relieves anxiety, for example, is that their orgone fields unite like two drops of water.
In the sexual orgasm, orgone energy becomes concentrated in the genitals; it is the tingling feeling experienced in sexual excitement. Living matter is made up of 'bions,' which are tiny cells pulsating with orgone energy.
Objects could become charged with this blue energy, and would then influence an electroscope. He finally concluded that this new, unknown energy comes from the sun, and that organic substances have the power to absorb this energy and retain it.
He constructed a box to prevent the energy escaping. It had to have metal walls - because organic matter absorbs orgone energy - and layers of organic matter outside, which would absorb any energy that managed to get through the metal. He observed bluish light around the dishes of the culture in this box. And then, to his amazement, he observed the same blue light in the box when the cultures had been removed.
But perhaps the most accessible work on Reich is that of his biographer Mann (1973). Since this book is recent and available, we will incorporate it by reference. Reich felt that this orgone energy could heal sickness, including cancer, and ran into trouble with the U. S. government regarding orgone energy as a cure for cancer, was imprisoned, and died there in 1957.
Summarizing the work of Reichenbach, Reich and others, Reich's biographer, Mann (1973:116) says of the energy known as od or orgone, that it is non-electrical, but
1) seems to be associated with magnets,
2) is polarized,
3) is released from the fingertips,
4) is related to breathing, and can be passed by touching,
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5) comes originally from the sun, and
6) is absorbed by water and can affect plant life.
Another researcher who found that sensitives could see the pranic light associated with magnetic fields (as did those of von Reichenbach) was Coblenz (1954:59). He also reports (ibid.: 223), that there are instances of light emission from the fingers of automatic writers.
We guess that pranic energy is somehow associated with the oxygen atom, and this is why it is so easily stored in water, and in the human body (which is mostly water), and why it is inspired into the body with each breath.
Mann (1973:150ff) devotes a whole chapter to this bioplasmic energy, giving an excellent summary of human electromagnetic energies and auras. He reports (p. 150) on the work of Dr. W. W. Coblenz who in 1954 wrote Man's Place in a Superphysical World ,in which he studied the effects of magnets on the etheric body, reporting: "The magnets had an aura which operated to interfere with the tests on auric light emanating from my body." Another investigator, J.C. Maby in the 1966 book The Physical Properties of Radiesthesia, summarized the work of the masters Mesmer, Charcot, Reichenbach, as well as more recent investigators such as Albert Abrams, W. E. Boyd, Ruth Drown, and George de la Warr. He believed that the unknown energies studied by these people were physical and supernatural. He noted that the radiations from the human being are stronger when the person is emotionally aroused, and invented a machine to pick up this energy release.
Mann quotes Maby (p. 151) as follows:
I find that an imaginative person can project energy capable of affecting either the radio electrometer or a radioactive preparation in conjunction with a Geiger counter . . . by visual concentration alone ... in a way that suggests waves ... in the micro-Hertzian region of the spectrum ...
Krippner (1975:175) describes the research of Prof. H. S. Burr, late of Yale University, who tried to understand electrodynamic biological energy fields by measuring the difference in voltage between two points on the surface of a living organism:
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Burr referred to the electrodynamic fields identified by these measurements as 'life-fields' or 'L-fields.' Noting that L-fields could be used to assess drug effects and the depth of hypnosis, Burr stated: 'L-field measurements are not only useful in diagnosing local conditions; they can also be used to assess the general state of the body as a whole, for these pure voltage differences - independent of any current flow or changes in skin resistance - reveal the state of the whole human force field . . . And, as the force field extends beyond the surface of the skin, it is sometimes possible to measure field-voltages with the electrodes a short distance from the surface of the skin - not in contact with it.' This indicated to Burr that the L-field was a 'true' field that was measured.
Burr maintained that L-fields help determine the growth of an organism, just as Andrade hypothesized that there was a 'biological organizing model' around each organism.
We have devoted some time to a discussion of pranic energy4 because it appears to be a very useful construct in energy transfers between the psychic realm and ours. Indeed, we may guess that pranic energy is the electricity and magnetism of the astral realm, and this is the reason why it shares so many commonalities with our electromagnetic spectrum. The operation of pranic energy of manifesting in the physical world in living organisms appears to involve the emission of both electrons, (ionization), and photons, (luminescence). We shall now turn our attention to some of these applications.
3.5 1) Luminosity and Auras *
Energy exchanges are associated with chemical and/or electrical reactions, and these may produce free electrons, (ionization), or photons, (light). The more vigorously such a reaction proceeds, more electrons and higher energy photons will be produced. But the production of these two products in turn results in luminosity and auras. So whenever there is a heavy discharge of pranic energy, or any other kind of energy exchange between the etheric and physical bodies (as in illness) such effects may be seen. These phenomena include the auras surrounding saints, transfiguration phenomena, (as in the shining face of Moses and Jesus), and certain signs of morbidity and grave illness in some kinds of sickness.
(page 177)
Arbman (1963:316), a learned Swedish author, whose works are unfortunately rare in the U.S., devoted an entire section of his large work to "The origin and nature of ecstatic psychic light-phenomena," which includes a much fuller discussion of the subject than we have space for here.5
Mystic experience is commonly one of a vision of supernal light. Whiteman, (1961:27ff), commences his book on mystic experience with a chapter entitled "The Vision of Archetypal Light," with many examples of this occurrence. Leuba (1972:255) calls this apprehension of light or luminosity in the surround "photism" (for further details see chapter VI).
Bioluminescence is by no means exclusively a psychic phenomenon. Rare cases of it are reported by Drs. G. M. Gould and E. L. Pyle in their Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (New York: Sydenham Publ. Co. 1937) according to Gaddis (1967:163):
(They) list the following examples: luminous perspiration, two cases of luminous breath, issuing from the mouths of patients shortly before death; two cases of phthisis in which the heads of the victims were surrounded by phosphorescent lights; and a victim of psoriasis who was enveloped in a luminous aura for several days. In another case a woman suffering from cancer of the breast showed a luminosity ...
Gaddis (ibid: 164) also reports an account in Annales des Sciences Psychiques, (July 1905) by one Dr. Charles Fere, who tells of two cases of auras about the heads and hands of two women patients who were hysterical. He also tells of an asthma patient who had a bluish flow emanate from her breasts.
He also notes Fodor's reference (Encyclopedia of Psychic Sciences, p. 209) to the research of Prof. Dubois of luminous wounds in "billious, nervous, red-haired and alcoholic patients." Luciferin and luciferase, constituents of ATP, and utilized by fireflies, were found in the supporations.
Tromp (1949) conducted an exhaustive investigation into electromagnetic effects in and around living organisms.' His chapter on this subject alone contains 286 pages, giving summary reports of many investigators. On pages 22-25 he discusses the
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Gurwitsch effect - (mitogenic radiation in the ultra-violet at 2000 angstroms) in association with the growth of plant and animal tissue. It appears weak and intermittent, being given off at certain critical times in developmental process. He postulates three possible explanations for this radiation: a) oxidation, b) glycolysis (splitting of glucose into lactic acid), and c) proteolysis (breaking down of proteins), all suspected of contributing to the ensuing bioluminescence.
Dingwall (1 926b;1 95) reports of the medium Pallidino that on one occasion she materialized dancing lights like fireflies. "One of these lights actually settled in the palm of M. Omati, an engineer by profession, who was able to examine it carefully. He experienced no sensation of heat, and the surrounding skin was hardly illuminated."
On another occasion (ibid:206) lights appeared "twice over her head, once in her lap, and once at the side of the curtain furtherest from her. They were of three kinds, a steady blue-green light, a yellow light, and a small sparkling light."
Bayless (1973:73ff) devotes a chapter to luminous manifestations. The most common of these are seen at or around the time of death. Also, not rare, are luminous discs and lights during seances. He also discusses self luminous apparitions of the dead. Another excellent source book on mysterious lights is Gaddis (1967) which contains several chapters on this subject.
Hunt and Draper, (1964:184) quote Tesla as follows:
In some instances I have seen all the air around me filled with tongues of living flame. Their intensity, instead of diminishing, increased with time.
This luminous phenomena (sic) still manifest themselves from time to time as when a new idea opening up possibilities strikes me, but they are no longer exciting, being relatively of small intensity. When I close my eyes I invariably observe first a background of very dark uniform blue, not unlike the sky on a clear but starless night. In a few seconds this field becomes animated with innumerable scintillating flakes of green, arranged in several layers and advancing towards me. Then there appears to the right, a beautiful pattern of two systems of parallel and closely spaced lines at right angles to
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one another in all sorts of colors with yellow-green and gold predominating. Immediately thereafter, the lines grow brighter and the whole thing is thickly sprinkled with dots of twinkling light. This picture moves slowly across the field of vision and in about ten seconds vanishes to the left leaving behind a ground of rather unpleasant and inert gray which quickly gives way to a billowing sea of clouds seemingly trying to mould themselves in living shapes.
Farges (1926:547) describes the official Catholic position on "luminous effluvia:"
Ecstasy, occasionally ascensional, is perhaps still more often luminous. Benedict XIV states, in fact, that there would be no end to the enumeration of all the case of supernatural splendour with which the saints were irradiated, if such were desired.
Varieties. - Sometimes it is the head or the face alone that gives forth a luminous aureole, but often the whole body also is surrounded with light. Ecstatics have been seen, although more rarely, to light up the whole church or cell during their nocturnal ecstasies; so much so as to suggest a fire, which others have run out to extinguish. Instances of fiery rays escaping from their eyes or hands are also cited.
He notes that prototypes of such irradiations are the shining face of Moses coming down from the mount (Exodus 34) and the transfiguration of Jesus of Mt. Tabor when his face shone like the sun (Matthew 17).
Mann (1973:143ff) in his work on Reich, devotes a chapter to the human aura. He cites the work of Kilner (1911) who described the human aura thus (Mann, 1973:145):
If someone was placed against a dark background in twilight a slightly luminous mist, oval in form, was seen around his body. It had three distinct zones. The first was a dark edging, half a centimeter wide, surrounding the body; this was the 'etheric double.' Outside this was the interior aura, dense and streaked perpendicularly to the body; this was from three to eight centimeters in width. Finally came the exterior aura which had no definite contour.
Kilner claimed to find a link between the aura and the conscious mind, as it nearly disappeared in trance, and did so at
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death. Though Kilner used dyed screens for perceiving the aura, Mann (1973:146) feels that his "success was probably attributable to his unwitting possession of clairvoyant powers." Other healers including Cayce, Garrett, and Worrall also see auras and use them to heal and diagnose disease; Cayce wrote a book on the subject.
The human aura, as well as the aura surrounding all living things (e.g., a leaf) has been photographed by Kirlian Photography (Moss, 1976:56). In one case described by Moss a leaf was cut, and then photographed; the missing piece showed in the photograph; hence, the aura showed the still intact etheric leaf.
On Sept. 15, 1979, the writer attended a workshop on the human aura by Dr. Valerie Hunt, of UCLA, Rev. Rosalyn Bruyere, a local aura reader, and Emelie Conrad, a shaman. The meeting was held in Beverly Hills. The following are notes gleaned from the proceedings, mostly from Rev. Bruyere. She conceives that the aura is an electromagnetic phenomenon - one is literally seeing ionization; and that high altitudes and dry weather conditions due to increase in negative ions, decrease the auric level and increase seratonin and melatonin discharge in the body. If your depth perception is accurate, it is easier to see auras, because you look at the person directly not his background. Most Westerners produce yellow aura when in the left hemisphere and blue in the right, while Easterners produce orange and purple. Shamans and schizophrenics, however, produce two white horned plumes of aura from the right and left frontal lobes: psychics and shamans, hence, are healed schizophrenics. The auric field is a transaction between the human system and the cosmos.
3.52) Electrical and Magnetic Properties
While electrical discharges from humans are rare, there have been instances. Persinger and Lafreniere (1977:108) in their catalog of Fortean events turned up twenty instances of humans having either electrical or magnetic properties including an 1877 case where a 17 year old girl showed high voltage discharge following illness, and a Washington, D.C. man gave out paralyzing electric shocks when touched. There was also the Maryland youth who became magnetized and attracted iron objects.
It may be remembered that the Pentecostal experience of the Disciples (Acts 3) was accompanied by "tongues of fire." But
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this rare phenomenon can also happen on more secular occasions, as witness Richet (1923:487) describing a seance with Home:
Other strange things were seen - a form like a bird flying and whistling in the room, tongues and jets of fire from Home's head; then as it were the blast of a strong wind, 'the most weird thing I ever heard.'
It is possible that this is an example of "St. Elmo's fire" a heavy brush discharge of static electricity which glows like a fire. Moses' "burning bush" could also have been of this kind. These phenomena are akin to those of "ball lightning" whose causes are still poorly understood, and whose behavior is rather mysterious.
But heavy ionization of ordinary air during thunderstorms can cause remarkable static-electric effects. Consider the following such description from a Pike's Peak storm in Gaddis (1967:46-8):
The hair and whiskers of observers were electrified. When charged with the electrical fluid, parts of the bodies of the men became luminous... The observer on placing his hands... where the electrical excitement was abundant, did not discover the slightest sensation of heat, but his hands became instantly aflame . . . The flames issued from his fingers with a rushing noise... The hair on his head stood erect and the pricking sensation on his bareheaded scalp was extremely painful... The peculiar smell of electrical odor (ozone-JCG) was noted.
All this, due to the rarefied air at the mountain top, is very similar to the electrical glow inside a neon tube.
Apparently luminosity is also produced in persons suffering from a serious disease under certain conditions. Gaddis (1967: 178ff) devotes several pages to accounts of this sort. Among others he notes the report of Ransom in Electrical Experimenter (June 1920) concerning victims of botulism who developed magnetic powers while ill. Fodor (Psychiatric Quarterly, April 1948) tells of PIK powers associated with cholera, and Coe adds that some other botulism patients glowed in the dark. Gaddis (1967:169) also tells of "human magnets, "- persons who attract metal objects. He (1967:169) also describes infants who seem to be born with an electric charge. A half-dozen cases of such infants or children are described; in some cases luminosity was also exhibited. Gaddis (1967:168) notes that some unusual persons seem to store up high
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amounts of static electricity, and consequently frequently start fires by sparks.
Tiller in "Energy Fields and the Body" (White, 1974:277), says:
I propose that the manifesting of psychoenergetic phenomena is associated with taking the primary energies in the body and making them coherent. In my modeling, I suspect that if we took all the energy in a single human body and made it completely coherent, there would be at least enough energy to create our entire universe at the physical (incoherent) level. You see, the basic energy is already there; it is just that it is in an incoherent form, and our job is to make it coherent. This we do by developing atunement with nature through our meditation, our thoughts, and our actions - i.e., it takes work.
If this line of reasoning is plausible, the sudden increase in coherence in a biological system caused by the possible infusion of cosmic energy could have caused a "spillover" discharge of energy (much like synchrotron radiation), as in the case of the "burning bush" of Moses.
After a careful examination of the biological effects of magnetic fields Barthnody (1964:277) concludes:
There remains no reasonable doubt that living systems are extraordinarily sensitive to magnetic fields. By extremely simple experiments it is possible to prove that highly diverse types of animals and plants may have their orientation modified by artificial fields of the order of strength of the geomagnetic field. This has already been established in our laboratory not only for the snails and flatworms, but also for the fruit fly Drosophila and the unicellular Paramecium. The colonial flagellate Volvox also is sensitive to very weak magnetic fields (personal communication from Dr. John D. Palmer). The nature of the organismic response is, however, far from simple. The systematic and periodic alterations in the strength and character of biological response suggest a highly differentiated response mechanism within the organism and belie any conclusion that the responsiveness is adventitious. To the contrary, the nature of the response properties suggest that the organism is normally integrated with its geomagnetic environment to a striking degree.
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Concluding Remarks: It is quite obvious from the rather unorganized material in this section and the lack of an over-riding rationale, that we are not in possession of all the facts regarding the electromagnetic properties of pranic energy. (The singular behavior of "ball-lightning" is enough evidence of that.) Despite the work of Burr, Reich, and Tesla, we still are much in the dark regarding fundamental relationships in this area. One guess is that pranic energy is to electromagnetic energy as the etheric body is to the physical body.
3.6) Independence from Physical Functions
One of the most interesting signs of saintly development is that it gradually seems to free the body from the routine performance of animal functions. Such changes are not found in nonsaintly paragnosts. Of the five principal functions (breathing, eating, excretion, sleeping, and sex), enough has been written elsewhere about dimunition in breathing and sex activity so that these changes will not be pursued further here. There is no information on excretion, so we will be confined to reductions in eating (inedia) and in sleeping (non-somnia). It is well known that such reductions take place naturally as part of monastic life, but we are interested in rare cases where there is alleged to have been a cessation of such function altogether.
3.61) A Note on Chastity
We have deleted discussion on cessation of breathing, excretion, and sexual activity as unprofitable. But we would like to append a short note on continence.
It is fashionable in Western intellectual circles to decry the requirement of continence in monastic life, as an outmoded concept which modern psychology has exploded; indeed, chastity in secular life is far from the norm, as older sanctions against it disappear. The author confesses that he has long held these characteristic Western views. Yet, it may be time to take a second look.
Hindu tradition, unlike Christian, gives us some thoughtful reasons for such prohibitions in those who wish to follow the religious life. While the instructions are confined to males, it appears that for safe passage of the kundalini fire up the spine, a transmu-
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tation of the seminal fluid is required in order to serve this higher use; and that subsequent to the ascent of the kundalini, any lower use of procreative powers may be not only deleterious but actually dangerous in a kind of "short-circuit" phenomenon. Storing of the prana in the body in enough quantity to produce healing and siddhis is not possible when activity in sexual life continues, according to these sources. And this is the real reason for asceticism in monastic life. It is true that storing up pranic energy may result in poltergeist-like spillovers, but as the Cure of Ars (who had such problems) would have said: "It is easier to face the Devil than a beautiful woman, and escape unscathed."
3.62) Inedia or Independence from Food and Drink
In some cases of devout persons, it appears that they are able to subsist without food or drink (in the case of Catholics, the Host is excepted). Some other method of obtaining energy is adopted (in the case of at least some mystics this appears to be from the sun). Inedia is a siddhi resulting from samyama on the trachea given by Patanjali's sutra 30 (Ayrana 1977:342).
Jung (Stern, 1976:50) described the enigma of a Swiss saint, Brother Klaus, of whom it was said that for twenty years he had touched neither food nor drink. Jung accepted this fact as "corroborated by reliable witnesses." Yogananda (1977:422) devotes a chapter to the mystic, Therese Neumann, who took no food except the Host. Concerning this matter of inedia, he says (ibid:539):
The non-eating state attained by Giri Bala is a yogic power mentioned in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras III:31. She employs a certain breathing exercise that affects the visudda chakra, the fifth center of subtle energies located in the spine. The visudda chakra, opposite the throat, controls the fifth element, akash or ether, pervasive in the inter-atomic spaces of the physical cells. Concentration on this "wheel" chakra enables the devotee to live by etheric energy.
Farges (1926:560-1) describes the inedia of several saints:
Blessed Angela of Foligno remained for twelve years without taking any nourishment; St. Catherine of Siena about eight years; Blessed Elizabeth of Rente more than fifteen years; St. Lydwine twenty-eight years; Blessed Catherine of Racconigi
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ten years; Dominic of Paradiso twenty years; in our own day, Rosa Andriani twenty-eight years; Domenica Lazzari and Louise Lateau fourteen years.
In order to prove the authenticity of these facts Benedict XIV drew up very severe rules of criticism. But we must not think that before his time these marvels were accepted with naive credulity without previous inquiry. The more astonishment they raised, the more they provoked mistrust, suspicion, watchfulness, and often unbelief.
Pope Innocent VII, during his sojourn at Perugia, had a judicial inquiry made into the case of Blessed Colomba of Rieti, who had taken no nourishment other than the eucharistic bread for more than twenty years. In 1659 the famous shepherdess of Laus was taken to the Bishop's house at Embrun in order to be more easily submitted to an inquiry respecting her visions and abstinence; she was guarded day and night for a fortnight. In 1813 Catherine Emmerich, whose abstinence was no less remarkable, was watched and guarded day and night for ten days by order of ecclesiastical authority. The twenty burghers entrusted with this prepared a circumstantial report, which was also confirmed by her physician, the famous Dr. Overberg.
In 1868 the abstinence of Sister Esperance of Jesus was officially confirmed by the Bishop of Ottawa, assisted by two physicians, one, Dr. Baubien, a Catholic, and the other, Dr. Ellis, a Protestant. She was subjected to most rigorous supervision for six weeks, locked in a room and guarded and watched by sisters who never left her. At the beginning of the experiment she weighed 113 pounds; at the end, in the presence of the Bishop of Ottawa, her weight had reached 124 pounds. The venerable Dr. Landry, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Quebec, who came to Royau in 1880, also testified to this in the presence of Dr. Imbert.
From October 25 to December 7, 1877, the abstinence of Josephine Reverdy was examined in like manner, as related in detail in the Apparitions de Boulleret, chapter V. She was constantly watched by ten women or girls, five by day and five by night, and the authenticity of the fact was recognized.
Moreover, there is another kind of control which goes to confirm the first and does away with any doubt. Not only do these abstaining saints eat nothing secretly, but they can no longer eat anything without throwing it up again immediately. It is not merely that they are exempt from the hunger common to
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all men, but also unable to sustain any earthly nourishment other than the Holy Eucharist.
Here, for instance, is the testimony of Blessed Raymond of Capua with regard to the inedia of St. Catherine of Siena, whose confessor and biographer he was. At first her extraordinary fasting had produced murmurings against her from her companions and from all who knew her. She was accused of wishing to surpass the fast of our Lord, of seeking after singularity, and so on. Raymond himself was alarmed at these murmurs, and feared lest he were mistaken in his direction of this soul. In order to cut short the scandal he desired to force her to eat. Through obedience she did so, but very soon threw up all that she had taken with atrocious suffering, even to the vomiting of blood.
3.63) Non-Somnia
While there are many examples in history and contemporary life of the reduced need for sleep in those of saintly or intellectual life, we know of very few instances where sleep has been entirely done away with. One is the account of Ram Gopal, the Hindu "sleepless saint" to which Yogananda (1977:157ff) devotes a whole chapter.
One of the effects of the practice of meditation is to reduce the hours needed for sleep. (See, for example, Satprem 1968 on Sri Aurobindo's practice.) And another effect seen in advanced meditators and others is the recurrence of lucid sleep, when the cosmic consciousness is found in the sleeping state as well as the waking.
Non-somnia, however, is not found among the siddhis resulting from Patanjali's sutras.
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3.7) Post-Mortem and Trans-Mortem Effects
This is a recondite area, about which there is little information. We touch lightly on the following sub-categories: .71) transfiguration, .72) translation, .73) automatic disposal of body after death, .74) incorruptibility of the cadaver, and .75) knowing the hour of one's death. What we appear to have here is no less than the resurrection promised by Jesus, namely the ultimate translation of the ascended being into cosmic light (cf. John 1977:239). In this view, transfiguration is a prefiguration of this integration, a sighting of the etheric body in its glory. The others are lesser levels afforded to those who did not reach translation -"consolation prizes" -- as it were, in the road to nirvana.
3.71) Transfiguration
On Mt. Tabor, before Peter, James, and John (Matthew 17: 2), Jesus "was transfigured before them, and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light." At his side were Moses and Elijah; a voice spoke to the disciples out of a cloud, and they were afraid. This is the classic example. It is possible that the transfiguration experience is a sighting of one of the higher vehicles of man, perhaps the etheric. Other lesser instances of translation have been St. Seraphim of Sarov (John 1978:282) and possibly St. Francis of Assisi. There have been other examples of shining faces (e.g., Moses, Exodus 34). Patanjali's yoga sutras No. 40 ( Aranya 1977:351-2), says that by "conquering the vital force called samana .... the yogin can become effulgent and excite the radiance in the body."
3.72) Translation
Translation - "to convey or remove to heaven without death" is mentioned in the Old Testament in connection with Elijah and Enoch. While Elijah was purportedly carried to heaven in a chariot, the translation of Indian saints seems to take place in a flash of light. John (1978:242-3) describes the translation of Chaitanya, Jnanehwar, Tukarum, and Ramalingam. Mohammed is believed by Muslims to have been translated. Some Christians believe that the shroud of Turin was caused by the translation of Jesus' body into a flash of light. We append the account of the translation of Tukarum as typical (ibid:273):
Tukarum sang late into the night: 'I have seen my own death with my own eye. It was inconceivably holy.' At the peak of his ecstasy, a blinding blaze of light caused his followers to close their eyes. When they looked again, Tukaram was gone.
Skarin (1952:183,4), who according to the frontispiece in her book was herself translated, tells of nine others who were translated. (The author has had personal communication from a woman who claims her husband was also translated following the
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directions of Skarin. We state this information as a matter of record. Despite questioning, we were not able to shake the story, nor did the woman show other signs of mental instability.)
3.73) Automatic Disposal of Body after Death
It is stated that one power of Adepts is to be able to cremate their body after death. Other traditions have it that aged Hindu saints pen themselves up when nearing death, and food passed in is no longer consumed. When friends break in, no corpse is found (John, 1978:24). Krippner and Villoldo (1976:168) describe similar situations which might be either translation or automatic disposal in the case of Inca saints. It may be that some cases of "SHC" (see Section 3.33) should come under this heading.
3.74) Incorruptibility
A far more common phenomenon is incorruptibility of the body (non-decomposition), which has been attested to many times, usually in connection with disinterring of the corpses of saints. There are, of course, natural reasons why incorruptibility can occur, but they are rare.
3.75) Knowing the Hour of One's Death
This phenomenon is quite common, even in ordinary people, and there are many examples of it in literature, history, and ordinary life.8
We have now examined four powers: stigmata, electromagnetic phenomena, freedom from bodily functions, and graces associated with death (3.4-3.7), all having to do with the growing independence of the body from physical conditions and requirements. In all cases the body is seen more as the temple of the spirit than as a physical corpus. The regnancy of the etheric body over the material body has again been asserted. We are beginning to glimpse an overriding theme in this taxonomy of cosmogenic powers - namely, that the human mind when joined with the numinous can effect startling changes by thought alone in the physical body and the physical universe. We shall continue this theme and its expansion as we survey the next set of four higher cosmogenic bodily powers.
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3.8) Levitation
Let us imagine that disincarnate intelligence wished to prove transcendental reality to us mortals; what means would be the most efficacious? Certainly the answer is levitation; for as others have noted, while reports of other types of miracles may be considered exaggeration, levitation is an either/or "experience." Either it occurs or it does not. There is no middle position. The reason most people cannot accept levitation is not because of the weakness of the testimony, but because its existence is such a flat contradiction to all they have believed about the nature of physical reality. Because of its egregious nature, we shall hence give levitation a considerable emphasis in this taxonomy. We ask the reader to suspend his judgment in an empirical inspection of the facts and data. If he be unwilling to assign a truth value at the 5% level of significance to any given datum, let him conduct in his mind a non-mathematical means test, and ask himself, what is the cumulative effect of such wealth of testimony, often from otherwise honest and even saintly persons, from every age and culture, from different religious persuasions (or from none at all). It is not a pleasant affect to have an empirical inspection overturn a deeply held prejudice, but paradigms exist to be supplanted, and even the most tenaciously held ones must finally yield to the simple data of experience.9
While there are many reports of levitation in every age and culture, we shall confine our attention to three categories where it has been especially well documented or reported. These are in order:
a) Levitation among Christian mystics,
b) Levitation among profane paragnosts, and
c) Levitation as a Transcendental Meditation siddhi.
These three categories had their apices in Europe during the 12th, the 19th and the 20th centuries respectively. Doubtless, we show Western provincialism in this restriction. There are many accounts of levitation among Asian shamans, and as well among Hindu holy men, but space limitations force neglect of these.
3.81) Levitation Among Christian Mystics
While rare, levitation is by no means unique among Christian saints and mystics, usually occurring in ecstasy or mystic rapture. Farges (1926:537) chronicles it in St. Paul of the Cross,
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St. Philip Neri, St. Stephen of Hungary, St. Peter of Alcantra, St. Francis Xavier, St. Agnes, and St. Joseph of Cupertino. He states:
St. Peter of Alcantra was unable to hear the lofty words of St. John VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST pronounced without falling into ecstasy and being raised above the earth. The Franciscan Biago of Caltanisetta went into ecstasy simply at the names of Jesus and Mary and sprang into the air enraptured with their beauty. Blessed Giles of the Order of St. Dominic remained suspended in the air in ecstasy for whole nights without it being possible to bring him back to earth or even to give the least inclination to his body. After her communion Mary of Agreda became slightly raised above the ground and seemed to be so light that those who stood by her were able to rock her with the slightest breath. King Philip II experienced the same phenomenon with Fr. Dominic ... St. Thomas of Villanova while preaching one day in his cathedral went into ecstasy and remained suspended in the air twelve hours...
The greatest flyer of them all was the famous St. Joseph of Cupertino to whose attested exploits Dingwall (1962a) devotes an entire chapter. A monk of notorious mortification (p. 12) while praying in chapel one day, was observed by a group of nuns: Suddenly he rose up into the air and with a cry flew in the upright position to the altar with his hands outstretched as on a cross, and alighted on it... The nuns ... cried out loudly, 'He will catch fire.' But his companion who was present, and accustomed to such sights, told the nuns not to lack faith, as he would not burn himself. Then with another cry Joseph flew back into the church in a kneeling position, and alighting on his knees began to whirl ... dancing and singing, being filled with joy and exultation...
Further, being sent to Rome to see Pope Urban V III(p. 13):
On finding himself in the presence of the supreme pontiff, Joseph was seized by ecstatic rapture, and rose in the air, remaining suspended until recalled to his senses by the fathergeneral. The Pope was so much impressed by this surprising event, that he is said to have declared that if Joseph should die during his pontificate then he himself would testify at the canonization.
Entering the basilica of Assisi (p. 14), he saw a picture of the Virgin on the ceiling. Uttering a cry, "Joseph rose into the air
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and flew 18 paces in order to embrace it, crying out, 'Oh, my Mother. "'
During his years at Cupertino and in the monastery of Assisi, his flights are too numerous to describe (p.14), though there are several recorded accounts of his flying onto the altar or pulpit during Mass, when transported in ecstasy. His flights never disturbed anything on the altar. Further says Dingwall (1 972a:16):
It is recorded that one day a priest, who was walking with him in the kitchen garden, remarked how beautiful was the heaven which God had made. Thereupon. . Joseph, uttering a shriek, sprang from the ground, and flew into the air, only coming to rest on top of an olive tree where he remained in a kneeling position for half an hour. It was noticed with wonder that the branch on which he rested shook only slightly as if a bird had been sitting on it.
In these transports, Joseph was able to carry heavy crosses, and in one instance a fellow priest (p.17), without difficulty. He is also said (p.18) to have cured a mad knight by taking him on an aerial journey.
The Duke of Brunswick, visiting Assisi in 1651 was converted to Catholicism after surreptitiously observing Joseph in chapel saying private Mass (p. 19):
There they heard him give a loud cry and saw him rise in the air in a kneeling position, passing backward five paces and then returning in the front of the altar, remaining in ecstasy for some time.
This shook up the Lutheran, and the next day he was present at Mass.
And this time he saw Joseph raise a palm high from the altar step and remain floating for a quarter of an hour. The Duke was so overcome by the sight that his doubts were resolved and he became a Catholic.
The great Leibnitz, the Duke's librarian, states that the Duke was converted by the wonder-working friar (p. 20).
Another noble who vouched for the miraculous powers was the Infanta Maria, daughter of the Duke of Savoy, who witnessed
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several levitations, (p.20). Still a third noble was the Admiral of Castile who, with his wife, witnessed a flight of twelve paces over his head in the chapel, (p. 22).
His physician several times observed him in rapturous flight, on one occasion when he was cauterizing Joseph's leg, (p. 26-7), the saint was completely insensible to the pain, and levitated. Joseph even rose from his death bed, (p. 28), and flew from his cell to the chapel. Three cardinals also testified that they had seen him levitated in the canonization process, (p. 23). Besides St. Joseph, (Dingwall, 1972a:166) tells briefly of other levitators, Sister Marie, and the Franciscan monk, Juan de Jesus.
Bishop (1973:166) tells about the levitation of St. Francis, and adds an important footnote about the importance of levitation itself, and his own bias about it:
Francis's escape into a private world naturally roused the curiosity of the five companions. Leo, presuming on old intimacy, spied on the Master, and was rewarded by seeing him frequently levitated to a height of about twenty feet, sometimes to the treetops, and once nearly out of sight.10
It is also easy to overlook the levitations of Jesus, in walking on the waves, the Transfiguration, and the Ascension.
As Dingwall is careful to point out, Christian mystics are not the only ones who fly, (1962:30-1). "Holy men and ascetics in India and the Far East have many times been described as levitated" and even savage tribes have their flying shamans.
Rama, (1978:442), tells of an almost incredible experience with the post mortem of a yogi who had predicted the time of leaving the body. After trying to lift the corpse and finding that it had acquired supernatural weight, he recalls what happened next:
I shall never forget the experience. A few minutes before sunrise I heard someone say: 'Now we will carry him.' There was no one around, so I thought: 'Perhaps I am imagining it.' My brother disciple also looked around. I asked, 'Did you hear something?' He said, 'Yes, I also heard it.' . . . Suddenly the man's body rose into the air, apparently of its own accord, and moved slowly toward the Ganges. It floated on the
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air, a few hundred yards, then lowered and sank into the Ganges.
Stace (1960:182) quotes St. Teresa's account of her levitation:
At other times, resistance has been impossible: my soul has been borne away, and indeed as a rule my head also, without my being able to prevent it: sometimes my whole body has been affected, to the point of being raised up from the ground.
This has happened only rarely; but once, when we were together in choir, and I was on my knees and about to communicate, it caused me the greatest distress. It seemed to me a most extraordinary thing and I thought there would be a great deal of talk about it; so I ordered the nuns (for it happened after I was appointed Prioress) not to speak of it. On other occasions, when I have felt that the Lord was going to enrapture me (once it happened during a sermon, on our patronal festival, when some great ladies were present), I have lain on the ground and the sisters have come and held me down, but none the less the rapture has been observed.
I can testify that after a rapture my body often seemed as light as if all weight had left it: sometimes this was so noticeable that I could hardly tell when my feet were touching the ground. For, while the rapture lasts, the body often remains as if dead and unable of itself to do anything: it continues all the time as it was when the rapture came upon it - in a sitting position, for example, or with the hands open or shut. The subject rarely loses consciousness: I have sometimes lost it altogether, but only seldom and for but a short time.
Pope Benedict XIV is quoted on the subject by Farges, (1926:547):
Ecstasy in fact is a participation, although imperfect, in the beatific vision of the elect in heaven, and levitation is a participation in the gift of agility which the bodies of these blessed ones possess in glory. Rapture of the transfigured body thus becomes the manifest sign and symbol of that of the soul, and the resemblance of our saints on earth to the blessed in heaven appears then to be more complete and more striking.
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3.82). Levitations of Non-Religious Paragnosts
While the medium Euspasia Palladino was detected in fraud, some of her feats defy it. (Dingwall, 1962b:204) reports an early eyewitness account of the levitation of a table under bright lights.
Probably the most celebrated levitator of modern times was the redoubtable Home who was accustomed to float around during seances, and often levitated objects including on one occasion, a piano, (1972:86): "While the Countess was seated at one of Erard's grand action pianos, it rose and balanced itself in the air during the whole time she was playing it." On another occasion, (1972:90) a table was lifted from the ground.
Here, (Home, 1972:177-8), is an interesting account of Home's levitation by a seance witness:
Another hand now appeared and on Mr. Home being touched by it, he exclaimed, 'They are raising me; do not look at me 'til I am above the table, as it might have the effect of bringing me down.' Almost at the same time Mr. Home was raised up and floated in the air at a height of about five feet . . . but upon approaching the window, he came again gently to the ground. He remarked; 'Their strength is hardly great enough yet, though I feel it will come soon. . . . At the same moment the same hand that had before imparted such supernatural strength to Mr. Home was again seen grasping him. His arms were raised above his head, and he was again lifted about two feet off the ground and carried to the window where he was raised to within about 18 inches of the ceiling. After remaining floating for about two minutes he descended; but on coming near his chair, he was again elevated and placed in a standing position . . . his weight not resting on it, it had no effect, nor was there even a creak heard. In about a minute both Mr. Home and the small table were elevated for a fourth time in the air about a foot ...
As this passage shows, Home believed that spirits levitated him and the objects he designated.
Dingwall, (1972a:) also reports some other levitations of Home not mentioned in Home's own book. On page 100, Reverend Davis reported "he saw D. D. Home float around Mr. Hall's drawing room." Dr. Harriet Clisby "was levitated along with
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Home in her own lodgings, " (p. 101).
The description of a witness of a seance is quoted in Home (1972:38-9):
The table was actually lifted up from the floor, without the application of a human hand or foot! A table weighing, I should judge, one hundred pounds, was lifted up a foot from the floor, the legs touching nothing. I jumped upon it, and it came up again! It then commenced rocking, without, however, allowing me to slide off, although it canted at least to an angle of forty-five degrees! Finally, an almost perpendicular inclination slid me off, and another of the company tried it with the same results. These things all happened in a room which was light enough to allow of our seeing under and over, and all around the table, which was touched by no one except the two persons who respectively got upon it to keep it down!
Suddenly, and without any expectation on the part of the company, Mr. Home, was taken up in the air! I had hold of his hand at the time, and I and others felt his feet - they were lifted a foot from the floor! He palpitated from head to foot apparently with the contending emotions of joy and fear which choked his utterance. Again and again he was taken from the floor, and the third time he was carried to the lofty ceiling of the apartment, with which his hand and head came in gentle contact.
I omitted to state that these latter demonstrations were made in response to a request of mine that the spirits would give us something that would satisfy everyone in the room of their presence. The medium was much astonished, and more alarmed than any of the rest, who, I may add, took the matter calmly, though they were intensely interested.
Home's own reactions follow: ibid.:39):
During these elevations, or levitations, I usually experience in my body no particular sensations than what I can only describe as an electrical fullness about the feet. I feel no hands supporting me, and since the first time, above described, I have never felt fear, though should I have fallen from the ceiling of some rooms in which I have been raised, I could not have escaped serious injury. I am generally lifted up perpendicularly;0. my arms frequently become rigid and drawn above my head, as if I were grasping the unseen power which
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slowly raises me from the floor. At times when I reach the ceiling, my feet are brought on a level with my face, and I am as it were in a reclining position. I have frequently been kept so suspended four or five minutes, an instance of which will be seen in an account which is given of occurrences in the year 1857, at a chateau near Bordeaux. I have been lifted in the light of day upon only one occasion, and that was in America. I have been lifted in a room in Sloane Street, London, with four gas-lights brightly burning, with five gentlemen present, who are willing to testify to what they saw, if need be, beyond the many testimonies which I shall hereafter adduce. On some occasions the rigidity of my arms relaxes, and I have with a pencil made letters and signs on the ceiling, some of which now exist in London.
Further on Home's levitations, Doyle (1926:1:195-6) tells us:
Take this question of levitation as a test of Home's powers. It is claimed that more than a hundred times in good light before reputable witnesses he floated in the air. Consider the evidence. In 1857, in a chateau near Bordeaux, he was lifted to the ceiling of a lofty room in the presence of Madame
Ducos, widow of the Minister of Marine, and of the Count and Countess de Beaumont. In 1860 Robert Bell wrote an article, 'Stranger than Fiction,' in the Cornhill. 'He rose from his chair,' says Bell, 'four or five feet from the ground . . . We saw his figure pass from one side of the window to the other, feet foremost, lying horizontally in the air.' Dr. Gully, of Malvern, a well-known medical man, and Robert Chambers, the author and publisher, were the other witnesses. Is it to be supposed that these men were lying confederates, or that they could not tell if a man were floating in the air or pre-
tending to do so? In the same year Home was raised at Mrs. Milner Gibson's house in the presence of Lord and Lady Clarence Paget, the former passing his hands underneath him to assure himself of the fact. A few months later Mr. Wason, a Liverpool solicitor, with seven others, saw the same phenomenon. 'Mr. Home,' he says, 'crossed the table over the heads of the persons sitting around it.' He added: 'I reached his hand seven feet from the floor, and moved along five or six paces as he floated above me in the air.' In 1861 Mrs. Parkes, of Cornwall Terrace, Regent's Park, tells how she was present with Bulwer-Lytton and Mr. Hall when Home in her own drawing-room was raised till his hand was on top of the door, and then floated horizontally forward. In 1866 Mr. and Mrs. Hall, Lady Dunsany, and Mrs. Senior, in Mr. Hall's house, saw
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Home, his face transfigured and shining, twice rise to the ceiling, leaving a cross marked in pencil upon the second occasion, so as to assure the witnesses that they were not the victims of imagination.
In 1868 Lord Adare, Lord Lindsay, Captain Wynne, and Mr. Smith Barry saw Home levitate upon many occasions. A very minute account has been left by the first three witnesses of the occurrence of December 16, of this year, when at Ashley House, Home, in a state of trance, floated out of the bedroom and into the sitting room window, passing seventy feet above the street.
Zollner (1881:206) gives Lord Lindsay's account:
I was sitting with Mr. Home and Lord Adare, and a cousin of his. During the sitting Mr. Home went into a trance, and in that state was carried out of the window in the room next to where we were, and was brought in at our window. The distance between the windows was about 7 feet 6 inches, and there was not the slightest foothold between them, nor was there more than a 12-inch projection to each window, which served as a ledge to put flowers on.
We heard the window into the next room lifted up and almost immediately after we saw Home floating in the air outside our window.
The moon was shining full into the room; my back was to the light, and I saw the shadow on the wall of the window-sill, and Home's feet about six inches above it. He remained in this position for a few seconds, then raised the window and glided into the room, feet foremost, and sat down.
Lord Adare then went into the next room to look at the window from which he had been carried. It was raised about 18 inches, and he expressed his wonder how Mr. Home had been taken through, so narrow an aperture.
Home said, still entranced 'I will show you,' and then with his back to the window he leaned back, and was shot out of the aperture, head first, with the body rigid, and then returned quite quietly.
The window is about 70 feet from the ground. I very much doubt whether any skillful tight-rope dancer would like to
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attempt a feat of this description, where the only means of crossing would be by a perilous leap, or being borne across in such a manner as I have described, placing the question of the light aside.
-- Lindsay, July 14th, 1871.
There is some conflicting evidence about this feat, as noted by Dingwall (1962a: 114-116). For another account of this and other phenomena associated with Home, see the chapter in Brown (1972:245-68).
We have tabulated in Table III-3, the many levitations described by Home in his autobiography (1962), including the type of levitation, the light, the height, the time, the witnesses, the narrator, and other remarks.
We have given attention to the levitations of Home, as he was perhaps the most famous paragnost, and accounts of his levitation are especially explicit. He was also, on several occasions, levitated himself; while in most other mediums there was levitation of inanimate objects only, apparently a much more easily accomplished task (and also one more easily open to fraud). We have, therefore, avoided many examples of alleged levitation during dark seances of light objects, such as bells, books, candles, handkerchiefs, etc.
Zollner (1881:56, 80) reports levitations of tables, chairs, and other objects, some during daylight in the presence of a medium:
Mrs. Nichols was with them at table, and reports that, as they were conversing, loud raps responded, and the heavy table loaded with dishes, when no one touched it, rose up some inches from the floor, and so remained, while she stooped down to see that all its feet were in the air. This is common enough in the presence of mediums, but the very powerful action in the drawing-room, in the light of mid-day, with no person near, seems to me novel and remarkable.
Moss (1974:384) has a section on levitation and notes the Cyril Scott book The Initiate in the New World which describes his eyewitness of a levitation performed by his guru.
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TABLE III-3 LEVITATIONS DESCRIBED BY HOME IN INCIDENTS IN MY LIFE
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The Wallaces (1977:438) list the following levitators: Colin Evans, Witch of Navarre, Don Juan, Daniel Home, Juan de Jesus, St. Joseph of Cupertino, Carlo Mirabelli, Stainton Moses, E. Pallidino, Willy Scheider. Photos exist in the cases of Evans and Mirabelli.
Eliade (1972:409) tells us: "Buddhist texts speak of four different magical powers of translation, the first being the ability to fly like a bird. Patanjali cites the power to fly through the air."
Richet, the French professor of physiology, was a famous and careful psychic researcher. His 1923 book devotes a chapter (p. 546-51) to levitations of the human body. He cites the French authority, Gorre (Mystique Divine, Paris: Poussielque, 1883), and the De Rochas sequel (Recueils de documents relatif a la levitation du corps humain, Paris: Leymarie, 1897), both of which cite many cases, including those of St. Peter of Alacantra, Christine, Agnes of Bohemia, Bernard de Courleon, Dalmacius of Gironne, St. Francis, St. Joseph of Cupertino (to whom Gorres assigns 12 pages), St. Paul de la Croix, St. Theresa, St. Philip de Neri, Dominique San Diego, Salvator de Horta, and more recently in the 19th century, Fornat, Dhiere and the Cure d'Ars. Partial levitations, in which there was a weight loss registered on scales, are also noted. Richet (1923:402-423) also gives details of dozens of levitations of tables and other objects in the presence of a medium. His explanation for these examples of PK in its most spectacular mode is that ectoplasmic rods or limbs usually invisible, expressed from the medium's body, accomplish the maneuver.
Here it should be observed, that if levitation of profane paragnosts is accomplished by pseudo-pods (psychic extensions of their bodies), it may have a different cause than levitation of saints, or persons in ecstasy or a state of grace, for which quantum mechanical rationales are advanced. It may be that all these different explanations are mere categorical components of a noncategorical truth which cannot be expressed in words. We are not in a position to judge, and so present the evidence and various theories to account for the phenomena, merely noting that there may be differences in them.
If levitation is accepted, it raises some very profound questions about gravitation, which is a far less well understood subject than most of us imagine. The possibility of gravitons, or
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gravitational corpuscles, and gravitational waves cannot at this time be discounted.
Levitation is one of the few siddhis where the feats of Christian mystics rival those of Hindu yogins. This suggests that the power is a spontaneous supercharacteristic of a state of extreme order (in line with our two-fluid model in Chapter One). Patanjali's sutra No. 41 (Aranya 1977:354-5) declares that by "practicing samyama on akasa and the body, and by meditation on the lightness of cotton wool, the yogin becomes light ... and can walk on water, on cobwebs, and on rays of light." In the TM siddhis program (to follow immediately), there is again meditation on a state of order, as we now read.
3.83) Levitation in the Transcendental Meditation Siddhis Program
A great deal of modern interest has recently been centered on widely reported accounts with pictures of TM practitioners levitating during meditation. Special courses are apparently necessary for this phenomenon to take place; a remarkable accompaniment of the levitation is a first attempt at scientific investigation and explanation of the effect. We shall accordingly give this development considerable attention.
Orme-Johnson and Farrow (1977:701-2) describe this in greater detail:
In their advanced training these teachers received specialized techniques known as the TM-Sidhi techniques, which are designed to elicit certain creative capabilities which in the past have been considered quite beyond the normal human repertoire of behavior. These abilities include knowledge of objects hidden from view, awareness of past and future, fully developed feelings of friendliness and compassion, enhancement of sensory thresholds to near the quantum mechanical level, invisibility, and levitation or "flying."
The basis of these abilities is the state of pure consciousness, the simplest form of awareness, and its associated state of highly coherent physiology. In principle the TM-Sidhi procedures simply make use of the insight that pure consciousness is the underlying field which structures not only the thought
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process but also the basic physical fields of gravitation and electromagnetism. By virtue of adopting specific procedures at the level of pure consciousness it is possible to make use of fundamental physical laws in such a way as to achieve the outstanding performance detailed in this research. The purpose of doing so is firstly to demonstrate to the student that he indeed possesses, in the form of the simplest state of his own awareness, the means to achieve all that is necessary or desirable in life, and secondly to strengthen the stability of pure consciousness by repeatedly subjecting it to procedures which integrate it with dynamic activity. Thus, the TM-Sidhi practices simultaneously test and strengthen pure consciousness in order to produce total integration of physiology.
Further to the specifics, Orme-Johnson and others say (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1977:708):
In a second study it was found that experiences of the siddhis develop in stages. Course participants were separately interviewed and were found to reach a consensus on the major stages of development of the experiences of several siddhis: Flying, Friendliness, Invisibility, Omniscience, and Strength. For example, the technique for "flying" (2, p. 349) has produced a variety of experiences that range from an awareness of the body becoming permeated by space and in some cases a mental and physical feeling of lightness, to an upward current of energy which may be accompanied by shaking of the body, fast breathing, and a spontaneous forward ballistic motion of two or three feet or "hop" from the sitting position; to "hopping" with an intense sense of transparency and lightness accompanied by increased control of direction; to more developed experiences such as feeling another upward impulse while still in the air; to a feeling of suspension in the air for a few seconds. An example of "hopping" is the following experience: 'I was sitting on a couch meditating at the time. I felt a tremendous amount of energy go through me and simultaneously I had a vision of my spine and my chest being just white light and a form in the air some place and then my body moved up and down on the couch two or three times. I thought, 'Oh, what is this?' and the next experience I had was hearing my body touch the floor. I say 'hearing' because I didn't feel it until after I heard it. It touched down, very, very softly. There was very little feeling of contact. I moved about a six-foot distance at that time.'
It is of interest that these stages correspond to stages of "flying" described in the Shiva Samhita (8, p. 30) of several
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thousand years of antiquity which states that first the body will shake, then hopping will occur, then the aspirant will "walk on air."
Levitation during meditation, while almost unknown among TM meditators who have not had this special training, seems to be reasonably common among the graduates of the special Siddhi course. The writer has talked with several who admitted that this effect occurs with some regularity during their meditations. They spoke of "bumping" as the most common experience, necessitating a pillow or other soft substance on the floor. Sustained flying appears rare, although personal report turned up at least one such instance.
TM sources say that the levitation effect is produced by careful observance of the injunctions in one of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. According to Singularities, January 31, 1978:
The power of levitation comes about when the experimenter practices a three-fold form of concentration upon the relationship of the physical body to space. The three aspects ... are: fixing one's attention on a single object, continuing that attention without a break in concentration and with a particular intent in mind, and finally merging with the object of that concentration.
Orme-Johnson and others (1977:709) in a footnote explain the key word sanyama as follows:
Sanyama is the basic technique for Performing the siddhis described by Patanjali. It entails the coming together of three elements: dhyana, the sequential flow of thought; and samadhi, transcendental consciousness of unbounded awareness. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali contain sutras of phrases containing ideas pertaining to specific siddhis upon which sanyama is performed.
Dharana (Evans-Wentz, 1958:177) is described as "yogic mastery of the thought process" (ibid:329), a condition of unbounded awareness and (in its highest state) of unmodified consciousness or boundless meditation.
3.84) Theories to Account for Levitation
Facts which should be taken into consideration:
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1. The levitated individual is not aware that he is about to be levitated; levitation comes as a surprise. St. Joseph of Cupertino seems always to have given a shriek.
2. The individual, while in levitation, does not press upon places where he alights; he is apparently weightless during such periods.
3. The weightless effect can be communicated to those with whom the levitator holds hands, as in the case of St. Joseph and the mad knight, Home and his friend, and Jesus on the waves and St. Peter. (Notice what the Ghost of Christmas Past said to Scrooge in a similar context.)
4. The levitated individual seems always to be in trance or samadhi,
We may inquire how those who were levitated thought it was accomplished. Home gives good testimony on this. He felt (being a Spiritualist) that departed spirits summoned up enough strength from the sitters and himself to materialize enough force to hold him up. Palladino appeared to believe much the same. Doyle (1926) and other scientific investigators felt that levitation was due to the action of an ectoplasmic psychic nimbus.
Levitating saints generally have believed that they were sustained by angels. One reason for this belief was that the vestments of the female levitators were never allowed to give onlookers immodest views.
Transcendental Meditation levitators have explained their levitation in terms of an ordered quantum mechanics state, as we have seen.
From this we gain the generalization that each levitator interpreted the phenomenon in accordance with his belief system, and we may add the corollary that since these differ and the phenomenon is the same, they all may have been mistaken. Perhaps the force which sustains a levitator is no more personal than the force which sustains a bridge, but is simply an example of the different laws when paraphysics is contrasted with physics.
Puharich (1962:209) states:
It is a long-standing legend that Yogins in the state of samadhi
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are capable of physically floating off the ground. If this is true, it would mean that the psi-plasma envelope of the Yogin contains a shielded region of marked decrease in the value of the gravitational constant. Hence the pull of the earth would be shielded and the individual would float. This possibility should be included in the list of critical experiments. One would have to search the world for a few individuals who claim to be able to do levitation. We could then conduct experiments comparable to those done by Sr. William Crookes on D. D. Home. Here the levitating individual is placed on a platform scale which under the constant gravitational pull of the earth would register a given amount of mass. The individual would then attempt to decrease this mass by undergoing the necessary mental operations to achieve levitation. This would be reflected in a loss of mass on the scale. There are a number of experiments from the last hundred years which state that weight losses up to 10% have been registered. If one could find such individuals one would have the simplest of all possible tests of the psi-plasma hypothesis.
While Puharich (1962:183-5) attempts a complex explanation of levitation in terms of diminution of gravitation due to peculiar reactions in the human nervous system, we shall here reject all physical explanations in favor of the theory that levitation constitutes clear evidence of the regnancy of a transcendent reality of greater order (the reference beam in the hologram paradigm), and that sensory reality is but the virtual image imprinted on the brain, as discussed in the introductory chapter. Physical reality as in levitation or in cases of spontaneous healing has to be altered to fit the sudden, perceptual change in the receptive mind. This is essentially what Castaneda meant by "seeing" a separate reality.
Looked at from a higher point of view, levitation and precognition are egregious assaults on the concept that life is confined to material sensory reality. Both are absolute, admitting no middle ground; both are flagrantly antithetical to materialistic philosophy; both offer spectacular possibilities for demonstration.
3.9) Invisibility
Outside of the Gyges parable by Socrates, there are very few, if any, accounts in the west of invisibility, though it is a Vedic siddhi (No. 21, Aranya 1977:327). "By practising samyama on the appearance of the body. . disappearance from view is
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effected." Besides Patanjali's Yoga sutras, it is rumored that this siddhi is also being taught in the TM advanced program. We read in Orme-Johnson, et al. (1977:708):
Invisibility has been described as ranging from a tingling sensation and/or a cool feeling in the body; to a feeling that 'the energy which is usually being sent out from the body is now falling back into itself' so that 'its radiations are collapsing inward'; to a feeling that the body is completely 'hiding itself' so that all that is left is the 'I-sense'; to becoming a white cloud, subjectively transparent.
Because of its very nature, invisibility is a far more difficult effect to prove evidentially than levitation; and, consequently, it is not so much "showcased." According to Singularities (Jan. 31, 1978), it says of invisibility: "To become invisible, according to Patanjali, involves the same process as levitation except that the object of one's concentration is the form and color of one's body."
The Pribram-Bohm holographic model is helpful in a rationale for invisibility, since there could well be an angle at which an imprinted hologram does not illuminate a virtual image.
Rev. Rosalyn Bruyere said at a Beverly Hills workshop (9/15/79) that bringing the aura inside the body can make one invisible.
3.X) Body Size and Weight Changes, Abnormal Strength
This category comprises a whole family of siddhis which relate to changes in body function, more general than some of the specifics treated earlier.
in corroboration we read in Long (1954:213-4):
Many reports have included the appearance of materialized forms, which were either larger or smaller than it is to be supposed the living person had been. This is similar to the phenomena of elongation of a living medium at seances, in which the medium's body has been seen to become longer by as much as two feet. (The kahunas believed that the shadowy body of a thing could be made larger or smaller.)
Let us consider "d," the distance between objects in 3-D
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space. For us this distance is a constant (the shortest distance between two objects is a straight line). But 4-space or in space under the influence of psychic force, "d" may be a variable with our "d" as its maximum. If "d" be reduced by delta "d" in flux under such influence, then points separated by "d" will be observed to be separated by "d" - delta "d" (somewhat less); and, hence, elongation may appear to take place.
3.Xl) Elongation
Bodily elongation is a very unusual power, but it is specifically referred to by Jesus (Matt. 6:27) in a cryptic utterance, "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to your stature." This is apparently not a rhetorical question, but a challenge to the audience that until this siddhi can be performed, amateurs should comport themselves as tyros. There are very few accounts of this power, but they are found in both holy and profane persons and in Hindu and Christian sources.
Palladino (Dingwall 1962b:182) "was able to increase her height by more than 10 centimeters."
Home (Richet, 1923:486) was another paragnost able to perform this feat. Richet reports: "That day Home's body was elongated... His ordinary height is five feet eight inches; he elongated to six feet five and one-half inches." Again quoting the Adare source, Richet (ibid) reports of Home:
Levitations were frequent, and still more frequent the elongations, this latter a singular phenomenon very susceptible of mistake, for which we have no parallel. Home was placed against the wall, Adare being in front of him; then his arms seemed to lengthen and his breast to swell. Home said to me, 'Adare, you see the extension is from the chest.' He again placed himself against the wall and extended his arms to their ordinary stretch. I made a pencil mark on the wall at the ends of his fingers. He then lengthened his left arm and I made a fresh mark; then his right arm, which I also marked. The total elongation, measured in this way, was nine and one-half inches.
Patanjali sutra No. 45 (Aranya 1977:363) involved a number of bodily changes, among which is "mahima, by which one can increase one's size or stature."
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3 X2) Size and Weight Changes
There are some traditions of giantism and miniaturization from Eastern sources, but none in the Western world. We shall confine our notice to measured weight changes and instances of immoveability.
St. Mary Magdalene (Dingwall 1962b:124) was an ecstatic who after Mass passed into a trance state and became rigid as if glued to the floor. All efforts to get her unstuck failed. There are other examples of immoveability among the saints.
Size and weight changes are mentioned in siddhi 45 (Aranya 1977:363) which specifies 1) minification, b) weight decrease, and c) increase of stature among other powers.
Speaking of weight changes in experiments with Home, Doyle (1926:1:245-6) remarks:
The most marked of these results was the alteration in the weight of objects, which was afterwards so completely confirmed by Dr. Crawford working with the Goligher circle, and also in the course of the 'Margery' investigation at Boston. Heavy objects could be made light, and light ones heavy, by the action of some unseen force which appeared to be under the influence of an independent intelligence.
Weight changes are among the most interesting phenomena connected with these powers, particularly as they suggest hypotheses about that nature of the powers. For example, Dingwall (1962b:199) tells us about an investigation of the medium Palladino:
One result of the committee's inquiry was to establish without shadow of doubt that many of the phenomena were objective and not due to hallucination on the part of the observers. With the medium's chair placed on a balance, it was evident that when the table was completely levitated, an increase in her weight resulted, roughly corresponding to the weight of the table.
The medium, Home, was also able to produce weight changes. Said Sir David Brewster, a participant at a Home seance (Home 1972:67): "The table was made light and heavy at com-
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mand. - On another occasion nine witnesses signed a statement which read in part (ibid:24): "It was perceived on lifting one end of the table, that its weight would increase or diminish in accordance with our request." On a third occasion of seance (ibid:200), "The table was made excessively heavy; four of us stood up and tried to lift it with all our power; it would not stir, neither could we turn it around. Dingwall (1962a:1 87ff) in a valuable appendix contains an extensive bibliography of the prodigies of Home.
3.X3) Extraordinary Strength
That ordinary people may possess extraordinary strength in crises is proverbial; we should not, therefore, be too surprised if it accompanies trance in paragnosts and saints.
It is difficult to separate this power from that of levitation, since they often occur together. St. Joseph of Cupertino (Dingwall 1962a:17) manifested it when he levitated a very heavy cross.
Home also manifested this power (Home 1972:177):
A block of wood, from the large arm of the tree of great weight ... was taken up by Mr. Home, as if it were a straw, carried around the room under his arm... It seemed to be of no weight to him, yet when two gentlemen, essayed, they could hardly move it.
As we have just mentioned, this power is a siddhi (No. 24, Aranya 1977:331), developed by samyama on physical strength.
This particular power does not seem so strange to Westerners, since there are many accounts of persons possessing enormous strength when confronted by a severe crisis wherein subconscious factors took over.
Dingwall (1962b:80) tells of the ecstatic Gabrielle who willingly suffered forty heavy blows on her stomach with a mallet without any apparent injury, and afterwards begged for more.
Dingwall (1962b:182-5) contains a valuable bibliography of citations on the spectacular somatic aspects of religious frenzy in the United States, many of which involve extraordinary somatic behavior.
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Patanjali sutra No. 24 (Aranya 1977:331) declares that "by practicing samyama on physical strength the strength of elephants can be obtained."
3.Y) Externalization of Sense Organs, Odors of Sanctity
This power is difficult to explain, but apparently what happens is that the senses become independent of the body, so that what we have is the apotheosis of the sensorium. Patanjali sutra No. 47 (Arayna 1977:365) says that "by samyama on the receptivity, essential character, 'I-sense,' inherent quality, and objectiveness of the five sense-organs, power over them can be acquired." On page 268, sutra No. 48 follows with, "Thence come powers of rapid movement as of mind, action of sense-organs independent of the body, and mastery over the primordial cause."
This last and ultimate physical power blends naturally into knowledge abilities (especially 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5), vision through opaque objects, miraculous touch, and miraculous hearing, all of which involve transcendence of physical sensory organs, and each of which will be discussed later in place.
The peculiar sweet, ethereal odor of some saints and Eastern holy men is well attested. While more or less of a curiosity, it seems to be connected with the exaltation of the sense of smell.
Yogananda (1977:481) reports that the etheric body has all the sensory organs; "but employs the intuitional sense to experience sensations through any part of the body."
Susy Smith catches a glimpse of the exterioration of the senses from the physical body to the etheric energy body by quoting the following dialog between Psychic magazine and the psychic Ingo Swann (Smith 1975:30):
PSYCHIC: Then perhaps you think a person exists in this dimension and in another one at the same time?
SWANN: Oh, yes. This has been generally accepted in historical psychism, but not nearly enough research has been done on it. We are always prone to interpret a psychic event in terms that the five senses can appreciate. Yet we have to establish greater senses in order to establish a reality for these things that exist at other places.
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Conclusion
What shall be said in explanation of all these marvels, which represent, (to be frank), a "cock-of-the-snoot" to scientific materialism, since every conceivable liberty is taken with its laws. We can, of course, as many do, simply deny that data, and try to sweep it under the rug. Being an empiricist, and jealous of personal honesty, this is not for the writer. One is then left, it seems, with three alternatives:
1) The data can be, according to the classical view, the work of spirits, both disincarnate and those who have passed over. But despite the immense number of saintly persons who have believed in this explanation, it somehow does not satisfy.
2) A better explanation in these eyes is that of sensuous reality being a holographic (virtual) image of a hologram imprinted on the brain, so that the world of physical reality is, (as Khayyam and Hesse both said), like a motion picture projection capable of being instantaneously changed when new film is introduced. If all of the psychic effects in this chapter are reviewed, it will be seen that each of them is amenable to this explanation.
3) But a third and vague alternative is offered us. Is it possible that this whole answer is not only grander than we imagine, but grander than we can imagine? And if so the stumbling block is the "we," for is the personal individuality the last illusion to be surmounted? What does it suggest when in exalted states we find that the individual mind somehow has access to general knowledge? It suggests, it seems, that there is but one general mind, and individual minds are but shadowy and evanescent illusions of it.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Recent developments in physics, especially the "non-locality" principle (cf Zukav 1979: 302-316) indicate that even physical particles which are separated in space may be informationally connected in some higher manner. If everything is somehow connected to everything else, telepathy becomes a natural consequence.
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2 We have confined our selective analysis of possession to the "highest" examples of
it in mediumship; for more primitive accounts, the reader is referred to Prince (1968).
3 C.R. = critical ratio. A C.R. of 2 places the possibility at the 5% level, of 2.56 at the 1% level, of 3 at the .003 level.
Further to prana and air, see Puharich in Regush (1977:62-22).
5 Arbman (1963:295-309) details a number of "ecstatic light experiences" occurring to those in mystic ecstasy. In these the light seems immanent in the room, rather than proceeding from any given source; there is sometimes an afterglow in shining faces of participant(s). We have earlier stated our belief that in such cases the hologram illusion of physical reality is temporarily set aside, and the light represents interior illumination of the reference beam of cosmic Ground.
* Further to luminescence, auras, etc., see Tompkins, P. L., and Bird, C. The Secret Life of Plants, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
6 Further to electrodynamics and life, see Burr in Regush (1977:233ff).
7 But see statement of Yoganada (1977:424) re Therese Neumann to whose inedia and stigmata he devotes an entire chapter.
8 For examples of exact premonitions of death see Richet 1923:350ff.
9 Leuba (1972:258), ever the skeptic, treats this subject as "impressions" of levitation, and dismisses them as OBE's or hallucinations.
10 "Most miracles can be explained away, as exaggerations or variations of familiar reality. But levitation is absolute; it must be exactly true or totally false. I do not believe Brother Leo's story;" (Bishop's footnote quoted exactly - JCG).
SPECIAL NOTE
As this book is in press, the author is chagrined to find that he has overlooked a fine book by the Englishman Michael Harrison on SHC called
Fire From Heaven. (U.S. ed New York: Methuen Co, 1 ). The book is very complete and contains a long bibliography.
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Hindu tradition, unlike Christian, gives us some thoughtful reasons for such prohibitions in those who wish to follow the religious life. While the instructions are confined to males, it appears that for safe passage of the kundalini fire up the spine, a transmu-
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tation of the seminal fluid is required in order to serve this higher use; and that subsequent to the ascent of the kundalini, any lower use of procreative powers may be not only deleterious but actually dangerous in a kind of "short-circuit" phenomenon. Storing of the prana in the body in enough quantity to produce healing and siddhis is not possible when activity in sexual life continues, according to these sources. And this is the real reason for asceticism in monastic life. It is true that storing up pranic energy may result in poltergeist-like spillovers, but as the Cure of Ars (who had such problems) would have said: "It is easier to face the Devil than a beautiful woman, and escape unscathed."
3.62) Inedia or Independence from Food and Drink
In some cases of devout persons, it appears that they are able to subsist without food or drink (in the case of Catholics, the Host is excepted). Some other method of obtaining energy is adopted (in the case of at least some mystics this appears to be from the sun). Inedia is a siddhi resulting from samyama on the trachea given by Patanjali's sutra 30 (Ayrana 1977:342).
Jung (Stern, 1976:50) described the enigma of a Swiss saint, Brother Klaus, of whom it was said that for twenty years he had touched neither food nor drink. Jung accepted this fact as "corroborated by reliable witnesses." Yogananda (1977:422) devotes a chapter to the mystic, Therese Neumann, who took no food except the Host. Concerning this matter of inedia, he says (ibid:539):
The non-eating state attained by Giri Bala is a yogic power mentioned in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras III:31. She employs a certain breathing exercise that affects the visudda chakra, the fifth center of subtle energies located in the spine. The visudda chakra, opposite the throat, controls the fifth element, akash or ether, pervasive in the inter-atomic spaces of the physical cells. Concentration on this "wheel" chakra enables the devotee to live by etheric energy.
Farges (1926:560-1) describes the inedia of several saints:
Blessed Angela of Foligno remained for twelve years without taking any nourishment; St. Catherine of Siena about eight years; Blessed Elizabeth of Rente more than fifteen years; St. Lydwine twenty-eight years; Blessed Catherine of Racconigi
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ten years; Dominic of Paradiso twenty years; in our own day, Rosa Andriani twenty-eight years; Domenica Lazzari and Louise Lateau fourteen years.
In order to prove the authenticity of these facts Benedict XIV drew up very severe rules of criticism. But we must not think that before his time these marvels were accepted with naive credulity without previous inquiry. The more astonishment they raised, the more they provoked mistrust, suspicion, watchfulness, and often unbelief.
Pope Innocent VII, during his sojourn at Perugia, had a judicial inquiry made into the case of Blessed Colomba of Rieti, who had taken no nourishment other than the eucharistic bread for more than twenty years. In 1659 the famous shepherdess of Laus was taken to the Bishop's house at Embrun in order to be more easily submitted to an inquiry respecting her visions and abstinence; she was guarded day and night for a fortnight. In 1813 Catherine Emmerich, whose abstinence was no less remarkable, was watched and guarded day and night for ten days by order of ecclesiastical authority. The twenty burghers entrusted with this prepared a circumstantial report, which was also confirmed by her physician, the famous Dr. Overberg.
In 1868 the abstinence of Sister Esperance of Jesus was officially confirmed by the Bishop of Ottawa, assisted by two physicians, one, Dr. Baubien, a Catholic, and the other, Dr. Ellis, a Protestant. She was subjected to most rigorous supervision for six weeks, locked in a room and guarded and watched by sisters who never left her. At the beginning of the experiment she weighed 113 pounds; at the end, in the presence of the Bishop of Ottawa, her weight had reached 124 pounds. The venerable Dr. Landry, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Quebec, who came to Royau in 1880, also testified to this in the presence of Dr. Imbert.
From October 25 to December 7, 1877, the abstinence of Josephine Reverdy was examined in like manner, as related in detail in the Apparitions de Boulleret, chapter V. She was constantly watched by ten women or girls, five by day and five by night, and the authenticity of the fact was recognized.
Moreover, there is another kind of control which goes to confirm the first and does away with any doubt. Not only do these abstaining saints eat nothing secretly, but they can no longer eat anything without throwing it up again immediately. It is not merely that they are exempt from the hunger common to
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all men, but also unable to sustain any earthly nourishment other than the Holy Eucharist.
Here, for instance, is the testimony of Blessed Raymond of Capua with regard to the inedia of St. Catherine of Siena, whose confessor and biographer he was. At first her extraordinary fasting had produced murmurings against her from her companions and from all who knew her. She was accused of wishing to surpass the fast of our Lord, of seeking after singularity, and so on. Raymond himself was alarmed at these murmurs, and feared lest he were mistaken in his direction of this soul. In order to cut short the scandal he desired to force her to eat. Through obedience she did so, but very soon threw up all that she had taken with atrocious suffering, even to the vomiting of blood.
3.63) Non-Somnia
While there are many examples in history and contemporary life of the reduced need for sleep in those of saintly or intellectual life, we know of very few instances where sleep has been entirely done away with. One is the account of Ram Gopal, the Hindu "sleepless saint" to which Yogananda (1977:157ff) devotes a whole chapter.
One of the effects of the practice of meditation is to reduce the hours needed for sleep. (See, for example, Satprem 1968 on Sri Aurobindo's practice.) And another effect seen in advanced meditators and others is the recurrence of lucid sleep, when the cosmic consciousness is found in the sleeping state as well as the waking.
Non-somnia, however, is not found among the siddhis resulting from Patanjali's sutras.
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3.7) Post-Mortem and Trans-Mortem Effects
This is a recondite area, about which there is little information. We touch lightly on the following sub-categories: .71) transfiguration, .72) translation, .73) automatic disposal of body after death, .74) incorruptibility of the cadaver, and .75) knowing the hour of one's death. What we appear to have here is no less than the resurrection promised by Jesus, namely the ultimate translation of the ascended being into cosmic light (cf. John 1977:239). In this view, transfiguration is a prefiguration of this integration, a sighting of the etheric body in its glory. The others are lesser levels afforded to those who did not reach translation -"consolation prizes" -- as it were, in the road to nirvana.
3.71) Transfiguration
On Mt. Tabor, before Peter, James, and John (Matthew 17: 2), Jesus "was transfigured before them, and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light." At his side were Moses and Elijah; a voice spoke to the disciples out of a cloud, and they were afraid. This is the classic example. It is possible that the transfiguration experience is a sighting of one of the higher vehicles of man, perhaps the etheric. Other lesser instances of translation have been St. Seraphim of Sarov (John 1978:282) and possibly St. Francis of Assisi. There have been other examples of shining faces (e.g., Moses, Exodus 34). Patanjali's yoga sutras No. 40 ( Aranya 1977:351-2), says that by "conquering the vital force called samana .... the yogin can become effulgent and excite the radiance in the body."
3.72) Translation
Translation - "to convey or remove to heaven without death" is mentioned in the Old Testament in connection with Elijah and Enoch. While Elijah was purportedly carried to heaven in a chariot, the translation of Indian saints seems to take place in a flash of light. John (1978:242-3) describes the translation of Chaitanya, Jnanehwar, Tukarum, and Ramalingam. Mohammed is believed by Muslims to have been translated. Some Christians believe that the shroud of Turin was caused by the translation of Jesus' body into a flash of light. We append the account of the translation of Tukarum as typical (ibid:273):
Tukarum sang late into the night: 'I have seen my own death with my own eye. It was inconceivably holy.' At the peak of his ecstasy, a blinding blaze of light caused his followers to close their eyes. When they looked again, Tukaram was gone.
Skarin (1952:183,4), who according to the frontispiece in her book was herself translated, tells of nine others who were translated. (The author has had personal communication from a woman who claims her husband was also translated following the
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directions of Skarin. We state this information as a matter of record. Despite questioning, we were not able to shake the story, nor did the woman show other signs of mental instability.)
3.73) Automatic Disposal of Body after Death
It is stated that one power of Adepts is to be able to cremate their body after death. Other traditions have it that aged Hindu saints pen themselves up when nearing death, and food passed in is no longer consumed. When friends break in, no corpse is found (John, 1978:24). Krippner and Villoldo (1976:168) describe similar situations which might be either translation or automatic disposal in the case of Inca saints. It may be that some cases of "SHC" (see Section 3.33) should come under this heading.
3.74) Incorruptibility
A far more common phenomenon is incorruptibility of the body (non-decomposition), which has been attested to many times, usually in connection with disinterring of the corpses of saints. There are, of course, natural reasons why incorruptibility can occur, but they are rare.
3.75) Knowing the Hour of One's Death
This phenomenon is quite common, even in ordinary people, and there are many examples of it in literature, history, and ordinary life.8
We have now examined four powers: stigmata, electromagnetic phenomena, freedom from bodily functions, and graces associated with death (3.4-3.7), all having to do with the growing independence of the body from physical conditions and requirements. In all cases the body is seen more as the temple of the spirit than as a physical corpus. The regnancy of the etheric body over the material body has again been asserted. We are beginning to glimpse an overriding theme in this taxonomy of cosmogenic powers - namely, that the human mind when joined with the numinous can effect startling changes by thought alone in the physical body and the physical universe. We shall continue this theme and its expansion as we survey the next set of four higher cosmogenic bodily powers.
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3.8) Levitation
Let us imagine that disincarnate intelligence wished to prove transcendental reality to us mortals; what means would be the most efficacious? Certainly the answer is levitation; for as others have noted, while reports of other types of miracles may be considered exaggeration, levitation is an either/or "experience." Either it occurs or it does not. There is no middle position. The reason most people cannot accept levitation is not because of the weakness of the testimony, but because its existence is such a flat contradiction to all they have believed about the nature of physical reality. Because of its egregious nature, we shall hence give levitation a considerable emphasis in this taxonomy. We ask the reader to suspend his judgment in an empirical inspection of the facts and data. If he be unwilling to assign a truth value at the 5% level of significance to any given datum, let him conduct in his mind a non-mathematical means test, and ask himself, what is the cumulative effect of such wealth of testimony, often from otherwise honest and even saintly persons, from every age and culture, from different religious persuasions (or from none at all). It is not a pleasant affect to have an empirical inspection overturn a deeply held prejudice, but paradigms exist to be supplanted, and even the most tenaciously held ones must finally yield to the simple data of experience.9
While there are many reports of levitation in every age and culture, we shall confine our attention to three categories where it has been especially well documented or reported. These are in order:
a) Levitation among Christian mystics,
b) Levitation among profane paragnosts, and
c) Levitation as a Transcendental Meditation siddhi.
These three categories had their apices in Europe during the 12th, the 19th and the 20th centuries respectively. Doubtless, we show Western provincialism in this restriction. There are many accounts of levitation among Asian shamans, and as well among Hindu holy men, but space limitations force neglect of these.
3.81) Levitation Among Christian Mystics
While rare, levitation is by no means unique among Christian saints and mystics, usually occurring in ecstasy or mystic rapture. Farges (1926:537) chronicles it in St. Paul of the Cross,
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St. Philip Neri, St. Stephen of Hungary, St. Peter of Alcantra, St. Francis Xavier, St. Agnes, and St. Joseph of Cupertino. He states:
St. Peter of Alcantra was unable to hear the lofty words of St. John VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST pronounced without falling into ecstasy and being raised above the earth. The Franciscan Biago of Caltanisetta went into ecstasy simply at the names of Jesus and Mary and sprang into the air enraptured with their beauty. Blessed Giles of the Order of St. Dominic remained suspended in the air in ecstasy for whole nights without it being possible to bring him back to earth or even to give the least inclination to his body. After her communion Mary of Agreda became slightly raised above the ground and seemed to be so light that those who stood by her were able to rock her with the slightest breath. King Philip II experienced the same phenomenon with Fr. Dominic ... St. Thomas of Villanova while preaching one day in his cathedral went into ecstasy and remained suspended in the air twelve hours...
The greatest flyer of them all was the famous St. Joseph of Cupertino to whose attested exploits Dingwall (1962a) devotes an entire chapter. A monk of notorious mortification (p. 12) while praying in chapel one day, was observed by a group of nuns: Suddenly he rose up into the air and with a cry flew in the upright position to the altar with his hands outstretched as on a cross, and alighted on it... The nuns ... cried out loudly, 'He will catch fire.' But his companion who was present, and accustomed to such sights, told the nuns not to lack faith, as he would not burn himself. Then with another cry Joseph flew back into the church in a kneeling position, and alighting on his knees began to whirl ... dancing and singing, being filled with joy and exultation...
Further, being sent to Rome to see Pope Urban V III(p. 13):
On finding himself in the presence of the supreme pontiff, Joseph was seized by ecstatic rapture, and rose in the air, remaining suspended until recalled to his senses by the fathergeneral. The Pope was so much impressed by this surprising event, that he is said to have declared that if Joseph should die during his pontificate then he himself would testify at the canonization.
Entering the basilica of Assisi (p. 14), he saw a picture of the Virgin on the ceiling. Uttering a cry, "Joseph rose into the air
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and flew 18 paces in order to embrace it, crying out, 'Oh, my Mother. "'
During his years at Cupertino and in the monastery of Assisi, his flights are too numerous to describe (p.14), though there are several recorded accounts of his flying onto the altar or pulpit during Mass, when transported in ecstasy. His flights never disturbed anything on the altar. Further says Dingwall (1 972a:16):
It is recorded that one day a priest, who was walking with him in the kitchen garden, remarked how beautiful was the heaven which God had made. Thereupon. . Joseph, uttering a shriek, sprang from the ground, and flew into the air, only coming to rest on top of an olive tree where he remained in a kneeling position for half an hour. It was noticed with wonder that the branch on which he rested shook only slightly as if a bird had been sitting on it.
In these transports, Joseph was able to carry heavy crosses, and in one instance a fellow priest (p.17), without difficulty. He is also said (p.18) to have cured a mad knight by taking him on an aerial journey.
The Duke of Brunswick, visiting Assisi in 1651 was converted to Catholicism after surreptitiously observing Joseph in chapel saying private Mass (p. 19):
There they heard him give a loud cry and saw him rise in the air in a kneeling position, passing backward five paces and then returning in the front of the altar, remaining in ecstasy for some time.
This shook up the Lutheran, and the next day he was present at Mass.
And this time he saw Joseph raise a palm high from the altar step and remain floating for a quarter of an hour. The Duke was so overcome by the sight that his doubts were resolved and he became a Catholic.
The great Leibnitz, the Duke's librarian, states that the Duke was converted by the wonder-working friar (p. 20).
Another noble who vouched for the miraculous powers was the Infanta Maria, daughter of the Duke of Savoy, who witnessed
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several levitations, (p.20). Still a third noble was the Admiral of Castile who, with his wife, witnessed a flight of twelve paces over his head in the chapel, (p. 22).
His physician several times observed him in rapturous flight, on one occasion when he was cauterizing Joseph's leg, (p. 26-7), the saint was completely insensible to the pain, and levitated. Joseph even rose from his death bed, (p. 28), and flew from his cell to the chapel. Three cardinals also testified that they had seen him levitated in the canonization process, (p. 23). Besides St. Joseph, (Dingwall, 1972a:166) tells briefly of other levitators, Sister Marie, and the Franciscan monk, Juan de Jesus.
Bishop (1973:166) tells about the levitation of St. Francis, and adds an important footnote about the importance of levitation itself, and his own bias about it:
Francis's escape into a private world naturally roused the curiosity of the five companions. Leo, presuming on old intimacy, spied on the Master, and was rewarded by seeing him frequently levitated to a height of about twenty feet, sometimes to the treetops, and once nearly out of sight.10
It is also easy to overlook the levitations of Jesus, in walking on the waves, the Transfiguration, and the Ascension.
As Dingwall is careful to point out, Christian mystics are not the only ones who fly, (1962:30-1). "Holy men and ascetics in India and the Far East have many times been described as levitated" and even savage tribes have their flying shamans.
Rama, (1978:442), tells of an almost incredible experience with the post mortem of a yogi who had predicted the time of leaving the body. After trying to lift the corpse and finding that it had acquired supernatural weight, he recalls what happened next:
I shall never forget the experience. A few minutes before sunrise I heard someone say: 'Now we will carry him.' There was no one around, so I thought: 'Perhaps I am imagining it.' My brother disciple also looked around. I asked, 'Did you hear something?' He said, 'Yes, I also heard it.' . . . Suddenly the man's body rose into the air, apparently of its own accord, and moved slowly toward the Ganges. It floated on the
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air, a few hundred yards, then lowered and sank into the Ganges.
Stace (1960:182) quotes St. Teresa's account of her levitation:
At other times, resistance has been impossible: my soul has been borne away, and indeed as a rule my head also, without my being able to prevent it: sometimes my whole body has been affected, to the point of being raised up from the ground.
This has happened only rarely; but once, when we were together in choir, and I was on my knees and about to communicate, it caused me the greatest distress. It seemed to me a most extraordinary thing and I thought there would be a great deal of talk about it; so I ordered the nuns (for it happened after I was appointed Prioress) not to speak of it. On other occasions, when I have felt that the Lord was going to enrapture me (once it happened during a sermon, on our patronal festival, when some great ladies were present), I have lain on the ground and the sisters have come and held me down, but none the less the rapture has been observed.
I can testify that after a rapture my body often seemed as light as if all weight had left it: sometimes this was so noticeable that I could hardly tell when my feet were touching the ground. For, while the rapture lasts, the body often remains as if dead and unable of itself to do anything: it continues all the time as it was when the rapture came upon it - in a sitting position, for example, or with the hands open or shut. The subject rarely loses consciousness: I have sometimes lost it altogether, but only seldom and for but a short time.
Pope Benedict XIV is quoted on the subject by Farges, (1926:547):
Ecstasy in fact is a participation, although imperfect, in the beatific vision of the elect in heaven, and levitation is a participation in the gift of agility which the bodies of these blessed ones possess in glory. Rapture of the transfigured body thus becomes the manifest sign and symbol of that of the soul, and the resemblance of our saints on earth to the blessed in heaven appears then to be more complete and more striking.
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3.82). Levitations of Non-Religious Paragnosts
While the medium Euspasia Palladino was detected in fraud, some of her feats defy it. (Dingwall, 1962b:204) reports an early eyewitness account of the levitation of a table under bright lights.
Probably the most celebrated levitator of modern times was the redoubtable Home who was accustomed to float around during seances, and often levitated objects including on one occasion, a piano, (1972:86): "While the Countess was seated at one of Erard's grand action pianos, it rose and balanced itself in the air during the whole time she was playing it." On another occasion, (1972:90) a table was lifted from the ground.
Here, (Home, 1972:177-8), is an interesting account of Home's levitation by a seance witness:
Another hand now appeared and on Mr. Home being touched by it, he exclaimed, 'They are raising me; do not look at me 'til I am above the table, as it might have the effect of bringing me down.' Almost at the same time Mr. Home was raised up and floated in the air at a height of about five feet . . . but upon approaching the window, he came again gently to the ground. He remarked; 'Their strength is hardly great enough yet, though I feel it will come soon. . . . At the same moment the same hand that had before imparted such supernatural strength to Mr. Home was again seen grasping him. His arms were raised above his head, and he was again lifted about two feet off the ground and carried to the window where he was raised to within about 18 inches of the ceiling. After remaining floating for about two minutes he descended; but on coming near his chair, he was again elevated and placed in a standing position . . . his weight not resting on it, it had no effect, nor was there even a creak heard. In about a minute both Mr. Home and the small table were elevated for a fourth time in the air about a foot ...
As this passage shows, Home believed that spirits levitated him and the objects he designated.
Dingwall, (1972a:) also reports some other levitations of Home not mentioned in Home's own book. On page 100, Reverend Davis reported "he saw D. D. Home float around Mr. Hall's drawing room." Dr. Harriet Clisby "was levitated along with
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Home in her own lodgings, " (p. 101).
The description of a witness of a seance is quoted in Home (1972:38-9):
The table was actually lifted up from the floor, without the application of a human hand or foot! A table weighing, I should judge, one hundred pounds, was lifted up a foot from the floor, the legs touching nothing. I jumped upon it, and it came up again! It then commenced rocking, without, however, allowing me to slide off, although it canted at least to an angle of forty-five degrees! Finally, an almost perpendicular inclination slid me off, and another of the company tried it with the same results. These things all happened in a room which was light enough to allow of our seeing under and over, and all around the table, which was touched by no one except the two persons who respectively got upon it to keep it down!
Suddenly, and without any expectation on the part of the company, Mr. Home, was taken up in the air! I had hold of his hand at the time, and I and others felt his feet - they were lifted a foot from the floor! He palpitated from head to foot apparently with the contending emotions of joy and fear which choked his utterance. Again and again he was taken from the floor, and the third time he was carried to the lofty ceiling of the apartment, with which his hand and head came in gentle contact.
I omitted to state that these latter demonstrations were made in response to a request of mine that the spirits would give us something that would satisfy everyone in the room of their presence. The medium was much astonished, and more alarmed than any of the rest, who, I may add, took the matter calmly, though they were intensely interested.
Home's own reactions follow: ibid.:39):
During these elevations, or levitations, I usually experience in my body no particular sensations than what I can only describe as an electrical fullness about the feet. I feel no hands supporting me, and since the first time, above described, I have never felt fear, though should I have fallen from the ceiling of some rooms in which I have been raised, I could not have escaped serious injury. I am generally lifted up perpendicularly;0. my arms frequently become rigid and drawn above my head, as if I were grasping the unseen power which
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slowly raises me from the floor. At times when I reach the ceiling, my feet are brought on a level with my face, and I am as it were in a reclining position. I have frequently been kept so suspended four or five minutes, an instance of which will be seen in an account which is given of occurrences in the year 1857, at a chateau near Bordeaux. I have been lifted in the light of day upon only one occasion, and that was in America. I have been lifted in a room in Sloane Street, London, with four gas-lights brightly burning, with five gentlemen present, who are willing to testify to what they saw, if need be, beyond the many testimonies which I shall hereafter adduce. On some occasions the rigidity of my arms relaxes, and I have with a pencil made letters and signs on the ceiling, some of which now exist in London.
Further on Home's levitations, Doyle (1926:1:195-6) tells us:
Take this question of levitation as a test of Home's powers. It is claimed that more than a hundred times in good light before reputable witnesses he floated in the air. Consider the evidence. In 1857, in a chateau near Bordeaux, he was lifted to the ceiling of a lofty room in the presence of Madame
Ducos, widow of the Minister of Marine, and of the Count and Countess de Beaumont. In 1860 Robert Bell wrote an article, 'Stranger than Fiction,' in the Cornhill. 'He rose from his chair,' says Bell, 'four or five feet from the ground . . . We saw his figure pass from one side of the window to the other, feet foremost, lying horizontally in the air.' Dr. Gully, of Malvern, a well-known medical man, and Robert Chambers, the author and publisher, were the other witnesses. Is it to be supposed that these men were lying confederates, or that they could not tell if a man were floating in the air or pre-
tending to do so? In the same year Home was raised at Mrs. Milner Gibson's house in the presence of Lord and Lady Clarence Paget, the former passing his hands underneath him to assure himself of the fact. A few months later Mr. Wason, a Liverpool solicitor, with seven others, saw the same phenomenon. 'Mr. Home,' he says, 'crossed the table over the heads of the persons sitting around it.' He added: 'I reached his hand seven feet from the floor, and moved along five or six paces as he floated above me in the air.' In 1861 Mrs. Parkes, of Cornwall Terrace, Regent's Park, tells how she was present with Bulwer-Lytton and Mr. Hall when Home in her own drawing-room was raised till his hand was on top of the door, and then floated horizontally forward. In 1866 Mr. and Mrs. Hall, Lady Dunsany, and Mrs. Senior, in Mr. Hall's house, saw
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Home, his face transfigured and shining, twice rise to the ceiling, leaving a cross marked in pencil upon the second occasion, so as to assure the witnesses that they were not the victims of imagination.
In 1868 Lord Adare, Lord Lindsay, Captain Wynne, and Mr. Smith Barry saw Home levitate upon many occasions. A very minute account has been left by the first three witnesses of the occurrence of December 16, of this year, when at Ashley House, Home, in a state of trance, floated out of the bedroom and into the sitting room window, passing seventy feet above the street.
Zollner (1881:206) gives Lord Lindsay's account:
I was sitting with Mr. Home and Lord Adare, and a cousin of his. During the sitting Mr. Home went into a trance, and in that state was carried out of the window in the room next to where we were, and was brought in at our window. The distance between the windows was about 7 feet 6 inches, and there was not the slightest foothold between them, nor was there more than a 12-inch projection to each window, which served as a ledge to put flowers on.
We heard the window into the next room lifted up and almost immediately after we saw Home floating in the air outside our window.
The moon was shining full into the room; my back was to the light, and I saw the shadow on the wall of the window-sill, and Home's feet about six inches above it. He remained in this position for a few seconds, then raised the window and glided into the room, feet foremost, and sat down.
Lord Adare then went into the next room to look at the window from which he had been carried. It was raised about 18 inches, and he expressed his wonder how Mr. Home had been taken through, so narrow an aperture.
Home said, still entranced 'I will show you,' and then with his back to the window he leaned back, and was shot out of the aperture, head first, with the body rigid, and then returned quite quietly.
The window is about 70 feet from the ground. I very much doubt whether any skillful tight-rope dancer would like to
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attempt a feat of this description, where the only means of crossing would be by a perilous leap, or being borne across in such a manner as I have described, placing the question of the light aside.
-- Lindsay, July 14th, 1871.
There is some conflicting evidence about this feat, as noted by Dingwall (1962a: 114-116). For another account of this and other phenomena associated with Home, see the chapter in Brown (1972:245-68).
We have tabulated in Table III-3, the many levitations described by Home in his autobiography (1962), including the type of levitation, the light, the height, the time, the witnesses, the narrator, and other remarks.
We have given attention to the levitations of Home, as he was perhaps the most famous paragnost, and accounts of his levitation are especially explicit. He was also, on several occasions, levitated himself; while in most other mediums there was levitation of inanimate objects only, apparently a much more easily accomplished task (and also one more easily open to fraud). We have, therefore, avoided many examples of alleged levitation during dark seances of light objects, such as bells, books, candles, handkerchiefs, etc.
Zollner (1881:56, 80) reports levitations of tables, chairs, and other objects, some during daylight in the presence of a medium:
Mrs. Nichols was with them at table, and reports that, as they were conversing, loud raps responded, and the heavy table loaded with dishes, when no one touched it, rose up some inches from the floor, and so remained, while she stooped down to see that all its feet were in the air. This is common enough in the presence of mediums, but the very powerful action in the drawing-room, in the light of mid-day, with no person near, seems to me novel and remarkable.
Moss (1974:384) has a section on levitation and notes the Cyril Scott book The Initiate in the New World which describes his eyewitness of a levitation performed by his guru.
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TABLE III-3 LEVITATIONS DESCRIBED BY HOME IN INCIDENTS IN MY LIFE
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The Wallaces (1977:438) list the following levitators: Colin Evans, Witch of Navarre, Don Juan, Daniel Home, Juan de Jesus, St. Joseph of Cupertino, Carlo Mirabelli, Stainton Moses, E. Pallidino, Willy Scheider. Photos exist in the cases of Evans and Mirabelli.
Eliade (1972:409) tells us: "Buddhist texts speak of four different magical powers of translation, the first being the ability to fly like a bird. Patanjali cites the power to fly through the air."
Richet, the French professor of physiology, was a famous and careful psychic researcher. His 1923 book devotes a chapter (p. 546-51) to levitations of the human body. He cites the French authority, Gorre (Mystique Divine, Paris: Poussielque, 1883), and the De Rochas sequel (Recueils de documents relatif a la levitation du corps humain, Paris: Leymarie, 1897), both of which cite many cases, including those of St. Peter of Alacantra, Christine, Agnes of Bohemia, Bernard de Courleon, Dalmacius of Gironne, St. Francis, St. Joseph of Cupertino (to whom Gorres assigns 12 pages), St. Paul de la Croix, St. Theresa, St. Philip de Neri, Dominique San Diego, Salvator de Horta, and more recently in the 19th century, Fornat, Dhiere and the Cure d'Ars. Partial levitations, in which there was a weight loss registered on scales, are also noted. Richet (1923:402-423) also gives details of dozens of levitations of tables and other objects in the presence of a medium. His explanation for these examples of PK in its most spectacular mode is that ectoplasmic rods or limbs usually invisible, expressed from the medium's body, accomplish the maneuver.
Here it should be observed, that if levitation of profane paragnosts is accomplished by pseudo-pods (psychic extensions of their bodies), it may have a different cause than levitation of saints, or persons in ecstasy or a state of grace, for which quantum mechanical rationales are advanced. It may be that all these different explanations are mere categorical components of a noncategorical truth which cannot be expressed in words. We are not in a position to judge, and so present the evidence and various theories to account for the phenomena, merely noting that there may be differences in them.
If levitation is accepted, it raises some very profound questions about gravitation, which is a far less well understood subject than most of us imagine. The possibility of gravitons, or
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gravitational corpuscles, and gravitational waves cannot at this time be discounted.
Levitation is one of the few siddhis where the feats of Christian mystics rival those of Hindu yogins. This suggests that the power is a spontaneous supercharacteristic of a state of extreme order (in line with our two-fluid model in Chapter One). Patanjali's sutra No. 41 (Aranya 1977:354-5) declares that by "practicing samyama on akasa and the body, and by meditation on the lightness of cotton wool, the yogin becomes light ... and can walk on water, on cobwebs, and on rays of light." In the TM siddhis program (to follow immediately), there is again meditation on a state of order, as we now read.
3.83) Levitation in the Transcendental Meditation Siddhis Program
A great deal of modern interest has recently been centered on widely reported accounts with pictures of TM practitioners levitating during meditation. Special courses are apparently necessary for this phenomenon to take place; a remarkable accompaniment of the levitation is a first attempt at scientific investigation and explanation of the effect. We shall accordingly give this development considerable attention.
Orme-Johnson and Farrow (1977:701-2) describe this in greater detail:
In their advanced training these teachers received specialized techniques known as the TM-Sidhi techniques, which are designed to elicit certain creative capabilities which in the past have been considered quite beyond the normal human repertoire of behavior. These abilities include knowledge of objects hidden from view, awareness of past and future, fully developed feelings of friendliness and compassion, enhancement of sensory thresholds to near the quantum mechanical level, invisibility, and levitation or "flying."
The basis of these abilities is the state of pure consciousness, the simplest form of awareness, and its associated state of highly coherent physiology. In principle the TM-Sidhi procedures simply make use of the insight that pure consciousness is the underlying field which structures not only the thought
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process but also the basic physical fields of gravitation and electromagnetism. By virtue of adopting specific procedures at the level of pure consciousness it is possible to make use of fundamental physical laws in such a way as to achieve the outstanding performance detailed in this research. The purpose of doing so is firstly to demonstrate to the student that he indeed possesses, in the form of the simplest state of his own awareness, the means to achieve all that is necessary or desirable in life, and secondly to strengthen the stability of pure consciousness by repeatedly subjecting it to procedures which integrate it with dynamic activity. Thus, the TM-Sidhi practices simultaneously test and strengthen pure consciousness in order to produce total integration of physiology.
Further to the specifics, Orme-Johnson and others say (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1977:708):
In a second study it was found that experiences of the siddhis develop in stages. Course participants were separately interviewed and were found to reach a consensus on the major stages of development of the experiences of several siddhis: Flying, Friendliness, Invisibility, Omniscience, and Strength. For example, the technique for "flying" (2, p. 349) has produced a variety of experiences that range from an awareness of the body becoming permeated by space and in some cases a mental and physical feeling of lightness, to an upward current of energy which may be accompanied by shaking of the body, fast breathing, and a spontaneous forward ballistic motion of two or three feet or "hop" from the sitting position; to "hopping" with an intense sense of transparency and lightness accompanied by increased control of direction; to more developed experiences such as feeling another upward impulse while still in the air; to a feeling of suspension in the air for a few seconds. An example of "hopping" is the following experience: 'I was sitting on a couch meditating at the time. I felt a tremendous amount of energy go through me and simultaneously I had a vision of my spine and my chest being just white light and a form in the air some place and then my body moved up and down on the couch two or three times. I thought, 'Oh, what is this?' and the next experience I had was hearing my body touch the floor. I say 'hearing' because I didn't feel it until after I heard it. It touched down, very, very softly. There was very little feeling of contact. I moved about a six-foot distance at that time.'
It is of interest that these stages correspond to stages of "flying" described in the Shiva Samhita (8, p. 30) of several
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thousand years of antiquity which states that first the body will shake, then hopping will occur, then the aspirant will "walk on air."
Levitation during meditation, while almost unknown among TM meditators who have not had this special training, seems to be reasonably common among the graduates of the special Siddhi course. The writer has talked with several who admitted that this effect occurs with some regularity during their meditations. They spoke of "bumping" as the most common experience, necessitating a pillow or other soft substance on the floor. Sustained flying appears rare, although personal report turned up at least one such instance.
TM sources say that the levitation effect is produced by careful observance of the injunctions in one of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. According to Singularities, January 31, 1978:
The power of levitation comes about when the experimenter practices a three-fold form of concentration upon the relationship of the physical body to space. The three aspects ... are: fixing one's attention on a single object, continuing that attention without a break in concentration and with a particular intent in mind, and finally merging with the object of that concentration.
Orme-Johnson and others (1977:709) in a footnote explain the key word sanyama as follows:
Sanyama is the basic technique for Performing the siddhis described by Patanjali. It entails the coming together of three elements: dhyana, the sequential flow of thought; and samadhi, transcendental consciousness of unbounded awareness. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali contain sutras of phrases containing ideas pertaining to specific siddhis upon which sanyama is performed.
Dharana (Evans-Wentz, 1958:177) is described as "yogic mastery of the thought process" (ibid:329), a condition of unbounded awareness and (in its highest state) of unmodified consciousness or boundless meditation.
3.84) Theories to Account for Levitation
Facts which should be taken into consideration:
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1. The levitated individual is not aware that he is about to be levitated; levitation comes as a surprise. St. Joseph of Cupertino seems always to have given a shriek.
2. The individual, while in levitation, does not press upon places where he alights; he is apparently weightless during such periods.
3. The weightless effect can be communicated to those with whom the levitator holds hands, as in the case of St. Joseph and the mad knight, Home and his friend, and Jesus on the waves and St. Peter. (Notice what the Ghost of Christmas Past said to Scrooge in a similar context.)
4. The levitated individual seems always to be in trance or samadhi,
We may inquire how those who were levitated thought it was accomplished. Home gives good testimony on this. He felt (being a Spiritualist) that departed spirits summoned up enough strength from the sitters and himself to materialize enough force to hold him up. Palladino appeared to believe much the same. Doyle (1926) and other scientific investigators felt that levitation was due to the action of an ectoplasmic psychic nimbus.
Levitating saints generally have believed that they were sustained by angels. One reason for this belief was that the vestments of the female levitators were never allowed to give onlookers immodest views.
Transcendental Meditation levitators have explained their levitation in terms of an ordered quantum mechanics state, as we have seen.
From this we gain the generalization that each levitator interpreted the phenomenon in accordance with his belief system, and we may add the corollary that since these differ and the phenomenon is the same, they all may have been mistaken. Perhaps the force which sustains a levitator is no more personal than the force which sustains a bridge, but is simply an example of the different laws when paraphysics is contrasted with physics.
Puharich (1962:209) states:
It is a long-standing legend that Yogins in the state of samadhi
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are capable of physically floating off the ground. If this is true, it would mean that the psi-plasma envelope of the Yogin contains a shielded region of marked decrease in the value of the gravitational constant. Hence the pull of the earth would be shielded and the individual would float. This possibility should be included in the list of critical experiments. One would have to search the world for a few individuals who claim to be able to do levitation. We could then conduct experiments comparable to those done by Sr. William Crookes on D. D. Home. Here the levitating individual is placed on a platform scale which under the constant gravitational pull of the earth would register a given amount of mass. The individual would then attempt to decrease this mass by undergoing the necessary mental operations to achieve levitation. This would be reflected in a loss of mass on the scale. There are a number of experiments from the last hundred years which state that weight losses up to 10% have been registered. If one could find such individuals one would have the simplest of all possible tests of the psi-plasma hypothesis.
While Puharich (1962:183-5) attempts a complex explanation of levitation in terms of diminution of gravitation due to peculiar reactions in the human nervous system, we shall here reject all physical explanations in favor of the theory that levitation constitutes clear evidence of the regnancy of a transcendent reality of greater order (the reference beam in the hologram paradigm), and that sensory reality is but the virtual image imprinted on the brain, as discussed in the introductory chapter. Physical reality as in levitation or in cases of spontaneous healing has to be altered to fit the sudden, perceptual change in the receptive mind. This is essentially what Castaneda meant by "seeing" a separate reality.
Looked at from a higher point of view, levitation and precognition are egregious assaults on the concept that life is confined to material sensory reality. Both are absolute, admitting no middle ground; both are flagrantly antithetical to materialistic philosophy; both offer spectacular possibilities for demonstration.
3.9) Invisibility
Outside of the Gyges parable by Socrates, there are very few, if any, accounts in the west of invisibility, though it is a Vedic siddhi (No. 21, Aranya 1977:327). "By practising samyama on the appearance of the body. . disappearance from view is
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effected." Besides Patanjali's Yoga sutras, it is rumored that this siddhi is also being taught in the TM advanced program. We read in Orme-Johnson, et al. (1977:708):
Invisibility has been described as ranging from a tingling sensation and/or a cool feeling in the body; to a feeling that 'the energy which is usually being sent out from the body is now falling back into itself' so that 'its radiations are collapsing inward'; to a feeling that the body is completely 'hiding itself' so that all that is left is the 'I-sense'; to becoming a white cloud, subjectively transparent.
Because of its very nature, invisibility is a far more difficult effect to prove evidentially than levitation; and, consequently, it is not so much "showcased." According to Singularities (Jan. 31, 1978), it says of invisibility: "To become invisible, according to Patanjali, involves the same process as levitation except that the object of one's concentration is the form and color of one's body."
The Pribram-Bohm holographic model is helpful in a rationale for invisibility, since there could well be an angle at which an imprinted hologram does not illuminate a virtual image.
Rev. Rosalyn Bruyere said at a Beverly Hills workshop (9/15/79) that bringing the aura inside the body can make one invisible.
3.X) Body Size and Weight Changes, Abnormal Strength
This category comprises a whole family of siddhis which relate to changes in body function, more general than some of the specifics treated earlier.
in corroboration we read in Long (1954:213-4):
Many reports have included the appearance of materialized forms, which were either larger or smaller than it is to be supposed the living person had been. This is similar to the phenomena of elongation of a living medium at seances, in which the medium's body has been seen to become longer by as much as two feet. (The kahunas believed that the shadowy body of a thing could be made larger or smaller.)
Let us consider "d," the distance between objects in 3-D
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space. For us this distance is a constant (the shortest distance between two objects is a straight line). But 4-space or in space under the influence of psychic force, "d" may be a variable with our "d" as its maximum. If "d" be reduced by delta "d" in flux under such influence, then points separated by "d" will be observed to be separated by "d" - delta "d" (somewhat less); and, hence, elongation may appear to take place.
3.Xl) Elongation
Bodily elongation is a very unusual power, but it is specifically referred to by Jesus (Matt. 6:27) in a cryptic utterance, "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to your stature." This is apparently not a rhetorical question, but a challenge to the audience that until this siddhi can be performed, amateurs should comport themselves as tyros. There are very few accounts of this power, but they are found in both holy and profane persons and in Hindu and Christian sources.
Palladino (Dingwall 1962b:182) "was able to increase her height by more than 10 centimeters."
Home (Richet, 1923:486) was another paragnost able to perform this feat. Richet reports: "That day Home's body was elongated... His ordinary height is five feet eight inches; he elongated to six feet five and one-half inches." Again quoting the Adare source, Richet (ibid) reports of Home:
Levitations were frequent, and still more frequent the elongations, this latter a singular phenomenon very susceptible of mistake, for which we have no parallel. Home was placed against the wall, Adare being in front of him; then his arms seemed to lengthen and his breast to swell. Home said to me, 'Adare, you see the extension is from the chest.' He again placed himself against the wall and extended his arms to their ordinary stretch. I made a pencil mark on the wall at the ends of his fingers. He then lengthened his left arm and I made a fresh mark; then his right arm, which I also marked. The total elongation, measured in this way, was nine and one-half inches.
Patanjali sutra No. 45 (Aranya 1977:363) involved a number of bodily changes, among which is "mahima, by which one can increase one's size or stature."
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3 X2) Size and Weight Changes
There are some traditions of giantism and miniaturization from Eastern sources, but none in the Western world. We shall confine our notice to measured weight changes and instances of immoveability.
St. Mary Magdalene (Dingwall 1962b:124) was an ecstatic who after Mass passed into a trance state and became rigid as if glued to the floor. All efforts to get her unstuck failed. There are other examples of immoveability among the saints.
Size and weight changes are mentioned in siddhi 45 (Aranya 1977:363) which specifies 1) minification, b) weight decrease, and c) increase of stature among other powers.
Speaking of weight changes in experiments with Home, Doyle (1926:1:245-6) remarks:
The most marked of these results was the alteration in the weight of objects, which was afterwards so completely confirmed by Dr. Crawford working with the Goligher circle, and also in the course of the 'Margery' investigation at Boston. Heavy objects could be made light, and light ones heavy, by the action of some unseen force which appeared to be under the influence of an independent intelligence.
Weight changes are among the most interesting phenomena connected with these powers, particularly as they suggest hypotheses about that nature of the powers. For example, Dingwall (1962b:199) tells us about an investigation of the medium Palladino:
One result of the committee's inquiry was to establish without shadow of doubt that many of the phenomena were objective and not due to hallucination on the part of the observers. With the medium's chair placed on a balance, it was evident that when the table was completely levitated, an increase in her weight resulted, roughly corresponding to the weight of the table.
The medium, Home, was also able to produce weight changes. Said Sir David Brewster, a participant at a Home seance (Home 1972:67): "The table was made light and heavy at com-
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mand. - On another occasion nine witnesses signed a statement which read in part (ibid:24): "It was perceived on lifting one end of the table, that its weight would increase or diminish in accordance with our request." On a third occasion of seance (ibid:200), "The table was made excessively heavy; four of us stood up and tried to lift it with all our power; it would not stir, neither could we turn it around. Dingwall (1962a:1 87ff) in a valuable appendix contains an extensive bibliography of the prodigies of Home.
3.X3) Extraordinary Strength
That ordinary people may possess extraordinary strength in crises is proverbial; we should not, therefore, be too surprised if it accompanies trance in paragnosts and saints.
It is difficult to separate this power from that of levitation, since they often occur together. St. Joseph of Cupertino (Dingwall 1962a:17) manifested it when he levitated a very heavy cross.
Home also manifested this power (Home 1972:177):
A block of wood, from the large arm of the tree of great weight ... was taken up by Mr. Home, as if it were a straw, carried around the room under his arm... It seemed to be of no weight to him, yet when two gentlemen, essayed, they could hardly move it.
As we have just mentioned, this power is a siddhi (No. 24, Aranya 1977:331), developed by samyama on physical strength.
This particular power does not seem so strange to Westerners, since there are many accounts of persons possessing enormous strength when confronted by a severe crisis wherein subconscious factors took over.
Dingwall (1962b:80) tells of the ecstatic Gabrielle who willingly suffered forty heavy blows on her stomach with a mallet without any apparent injury, and afterwards begged for more.
Dingwall (1962b:182-5) contains a valuable bibliography of citations on the spectacular somatic aspects of religious frenzy in the United States, many of which involve extraordinary somatic behavior.
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Patanjali sutra No. 24 (Aranya 1977:331) declares that "by practicing samyama on physical strength the strength of elephants can be obtained."
3.Y) Externalization of Sense Organs, Odors of Sanctity
This power is difficult to explain, but apparently what happens is that the senses become independent of the body, so that what we have is the apotheosis of the sensorium. Patanjali sutra No. 47 (Arayna 1977:365) says that "by samyama on the receptivity, essential character, 'I-sense,' inherent quality, and objectiveness of the five sense-organs, power over them can be acquired." On page 268, sutra No. 48 follows with, "Thence come powers of rapid movement as of mind, action of sense-organs independent of the body, and mastery over the primordial cause."
This last and ultimate physical power blends naturally into knowledge abilities (especially 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5), vision through opaque objects, miraculous touch, and miraculous hearing, all of which involve transcendence of physical sensory organs, and each of which will be discussed later in place.
The peculiar sweet, ethereal odor of some saints and Eastern holy men is well attested. While more or less of a curiosity, it seems to be connected with the exaltation of the sense of smell.
Yogananda (1977:481) reports that the etheric body has all the sensory organs; "but employs the intuitional sense to experience sensations through any part of the body."
Susy Smith catches a glimpse of the exterioration of the senses from the physical body to the etheric energy body by quoting the following dialog between Psychic magazine and the psychic Ingo Swann (Smith 1975:30):
PSYCHIC: Then perhaps you think a person exists in this dimension and in another one at the same time?
SWANN: Oh, yes. This has been generally accepted in historical psychism, but not nearly enough research has been done on it. We are always prone to interpret a psychic event in terms that the five senses can appreciate. Yet we have to establish greater senses in order to establish a reality for these things that exist at other places.
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Conclusion
What shall be said in explanation of all these marvels, which represent, (to be frank), a "cock-of-the-snoot" to scientific materialism, since every conceivable liberty is taken with its laws. We can, of course, as many do, simply deny that data, and try to sweep it under the rug. Being an empiricist, and jealous of personal honesty, this is not for the writer. One is then left, it seems, with three alternatives:
1) The data can be, according to the classical view, the work of spirits, both disincarnate and those who have passed over. But despite the immense number of saintly persons who have believed in this explanation, it somehow does not satisfy.
2) A better explanation in these eyes is that of sensuous reality being a holographic (virtual) image of a hologram imprinted on the brain, so that the world of physical reality is, (as Khayyam and Hesse both said), like a motion picture projection capable of being instantaneously changed when new film is introduced. If all of the psychic effects in this chapter are reviewed, it will be seen that each of them is amenable to this explanation.
3) But a third and vague alternative is offered us. Is it possible that this whole answer is not only grander than we imagine, but grander than we can imagine? And if so the stumbling block is the "we," for is the personal individuality the last illusion to be surmounted? What does it suggest when in exalted states we find that the individual mind somehow has access to general knowledge? It suggests, it seems, that there is but one general mind, and individual minds are but shadowy and evanescent illusions of it.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Recent developments in physics, especially the "non-locality" principle (cf Zukav 1979: 302-316) indicate that even physical particles which are separated in space may be informationally connected in some higher manner. If everything is somehow connected to everything else, telepathy becomes a natural consequence.
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2 We have confined our selective analysis of possession to the "highest" examples of
it in mediumship; for more primitive accounts, the reader is referred to Prince (1968).
3 C.R. = critical ratio. A C.R. of 2 places the possibility at the 5% level, of 2.56 at the 1% level, of 3 at the .003 level.
Further to prana and air, see Puharich in Regush (1977:62-22).
5 Arbman (1963:295-309) details a number of "ecstatic light experiences" occurring to those in mystic ecstasy. In these the light seems immanent in the room, rather than proceeding from any given source; there is sometimes an afterglow in shining faces of participant(s). We have earlier stated our belief that in such cases the hologram illusion of physical reality is temporarily set aside, and the light represents interior illumination of the reference beam of cosmic Ground.
* Further to luminescence, auras, etc., see Tompkins, P. L., and Bird, C. The Secret Life of Plants, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
6 Further to electrodynamics and life, see Burr in Regush (1977:233ff).
7 But see statement of Yoganada (1977:424) re Therese Neumann to whose inedia and stigmata he devotes an entire chapter.
8 For examples of exact premonitions of death see Richet 1923:350ff.
9 Leuba (1972:258), ever the skeptic, treats this subject as "impressions" of levitation, and dismisses them as OBE's or hallucinations.
10 "Most miracles can be explained away, as exaggerations or variations of familiar reality. But levitation is absolute; it must be exactly true or totally false. I do not believe Brother Leo's story;" (Bishop's footnote quoted exactly - JCG).
SPECIAL NOTE
As this book is in press, the author is chagrined to find that he has overlooked a fine book by the Englishman Michael Harrison on SHC called
Fire From Heaven. (U.S. ed New York: Methuen Co, 1 ). The book is very complete and contains a long bibliography.
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CHAPTER IV
Cosmogenic: Mental (Knowledge) Abilities
The final conclusion is that we know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.
- Walter Grierson
We have made an arbitrary distinction between physical powers and mental abilities, the former relating to the body, and the latter to the mind. But this duality is not seen in the siddhis, which commence with levitation at 3.8 and extend through infused knowledge at 4.8. What we are seeing in this taxonomic progression is the transcendence of the cosmic spirit first in the body and then in the mind, which process involves a cleansing and renewing of various functions to accommodate to a new order of reality. After the bodily siddhis in the last section, we continue with a transformation in the senses, and then a transmutation in knowledge itself, until eventually knowledge is translated into state, and the knower becomes one with the known.
In this taxonomy we shall follow the order which Radha (1978) described. She avers that these cosmogenic extensions of sensory knowledge come from the successive openings of the various chakra centers in the order given, with knowledge accompanying the opening of the sixth chakra. Presumably the completion of the circuit in the opening of the seventh chakra would correspond to the continuous contact and union in our 4.9. One may also note that 4.1 to 4.7 involve the cleansing of the doors of perception, spoken of by Blake in connection with the Adamic ecstasy (Jhana 0), (of Gowan 1975:361); 4.8 corresponds to the infused knowledge (Jhanas 1-4), (of Gowan 1975:366ff); and 4.9 corresponds to the continuous contact and union (Jhanas 5-8), (of Gowan 1975:376-79).
The reader will notice a certain "thinness" in this section as compared with the earlier one. It is important to realize that this is not because of the lesser importance of the topics, but because of less knowledge about them; most of them are simply
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too far beyond us for close examination; hence less is understood and writtten about them. There is also another aspect. The categorical language of discourse is less and less able to describe the non-categorical aspects of these levels adequately - in short, the language channel is too narrow for the message.
At this point, the thoughtful reader will ask a difficult question, which we will do our best to forestall: "Why (and in what manner) are the cosmogenic knowledge abilities 4.1 - 4.5, which deal with extraordinary aspects of the five senses, different from the ontogenic extensions of sensory modalities in 2.11 - 2.15. " Having shown in Section 0, (the phylogenic abilities of other species), that some animals possess extraordinary natural abilities, which are not considered supernatural despite the fact that little or nothing is known of their operation, we conclude from empirical observation that somewhat similar ontogenic abilities of exotic aspect exist among some members of humanity. These are cases, where the individuals 1) do not claim that there is any cosmic intervention in their natural powers, nor 2) do their lives indicate any anomalies of behavior which accompany psychotic, shamanistic, or saintly lifestyles. Neither of these conditions obtain in the cosmogenic realm. It is true that rather odd individuals possess these extensions of sensory modalities, but this may be an effect rather than a cause of their differences. In addition, the cosmogenic aspects are described in the religious literature of the world, particularly in the Hindu sources as being a part of cosmic developmental process, and are hence in place in theory as well as being observed in fact. It is true that some of the ontogenic extensions in 2.11-2.15 may be due (if one is willing to accept reincarnation or occult philosophy) to powers a prior incarnation developed, which are seen as un-understood epiphenomena in this one; they may also be due to the effects of guardian spirits. But in the final analysis, this question is an open one: we do not know what the difference (if it exists) signifies.
4.01) Psychometry
Psychometry is a mental ability which depends upon touch. When an object is touched impressions about its past are received. Long (1954:132-3) quotes the account of the psychometrist Ossowiecki:
I begin by stopping all reasoning, and I throw all my inner
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power into perception of spiritual sensation. I affirm that this condition is brought about by my unshakable faith in the spiritual unity of all humanity. I then find myself in a new and special state in which I see and hear outside time and space . . . Whether I am reading a sealed letter, or finding a lost object, or psychometrizing, the sensations are nearly the same. I seem to lose some energy; my temperature becomes febrile, and the heartbeats unequal. I am confirmed in this supposition because, as soon as I cease from reasoning, something like electricity flows through my extremities for a few seconds. This lasts a moment only, and then lucidity takes possession of me, pictures arise, usually from the past. I see the man who wrote the letter and I know what he wrote. I see the object at the moment of its loss, with details of the event; or again I perceive or feel the history of the thing I am holding in my hands. The vision is misty and needs great tension. Considerable effort is required to perceive some details and conditions of the scenes presented.
We also quote from Long (1954:134) in an effort to explain the phenomenon:
In an effort to explain how psychometry is accomplished, several theories have been advanced. Dr. Pagenstecher offered the following:
'The associated object which practically witnessed certain events of the past, acting in the way of a tuning fork, automatically starts in our brain the specific vibrations corresponding to the said events; furthermore, the vibrations of our brain once being set in tune with certain parts of the Cosmic Brain already stricken by the same events, call forth sympathetic vibrations between the human brain and the Cosmic Brain, giving birth to thought pictures which reproduce the events in question.'
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle offered the explanation that all events and circumstances impressed themselves on some form of invisible and permanent, unchangeable ether. This imprinted ether, he supposed, was read by psychic vision by the psychometrist when attention was centered on a part of the ether connected with the object held in the hands.
Theosophists, building on ideas found in India, propound (see the works of Blavatsky) the theory that there is a WorldSoul or Akasa, upon whose memory is impressed all that happens. Psychometry, under this theory, becomes more
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definitely mechanical. One uses the object held in the hands to make a psychic connection with the part of the memory of the World-Soul having to do with the object's past. By a form of psychic telepathy, or - better yet - mind reading, the psychometrist 'reads the Akashic Records.'
From work elsewhere (1974:25-6) we quote: "Prince (1963:132) tells the historical account of the poet, Robert Browning who, when in Florence, met for the first time Count Giunasi, reputed to have such powers. The count asked the poet if he had any memento he would like to hear the history of. Browning produced some gold wrist studs which he had never worn in Florence before. The count held them awhile and then said, impressed, 'There is something here which cries out 'Murder. " The studs were in fact the property of Browning's great uncle who wore them when he was murdered.
"Of course, telepathy between Browning and the count would explain this experience, but Krippner (p. 87) cites Hilprecht on a case where the information was not known to anyone living. A similar example of the secret drawer is attributed to Swedenborg. The occultists call this sort of collective memory the 'Akashic records,' which can, of course, be accounted for by the concept of the 'collective preconscious."'
The famous novelist, Maeterlinck (1975:47), devoted a chapter in his book on the paranormal to psychometry and gave many examples of it.
One of the really social uses of psychometry is in archaeology. An excellent example of such work in which a sensitive gives pictures of life in Pompeii by touching artifacts from that city is found in the Denton article "Life and Death in Pompeii" (Garrison 1973:21-62).*
4.02) Knowledge of Arrangement and Motion of Stars
Patanjali's yoga sutras No. 27 and 28 state as follows (Aranya 1977:340-1): "By practising samyama on the lunar entrance of the body the disposition of the stellar system is known," and "By practising samyama on the fixed pole star, the movement of the stars is to be known." This is the only siddhi where power which may have seemed miraculous to Easterners now seems academic to Westerners.
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The author admits that the pole star sutras seemed quaint and almost out of place amid the other powers, seemingly much more arcane and mysterious to a Westerner. This view, however, may be merely Western ignorance. On asking a highly placed practitioner of the TM siddhis program about the pole star sutras, and why attention was paid to them, the answer was that they were necessary to enable the adept to pilot his way through the universe of stars and return to the solar system and the earth! This remarkable remark suggests the OBE consciousness of the shaman in his magical flight, and the nature of consciousness in transcending the time and space of the physical body. But TM siddhis adepts are not the only ones who have glimpsed this wondrous horizon. Consider the following extraordinary statement of
Charles Lindbergh (Muses and Young, 1972:312):
Will we then find [that] life to be only a stage, though an essential one, in a cosmic evolution of which our evolving awareness is beginning to become aware? Will we discover that only without spaceships can we reach the galaxies; that only without cyclotrons can we know the interior of atoms? To venture beyond the fantastic accomplishments of this physically fantastic age, sensory perception must combine with the extrasensory, and I suspect that the two will prove to be different faces of each other. I believe it is through sensing and thinking about such concepts that great adventures of the future will be found.
4.1) Vision of Cosmic Beings
Patanjali sutra No. 26 (Aranya 1977:334) states that "by practising samyama on the point in the body known as the solar entrance, the knowledge of the cosmic regions is effected." It appears from the following text the regions involved are in the "astral" plane or realm of potentiality. Similarly sutra No. 32 (Aranya 1977:343) states that "by samyama on the coronal light, siddhis can be seen." The coronal light is a small hole in the skull through which the adepts emanates effulgent light. Siddhis are devas or astral beings.
From a Western point of view this siddhi appears to be the ability to visualize the astral realm, whereas heretofore the protagonist has merely been sensitive to it. As radio preceded television, sensitivity always seems to precede vision. It appears that consciousness has established itself enough in the realm of all possibil-
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ities (the etheric) so that vision there becomes possible - Don Juan called this "seeing," and berated Castaneda for not being able to accomplish it. The words of the sutra make it abundantly clear that the realm of essence has not been reached, so that what is seen here are the devas, not "the clear light of the void." It is possible that this ability is out of place in the taxonomy and might be placed after 4.7 (Adamic ecstasy).
4.2) Calm
Sutra No. 31 (Aranya 1977:343) states that by samyama on the bronchial tube, calmness in breathing is obtained; this in turn leads to calmness in the body, which leads to calmness of mind.
From a Western point of view this siddhi refers to the purification of the body-mind; and, hence, the elimination of "static" so that the receptive device can become more refined. It is the analogue of the hi-fi "dolby" in shutting off extraneous noise, a necessary function to prepare for the siddhis which follow.
This siddhi establishes the importance to be attached to calm, an absolutely necessary state for the reception of right hemisphere imagery consequent upon psychic resonance. The amplitude of the incoming transpersonal signal is very minute, and any large noise error will completely hide them. Because calm is not spectacular we take it for granted, not realizing that it is, in effect, a grace. The Bible tells us to listen "for a still, small voice." Any method which will reduce outside noise and calm the interior discourse of the left hemisphere will tend to accomplish this. Medieval mystics referred to this as "the prayer of quiet."
4.3) Vision Through Opaque Objects: Miraculous Sight
Patanjali Yoga sutra No. 24 (Aranya 1977:332) states: "By applying the effulgent light of the higher sense-perception, knowledge of subtle objects or things obstructed from view or placed at a great distance, can be acquired." The commentary states that "this is the highest attainment, before which clairvoyance pales into insignificance." This ability, therefore, is different from the power of "traveling clairvoyance" which appears to be performed in an out-of-body experience. It is a knowledge ability, the apotheosis of externalization of sensory organs, spoken of in Section 3Y. It may well be that Swedenborg exhibited this ability in the
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incident involving the secret of the dead brother of the Queen of Sweden (Dingwall 1962b:45-6) since it involved a hidden note, but Swedenborg's own explanation was that he was enabled to converse with the dead.
Cryptesthesia, "hidden perception," is the explanation given by Barrett and Besterman (1968:275) for the success of dowsers, with the divining rod only a prop which allows the right hemisphere a motor activity in place of the proscribed verbal. They describe (ibid:264) a dowser's letter, quoting:
In the year 1862, 1 had a remarkable experience when out water-finding with the rod..... I found that after "setting" myself to use the rod, i.e., getting into an abstracted mental condition, lost to all around, when, or just before the rod turned, I could - as it were clairvoyantly - see the underground springs
The authors then describe the same ability in other dowsers, and including some who could "see" capital letters hidden in sealed envelopes.
Dermoptica (eyeless sight) is well researched in the Soviet Union, and in their book, Ostrander and Schroeder (1970:158ff) devote a whole chapter to it. The Russians believe that skin has much finer sensing powers than we realize and feel they can train people to discriminate colors by touch.
Moss (1974:95ff) discusses "skin vision," and especially details the case of several Soviet subjects, plus that of Mary Wimberly, all of whom could read with their fingers.
Watson (1973:267ff) in a section on "eyeless sight" describes a blind girl in Italy who winced when a bright light was held to her ear, and a blind Scottish schoolboy who could discriminate between colored lights. A medical board examined a blind Virginia girl who could distinguish colors and read large print (cf Edwards, F. "People Who Saw Without Eyes" in Strange People, London: Pan Books, 1970).
Watson then cites the Life (12 June 1964) article by A. Rosenfield about the Russian Rosa Kuleshova who can see with her fingers, under the most rigid controlled testing.
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Those trained in physics know that Nicol prisms polarize light passing through them. If polarizing substances are used in pairs the light gradually diminishes to darkness as the angle between the two lenses is rotated from zero to ninety degrees. Bearing this in mind, let us attend to a remarkably suggestive experiment1 with the medium Slade performed by Professor Zollner (Zollner 1881:65-6).
I desired him, while sitting in his chair, to fix his eye on the front prism, and then to look with the apparatus at the clear sky (the experiment took place at my house at 11.45 in the morning of the 14th December, 1877), while I slowly turned the front Nicol. I now asked Slade, when the two prisms were about crossed, if he observed the gradual darkening of the field of view. To my great surprise, he said he did not. I supposed him to be deceived by the side light, and therefore disposed the two prisms from the front at right angles, so that neither I nor my friends could see through at all. Slade still asserted that he did not perceive the least change in the clearness of the sky; and as proof he read an English writing, placed before the two crossed Nicols, covering his left eye, as we saw, with his left hand. I was not, however, contented with his proof of the fact. Next morning, when we were again assembled at my house, I had two very large Nicol's prisms (for the production of a greater field of view) fixed to turn closely one over the other, and a large circular screen, which completely covered the sight of the observer, so placed in connection with the prisms, that external objects could only be perceived through the two Nicol's prisms. I then took an English book, Tyndall's Faraday as a Discoverer, and in Slade's absence marked by interlineations the following words on page 81 : - 'The burst of power which had filled the four preceding years with an amount of experimental work unparalled in the history of Science." When I again made Slade look through the two crossed Nicols at the sky, and he declared, as on the day before, that he did not remark the least change in the clearness of the sky when the prisms were turned, I requested him to sit on a chair, and to read to me the underlined words from the book, held at a distance of about two feet from his sight. To the great astonishment of us all, he immediately read the above words with perfect accuracy.
Astral organs of vision can apparently see through opaque objects.
Underhill (1964:155) tells us that one of the many powers
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of St. Catherine of Siena was the ability to be aware of the thoughts and deeds of her disciples, and the biographer provides striking testimony of the fact in the confession of an erring student.
Underhill (1964:76) quotes St. Hildegarde on her visions:
'From my infancy until now, in the 70th year of my age,' she says, 'my soul has always beheld this Light; and in it my soul soars to the summit of the firmament and into a different air ... The brightness which I see is not limited by space and is more brilliant than the radiance round the sun... I cannot measure its height, length, breadth. Its name, which has been given me, is 'Shade of the Living Light' . . . . Within that brightness I sometimes see another light, for which the name Lux Vivens has been given me. When and how I see this, I cannot tell; but sometimes when I see it all sadness and pain is lifted from me, and I seem a simple girl again, and an old woman no more!'
We have referred earlier to "the exteriorization of the sense organs" as indicating the transcendence of the particular function of a given sense organ (e.g., the eye) by other means (e.g., dermaoptica). But there can, it appear, also be "an interiorization of the sense organs" in which through some "inner sight" or clairvoyance, the adept senses or perceives the distant object, or reads a moral condition off the patient's aura. In either case the localization of a particular sense in a particular organ is being transcended.
it is probable that extensions of vision amounting to miraculous sight or clairvoyance are due to the nascent ability to visualize in the next vivency above this one, - namely in the etheric. If we recall the statement: "Faith is the substance of things sought for, the evidence of things not seen." We get close to the concept of "thoughts being things" in this realm, and the corresponding psychic ability to perceive them before they are formed into matter. An allied power is the ability to read matters pertaining to human beings off their aura, which aids in diagnosis and healing of both physical and moral faults.
4.4) Miraculous Touch
In this section we shall consider the paranormal effects of an adept touching a patient. Jesus touched Peter, and Peter was
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again able to walk on water (Matt. 14:31); a firewalking adept touched Rev. Bingham (Long, 1948:31), and he was enabled to walk across burning coals; St. Joseph of Cupertino touched a man, and he was able to fly (Dingwall, 1962a:18). Even Scrooge was borne aloft by the ghost of Christmas Past - ("Touch but the hem of my garment, and you shall be upheld in more than this.") Evidently something magical may happen when one is touched by the right person.
Touch is also involved in psychometry, or the ability by touching an object to read its past history. There are also other paranormal effects of some kinds of touching, but we shall narrow our report to the most important aspect of touching, namely healing, and we shall further constrain it to two aspects of healing: 1) the laying on of hands, and 2) psychic surgery.
4.41) Healing Through the Laying on of Hands
We shall attempt to distinguish three types of healing. The type to be discussed here, seems to involve some sort of current or magnetic effect, emanating from the hands (and capable of being recorded by Kirlian photography), which can effect healing or amelioration on the body of a patient. This kind of healing is mentioned in the Bible, is a prominent part of early Christian faith,2 and is a procedure in some religious sects today.2
Another type of healing to be discussed under 4.6 is more cerebral and seems to involve some kind of visualization or restructuring in the mind of the healer, who sees the person whole and healthy. This kind of healing requires more authority in the healer and is amenable to absent treatment.
Susy Smith (1977:40) quotes Hammond, quoting LeShan (1966:99) on the two types in order opposite to ours:
Putting it all together, what seemed to be happening was this: the healer, with his caritas and the concept of physics on which he is operating, welcomes the patient home to the universe. The patient recognizes this at a deep personal or subconscious level and at that moment his body's self-repair mechanism is stimulated to function closer to its potential. LeShan feels this is the major type of healing and is the kind done by many individual healers, Christian Scientists, and prayer circles.
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Type 2, on the other hand, represents an effort on the part of the healer to heal, and he does not go into an altered state of consciousness, according to LeShan. 'He perceives a current of energy flowing through his hands and being passed through the area of the wound. The juice is turned on, so to speak, and sometimes healing results.'
We believe that most writers confuse our second (orthocognitive) and our third ("union-compassion") type of healing, as LeShan has done in the first paragraph. We shall say more about the rare third type in section 4.73.
Mann (1973:116) tells us that Reich's orgone energy can be communicated by touch. He devotes a chapter to the laying on of hands as an orgone phenomenon (ibid:83ff), much like transferring an electric charge from a strong battery to a weak one. He notes (p. 87) the views of Galvani, (p. 89) Mesmer, and (p. 95ff) Reichenbach on the healing and curative properties of this energy. He quotes Colson (ibid: 106):
The rays seem to be given off most strongly by those parts of the organism which are replaced most rapidly, such as the palm of the hands and the soles of the feet... The tips of the fingers are very strong emitters of this energy. The sex organs in both sexes and the breasts of women emit these rays quite strongly.
When pranic energy outflows through the hands, the laying-on-of-hands type of healing results. Kirlian photography makes possible the photographing of this energy (Moss 1974), as it leaves the tips of the healer's fingers. Moss (ibid:62ff) also discusses the higher type of healing (our 4.6) and suggests differences between the two kinds.
Reich's biographer, Mann (1973:176), also distinguishes between the two orders of healing:
Characteristically, laying on of hands of 'magnetic' or psychic healers depletes their energies to a greater or lesser extent. Dr. Weatherhead quotes a Dr. Petetin, of Lyons, and Deleuze, a French naturalist, for this view of healing. Deleuze, in his Critical History of Animal Magnetism (1813), wrote: 'It is an emanation from ourselves guided by our will . . . He who magnetizes for curative purposes is aiding with his own life the failing life of the sufferer" (Weatherhead, p. 114). In the process
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such healers may even take on some or all of the symptoms of the patient. To avoid this, most of the books on magnetic or pranic healing advise the healer to shake or flick the hands and wrists at the termination of a healing, thereby hopefully 'shaking off' the unhealthy emanations from the patient that could cling to hands and arms. Some even advise washing the hands (Yogi Ramacharada, p. 70). This 'contamination' of the healer reminds one of how healthy people in Eeman's healing circuits would initially take on the fevers or other symptoms of their sick neighbor in the circuit.
The true saintly healer apparently disposes of a different and superior energy. He can heal at a distance as well as with physical contact, and sometimes virtually instantaneously; no serious illness (e.g., cancer) is beyond treatment; the healer is not susceptible to catching anything of the patient's sickness and he can go on for hours without tiring. In fact, he usually ends up a healing session feeling more energetic and spiritually resilient than when he began. (A conventional test of divine healing is whether it invigorates the healer.) Such saintly healers were fairly common in the first three centuries of Christianity and included a number of medieval saints like Saint Philip Neri.
Note that this citation contains some aspects of a third type of healing ("Union-compassion" healing) to be discussed in section 4.73).
Dean (1975:239-293) has five chapters on non-medical healing, including one by the Greens on voluntary control of body states, and one by Dr. Carl Simonton on the role of the mind in the therapy of cancer. It also contains LeShan's "General Theory of Psychic Healing" including the distinction between Type I (orthocognitive) and Type II (laying-on-of-hands) healing.
Instances of healing by the laying on of hands are not confined to the New Testament; they are legion today, both inside and outside of organized religion. There seems to be some kind of a natural force, which can be tapped by some people and transferred, sometimes with great power to others. (For a scholarly discussion on the natural healing power of nature see Newberger 1933.) Luke 8:43-8 suggests that Jesus felt a force leave him when touched by an ailing woman. Here is an example picked at random from a chapter on "healing hands" by Susy Smith (1975: 36):
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I sat in a chair in Geoff's living room and he placed a hand on my stomach and another on my back. My wife Barbara and my parents were also in the room, praying.
As soon as Geoff touched me I felt a sensation. The hairs on the back of my neck started to stand on end and tingle. I felt as if some great energy were traveling through me.
Then I closed my eyes. Suddenly I felt as if I was not in my body anymore. I could feel myself floating above the room and looking down onto the others and my own body. It was like watching a film.
Suddenly the pain started to go away. I was given the healing for about 45 minutes and by the end the pain had gone and I felt better.
The next day doctors at nearly Manchester Hospital examined him and took new X-rays. They said with amazement that he was 100 percent well, his X-rays completely clear.
Here is another example from Smith (ibid:30-31):
Some other laboratory experimentation of an entirely different nature began some ten years ago with the claims of Oskar Estebany who stated that he had special healing powers in his hands. Dr. Bernard Grad, assistant professor of psychiatry at McGill University... decided to conduct an investigation.
His first experiment, carried out in 1960 in collaboration with Dr. Remi Cadoret of the Winnipeg Medical School, involved controlled testing of the rate of healing of laboratory mice that had been given superficial wounds. Faster healing occurred to the mice treated by Estebany than control mice with equal disease or disability who were untreated or were treated by other persons claiming no healing ability.
Sister M. Justa Smith of Rosary Hill College, Buffalo, New York, a recognized authority in the field of enzyme research, has conducted tests with Mr. Estebany and the enzyme trypsin and found similar results. These experiments demonstrated that the activity level of the enzyme was increased by an average of ten percent when held by Estebany in a reagent bottle for some 75 minutes. (The same effect, ten percent augmentation, can be achieved by subjecting the enzymes to a magnetic field - 13,000 gauss strength, for two hours. It would thus seem that there is some way to actually measure this PK force.)
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A recent and scholarly compendium on healing is that edited by Meek (1977). In it, a number of the foremost healers have articles; particularly noteworthy being those by Puharich, Tiller, Motoyama, Watson, Stelter, Price, and others. The book devotes considerable space to psychic surgery in Brazil and in the Phillipines, and is perhaps the best recent source summing up these remarkable phenomena. The book is also notable for some serious study of various paradigms to explore psychic healing. It alone besides this book, discriminates three such types of healing (entitling them type a, b, and c). For all these reasons, this book is a must in any consideration of the subject.
Meek (1977:139ff) cites the work of Burr, Tiller, Worrall, and others with regard to the relationship of the molecular structure of water and healing.2 We are told by occultists that prana can easily be stored in water. The human body, is of course, nearly 90% water, and prana which can also be stored in the human body, seems to have some affinity for the oxygen molecule. Mrs. Worrall was able to "treat water" and make it more productive when used on plants. Analysis showed that this tended to magnetize the water, and further chemical analysis showed that this was due to cutting down the hydrogen bonding from 100% to around 90%. To anthropomorphize what is actually a chemical situation, we may say that two hydrogen atoms are legally bonded, (married), to an oxygen atom. But "hydrogen bonding" refers to a phenomenon where the hydrogen atoms conduct transitory flirtations with nearby oxygen atoms, atoms which are legally bonded to other hydrogen atoms. This extracurricular activity is apparently 100% prevalent in ordinary water, and in some way it appears to impair the efficacy of prana. When magnetic influences or a healer's hands cut down to some extent the prevalence of this bonding, the water appears more capable of releasing its stored prana. So it seems that in a rather literal way water can be purified and, (if you will), sanctified.
One of the reasons why touch is such a powerful psychic sensor is that it seems to be more "en rapport" with the collective preconscious than the brain. Barbara Brown in "New Mind, New Body" (Psychology Today, August 1974) reports:
Long before conscious recognition by the brain, the body and its subconscious substructures recognizes and makes judgments about what goes on in the environment. The subconscious is
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more in touch with reality than consciousness, and has the facility to express its recognition of reality via the skin . . . (She then reports two experiments where the skin was more in contact with reality than the brain), concluding ...
The enormously important findings received little research attention, though they offered a way to look at the universe of the subconscious. When the skin responds to such mild signals then the possibility arises that through the skin the whole world of the subconscious could be explored.
The Patanjali siddhi, most appropriate to this power is No. 29, (Aranya, 1977:341-2), which refers to knowledge of the bodily system, which is obtained by practicing samyama on the plexus of the navel.
4.42) Psychic Surgery
We now consider what is perhaps the most unbelievable, (and certainly one of the most egregious), psychic effects in our catalogue. The reader should be prepared for testimony that psychic surgeons open the body with dirty knives or their bare hands, with no antiseptics nor anesthesia; that they remove foreign objects painlessly; that the wound closes easily and heals almost at once without scar, and finally, that the witness is unsure whether in fact the hands of the surgeon were inside the body of the patient!
The reader who wishes further reading on the subject should consult Krippner and Villoldo (1976) which is the most recent authoritative book, containing a large bibliography. We shall refer to their researches later, but before doing so it seems necessary to prepare the reader somewhat by giving him some rationale.
To do so, we need to go back and ask: "What is a percept?" The American College Dictionary defines it as "the mental result of perceiving." But such a result - (as when we read untied for united) may be an illusion. To get around this possibility, (and others much more serious) we will call this kind of percept a concept-percept. Concept-percepts are of high consensual validity generally, giving rise to the old saw: "Seeing is believing." But there are occasional rare instances in which either the concept-percepts of two witnesses differ, or either differs from another kind of percept which we shall call a " recorded-percept." A
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recorded percept occurs when a physical recording exists, - such as a photo, hologram, tape or record.
Let us consider the case when the concept-percepts of witnesses to event A are different from the recorded-percepts of event A. What can have caused the difference? Which is correct? (We assume, of course, that the recorded percepts have not been tampered with.) One would immediately think that such a difference might be a good definition of an altered state of consciousness in the human observer, since it would be superficially evident that they would change and not the mechanical contrivance which would register the unusual result. The surprising fact, however, is that there are instances where it is the mechanical contrivance which registers something unusual, while the human observer sees nothing strange. The theoretical consequences of this state of affairs are important enough for some careful scrutiny.
Let us start with a common instance of this anomaly, your perception of some part of your body, and an x-ray of the same. The recorded percept is different from the concept-percept because wave lengths which excite the x-ray plate are invisible to the human eye.
Let us now consider Krippner and Villoldo (1976:184), a picture of a flame behind a healer's hands which are transparent in the picture, tho not so according to witnesses. The previous explanation suggests that some ultraviolet waves were generated by the flame, and these passed through the hands, making them appear transparent. An ordinary camera will pick up such waves.
Let us now consider another picture example, (Murchison 1927:84-5). This picture showing an invisible beaker on a balance was taken during a seance by infrared light in complete visual darkness. The observers passed their hands over the balance but detected nothing, yet the beaker shows clearly in the photograph.
Using these two cases only, we may say that in both:
1) An object which appears visible when observed under longer wave lengths appears invisible when viewed under shorter wave lengths.
2) In each case it is the mechanical contrivance which reports the unusual effect, (doubtless because it is
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capable of going above and below the visible octave).
3) The healer generates higher frequency waves, the ghost controls lower frequency waves.
4) The visibility (presence) of an object may depend on the wave length used to "perceive" it. In other words some objects may be "real" only at certain wave lengths.
One of the many curious aspects of "psychic surgery" is that close and meticulous onlookers are unsure whether the surgeon's hands penetrated the body of the patient. Here is an example from Smith (1977:51):
Rev. Plume touches his fingers to the area to be treated and they seem to disappear right into the operating space. I have heard this described by a friend, Walter Uphoff of the University of Colorado, who witnessed it as "so impossible that it was difficult to believe;" but he thought there must be something to it - especially when the patient seemed relieved of his complaint when it was over. He concluded it should be objectively investigated. He said: "I saw things I could not understand or integrate into any conceptual framework - so I can at this point neither reject nor accept."
Here are similar instances from Krippner and Villoldo 1976:
(p. 75) Pachita stood at the head of the bed and seemed to insert her fingers into the girl's forehead ...
(p. 82) As Pachita began to massage the woman's abdomen, I observed what I had noticed many times before - Pachita's hands seemed to disappear into the healee's body.
(p. 83) As I moved my hand forward it seemed as if Pachita placed it in the abdominal cavity, and instructed me to push the intestines upward and out of the way.
(p. 85) 1 seemed to place the bladder-like object in the lower part of the body opening .
More of the same could be adduced from other psychic surgeon's operations. This is mighty strange business, when the observer, a trained psychologist, assisting in an operation, cannot tell whether or not the body is being physically opened.
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If we assume honest reporting, then we are rewarded with a very fruitful psychological experiment in the paranormal, the importance of which is hard to overestimate. For it is always from such apparent violations of "natural" law that new and deeper laws are revealed. We have forced nature into a kind of striptease, which discloses more of her secrets.
We suggest two possible explanations:
1) The body is being opened by paranormal means, but the belief system of the onlooker will not allow him to admit it.
2) The healer is actually operating on the etheric body, which he is able to open. Since reality is with the etheric body, of which the physical body is only a hologram, (virtual image), there is psychic pressure for the material to mirror the astral. But this "saving of the appearances" which is virtually fully accurate under most circumstances, here admits of a large enough discrepancy so that the eye is unable to tell, - in other words under these unusual circumstances the "indeterminancy" becomes macroscopic enough to observe.
Krippner (1975:229), witnessing psychic surgery with the healer, Blance, became himself a part of the operation:
He brought my finger to a point about six inches from the skin just underneath the shoulder blade. Suddenly, he made an abrupt motion with my forefinger, then released it.
I had not taken my eyes off the woman's skin as this procedure was transpiring. I maintained my attention because I knew that Blance was reputedly able to cut skin at a distance as part of a 'purification' ritual. And I noticed a slit on the woman's skin the exact area beneath my finger position. Within a few seconds, a thin ribbon of blood filled this slit. It appeared to me as if the cut were superficial, barely scratching the first layer of skin.
In summary, (ibid:233) he theorizes as follows:
Possibly paranormal, however, were the scratches made by Blance on human skin. I conjectured that this may have been the result of focusing bodily field, "psychic energies," or a
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combination of the two, in the way that a magnifying glass focuses sunlight to produce a burned hole on paper.
I further suggested that the 'bioplasmic body' may interact with the person's acupuncture points and meridians, found by the Soviet researchers to be areas of high electrical conductivity. This would explain why Taylo's patients winced in pain when the ring made from diamond chips was brought near to their acupuncture points. Apparently, either their bodily fields or 'psychic energies' - or both - were out of balance. The healing ritual was needed to restore the energetic balance.
For explanation Krippner (1975:173) quotes the views of the Brazilian healer Kardec:
Kardec believed that the 'spirit' is enveloped in a semimaterial body of its own, which he named the perispirit. The perispirit is composed of a magnetic fluid (or 'aura') which contains a certain amount of electricity. Therefore, healing can be accomplished by psychic healers who send magnetic rays from their fingertips into the 'auras' of ill persons. A healer can also magnetize water which can be utilized for healing purposes. These techniques involve physical 'passes' similar to those originated by Mesmer.
Meek (1977:60ff) devotes a chapter to the Phillipine healers, including Josefina Sison, Felisa Macans, the team healing of the Bugarins and Tony Agpaoa. This was an eyewitness account, wherein he accepts the fact that they are able to materialize and dematerialize tissue, and create incisions in the skin by making passes over without touching it. Stelter (ibid:70ff) tells of the paranormal pulling of teeth by Phillipine healers done in his presence by mere touch and without pain. He describes (ibid:74-5) paranormal incisions in the skin which he witnessed. We quote:
I checked to see if the psychokinetic incisions have ionizing rays in strong measure. I used films which are used in Germany to protect people working with radioactive materials. The films, sealed in plastic film holders were placed on the patient's skin before Blance made his incision from a distance. After his fingers moved through the air, the film was untouched at the top, but the skin was cut and the film was scratched on its under side.
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Later in Germany Blance suffered a breakdown, before which the cuts became uncontrollable, and began to appear on his hands. Stelter (ibid:76) also discusses materialization and dematerialization phenomena in connection with opening and closing of operational incisions, and the question of where the healer's hands are. Seutemann, (ibid:89ff), herself a psychic healer, after a discussion of the facts of psychic surgery says (p. 92):
It is my conviction that most of the work done by the healer is at the level of the etheric body. Only after this body is restored to normal balance can the healing result in the organs of the physical body.
Meek (ibid:126ff) ends this remarkable exposition of psychic surgery with a summation of the data and implications.
The eminent Japanese researcher, Motoyama has contributed a chapter in Meek (1977:147ff) on his investigations of psychic healing, and his several inventions therewith connected. He has witnessed Phillipine surgery, and checked out that tumors and other tissue apparently taken from the patient's body did actually come from them (p. 147). He has proved (p. 149) that the healing power can be transmitted through lead shielding, hence is not physical, but "higher dimensional energy (p. 150)." Regarding psychic incisions, he notes that they are two to three times as wide as those made by a knife, and look like those made by a laser. He also hypothesizes that prana is stored in the chakras, and in healers can be ejected at will from the finger tips or the toes.
Meek (1977:41ff) in a discussion of the Brazilian psychic healer, Arigo, quotes Puharich (ibid.) who gives ten characteristics of a complete healer:
1) ability to diagnosis in presence or absence of patient,
2) to heal by laying on of hands,
3) to heal himself,
4) to use molecular medicine (pharmaceuticals),
5) to produce anesthesia by non-chemical means,
6) to perform instant surgery,
7) to violate supposed laws of antisepsis,
8) to perform action at a distance,
9) to possess a "guide" or spirit helper, and
10) to regenerate tissue.
Watson (1974:209-24) devotes a chapter to psychic surgery.
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Some quotes:
(p. 220) 1 spent several days working with J. Sison ... and saw her perform over two hundred operations, about 85% of which involved materialization phenomena.
(p.220) I have seen Juan Blance of Pasig make real incisions in the bodies of his patients, but without a knife and from a distance.
(p.223) The most obvious and dramatic aspect of the Luzon healing process is the manifestation of living tissue.
(p. 213) (referring to Arigo, the Brazilian healer) He performed thousands of elaborate operations with table knives and scissors in totally unsterile conditions... Summing up their study of Arigo, Puharich said: 'He does it. I can't tell you how.'
This chapter, containing accounts of several investigations of psychic surgery, is a very convincing document.
Once again we have had the courage to take some very incredible testimony while holding an open mind about its significance. And once again the evidence, if it can be believed, has pointed us in the direction of the illusory nature of physical reality, which appears to be a virtual image of a more ultimate reality. We have thus stripped some more of the veils of "maya" from nature and have been rewarded by a more fundamental view.
4.5) Acute Hearing and Clairaudience
When Blake's "doors of perception" are being cleansed, the ordinary senses become more acute; and new senses, some of them psychic, become further developed. It is difficult to ascertain wherein the "natural" leaves off and the supersensory begins. Consider the case of hearing. Hearing is one of the TM Siddhi Program targets (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1977:703):
Similar results arise from Clements and Milstein's study of auditory thresholds (paper 104). Even before the practice of the specific TM-Sidhi procedure being tested, subjects showed auditory thresholds eleven decibels more sensitive than the
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population mean, again necessitating adjustment of the audiometer to handle the increased sensitivity. After the practice of the siddhi procedure for 'supernormal hearing,' thresholds decreased by a further three decibels in this pilot study. Of special interest are the subjective reports on the test. Many subjects reported the faintest levels of sound to be exquisitely clear and beautiful and said that they were able to appreciate the abstract form of the sound as it developed to the level of manifest perception. This is of great interest, since it offers a means to corroborate the suggestion of Domash that pure consciousness is a quantum mechanical state, potentially sensitive to quantum mechanical events in the perceptual and neural apparatus.
Clements and Milstein (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1978:721) note the reason for the gain is that "there is a reduction of noise within the neural pathways of the inner ear to the brain, and within the auditory cortex itself." They believe that this coherent function is related to "a macroscopic coherence quantum phenomenon" as noted by Domash (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1978: 652-70).
The descriptor used by psychology for the phenomenon of hearing sounds not made by natural sources is "auditory hallucination." Jaynes (1976:84ff) devotes a chapter to this subject. He notes that even today, auditory hallucinations are common among normal subjects (as indeed the author can testify from personal experience). Jaynes points out that in the past, such a voice was considered to be a god within - the "still, small voice" of the Old Testament.
Jaynes (1976:108) describes Penfield's experiment of electrical stimulation of the area of the right temporal lobe corresponding to the Wernicke (speech) area in the left hemisphere.
Case 8, a 26-year-old housewife, stimulated in approximately the same area, said there seemed to be a voice a way, way off. 'It sounded like a voice saying words, but was so faint I couldn't get it.'
Meditators, approaching satori, report an almost exactly similar phenomenon, namely the "hearing of men talking quietly at a great distance." If man's brain may be compared to a radio receiver, the location of the tuner is evidently in this area.
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An interesting effect associated with clairaudience is that reported by some meditators of hearing celestial music.
The Patanjali siddhi No. 41, "a Divine sense of Hearing" (Aranya 1977:352ff), is most appropriate here. It is obtained, says Patanjali, by samyama on the relationship between akasa and the power of hearing.
4.6) Empery
In Genesis (1:28) we are told that God gave man dominion over the earth and all it contained. This siddhi involves dominion over self and others, as in healing, over animals and weather, as well as other aspects of the natural environment, including the working of miracles. It makes every man a Prospero. The enormous power of such empery requires equally responsible behavior in not misusing it. Empery in its various forms is generally associated with full accomplishment of shamanism or sainthood, and it is not surprising that the major figures in religious history (e.g., Jesus) show it so prominently. We subcategorize as follows: .61 self, .62 others (higher healing), .63 animals, .64 miscellaneous miracles.
Essentially such empery results from a firm perception of the subtle reality beyond the gross hologram of sensuous reality, with the concomitant awareness that this subtle realm is the actual theater of action and the physical merely the realm of effects. Thus one transcends the prison of the three illusions - time, space, and personality (Gowan 1975:10) and in their place finds a "nonsensuous unity in all things."
Randall (1975:171) quotes LeShan on clairvoyant as opposed to sensory reality:
A person experiencing the world in terms of the Clairvoyant Reality sees individual identity as mainly illusory; objects and events are observed as merely parts of a larger pattern. Since the knower and the known are one, there is no barrier to the transfer of information between them, so that psi phenomena are normal in this world-view.
This leads to what LeShan calls Type I healing (our 4.6 variety).
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4.61) Empery over Self
The first dominion that man must gain is dominion over himself. The reason for this is obvious. To gain power over others before the purification of the self, and what saints have called "self-noughting" is most dangerous, since it involves the possible use of universal power for selfish ends. This is the definition of magic, and it has been proscribed by every great religious leader in history.
The struggle to replace the little selfish ego with the presence of God, or, as the Bible has it, "to put off the Old Adam with the New" is a difficult, lifelong effort, which, as many have found, is aided by submission to a guru or personal Saviour. Others find it easier to take the triple vow of poverty, chastity and obedience. These are all ways of self-mortification or purification. The more completely this process is accomplished the more clearly will come the subsequent vision of ultimate reality. The more impurities are admixed with the situation, the more the vision will be (as the Bardo Thodol tells one) a vision of the various orders of devas rather than the clear light of the Void.
4.62) Empery over Others (Higher Healing); Orthocognition
In Section 4.4 we spoke of a form of energy healing through "laying on of hands." In this section we discuss a higher form of healing which involves a completely different principle. This form does not need any physical contact, and can be carried on from a distance ("absent treatment"). Our name of this form of therapy is orthocognition or "correct thinking," since it involves an inner perception of the ideal situation, of which the physical manifestation is only a distorted reflection. This matter has been treated in detail elsewhere (Gowan 1975:320ff) which we quote: "Orthocognition involves the realization and visualization that numinous relationships exist. In other words, orthocognition is like having a correct map of the territory you are traversing in your mind; both would be helpful in not getting lost.
"The mere knowledge that something exists, and the correct visualization of one's relationship to it does much to remove superstitions and fear, and to put one on the right track in thinking.
"Orthocognition is no more than this - a first step in the syntaxic realm. Orthocognition has two aspects: 1) knowledge
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that the numinous element exists, and b) visualization of our relationship to it, and the consequences thereof. Knowledge that the numinous element exists may be expressed in the following hypothesis. It appears to us as:
1) An all-powerful, impersonal, immaterial force without characteristics or form and without will;
2) Existing outside of time and space, but available to us as a suggestible medium in a hierarchy of altered states of consciousness;
3) Having responsibility for the welfare and survival of all life generally, and specifically for the development and self-concept of man;
4) Receptive to cognitive will, as is a computer terminal when the proper order is encoded, and executing that will in a machine-like impersonal, uncognized, and sometimes unexpected manner, quickly, accurately, impartially, inexorably, appropriately, elegantly, and completely.
"This is essentially the doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy which Happold (11970:20) summarizes as follows:
1 ) The phenomenological world is only a partial reality.
2) Man's nature is such that he can intuit the noumenon.
3) He can therefore develop and eventually identify with Divinity.
4) This process is the chief end of man's life.
"Let us imagine that a man has been knocked unconscious and then thrown into a dark dungeon so that when he comes to he is in utter blackness. His successive levels of awareness will provide an analogy to our own developing orthocognition of ultimate reality.
"At level zero the man is not conscious.
"At level one he is barely conscious and does not know where he is
"At level two he is conscious of being somewhere in an enclosed space, but because of his concussion he does not have memory of whence he came.
"At level three he has explored his enclosed space and con-
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cluded - that he is a prisoner within it; moreover he begins to remember that he was once outside.
"Finally at level four, he recognizes the fact of his present condition, namely that he is a prisoner in a dungeon whose doors and dimensions he knows. He now remembers fully what freedom is like outside, and is beginning to formulate plans to escape.
"Orthocognition follows closely upon recognition of the illusory aspects of time, space, and personality. If the reader will refer to the section on the Three Illusions (4.13) he will see that orthocognition follows as a matter of course from this premise.
"Knowledge is power, and orthocognitive knowledge of the relationship between the conscious mind and the numinous element leads at once to power. This power must (like all tools) be used carefully and wisely. Basically the power involves the orthocognitive recognition of our relationship to the numinous element, and our visualization of this relationship as 'accomplish' (we use the untensed verb form to impress in the reader's mind that this action 'take' place outside of time). Since the action 'lie' outside of time in the 'durative topocosm' (an infinity of potential events), our visualization of it as having occurred, occurring, and being about to occur provides the nourishment to make the seed idea germinate and manifest in the physical world of space/time. (Notice how similar is the action of the Hopi Indian in the rain dance, when he performs a similar enactive representation to make manifest a hoped-for-future event which is within his heart.)
"The application of our relationship to the numinous element, and the consequences thereof, may be visualized in strengthening self-concept in seven vital areas:
1) my body and physical health
2) my wealth and possessions
3) my loved ones
4) my work and avocation
5) my interests, associations, and social relationships
6) my creations, my gifts to the society
7) my state, nation, culture, and world, especially regarding peace and prosperity.
"Each of these areas represents an expansion of self-concept away from egocentricity in the direction of freedom and altruism.
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Together they cover the totality of self-concept which in turn (since it represents the ego's view of itself) is directly enriched and nourished by the numinous element. Hence, as a consequence of our relationship to this impersonal element, we should endeavor each day to visualize whatever aspect of self-concept we want to actualize as already existing now in an ideal state and needing only our desire and will to become manifest. In other words, this part of orthocognition aids us to bring about the necessary environmental conditions for growth.
"Let us be honest enough to admit that orthocognition is a low form of syntaxic conceptualization, for it is tinged with personal and selfish will. This constitutes a danger, especially that we shall be responsible for willing some event which indirectly causes trouble to ourselves or our neighbor. (No responsible person would ever be guilty of directly willing such an event.) We should endeavor to purify our minds from selfish purpose, before such an attempt and ever try to ascend the self-concept scale in visualizing as many concrete conditions at the high end as at the low end. Such scruples also suggest that orthocognition is best practiced along with meditation, which may be much more effective in removing the selfish ego. It is important to realize, however, that orthocognition is distinct from meditation, and that it has a legitimate function of promoting positive reinforcement for our continuing this growth. The laborer in the vineyard has a right to his pay, and we have a right as we progress to be protected and made comfortable in our daily lives (though we must not allow comfort to degenerate into sloth).
"While the creative aspects of the mind (which indicate it is part of the noumenon) embrace all nature, the relative ease with which the power to affect the environment may be exercised, is expressed in a hierarchy of self concept going outward from the body image through the phenomenal and environmental selves to successively embrace 'my body, my possessions, my relations with my loved ones, my work, my interests, my relations, my creations, and my world.' The easiest of these to affect and to change is, of course, 'my self-concept,' then come events, things, and finally other persons, society, and the universe.
"It is important that we understand the uses and limitations of orthocognition. As one of the initial forms of syntaxic representation of the numinous element, it represents a way station to
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aid in our developmental progress, not a form to be cherished forever. Specifically, it has the disadvantage of looking at the universe in terms of the welfare of the personal ego or self-concept and of the modification of that environment for the benefit of the personal ego. Since the concept of the personal ego is itself an illusion, one may well ask what if any benefits are gained by compounding an illusory process. The interim benefits are that the self-concept develops through orthocognition from a lesser 'my' to a greater 'my' (as in going along the hierarchy from 'my body' to 'my world'). This gradual movement from egocentricity to freedom is truly developmental and encourages ego-diffusion; it also has the advantage of helping the ego to feel secure during such an operation; the reduction of anxiety is a helpful step in such a progression. The danger is the usual one in developmental progress, namely that any one stage may prove so tempting that one willingly remains there instead of pushing on. If there be two roads to reality, one through the desert of self-denial and mortification and the other in a milk-and-honey land of delight, the austere path offers less temptation to daily than the comfortable one. The stages of self-concept interest in orthocognition are stages to be gradually surmounted, for every 'my' that ties the ego to ownership or association delays development. The wise man, therefore, will realize orthocognition for what it is, an interim device, particularly suitable for us westerners for the gradual transcendence of self-concept by applying it more and more to the environmental self, and less and less to the personal self.
"The power of orthocognition is akin to the power of the dreamer in the lucid dream. Both help us become aware that we are dreaming and that the dream world we inhabit in the daytime is not more real than the dream world we inhabit asleep. Since both are dreams, we may expect that mental causes may change the percepts we 'see' awake just as they change the dream percepts. It is this awareness that the perceptual world is not 'loose and separate,' but a product of collective consciousness and, hence, changeable by mental means that is the freeing orthocognitive construct.
"We have discussed orthocognition as if it were always a deliberate and conscious attempt at control of the environment through visualization in the syntaxic mode, but we must note for completeness that there are many instances of such visualizations in other modes in which, without realizing that he is doing so, the
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individual sets in motion the same kind of archetype or mental picture which eventuates in a manifest material state or event.
"For the human mind is not merely endowed (as part of the noumenon) with the power to cognize nature, it is also endowed with the power to design nature. The end objective of consciousness is not mere experience but reification. Whether we realize it or not, our thoughts affect the plastic numinous element which tends (unless prevented by other thoughts) to transform these thoughts into events. This is the secret of the self-fulfilling prophecy, for what a man can predict or visualize is (to use Koko's words), 'As good as done already.' As Pearce (11973:11) states: 'Thinking is a shaping force in reality.'
"Life is like being stunned then put into a strait jacket then dropped from a great height with a parachute. The problem is one first has to come to, then get out of the strait jacket, then activate the parachute. When consciousness is imprisoned in space, time, and personality, it is put into this position. Orthocognition is the first dawning of consciousness that it is in this fix (i.e., like the lucid dreamer that he is having a dream). Then the problem is to get out of the situation and not be beguiled by all of its allurements. Like Apollo, we are set in a great chariot for a swing through the heavens. But will consciousness reap the regard of this journey through space and time, or will there be only the usual Pussycat's report?
Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
I've been to London to visit the Queen.
Pussycat, pussycat what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under her chair.
"When consciousness is encased in creaturehood, it is very difficult not to be about the business of the creature. So after all the effort of going to London we may content ourselves with frightening a little mouse, rather than seeing the Queen.
"Blofeld (1970:84) calls orthocognition "visualization" and says of it:
It produces quick results by utilizing forces familiar to man only at the deeper levels of consciousness ... wherewith mind creates and animates the whole universe; ordinarily they are
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not ours to command, until the false ego is negated or unless we employ yogic means to transcend its bounds....
"Since orthocognition involves a realization that the ego rather than being the central aspect of life is something to be transcended, it requires a radical switch in thinking. This from 'I-thinking' to 'not I-thinking' is made more difficult by the construction of our grammar. But since we can also rise by that which appears to cause our fall, we can deal with this problem grammatically. We can express the triple integral of the ego mathematically by SSS1 (where S= the integral sign). We can hence use the shortened symbol S1 to mean the transpersonal noumenon; so that when we say 'I visualize,' we are more accurate to say (or write) 'S'I visualize,' since only 'S' I is capable of bringing the visualization to manifestation. (See Table X, page 252 in Trance, Art, Creativity)
"it is sometimes loosely stated that an action taken in the body (orthocognition or a physical ritual, see Section 3.5 last 5 paragraphs) activates a cosmic source, but this is an inaccurate rendition of the event. What happens is that the S I situation takes place outside of time (and hence eternally and recurrently in time), and the calling forth of the function outside of time hence projects the manifestation into time in the here and now and in the future. This process which transforms thought into action can be performed syntaxically through orthocognition by the S I procedure which works in the durative topocosm. It can also be accomplished parataxically through the ritual repetition of a formula which sets up a vibration or cycle. Both processes are like turning on a tap to release a flow of water. They do not produce the water which flows; they merely release it or bring it from posse into esse.
"To program one's dreams and to program one's (dreaming awake) normal life are very similar functions. One involves creativity and the other healing; both are orthocognitive. For in both it is SI which brings design to an otherwise chaotic state.
"The stages of consciousness in man go from essential animal consciousness (mere reaction to stimuli) to self-consciousness (normal formal operations and some insight) to orthocognition (with its understanding that SI is imprisoned in time, space, and personality). Finally there comes cosmic consciousness which is at first transient in the psychedelic stage and continual in the unitive."
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The reader is invited to recheck the Sullivan-Van-Rhijn theory (Gowan 1975:2) which states that experience which cannot either be cognized or felt by the conscious mind, must appear, either in the body or the environment, usually in the form of illness or accident. Zukav (1979:56) quotes Jung to the same effect: "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate."
Roberts (1974:121) through "Seth" points out: "(Thoughts) have electromagnetic reality. They affect your physical being, and they are automatically translated by your nervous system into the stuff of your flesh and your experience."
Roberts (1974:320) has "Seth" echo these actualizations from the realm of all possibilities:
The 'you' that you presently conceive yourself to be represents the emergence into physical experience of but one probable state of your being, who then directs life, and 'frames' and defines all sense data... In your terms, probable events are brought into actuality by utilizing the body's nerve structure through certain intensities of will or conscious belief... These beliefs obviously have another reality besides the one with which you are familiar. They attract and bring into being certain events instead of others. Therefore, they determine the entry of experience of events from an endless variety of probable ones.
In actuality there may be a third kind of healing, which will be considered under Section 4.73, although the third kind is usually confused with the second, as neither involves a laying-on-of-hands. We will call this kind of healing "union-compassion" healing. While further remarks about it are reserved for the later section, we will indicate the rationale which brought it to our attention here.
In Trance, Art and Creativity (1975:19ff), we noted three modes of operation: 1) prototaxic or somatic, 2) parataxic or emotional, and 3) syntaxic or cognitive. It appears that there is a kind of healing for each mode, viz: 1) laying on of hands, 2) union compassion, and 3) orthocognitive. (Ed. Note: This is a late insight, made only after the bulk of this section was completed.)
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Like this book, Meek (1977:214) distinguishes three types of healing. Type A is magnetic healing "involving a flow of vital energy to the patient." Meek quotes Davis to the fact that prana from the healer's left hand acts like the north pole of a magnet (p. 216). Type B, or "bioplasmic healing" (p. 219) has to do with energy exchanges between the healer's etheric body and the patient's. This would supposedly be pranic energy. Type B does not occur alone. Type C (or Mind and Spirit Healing, p. 221) is similar to our "orthocognitive" healing and may be accomplished in absentia. We are inclined to feel that Meek's type A and B both concern pranic energy and should be combined. We accept type C as orthocognition, but would add our third type of gemeinschaftgefuhl healing, so while both Meek and the author recognize three types, we differ in their characteristics.
In order properly to understand healing, let us look at the problem of knowledge from another point of view. It has been said that the central problem of the cosmos is, "To what vivency is consciousness awake?" We may paraphrase this wisdom by asking, "What level of consciousness is aware of a particular situation?" Let us suppose that the higher levels of consciousness (the parataxic and the syntaxic) are not aware, and that only the somatic (or body) level is aware. Then the only feedback of which consciousness may be aware is the pain and illness of the body which is really the carrier of vital information, could the higher levels but decode it. As knowing progresses from skin (prototaxic) to full cognition (syntaxic) various awakenings in the about-to-be perceived event precede full cognition, like little serendipities, which the individual, far from understanding as due to his own awakening realization of order) attributes to accidents in the environment (and which Jung called synchronicity). Actually, these are the heralds of the cognitive dawning of a condition of order which has already taken place in some higher realm. The task of the orthocognitive healer is really to hasten this enlightenment of consciousness.
4.63) Empery over Animals
One of the more charming aspects of empery, since it recalls man's pristine position in the Garden of Eden, is his control over animals. This control is united with love, tenderness, and perfect innocence toward the lower forms of life, which we see in the "reverence for life" views of Schweitzer. But, of course, the most
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perfect example of gemeinschaftgefuhl extended not just to all humanity but to all creatures is that of St. Francis. Bishop (1974: 184-5) speaking of St. Francis says:
Especially he loved living creatures, and of them especially birds. Best of the birds, to him, were the cowled larks, earthcolored like monks, and humble, but such sweet singers! The larks returned his love. On the night before his death a great multitude came and wheeled above his roof, singing their farewell. One may remember his warm reception by the birds of La Verna. On another occasion a swarm of birds - wood pigeons, crows, rooks - assembled on a tree to hear his sermon, and at the end bowed their heads reverently down; and again a brawling band of swallows fell silent at his command. He tamed many birds for pets, or rather companions - his familiar hawk at La Verna, a loving moorhen, a family of robins, one of whom suffered death as penalty for gluttony, a pheasant who followed him like a dog. The birds in Giotto's fresco are identified as goldfinches, quail, sparrows, and pigeons. Francis proposed even that the state should undertake to throw grain for the birds on the roads every Christmas, as a present. There was a pet crow who went begging for the brothers, and who, at Francis's passing, came to die on his grave.
Sakuhar (1952:29) tells us of the empery of Shri Baba, a Twentieth-Century Indian avatar:
Baba was in the habit of borrowing oil from the shopkeepers of the village for his little lamps which he kept burning the whole night, both in the masjid and the temple. Once these merchants who were wont to supply him with oil gratis took it into their heads to refuse this little service to the Master. Quite unperturbed, the Saint filled his lamp containers with water and lighted the wicks - and lo, they started burning, and kept burning all throughout the silent watches of the night as if in defiance of the ungracious behavior of the shopkeepers who later repented and became his disciples,
Instances abound too of Baba's control over the elements. Christlike he could command the winds and the rain and the lightning to obey his behests. One evening there was a terrible and destructive storm at Shirdi and the little village was flooded with incessant rain. The many local deities were sought to be appeased but in vain. At last people flocked to the masjid and prayed to Baba to quell the storm. The great yogi came
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out to the edge of the masjid and ordered the storm to cease. At once the winds and the rain and the lightning obeyed his sweet will and became still.
Patanjali sutra No. 17 (Aranya 1977:317) is the nearest to this power, for it declares that by practicing samyama on sound, the yogin can gain knowledge of the sounds produced by all beings.
A full discussion of instances of empery over animals would make a delightful book, but we do not have the time here to pursue the subject in detail. Underhill (1964:94) speaks of Conrad of Offida as "inheriting the Franciscan power over animals." Mesmer (Buranelli 1975:203) had the power: "His gift of drawing animals remained, the gift he had first noticed in his childhood." Shamans traditionally cultivate empery, and Long (1954:356-62) has a short chapter on empery over nature on the part of the Hawaiian kahunas, especially over sharks and weather.
Rama (1978:87, 151, 157) describes mantras which give empery over (and hence protection from) bees, snakes, and tigers. Montagu (1950:19) describes empery over nature as one of the nineteen signs of sainthood. A chapter on empery over animals is contributed by E. Salverte in the collection by Garrison (1973: 239-52). Among other matters we learn that the art was known to Pythagoras.
4.64) Miscellaneous Miracles
We include under this category of empery, dominion over the natural elements (weather), over food and its multiplication, and transubstantiation (or the changing of one substance into another, such as water into wine). Those familiar with the New Testament will recall that Jesus is supposed to have wrought all these miracles. Because of the rarity of data in this area and the consequent difficulty of belief for most persons, we shall sketch the area but lightly, contenting ourselves with making only two points:
1) Other adepts besides Christ, born in East and West are said to have accomplished one or more of these miracles;
2) The hologram model, which makes sensuous reality a world of appearances, allows for a paradigm explaining such high-level miracles as orthocognition of correct thought-forms in place of the physical evidence.
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Primitive man with his medicine men and shamans has always felt that he could influence the environment magically. Whether in rain-making, the protection of the totem animal, fertility rites, hunting rituals or other miraculous effects, the stories of such interventions are legion and found in every culture.
4-7)Adamic Ecstasy
Aranya (1977:315) translates Patanjali's sutra No. 16 as stating that knowledge of the past and future can be obtained by samyama on the "changes of characteristics, of temporal changes, and of states. . ." Evidently every event in time produces a trace outside of time, and this trace can be recovered or precognized. The "cleansing of the doors of perception" or refining of the senses to be cognizant of higher levels, allows them in some manner to "see through" the hologram and perceive the original object and the reference beam, that is, to become conscious of ultimate reality (or more accurately of a more ultimate reality).
We quote from earlier work (1975:361ff) on such ecstasies:
"4.71 Adamic or Time Ecstasies ("Access" or Jhana 0)
"The next level of ecstasy is one to which Blake's great words 'the doors of perception are cleansed' apply. All things are seen in the pristine goodness which Adam found before he fell from grace (hence the name). This is the Hindu 'access' state in which the primary object does not fully occupy the mind, but comes and goes transiently. God is heard although not seen. The self is restored to primitive grace. Siddhis are most likely in this stage, particularly those of bodily lightness as though floating on air. There may also be light flashes, or waves before the eyes; also noise like running water or the muffled sound of men talking at a distance. Because of this level there is initial loosening of the time aspect of the triple illusion, there often appears to be renewal or restoration of that which has been lost in the past, hence a reestablishment of pristine glory; this can also become a siddhi in which the individual sees the activities of a former time as in a vision. Another common experience is being enveloped in fire or seeing it close by.
Leuba (1925:209) describes an Adamic Ecstasy (Participant is climbing a mountain):
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When all at once I experienced a sense of being raised above myself; I felt the presence of God.... I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God....
"Knox (1950:153) quotes George Fox in another Adamic Ecstasy:
Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I know nothing but pureness, innocency, and righteousness being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that I was come up into the state of Adam which he was in before he fell.
"Bucke (1923:v) tells about his own 'illumination:'
All at once without warning of any kind I found myself wrapped in a flame colored cloud.... Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation ... of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe.
"Bucke was surprised to find that such unusual experiences were more common than he had expected, and his book Cosmic Consciousness which catalogs a number of similar ecstasies (first printed in 1901 ) has gone through many reprintings.
"Among the many historical figures cited in the book, one of the most telling is that of Blaise Pascal, famous French scientist and mathematician who had an experience which literally changed his life. He wrote about it as follows (Bucke: 1929:274):
In the year of Grace, 1654, Monday, 23 November, day of St. Clement, Pope and Martyr. From about half past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve midnight, FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not the philosophers nor of the Wise. Assurance, joy, assurance, feeling, joy, peace...
"An even more famous example occurred to Moses on Mt. Sinai as related in Exodus 3:2-5:
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And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire, out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called him out of the midst of the bush, and said: Moses, Moses. And he said, here am 1. And He said, draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place wherein thou standest is holy ground.
"And perhaps the most famous experience of all is given in Acts 9:3-6:
And as he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined about him a light from heaven; and he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
"Adamic ecstasies show loss of worldliness, desire, sin, sorrow. It is significant that Adamic ecstasies also sometime involve the loss of sense of time. Laski (1962:112) quotes Jefferies who had a similar experience of the Roman legions when standing beside a Roman ruin. Laski quotes Toynbee on similar historical visions on site, and notes the abundance of ruins as triggers for such experiences. She quotes Wordsworth (p. 115) who at Stonehenge had a vision of ancient druids at their rites. One might well call these locus experiences. Since they tune in to the numinous aspects of a site in its durative nature, they are the syntaxic correlates of the prototaxic hauntings and apparitions.
"Auden (1956:27-8) muses on archetypes and sacred sites as triggers: 'Some sacred beings seem sacred to all imaginations at all times,' and 'many of us have sacred landscapes which probably all have much in common.'
"D. H. Lawrence in The Rainbow (1949:204-5) echoes a similar timelessness: 'Away from time, always outside of time... Here in the church, 'before' and 'after' were folded together, all was contained in oneness,' as does T. S. Eliot in 'Four Quartets.'
"Happold (1970:x368-70) quotes Thomas Traherne on the latter's Adamic ecstasy. Since such an ecstasy recovers 'le temps perdu' it constitutes a vision of the durative topocosm:
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Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehension of the world than I.... All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful.... All things were spotless, and pure, and glorious .... I saw all in the peace of Eden.... All time was eternity ....
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.... The men, 0 what venerable and reverend creatures ... and the young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty.... Boys and girls were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of day, and something infinite behind everything appeared....
"The difference between 'hearing the Lord' and 'seeing the Lord' which distinguishes Adamic ecstasies from Knowledge ecstasies, is illustrated in Exodus 33:9, 11, 18-23.
And it came to pass as Moses entered the tabernacle the cloudy pillar descended and stood at the door of the tabernacle, and the Lord talked with Moses. And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face.... And he said 'I beseech thee, show me thy glory.' And (the Lord) said 'Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me and live.... And it shall come to pass that while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft in the rock, and will cover thee with my hand, while I pass by. And I will take away my hand and thou shall see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen.
From which it is evident that Moses had an Adamic vision.
"Many saints are reputed to have had time ecstasies in which they had a vision of holy events. St. Bridget, while adoring a creche, had a vision of Jesus' birth. St. Francis received the Stigmata in a similar instance. St. Teresa, and many others have had such theophanies.
"Let us see what the mystics say about jhana 0, or the 'access' state. St. Teresa (Leuba, 1912:164) calls this 'The Sleep of the Powers' or the Orison of Union (in her Interior Castle where it is the fifth dwelling). As the last state before complete rapture, the soul is more and more absorbed in the complete contemplation of
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God, which is found more and more enjoyable. The intellectual and sensory powers seem asleep. Teresa calls this state 'a celestial madness.' Similar strong affective aspects are mentioned by St. Francois de Sales (Leuba, 1912:168) who calls it Amorous Abstraction and mentions the 'presence of the Bridegroom;' 'the soul hears his voice.' Mental activity is reduced to nil. Father Poulain (1912) Leuba (1925:178) calls this state Full Union. He says: 'The soul is fully occupied with the divine object; it is not diverted by any other thought; in short it has no distractions.'
"The Hindus also agree that this level involves ecstasy which they call 'samadhi.' The lowest level is samadhi 'with support' (sampajnata) in which samadhi is achieved (Eliade 1969:93) 'with the help of an object or a thought.' The yogi penetrates the essence of the object and assimilates it, but he is still differentiated from it. This samadhi level makes possible knowledge and puts an end to suffering. While there is not perfect correspondence between the yogic graces and the Christian, either here or in the next samadhi level, there is an outside-of-time aspect which corresponds to our Adamic Ecstasy. For example, in 'gripping' an object the yogi assimilates its past and future as well as its present."
4.72) Friendliness and Gemeinschaftgefuhl
The English word does not fully express the universal compassion inherent in the German word. Aranya (1977:330) translates Patanjali's sutra No. 23, as recommending friendliness, compassion and goodwill to all. Through this samyama the yogi "destroys all feelings of envy and hatred ... and gets completely free from harshness and malice." But even this does not give us the full range of the function.
Maslow (1954:217) explains gemeinschaftgefuhl thus:
This word, invented by Alfred Adler, is the only one available that describes well the flavor of the feelings for mankind expressed by self-actualizing subjects. They have for human beings in general a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection... Because of this they have a genuine desire to help the human race. It is as if they were all members of a single family.
This compassionate feeling for all humanity, transcending the bonds of family, kinship, friends, or one's cultural contempor-
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aries is seen in enlightened persons as Jesus, Gandhi, Schweitzer and Eleanor Roosevelt. One is reminded of what Einstein said: "Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures. . ."
This brotherhood feeling to all humans comes from a deeper feeling that the universe is beneficent, for "The fatherhood of God produces the brotherhood of man." In consonance with this idea Orme-Johnson and Farrow (1977:708) state:
The effect of the technique on friendliness ranges from a feeling of harmony within oneself and/or a greater degree of inner correlation or mind-body coordination; to the above feeling not only encompassing one's self but projecting outward to include objects or people in the vicinity; to an all encompassing friendliness radiating out into the universe, a sense of being an intense beacon light of friendliness filling all creation.
4.73) Union-Compassion Healing
This highest form of healing is only possible to those adepts who have access to gemeinschaftgefuhl (or world-compassion) through the grace of Adamic ecstasy. As we have indicated in Section 4.62, it is the parataxic cognate of the syntaxic orthocognitive healing, and the prototaxic laying-on-of-hands healing. (For the meaning of prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic consult Gowan 1975:19.)
Union-compassion healing is instantaneous: a number of Jesus' healings were of this type. The Master, with great love and compassion for the welfare of his brother-man or sister-woman, sees them as unified in the love of God, and out of this love-union-compassion comes the immediate change. This high level of healing is not possible for most mortals; and consequently, it is rare, but it is both theoretically required by the triplicity of the prototaxic, parataxic, syntaxic modes, and is evident in the work of the greatest avatars.
When a condition of health has been established (or better visualized) on the realm of all possibilities (the etheric), it may take some little time for it to manifest on the physical. This is why healing of the two lower kinds often takes time.
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In the highest form of healing which is instantaneous, we may wonder if the adept has not reached back into time and corrected a past condition, so that the results are expressed by an instantaneous change in the present state.
4.8) Infused Knowledge
There appear to be four levels of knowledge ecstasies each with a deeper infusion of cosmic wisdom (jhanas 1, 2, 3, 4). Some kind of transcendent knowledge is communicated so suddenly and completely that the mystic "knows everything." St. Thomas Aquinas, after a long career as scholar and philosopher, had such a visionary experience in chapel one Sunday. Declaring that his previous knowledge was as nothing compared with what had been revealed to him, he stopped in the middle of a book and never wrote another word. Jacob Boehme is quoted by Bucke (1901 :182): "The gate was opened to me that in one-quarter of an hour, I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a university. .. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the byss and the abyss. In many there is a vision of the Deity, and a great affective overload; even in intellectuals (according to
Ramakrishna, Younghusband 1930:27): "It is impossible to express in language the ecstasy of divine communication. . . ." The knowledge communicated is both general and ineffable. While it comprises "allness," its details are seldom discussed. Our guess is that at this level the mystic begins to experience the phenomenon of knowledge turning into state. As has been stated elsewhere (1975:379): "This integration or return to primordial unity is the finality of knowledge which in the end transmutes into being." In other words through knowledge more and more complete, the knower becomes the known.
The question of "infused powers" is a delicate one because it appears that such infusion may occur as a result of removing certain human elements of the conscious mind. It is as if in James' phrase the human consciousness is a bottleneck through which reality is filtered. Disturb this constraint, and exotic powers appear, as in the telepathic predilections of schizophrenics, the seeing of auras by Reichenbach's neurotics, the psychic powers following electric shock or other brain trauma.
Is it fair to call these manifestations which appear in subtraction, as higher powers which should appear in addition?
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Further, since these powers appear to be those of the prototaxic numinous with very little human component, is it fair to call them exotic powers of humanity? Where is the line separating the exhibition of numinous power shown in trance states from a more obviously human ability? Surely, no one would regard the best of Wordsworth or Tennyson as non-human numinous powers, although it is perfectly obvious that "Intimations of Immortality" is inspired verse.
We hazard the belief that the crucial component is "control," and that the cut line comes between possession trance and shamanistic behavior. If one is in control of the experience, so that one can will it to occur, with what suitable props may be necessary, one may be said to have infused power. It is a bit like whether an infielder has control of the ball in making a put-out in baseball.
The infusion of cosmic knowledge is a siddhi. Orme-Johnson and others (1978:708) describe the reactions of advanced TM meditators to this experience as follows:
Experiences of 'omniscience' do not seem to show such a clear developmental sequence. There was general agreement that the early stage could be described as a feeling of expansion of the mind and the expansion of the influence of the body. Four alternatives were given for the next stage:
a) a sense of universality and the ability to do anything;
b) a sense of perfection and of being all-pervasive, of being all that there is in nature;
c) a feeling of being stationed in the borderline between the manifest and the unmanifest levels of creation, a state of ultimate evenness;
d) an experience of the mind as infinite, radiating upward in a cone-shaped pattern.
Since we have elsewhere (1975:366ff) argued that the successive knowledge-contact jhanas are part of the process of stripping away the personality, it is rather difficult to state what is going on in a language which is referenced to the personal pronouns. The various degrees of knowledge-contact are accompanied in many saints by visions, and even in some cases contact with the numinous element. As creation is differentiation, yogic escalation is integration in which things are returned to their original, primordial order.
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It is probable that there are numerous specific powers represented under this heading, and that only our lowly position far away from them prevents our being able to separate them more specifically. We know that there are four jhanas involved (jhanas 1-4, see Gowan 1975:366-75). Patanjali's sutras numbers 33, 34, 44, 45, 49, and 52-4 (Aranya 1977:344ff) also discriminate. Remembering that mere words become less and less meaningful at these levels, let us continue for a little while.
Sutra 33 (Aranya 1977:344) states that "Taraka knowledge is the state of knowledge before attainment of discriminative enlightenment." Like the dawn before the sun, when this level is attained, the yogin comes to know everything. Sutra 34 states that "by practicing samyama on the heart, knowledge of the mind is acquired." This evidently allows knowledge to get past the fluctuations of the gunas and surmount the conception of ego.
Sutras 44 and 45 (Aranya 1977:358ff) have to do with samyamas on the bhutas or basic elements. With the conquest of these, the essence or real nature of objects becomes known and these properties can be changed at will. Consequently, a higher type of omniscience and other powers emerge.
Sutra 49 (Aranya 1977:368ff) states that to the yogin "established in the discernment between buddhi and Purusa come supremacy over all beings and omniscience." All forms of the gunas appear before the mind of the yogin, hence, he has knowledge of past, present, and future states. Sutras 52-4 discuss discriminative knowledge whereby the yogin can discriminate between the essence of two apparently identical objects. But it is also obvious that the verbal channel is inadequate to carry the full message.
4.9) Continuous Contact and Union: (jhanas 5-8)
These four levels of being are beyond descriptive knowledge as we know it, out of time and space, and also beyond personality. Consequently, while we have tried to describe them elsewhere (Gowan 1975:374-8), it is very difficult to say much about them except in poetry, music or parable. The easiest understood analogy is spiritual marriage, reflecting the continuous contact and union between the individual and general mind.
From The Interior Castle II: chapter 2:333-35), St. Teresa
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says of Spiritual Marriage (speaking of herself in the third person):
Let us now come to treat of the Divine and Spiritual Marriage, although this great favor cannot be fulfilled perfectly in us during our lifetime, for if we were to withdraw ourselves from God this great blessing would be lost. When granting this favor for the first time, His Majesty is pleased to reveal Himself to the soul through an imaginary vision of His most sacred Humanity, so that it may clearly understand what is taking place and not be ignorant of the fact that it is receiving so sovereign a gift. To other people the experience will come in a different way. To the person of whom we have been speaking the Lord revealed Himself one day, when she had just received Communion, in great splendour and beauty and majesty, as He did after His resurrection, and told her that it was time she took upon her His affairs as if thy were her own and that He would take her affairs upon Himself; and He added other words which are easier to understand than to repeat.
This, you will think, was nothing new, since on other occasions the Lord had revealed Himself to that soul in this way. But it was so different that it left her quite confused and dismayed: for one reason, because this vision came with great force; for another, because of the words which He spoke to her; and also because, in the interior of her soul, where He revealed Himself to her, she had never seen any visions but this. For you must understand that there is the greatest difference between all the other visions we have mentioned and those belonging to this Mansion, and there is the same difference between the Spiritual Betrothal and the Spiritual Marriage as there is between two betrothed persons and two who are united so that they cannot be separated any more.
"More austerely the Bhagavad Gita says of the mystical state, samadhi:3
The self-controlled practitioner, while enjoying the various sense objects through the senses which are disciplined and free from likes and dislikes, attains placidity of mind. With the attainment of such placidity of mind, all his sorrows come to an end, and the intellect of such a person of tranquil mind soon withdraws itself from all sides, and becomes firmly established in the supreme reality.
"Harding (1973:159) is definite about the advantages of the syntaxic mode of juncture between the conscious ego and the numinous element:
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But if a man who has had an ecstatic experience succeeds in holding to his conscious standpoint and its values, and also retains the new influx that has come to him from the very depths of the psyche, he will be obliged to endure the conflict that two such widely different components will necessarily create, and will be compelled to seek for a means of reconciling them. This attitude is the only safeguard against falling under the spell of the nonpersonal daemonic powers of the unconscious; it is the modern way of following John's advice to 'prove the spirits.' If the effort is successful, and inner marriage will be consummated, the split between the personal and the nonpersonal part of the psyche will be healed, and the individual will become a whole, a complete being.
"But perhaps the best metaphor is that of coming home. St. Augustine says: 'Thou has made us for thyself and we are not happy until we dwell in thee.' As Ruysbroeck says: 'God is the home of the soul.' One might quote Stevenson's epitaph as it so pertinently applies to the psyche:
Here he lies where he longed to be:
Home is the sailor, home from the sea;
And the hunter home from the hill.
"In Underhill's words (1960:367), 'The Transcendent is perceived by contact not vision.'
... Oh, wonder of wonders,' says Eckhart, 'when I think of the union the soul has with God.' And Suso says: 'In this rapture the soul disappears, yet not entirely. It acquires certain qualities of divinity, but does not naturally become divine.' Plotinus puts it: 'The soul neither sees nor distinguishes by seeing.' 'it ceases to be itself .... it belongs to God.' 'The perceiver is one with the thing perceived.' 'Ecstasy is a desire of contact .... and a striving after union.'
"Underhill (1960:416) lists the three marks of the state as: 1) absorption in the interests of the Infinite, 2) freedom and serenity flowing from consciousness of its authority, 3) a center of energy in the world and lives of others.
"Meister Eckhart tells us:
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"'The knower and the known are one ... God and I we are one.... The eye with which I see God is the same as that with which He sees me.'
"Cognitive knowledge (like carnal knowledge) has in its finality become union.
"This is the fifth state of consciousness of the yogis, a state in which the altered state of consciousness is permanent. It is also a stage where all aspects of self have been transcended. It is consequently very difficult to say anything about it, as words are not adequate. Paradoxical statements abound as in most limit situations. (Christians who may be offended when such a mystic says, 'I am become God' may be comforted by recollecting that what the mystic is really trying to describe is an ineffable situation in which the semantic aspect becomes distorted.) What is apparent is that development has reached some higher level where there is even less of space, time, and 'I-ness' and even more of the Absolute.
"Laski (1962:63) quotes Poulain on the unitive state as 1) a union that is almost permanent, persisting even mid exterior occupations, 2) transformation of the higher abilities (hence transforming union), 3) intellectual vision.
"We need not detain ourselves with vain quibbles about whether the mystic is absorbed into Deity or whether he retains his conscious individuality. Words are simply not relevant or adequate, for paradoxical opposites become both possible simultaneously at such exalted levels. What has happened is that the 'not-me' of the early numinosium has become the me, and in place of dissociation, incongruity, and discontinuity between the numinous element and the individual psyche, there has come association, congruity, and continuity.
"Jung states in the Secret of theGolden Flower: 'Every statement about the transcendental ought to be avoided because it is a laughable presumption on the part of the human mind, unconscious of its limitations.'
"While we are unable to describe in detail what is going on at these exalted levels, that does not mean that little is taking place. The real business of these high states is to make increasingly
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permanent and real the intimations of escape from the prison of time, space, and personality begun in the lower jhanas. For example, the Adamic Ecstasy (Jhana 0) with its time distortion starts the process of escape from time, but this feeling is experienced only in an ephemeral manner as if in trance: it is the first wiggle of the nascent butterfly in attempting to escape from the cocoon. Such transcendence becomes increasingly apparent at each higher level. Similarly the escape from the physical world of space is started at jhana 1, yet it is obvious from the descriptions of jhana 5, 6, and 7, that different aspects of this transcendence are being accomplished. Words may be inadequate to express the process of these high graces, and we may know little about what is going on, but we can intuit that the continued specifics of this transcendence are much involved.
"It is important to attempt to restate for our Western minds, which are not used to the concept, that for the Hindu yogi, extreme concentration on an object becomes 'grasping the object' first in knowledge of the essence of the object, and then in a 'passage from knowledge to state,' essentially becoming the object. Since the object is usually Isvara (the Lord), the result of this progression is deliverance. As Eliade (1969:96) explains:
The object is no longer known through associations.... it is grasped directly, in its existential nakedness....
Let us note that.... Samprajnata Samadhi is shown to be a state achieved through a certain knowledge'. . . This passage from knowledge to state must be kept constantly in mind... (it) leads to a fusion of all modalities of being...
This absolute knowledge reveals that 'knowledge and being are no longer discrete from each other.' So the yogi who penetrates to Asamprajnata Samadhi (samadhi without support of objects) becomes one with the Deity. As Eliade (1969:114) remarks: 'The human consciousness is eliminated... its constituent functions having been reabsorbed into the primordial substance.
"If creation may be compared to the mathematical process of differentiation, then yogic escalation may be compared to the process of integration, for it returns to an undifferentiated state or function.
"Thus we are enabled to see the grand theme of the great
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process of creation and salvation emerge namely, that in the juncture between the individual and the general mind, duality is abolished, and through knowledge more and more complete, the one becomes the other. Notice that in section 4.2 (Tantric Sex), if the word know is used in the carnal sense, the knower and the known are fused in union. This integration or return to primordial unity is the finality of knowledge which in the end transmutes into being. Thus the dichotomy of symbol and referent, verba and res, thought and action, Shiva and Shakti is resolved by their transcendence of duality in union. 'I am become God;' says Meister Eckhart, testifying truthfully to a mystic state which was as far beyond comprehension of the churchmen who excommunicated him as the fact that complete knowledge can become complete being is above us. The omega point is reached when 'the All shall know the All' for then All shall become All without differentiation. At every level, prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic, the upward escalation of humanity is a prefiguring of this 'divine, far-off event.'
"But if we in the West have difficulty in grasping such a concept of absolute thought becoming absolute state, we should remember that the very same idea was proclaimed by none other than Socrates in the Symposium when he concluded:
This is the life which men should lead above all others in the contemplation of Beauty absolute .... Dwelling in that realm alone, he will bring forth not images of beauty, but Beauty itself, and so would become immortal and be the friend of God.
FOOTNOTES:
*See Jones, D. E. Visions of Time: Experiments in Psychic Archeology Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Pub. House, 1979.
1 For a possible ingenious naturalistic explanation of this phenomenon in terms of diagonal polarization and lattice logic, see Zukav (1979:283ff).
375-89).
2 The force has been discussed in 3.5 as "prana." Psychic Observer (Box 8606 Washington, D.C. 20011 ), for Fall, 1978 has 49 different names for this life or vital force, including prana (the ancient vedic name), mana, elan-vital, od, orgone, eckankar, chi, dynamis, numen, and el. This list of 49 synonyms is reproduced in the Fall 1979 edition of Research Reporter, Box 57127, L.A. 90075.
3 Further to healing effects of radiation, see Florvik in Regush (1977:298-300).
4 The remainder of this chapter is quoted from the author's earlier work (1975:
CHAPTER V
Genius, Precocity and Reincarnation
"Man's genius is a deity.
-- Heraclitus
"Talk not of genius baffled.
Genius is master of man.
Genius does what it must.
Talent does what it can.
-- Bulwer-Lytton
5.0) Introduction1
Let us first define our terms. By "genius" we shall mean "possession of genii" (rather than a very high I.Q.). By "precocity" we shall mean not only accelerated accomplishment of developmental tasks, but the perfected completion of some extraordinary social skill at an amazingly young age. (These definitions avoid, to some extent, the tautology that if genius is defined as having a very high I.Q., and precocity is defined as a very high first derivative of intelligence with respect to time, namely rate, they are essentially the same.) Furthermore, our definition of genius is perhaps a poetic way of saying that access to right-hemisphere function is operant. Finally, let us define reincarnation negatively as disbelief that the soul is created at birth or conception, and that it cannot return to another reincarnation.
One reason that we favor the definition of genius as "possession by genii" rather than merely a very high I.Q. is that certain characteristics of genius point to access to transcendental power. This power reminds one of Otto's "numinous element" (Gowan 1975:3ff) in that it is possessive, overpowering, fascinating, and mysterious. But it also seems beneficent and revivifying, and while it appears to use the individual for its own expression, it revitalizes him in the process. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in J. W. N. Sullivan's biography of Beethoven (1927:63):
It is probable that every genius of the first order becomes aware of this curious relation towards his own genius. Even the most fully conscious type of genius, the scientific genius, as Clerk Maxwell and Einstein, reveals this feeling of being possessed. A power seizes them of which they are not normally aware except by obscure premonitions. With Beethoven, so extraordinarily creative, a state of more or less unconscious tumult
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must have been constant. But only when the consciously defiant Beethoven had succumbed, only when his pride and strength had been so reduced that he was willing, even eager, to die and abandon the struggle, did he find that his creative power was indeed indestructible and that it was its deathless energy that made it impossible for him to die.
The juxtaposition of the three words, genius, precocity, and reincarnation, in the heading require an explanation from the author who has been an avid student of the first two and a very reluctant one of the third. If one honestly faces the brutal question: "Why do you have the mind of a genius, and I have the mind of a cretin?" one is compelled either to abandon the concept of justice in the universe, or the idea that this is the first time around. This essay is hence an apologia for having opted for the side of justice.
Once the plunge is taken, it is rather easy to assign reincarnation as the reason for the precocity of genius. If geniuses merely grew wiser for longer periods than ordinary men, one could, of course, not make this connection; but the fact is that they have incredible rates of intellectual development, much as if they were recalling mental powers, rather than learning them for the first time. It was Socrates who first told us that, "The soul doth remember what she has learned before."
The previous point is important enough to state in another way. There seems to be no a-priori reason why genius should require precocity; it would seem just as feasible for the genius to continue developing after others had left off. But this is never the case. There is elevation both in the variable (intelligence) and in its derivative (rate of development), - thus the hint that there is a third variable (reincarnation) affecting the behavior of the other two is given.
Let us imagine that the principle of reincarnation contains a grain of truth, and that evolving entities whose capacities compass a much larger sweep of abilities than is generally shown in mortal personality desire to incarnate, which is for them a kind of imprisonment in time, space, and personality. Of these three, the last is the most constraining for it involves throwing the dice of the chromosomes so that what is expressed in the mortal personality is but a fraction of what is latent in the entity.
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Let us imagine that occasionally one of these entities is of a higher order, and has so many emergent powers activated that even the random mitosis of the genes results in many unusual abilities. Let us further imagine that of these nascent abilities, which must be developed by the environment to become fully manifested, society esteems only a few, leaving the others as odd, eerie, or discounting them altogether, and concentrating on only the most prosaic, in which the individual may excel.
We now have painted a pretty clear picture of the exotic powers of genius, which have been described heretofore. Moreover, we have provided a rationale for them, and have shown why they are more likely to occur in the able and talented.
If genius means "possession by genii" one may well ask, What produces in able persons the beneficent possession? What activates a gene to become expressive instead of dormant?
Those who believe in control/assistance from relatives and friends beyond the veil may retort that it is due to these effects; those who believe in reincarnation may aver that it is due to the cumulative effect of past lives; those who feel the wish for more personal control of destiny may state that it is due to the will of the individual calling forth those particular preconscious processes which can be beneficial in realizing a strongly held wish to dream. What is incontestable is that of two men equally endowed by nature, one will flower in adulthood, and one will wither; and both the efflorescence and the blight seem to come from other than obvious personal sources.
It may be asked, "What is the task of consciousness in the normal state in the physical world?" The Bible says it is to "build a house, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." Troward (1909:31) says that it is to develop "subjective will," so that in effect the conscious mind can control the subconscious ability to will and discriminate.
If we consider that in the normal state, consciousness is locked in a triple prison of time, space, and personality, so that it is in effect confined to a single individual cell in a multidimensional space-time, it would seem logical that its task, in the manner of a multiple mathematical integration, is to become aware (and hence functional) throughout time, space, and in every personality. This
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consummation "devoutly to be wished" is indeed de Chardin's "Omega Point," so progress toward it by any one personality in any one incarnation must be necessarily partial and incomplete.
If we admit that the vast majority of humans cannot and do not come to perfection or Buddhahood in a single lifetime, and if we also stipulate that there is some task to be accomplished here in line with the previous argument, then it must follow that those who do not succeed on the first try are enabled to try again. But this is tantamount to admitting the possibility of successive incarnations.
Which is more likely - that a merciful Supreme Being condemns all of his creatures (save the very elect who make it on the first try) to chaotic nescience, or that they are mercifully permitted to try it again? If we answer to the second alternative, we are accepting reincarnation over the one-shot Christian view. Surely, if there is reincarnation, a merciful and just Deity would allow some advantage to carry over from the former trial, not require a start from scratch so to speak. This admission allows for the inheritance of differential aptitudes, i.e., intelligence. And finally, if intelligence, more properly mental age, is a function of time, then its first derivative (precocity) will also be in evidence. We now have shown the connection between the three variables which form the title of this essay.
There is a fairly simple test of the previous argument. If humans of high intelligence are older hands in the incarnation process, then they should, on the average, exhibit more escalation into the creative, psychedelic, and unitive stages than others. The first witness for the affirmative in this matter is, of course, Bucke (1901:81) who clearly defines his 45 elect illuminants as being of greater than average intelligence, indeed most of them remarkably so. Au contraire, it may be argued that those whose theophany became a matter of historical record had the presence of mind to write it down, hence verbally facile to start with. The second witness for the affirmative is none other than Maslow (1954:199-234) in his famous "Characteristics of Self Actualizing People." If you look at his list of 85 or so people, all admittedly creative, they are all very much above average; he also notes that a number of them confessed to the "oceanic" experience of illumination.
It is possible to bring forward examples of men who were
Cosmogenic: Mental (Knowledge) Abilities
The final conclusion is that we know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.
- Walter Grierson
We have made an arbitrary distinction between physical powers and mental abilities, the former relating to the body, and the latter to the mind. But this duality is not seen in the siddhis, which commence with levitation at 3.8 and extend through infused knowledge at 4.8. What we are seeing in this taxonomic progression is the transcendence of the cosmic spirit first in the body and then in the mind, which process involves a cleansing and renewing of various functions to accommodate to a new order of reality. After the bodily siddhis in the last section, we continue with a transformation in the senses, and then a transmutation in knowledge itself, until eventually knowledge is translated into state, and the knower becomes one with the known.
In this taxonomy we shall follow the order which Radha (1978) described. She avers that these cosmogenic extensions of sensory knowledge come from the successive openings of the various chakra centers in the order given, with knowledge accompanying the opening of the sixth chakra. Presumably the completion of the circuit in the opening of the seventh chakra would correspond to the continuous contact and union in our 4.9. One may also note that 4.1 to 4.7 involve the cleansing of the doors of perception, spoken of by Blake in connection with the Adamic ecstasy (Jhana 0), (of Gowan 1975:361); 4.8 corresponds to the infused knowledge (Jhanas 1-4), (of Gowan 1975:366ff); and 4.9 corresponds to the continuous contact and union (Jhanas 5-8), (of Gowan 1975:376-79).
The reader will notice a certain "thinness" in this section as compared with the earlier one. It is important to realize that this is not because of the lesser importance of the topics, but because of less knowledge about them; most of them are simply
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too far beyond us for close examination; hence less is understood and writtten about them. There is also another aspect. The categorical language of discourse is less and less able to describe the non-categorical aspects of these levels adequately - in short, the language channel is too narrow for the message.
At this point, the thoughtful reader will ask a difficult question, which we will do our best to forestall: "Why (and in what manner) are the cosmogenic knowledge abilities 4.1 - 4.5, which deal with extraordinary aspects of the five senses, different from the ontogenic extensions of sensory modalities in 2.11 - 2.15. " Having shown in Section 0, (the phylogenic abilities of other species), that some animals possess extraordinary natural abilities, which are not considered supernatural despite the fact that little or nothing is known of their operation, we conclude from empirical observation that somewhat similar ontogenic abilities of exotic aspect exist among some members of humanity. These are cases, where the individuals 1) do not claim that there is any cosmic intervention in their natural powers, nor 2) do their lives indicate any anomalies of behavior which accompany psychotic, shamanistic, or saintly lifestyles. Neither of these conditions obtain in the cosmogenic realm. It is true that rather odd individuals possess these extensions of sensory modalities, but this may be an effect rather than a cause of their differences. In addition, the cosmogenic aspects are described in the religious literature of the world, particularly in the Hindu sources as being a part of cosmic developmental process, and are hence in place in theory as well as being observed in fact. It is true that some of the ontogenic extensions in 2.11-2.15 may be due (if one is willing to accept reincarnation or occult philosophy) to powers a prior incarnation developed, which are seen as un-understood epiphenomena in this one; they may also be due to the effects of guardian spirits. But in the final analysis, this question is an open one: we do not know what the difference (if it exists) signifies.
4.01) Psychometry
Psychometry is a mental ability which depends upon touch. When an object is touched impressions about its past are received. Long (1954:132-3) quotes the account of the psychometrist Ossowiecki:
I begin by stopping all reasoning, and I throw all my inner
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power into perception of spiritual sensation. I affirm that this condition is brought about by my unshakable faith in the spiritual unity of all humanity. I then find myself in a new and special state in which I see and hear outside time and space . . . Whether I am reading a sealed letter, or finding a lost object, or psychometrizing, the sensations are nearly the same. I seem to lose some energy; my temperature becomes febrile, and the heartbeats unequal. I am confirmed in this supposition because, as soon as I cease from reasoning, something like electricity flows through my extremities for a few seconds. This lasts a moment only, and then lucidity takes possession of me, pictures arise, usually from the past. I see the man who wrote the letter and I know what he wrote. I see the object at the moment of its loss, with details of the event; or again I perceive or feel the history of the thing I am holding in my hands. The vision is misty and needs great tension. Considerable effort is required to perceive some details and conditions of the scenes presented.
We also quote from Long (1954:134) in an effort to explain the phenomenon:
In an effort to explain how psychometry is accomplished, several theories have been advanced. Dr. Pagenstecher offered the following:
'The associated object which practically witnessed certain events of the past, acting in the way of a tuning fork, automatically starts in our brain the specific vibrations corresponding to the said events; furthermore, the vibrations of our brain once being set in tune with certain parts of the Cosmic Brain already stricken by the same events, call forth sympathetic vibrations between the human brain and the Cosmic Brain, giving birth to thought pictures which reproduce the events in question.'
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle offered the explanation that all events and circumstances impressed themselves on some form of invisible and permanent, unchangeable ether. This imprinted ether, he supposed, was read by psychic vision by the psychometrist when attention was centered on a part of the ether connected with the object held in the hands.
Theosophists, building on ideas found in India, propound (see the works of Blavatsky) the theory that there is a WorldSoul or Akasa, upon whose memory is impressed all that happens. Psychometry, under this theory, becomes more
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definitely mechanical. One uses the object held in the hands to make a psychic connection with the part of the memory of the World-Soul having to do with the object's past. By a form of psychic telepathy, or - better yet - mind reading, the psychometrist 'reads the Akashic Records.'
From work elsewhere (1974:25-6) we quote: "Prince (1963:132) tells the historical account of the poet, Robert Browning who, when in Florence, met for the first time Count Giunasi, reputed to have such powers. The count asked the poet if he had any memento he would like to hear the history of. Browning produced some gold wrist studs which he had never worn in Florence before. The count held them awhile and then said, impressed, 'There is something here which cries out 'Murder. " The studs were in fact the property of Browning's great uncle who wore them when he was murdered.
"Of course, telepathy between Browning and the count would explain this experience, but Krippner (p. 87) cites Hilprecht on a case where the information was not known to anyone living. A similar example of the secret drawer is attributed to Swedenborg. The occultists call this sort of collective memory the 'Akashic records,' which can, of course, be accounted for by the concept of the 'collective preconscious."'
The famous novelist, Maeterlinck (1975:47), devoted a chapter in his book on the paranormal to psychometry and gave many examples of it.
One of the really social uses of psychometry is in archaeology. An excellent example of such work in which a sensitive gives pictures of life in Pompeii by touching artifacts from that city is found in the Denton article "Life and Death in Pompeii" (Garrison 1973:21-62).*
4.02) Knowledge of Arrangement and Motion of Stars
Patanjali's yoga sutras No. 27 and 28 state as follows (Aranya 1977:340-1): "By practising samyama on the lunar entrance of the body the disposition of the stellar system is known," and "By practising samyama on the fixed pole star, the movement of the stars is to be known." This is the only siddhi where power which may have seemed miraculous to Easterners now seems academic to Westerners.
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The author admits that the pole star sutras seemed quaint and almost out of place amid the other powers, seemingly much more arcane and mysterious to a Westerner. This view, however, may be merely Western ignorance. On asking a highly placed practitioner of the TM siddhis program about the pole star sutras, and why attention was paid to them, the answer was that they were necessary to enable the adept to pilot his way through the universe of stars and return to the solar system and the earth! This remarkable remark suggests the OBE consciousness of the shaman in his magical flight, and the nature of consciousness in transcending the time and space of the physical body. But TM siddhis adepts are not the only ones who have glimpsed this wondrous horizon. Consider the following extraordinary statement of
Charles Lindbergh (Muses and Young, 1972:312):
Will we then find [that] life to be only a stage, though an essential one, in a cosmic evolution of which our evolving awareness is beginning to become aware? Will we discover that only without spaceships can we reach the galaxies; that only without cyclotrons can we know the interior of atoms? To venture beyond the fantastic accomplishments of this physically fantastic age, sensory perception must combine with the extrasensory, and I suspect that the two will prove to be different faces of each other. I believe it is through sensing and thinking about such concepts that great adventures of the future will be found.
4.1) Vision of Cosmic Beings
Patanjali sutra No. 26 (Aranya 1977:334) states that "by practising samyama on the point in the body known as the solar entrance, the knowledge of the cosmic regions is effected." It appears from the following text the regions involved are in the "astral" plane or realm of potentiality. Similarly sutra No. 32 (Aranya 1977:343) states that "by samyama on the coronal light, siddhis can be seen." The coronal light is a small hole in the skull through which the adepts emanates effulgent light. Siddhis are devas or astral beings.
From a Western point of view this siddhi appears to be the ability to visualize the astral realm, whereas heretofore the protagonist has merely been sensitive to it. As radio preceded television, sensitivity always seems to precede vision. It appears that consciousness has established itself enough in the realm of all possibil-
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ities (the etheric) so that vision there becomes possible - Don Juan called this "seeing," and berated Castaneda for not being able to accomplish it. The words of the sutra make it abundantly clear that the realm of essence has not been reached, so that what is seen here are the devas, not "the clear light of the void." It is possible that this ability is out of place in the taxonomy and might be placed after 4.7 (Adamic ecstasy).
4.2) Calm
Sutra No. 31 (Aranya 1977:343) states that by samyama on the bronchial tube, calmness in breathing is obtained; this in turn leads to calmness in the body, which leads to calmness of mind.
From a Western point of view this siddhi refers to the purification of the body-mind; and, hence, the elimination of "static" so that the receptive device can become more refined. It is the analogue of the hi-fi "dolby" in shutting off extraneous noise, a necessary function to prepare for the siddhis which follow.
This siddhi establishes the importance to be attached to calm, an absolutely necessary state for the reception of right hemisphere imagery consequent upon psychic resonance. The amplitude of the incoming transpersonal signal is very minute, and any large noise error will completely hide them. Because calm is not spectacular we take it for granted, not realizing that it is, in effect, a grace. The Bible tells us to listen "for a still, small voice." Any method which will reduce outside noise and calm the interior discourse of the left hemisphere will tend to accomplish this. Medieval mystics referred to this as "the prayer of quiet."
4.3) Vision Through Opaque Objects: Miraculous Sight
Patanjali Yoga sutra No. 24 (Aranya 1977:332) states: "By applying the effulgent light of the higher sense-perception, knowledge of subtle objects or things obstructed from view or placed at a great distance, can be acquired." The commentary states that "this is the highest attainment, before which clairvoyance pales into insignificance." This ability, therefore, is different from the power of "traveling clairvoyance" which appears to be performed in an out-of-body experience. It is a knowledge ability, the apotheosis of externalization of sensory organs, spoken of in Section 3Y. It may well be that Swedenborg exhibited this ability in the
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incident involving the secret of the dead brother of the Queen of Sweden (Dingwall 1962b:45-6) since it involved a hidden note, but Swedenborg's own explanation was that he was enabled to converse with the dead.
Cryptesthesia, "hidden perception," is the explanation given by Barrett and Besterman (1968:275) for the success of dowsers, with the divining rod only a prop which allows the right hemisphere a motor activity in place of the proscribed verbal. They describe (ibid:264) a dowser's letter, quoting:
In the year 1862, 1 had a remarkable experience when out water-finding with the rod..... I found that after "setting" myself to use the rod, i.e., getting into an abstracted mental condition, lost to all around, when, or just before the rod turned, I could - as it were clairvoyantly - see the underground springs
The authors then describe the same ability in other dowsers, and including some who could "see" capital letters hidden in sealed envelopes.
Dermoptica (eyeless sight) is well researched in the Soviet Union, and in their book, Ostrander and Schroeder (1970:158ff) devote a whole chapter to it. The Russians believe that skin has much finer sensing powers than we realize and feel they can train people to discriminate colors by touch.
Moss (1974:95ff) discusses "skin vision," and especially details the case of several Soviet subjects, plus that of Mary Wimberly, all of whom could read with their fingers.
Watson (1973:267ff) in a section on "eyeless sight" describes a blind girl in Italy who winced when a bright light was held to her ear, and a blind Scottish schoolboy who could discriminate between colored lights. A medical board examined a blind Virginia girl who could distinguish colors and read large print (cf Edwards, F. "People Who Saw Without Eyes" in Strange People, London: Pan Books, 1970).
Watson then cites the Life (12 June 1964) article by A. Rosenfield about the Russian Rosa Kuleshova who can see with her fingers, under the most rigid controlled testing.
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Those trained in physics know that Nicol prisms polarize light passing through them. If polarizing substances are used in pairs the light gradually diminishes to darkness as the angle between the two lenses is rotated from zero to ninety degrees. Bearing this in mind, let us attend to a remarkably suggestive experiment1 with the medium Slade performed by Professor Zollner (Zollner 1881:65-6).
I desired him, while sitting in his chair, to fix his eye on the front prism, and then to look with the apparatus at the clear sky (the experiment took place at my house at 11.45 in the morning of the 14th December, 1877), while I slowly turned the front Nicol. I now asked Slade, when the two prisms were about crossed, if he observed the gradual darkening of the field of view. To my great surprise, he said he did not. I supposed him to be deceived by the side light, and therefore disposed the two prisms from the front at right angles, so that neither I nor my friends could see through at all. Slade still asserted that he did not perceive the least change in the clearness of the sky; and as proof he read an English writing, placed before the two crossed Nicols, covering his left eye, as we saw, with his left hand. I was not, however, contented with his proof of the fact. Next morning, when we were again assembled at my house, I had two very large Nicol's prisms (for the production of a greater field of view) fixed to turn closely one over the other, and a large circular screen, which completely covered the sight of the observer, so placed in connection with the prisms, that external objects could only be perceived through the two Nicol's prisms. I then took an English book, Tyndall's Faraday as a Discoverer, and in Slade's absence marked by interlineations the following words on page 81 : - 'The burst of power which had filled the four preceding years with an amount of experimental work unparalled in the history of Science." When I again made Slade look through the two crossed Nicols at the sky, and he declared, as on the day before, that he did not remark the least change in the clearness of the sky when the prisms were turned, I requested him to sit on a chair, and to read to me the underlined words from the book, held at a distance of about two feet from his sight. To the great astonishment of us all, he immediately read the above words with perfect accuracy.
Astral organs of vision can apparently see through opaque objects.
Underhill (1964:155) tells us that one of the many powers
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of St. Catherine of Siena was the ability to be aware of the thoughts and deeds of her disciples, and the biographer provides striking testimony of the fact in the confession of an erring student.
Underhill (1964:76) quotes St. Hildegarde on her visions:
'From my infancy until now, in the 70th year of my age,' she says, 'my soul has always beheld this Light; and in it my soul soars to the summit of the firmament and into a different air ... The brightness which I see is not limited by space and is more brilliant than the radiance round the sun... I cannot measure its height, length, breadth. Its name, which has been given me, is 'Shade of the Living Light' . . . . Within that brightness I sometimes see another light, for which the name Lux Vivens has been given me. When and how I see this, I cannot tell; but sometimes when I see it all sadness and pain is lifted from me, and I seem a simple girl again, and an old woman no more!'
We have referred earlier to "the exteriorization of the sense organs" as indicating the transcendence of the particular function of a given sense organ (e.g., the eye) by other means (e.g., dermaoptica). But there can, it appear, also be "an interiorization of the sense organs" in which through some "inner sight" or clairvoyance, the adept senses or perceives the distant object, or reads a moral condition off the patient's aura. In either case the localization of a particular sense in a particular organ is being transcended.
it is probable that extensions of vision amounting to miraculous sight or clairvoyance are due to the nascent ability to visualize in the next vivency above this one, - namely in the etheric. If we recall the statement: "Faith is the substance of things sought for, the evidence of things not seen." We get close to the concept of "thoughts being things" in this realm, and the corresponding psychic ability to perceive them before they are formed into matter. An allied power is the ability to read matters pertaining to human beings off their aura, which aids in diagnosis and healing of both physical and moral faults.
4.4) Miraculous Touch
In this section we shall consider the paranormal effects of an adept touching a patient. Jesus touched Peter, and Peter was
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again able to walk on water (Matt. 14:31); a firewalking adept touched Rev. Bingham (Long, 1948:31), and he was enabled to walk across burning coals; St. Joseph of Cupertino touched a man, and he was able to fly (Dingwall, 1962a:18). Even Scrooge was borne aloft by the ghost of Christmas Past - ("Touch but the hem of my garment, and you shall be upheld in more than this.") Evidently something magical may happen when one is touched by the right person.
Touch is also involved in psychometry, or the ability by touching an object to read its past history. There are also other paranormal effects of some kinds of touching, but we shall narrow our report to the most important aspect of touching, namely healing, and we shall further constrain it to two aspects of healing: 1) the laying on of hands, and 2) psychic surgery.
4.41) Healing Through the Laying on of Hands
We shall attempt to distinguish three types of healing. The type to be discussed here, seems to involve some sort of current or magnetic effect, emanating from the hands (and capable of being recorded by Kirlian photography), which can effect healing or amelioration on the body of a patient. This kind of healing is mentioned in the Bible, is a prominent part of early Christian faith,2 and is a procedure in some religious sects today.2
Another type of healing to be discussed under 4.6 is more cerebral and seems to involve some kind of visualization or restructuring in the mind of the healer, who sees the person whole and healthy. This kind of healing requires more authority in the healer and is amenable to absent treatment.
Susy Smith (1977:40) quotes Hammond, quoting LeShan (1966:99) on the two types in order opposite to ours:
Putting it all together, what seemed to be happening was this: the healer, with his caritas and the concept of physics on which he is operating, welcomes the patient home to the universe. The patient recognizes this at a deep personal or subconscious level and at that moment his body's self-repair mechanism is stimulated to function closer to its potential. LeShan feels this is the major type of healing and is the kind done by many individual healers, Christian Scientists, and prayer circles.
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Type 2, on the other hand, represents an effort on the part of the healer to heal, and he does not go into an altered state of consciousness, according to LeShan. 'He perceives a current of energy flowing through his hands and being passed through the area of the wound. The juice is turned on, so to speak, and sometimes healing results.'
We believe that most writers confuse our second (orthocognitive) and our third ("union-compassion") type of healing, as LeShan has done in the first paragraph. We shall say more about the rare third type in section 4.73.
Mann (1973:116) tells us that Reich's orgone energy can be communicated by touch. He devotes a chapter to the laying on of hands as an orgone phenomenon (ibid:83ff), much like transferring an electric charge from a strong battery to a weak one. He notes (p. 87) the views of Galvani, (p. 89) Mesmer, and (p. 95ff) Reichenbach on the healing and curative properties of this energy. He quotes Colson (ibid: 106):
The rays seem to be given off most strongly by those parts of the organism which are replaced most rapidly, such as the palm of the hands and the soles of the feet... The tips of the fingers are very strong emitters of this energy. The sex organs in both sexes and the breasts of women emit these rays quite strongly.
When pranic energy outflows through the hands, the laying-on-of-hands type of healing results. Kirlian photography makes possible the photographing of this energy (Moss 1974), as it leaves the tips of the healer's fingers. Moss (ibid:62ff) also discusses the higher type of healing (our 4.6) and suggests differences between the two kinds.
Reich's biographer, Mann (1973:176), also distinguishes between the two orders of healing:
Characteristically, laying on of hands of 'magnetic' or psychic healers depletes their energies to a greater or lesser extent. Dr. Weatherhead quotes a Dr. Petetin, of Lyons, and Deleuze, a French naturalist, for this view of healing. Deleuze, in his Critical History of Animal Magnetism (1813), wrote: 'It is an emanation from ourselves guided by our will . . . He who magnetizes for curative purposes is aiding with his own life the failing life of the sufferer" (Weatherhead, p. 114). In the process
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such healers may even take on some or all of the symptoms of the patient. To avoid this, most of the books on magnetic or pranic healing advise the healer to shake or flick the hands and wrists at the termination of a healing, thereby hopefully 'shaking off' the unhealthy emanations from the patient that could cling to hands and arms. Some even advise washing the hands (Yogi Ramacharada, p. 70). This 'contamination' of the healer reminds one of how healthy people in Eeman's healing circuits would initially take on the fevers or other symptoms of their sick neighbor in the circuit.
The true saintly healer apparently disposes of a different and superior energy. He can heal at a distance as well as with physical contact, and sometimes virtually instantaneously; no serious illness (e.g., cancer) is beyond treatment; the healer is not susceptible to catching anything of the patient's sickness and he can go on for hours without tiring. In fact, he usually ends up a healing session feeling more energetic and spiritually resilient than when he began. (A conventional test of divine healing is whether it invigorates the healer.) Such saintly healers were fairly common in the first three centuries of Christianity and included a number of medieval saints like Saint Philip Neri.
Note that this citation contains some aspects of a third type of healing ("Union-compassion" healing) to be discussed in section 4.73).
Dean (1975:239-293) has five chapters on non-medical healing, including one by the Greens on voluntary control of body states, and one by Dr. Carl Simonton on the role of the mind in the therapy of cancer. It also contains LeShan's "General Theory of Psychic Healing" including the distinction between Type I (orthocognitive) and Type II (laying-on-of-hands) healing.
Instances of healing by the laying on of hands are not confined to the New Testament; they are legion today, both inside and outside of organized religion. There seems to be some kind of a natural force, which can be tapped by some people and transferred, sometimes with great power to others. (For a scholarly discussion on the natural healing power of nature see Newberger 1933.) Luke 8:43-8 suggests that Jesus felt a force leave him when touched by an ailing woman. Here is an example picked at random from a chapter on "healing hands" by Susy Smith (1975: 36):
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I sat in a chair in Geoff's living room and he placed a hand on my stomach and another on my back. My wife Barbara and my parents were also in the room, praying.
As soon as Geoff touched me I felt a sensation. The hairs on the back of my neck started to stand on end and tingle. I felt as if some great energy were traveling through me.
Then I closed my eyes. Suddenly I felt as if I was not in my body anymore. I could feel myself floating above the room and looking down onto the others and my own body. It was like watching a film.
Suddenly the pain started to go away. I was given the healing for about 45 minutes and by the end the pain had gone and I felt better.
The next day doctors at nearly Manchester Hospital examined him and took new X-rays. They said with amazement that he was 100 percent well, his X-rays completely clear.
Here is another example from Smith (ibid:30-31):
Some other laboratory experimentation of an entirely different nature began some ten years ago with the claims of Oskar Estebany who stated that he had special healing powers in his hands. Dr. Bernard Grad, assistant professor of psychiatry at McGill University... decided to conduct an investigation.
His first experiment, carried out in 1960 in collaboration with Dr. Remi Cadoret of the Winnipeg Medical School, involved controlled testing of the rate of healing of laboratory mice that had been given superficial wounds. Faster healing occurred to the mice treated by Estebany than control mice with equal disease or disability who were untreated or were treated by other persons claiming no healing ability.
Sister M. Justa Smith of Rosary Hill College, Buffalo, New York, a recognized authority in the field of enzyme research, has conducted tests with Mr. Estebany and the enzyme trypsin and found similar results. These experiments demonstrated that the activity level of the enzyme was increased by an average of ten percent when held by Estebany in a reagent bottle for some 75 minutes. (The same effect, ten percent augmentation, can be achieved by subjecting the enzymes to a magnetic field - 13,000 gauss strength, for two hours. It would thus seem that there is some way to actually measure this PK force.)
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A recent and scholarly compendium on healing is that edited by Meek (1977). In it, a number of the foremost healers have articles; particularly noteworthy being those by Puharich, Tiller, Motoyama, Watson, Stelter, Price, and others. The book devotes considerable space to psychic surgery in Brazil and in the Phillipines, and is perhaps the best recent source summing up these remarkable phenomena. The book is also notable for some serious study of various paradigms to explore psychic healing. It alone besides this book, discriminates three such types of healing (entitling them type a, b, and c). For all these reasons, this book is a must in any consideration of the subject.
Meek (1977:139ff) cites the work of Burr, Tiller, Worrall, and others with regard to the relationship of the molecular structure of water and healing.2 We are told by occultists that prana can easily be stored in water. The human body, is of course, nearly 90% water, and prana which can also be stored in the human body, seems to have some affinity for the oxygen molecule. Mrs. Worrall was able to "treat water" and make it more productive when used on plants. Analysis showed that this tended to magnetize the water, and further chemical analysis showed that this was due to cutting down the hydrogen bonding from 100% to around 90%. To anthropomorphize what is actually a chemical situation, we may say that two hydrogen atoms are legally bonded, (married), to an oxygen atom. But "hydrogen bonding" refers to a phenomenon where the hydrogen atoms conduct transitory flirtations with nearby oxygen atoms, atoms which are legally bonded to other hydrogen atoms. This extracurricular activity is apparently 100% prevalent in ordinary water, and in some way it appears to impair the efficacy of prana. When magnetic influences or a healer's hands cut down to some extent the prevalence of this bonding, the water appears more capable of releasing its stored prana. So it seems that in a rather literal way water can be purified and, (if you will), sanctified.
One of the reasons why touch is such a powerful psychic sensor is that it seems to be more "en rapport" with the collective preconscious than the brain. Barbara Brown in "New Mind, New Body" (Psychology Today, August 1974) reports:
Long before conscious recognition by the brain, the body and its subconscious substructures recognizes and makes judgments about what goes on in the environment. The subconscious is
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more in touch with reality than consciousness, and has the facility to express its recognition of reality via the skin . . . (She then reports two experiments where the skin was more in contact with reality than the brain), concluding ...
The enormously important findings received little research attention, though they offered a way to look at the universe of the subconscious. When the skin responds to such mild signals then the possibility arises that through the skin the whole world of the subconscious could be explored.
The Patanjali siddhi, most appropriate to this power is No. 29, (Aranya, 1977:341-2), which refers to knowledge of the bodily system, which is obtained by practicing samyama on the plexus of the navel.
4.42) Psychic Surgery
We now consider what is perhaps the most unbelievable, (and certainly one of the most egregious), psychic effects in our catalogue. The reader should be prepared for testimony that psychic surgeons open the body with dirty knives or their bare hands, with no antiseptics nor anesthesia; that they remove foreign objects painlessly; that the wound closes easily and heals almost at once without scar, and finally, that the witness is unsure whether in fact the hands of the surgeon were inside the body of the patient!
The reader who wishes further reading on the subject should consult Krippner and Villoldo (1976) which is the most recent authoritative book, containing a large bibliography. We shall refer to their researches later, but before doing so it seems necessary to prepare the reader somewhat by giving him some rationale.
To do so, we need to go back and ask: "What is a percept?" The American College Dictionary defines it as "the mental result of perceiving." But such a result - (as when we read untied for united) may be an illusion. To get around this possibility, (and others much more serious) we will call this kind of percept a concept-percept. Concept-percepts are of high consensual validity generally, giving rise to the old saw: "Seeing is believing." But there are occasional rare instances in which either the concept-percepts of two witnesses differ, or either differs from another kind of percept which we shall call a " recorded-percept." A
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recorded percept occurs when a physical recording exists, - such as a photo, hologram, tape or record.
Let us consider the case when the concept-percepts of witnesses to event A are different from the recorded-percepts of event A. What can have caused the difference? Which is correct? (We assume, of course, that the recorded percepts have not been tampered with.) One would immediately think that such a difference might be a good definition of an altered state of consciousness in the human observer, since it would be superficially evident that they would change and not the mechanical contrivance which would register the unusual result. The surprising fact, however, is that there are instances where it is the mechanical contrivance which registers something unusual, while the human observer sees nothing strange. The theoretical consequences of this state of affairs are important enough for some careful scrutiny.
Let us start with a common instance of this anomaly, your perception of some part of your body, and an x-ray of the same. The recorded percept is different from the concept-percept because wave lengths which excite the x-ray plate are invisible to the human eye.
Let us now consider Krippner and Villoldo (1976:184), a picture of a flame behind a healer's hands which are transparent in the picture, tho not so according to witnesses. The previous explanation suggests that some ultraviolet waves were generated by the flame, and these passed through the hands, making them appear transparent. An ordinary camera will pick up such waves.
Let us now consider another picture example, (Murchison 1927:84-5). This picture showing an invisible beaker on a balance was taken during a seance by infrared light in complete visual darkness. The observers passed their hands over the balance but detected nothing, yet the beaker shows clearly in the photograph.
Using these two cases only, we may say that in both:
1) An object which appears visible when observed under longer wave lengths appears invisible when viewed under shorter wave lengths.
2) In each case it is the mechanical contrivance which reports the unusual effect, (doubtless because it is
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capable of going above and below the visible octave).
3) The healer generates higher frequency waves, the ghost controls lower frequency waves.
4) The visibility (presence) of an object may depend on the wave length used to "perceive" it. In other words some objects may be "real" only at certain wave lengths.
One of the many curious aspects of "psychic surgery" is that close and meticulous onlookers are unsure whether the surgeon's hands penetrated the body of the patient. Here is an example from Smith (1977:51):
Rev. Plume touches his fingers to the area to be treated and they seem to disappear right into the operating space. I have heard this described by a friend, Walter Uphoff of the University of Colorado, who witnessed it as "so impossible that it was difficult to believe;" but he thought there must be something to it - especially when the patient seemed relieved of his complaint when it was over. He concluded it should be objectively investigated. He said: "I saw things I could not understand or integrate into any conceptual framework - so I can at this point neither reject nor accept."
Here are similar instances from Krippner and Villoldo 1976:
(p. 75) Pachita stood at the head of the bed and seemed to insert her fingers into the girl's forehead ...
(p. 82) As Pachita began to massage the woman's abdomen, I observed what I had noticed many times before - Pachita's hands seemed to disappear into the healee's body.
(p. 83) As I moved my hand forward it seemed as if Pachita placed it in the abdominal cavity, and instructed me to push the intestines upward and out of the way.
(p. 85) 1 seemed to place the bladder-like object in the lower part of the body opening .
More of the same could be adduced from other psychic surgeon's operations. This is mighty strange business, when the observer, a trained psychologist, assisting in an operation, cannot tell whether or not the body is being physically opened.
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If we assume honest reporting, then we are rewarded with a very fruitful psychological experiment in the paranormal, the importance of which is hard to overestimate. For it is always from such apparent violations of "natural" law that new and deeper laws are revealed. We have forced nature into a kind of striptease, which discloses more of her secrets.
We suggest two possible explanations:
1) The body is being opened by paranormal means, but the belief system of the onlooker will not allow him to admit it.
2) The healer is actually operating on the etheric body, which he is able to open. Since reality is with the etheric body, of which the physical body is only a hologram, (virtual image), there is psychic pressure for the material to mirror the astral. But this "saving of the appearances" which is virtually fully accurate under most circumstances, here admits of a large enough discrepancy so that the eye is unable to tell, - in other words under these unusual circumstances the "indeterminancy" becomes macroscopic enough to observe.
Krippner (1975:229), witnessing psychic surgery with the healer, Blance, became himself a part of the operation:
He brought my finger to a point about six inches from the skin just underneath the shoulder blade. Suddenly, he made an abrupt motion with my forefinger, then released it.
I had not taken my eyes off the woman's skin as this procedure was transpiring. I maintained my attention because I knew that Blance was reputedly able to cut skin at a distance as part of a 'purification' ritual. And I noticed a slit on the woman's skin the exact area beneath my finger position. Within a few seconds, a thin ribbon of blood filled this slit. It appeared to me as if the cut were superficial, barely scratching the first layer of skin.
In summary, (ibid:233) he theorizes as follows:
Possibly paranormal, however, were the scratches made by Blance on human skin. I conjectured that this may have been the result of focusing bodily field, "psychic energies," or a
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combination of the two, in the way that a magnifying glass focuses sunlight to produce a burned hole on paper.
I further suggested that the 'bioplasmic body' may interact with the person's acupuncture points and meridians, found by the Soviet researchers to be areas of high electrical conductivity. This would explain why Taylo's patients winced in pain when the ring made from diamond chips was brought near to their acupuncture points. Apparently, either their bodily fields or 'psychic energies' - or both - were out of balance. The healing ritual was needed to restore the energetic balance.
For explanation Krippner (1975:173) quotes the views of the Brazilian healer Kardec:
Kardec believed that the 'spirit' is enveloped in a semimaterial body of its own, which he named the perispirit. The perispirit is composed of a magnetic fluid (or 'aura') which contains a certain amount of electricity. Therefore, healing can be accomplished by psychic healers who send magnetic rays from their fingertips into the 'auras' of ill persons. A healer can also magnetize water which can be utilized for healing purposes. These techniques involve physical 'passes' similar to those originated by Mesmer.
Meek (1977:60ff) devotes a chapter to the Phillipine healers, including Josefina Sison, Felisa Macans, the team healing of the Bugarins and Tony Agpaoa. This was an eyewitness account, wherein he accepts the fact that they are able to materialize and dematerialize tissue, and create incisions in the skin by making passes over without touching it. Stelter (ibid:70ff) tells of the paranormal pulling of teeth by Phillipine healers done in his presence by mere touch and without pain. He describes (ibid:74-5) paranormal incisions in the skin which he witnessed. We quote:
I checked to see if the psychokinetic incisions have ionizing rays in strong measure. I used films which are used in Germany to protect people working with radioactive materials. The films, sealed in plastic film holders were placed on the patient's skin before Blance made his incision from a distance. After his fingers moved through the air, the film was untouched at the top, but the skin was cut and the film was scratched on its under side.
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Later in Germany Blance suffered a breakdown, before which the cuts became uncontrollable, and began to appear on his hands. Stelter (ibid:76) also discusses materialization and dematerialization phenomena in connection with opening and closing of operational incisions, and the question of where the healer's hands are. Seutemann, (ibid:89ff), herself a psychic healer, after a discussion of the facts of psychic surgery says (p. 92):
It is my conviction that most of the work done by the healer is at the level of the etheric body. Only after this body is restored to normal balance can the healing result in the organs of the physical body.
Meek (ibid:126ff) ends this remarkable exposition of psychic surgery with a summation of the data and implications.
The eminent Japanese researcher, Motoyama has contributed a chapter in Meek (1977:147ff) on his investigations of psychic healing, and his several inventions therewith connected. He has witnessed Phillipine surgery, and checked out that tumors and other tissue apparently taken from the patient's body did actually come from them (p. 147). He has proved (p. 149) that the healing power can be transmitted through lead shielding, hence is not physical, but "higher dimensional energy (p. 150)." Regarding psychic incisions, he notes that they are two to three times as wide as those made by a knife, and look like those made by a laser. He also hypothesizes that prana is stored in the chakras, and in healers can be ejected at will from the finger tips or the toes.
Meek (1977:41ff) in a discussion of the Brazilian psychic healer, Arigo, quotes Puharich (ibid.) who gives ten characteristics of a complete healer:
1) ability to diagnosis in presence or absence of patient,
2) to heal by laying on of hands,
3) to heal himself,
4) to use molecular medicine (pharmaceuticals),
5) to produce anesthesia by non-chemical means,
6) to perform instant surgery,
7) to violate supposed laws of antisepsis,
8) to perform action at a distance,
9) to possess a "guide" or spirit helper, and
10) to regenerate tissue.
Watson (1974:209-24) devotes a chapter to psychic surgery.
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Some quotes:
(p. 220) 1 spent several days working with J. Sison ... and saw her perform over two hundred operations, about 85% of which involved materialization phenomena.
(p.220) I have seen Juan Blance of Pasig make real incisions in the bodies of his patients, but without a knife and from a distance.
(p.223) The most obvious and dramatic aspect of the Luzon healing process is the manifestation of living tissue.
(p. 213) (referring to Arigo, the Brazilian healer) He performed thousands of elaborate operations with table knives and scissors in totally unsterile conditions... Summing up their study of Arigo, Puharich said: 'He does it. I can't tell you how.'
This chapter, containing accounts of several investigations of psychic surgery, is a very convincing document.
Once again we have had the courage to take some very incredible testimony while holding an open mind about its significance. And once again the evidence, if it can be believed, has pointed us in the direction of the illusory nature of physical reality, which appears to be a virtual image of a more ultimate reality. We have thus stripped some more of the veils of "maya" from nature and have been rewarded by a more fundamental view.
4.5) Acute Hearing and Clairaudience
When Blake's "doors of perception" are being cleansed, the ordinary senses become more acute; and new senses, some of them psychic, become further developed. It is difficult to ascertain wherein the "natural" leaves off and the supersensory begins. Consider the case of hearing. Hearing is one of the TM Siddhi Program targets (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1977:703):
Similar results arise from Clements and Milstein's study of auditory thresholds (paper 104). Even before the practice of the specific TM-Sidhi procedure being tested, subjects showed auditory thresholds eleven decibels more sensitive than the
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population mean, again necessitating adjustment of the audiometer to handle the increased sensitivity. After the practice of the siddhi procedure for 'supernormal hearing,' thresholds decreased by a further three decibels in this pilot study. Of special interest are the subjective reports on the test. Many subjects reported the faintest levels of sound to be exquisitely clear and beautiful and said that they were able to appreciate the abstract form of the sound as it developed to the level of manifest perception. This is of great interest, since it offers a means to corroborate the suggestion of Domash that pure consciousness is a quantum mechanical state, potentially sensitive to quantum mechanical events in the perceptual and neural apparatus.
Clements and Milstein (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1978:721) note the reason for the gain is that "there is a reduction of noise within the neural pathways of the inner ear to the brain, and within the auditory cortex itself." They believe that this coherent function is related to "a macroscopic coherence quantum phenomenon" as noted by Domash (Orme-Johnson and Farrow 1978: 652-70).
The descriptor used by psychology for the phenomenon of hearing sounds not made by natural sources is "auditory hallucination." Jaynes (1976:84ff) devotes a chapter to this subject. He notes that even today, auditory hallucinations are common among normal subjects (as indeed the author can testify from personal experience). Jaynes points out that in the past, such a voice was considered to be a god within - the "still, small voice" of the Old Testament.
Jaynes (1976:108) describes Penfield's experiment of electrical stimulation of the area of the right temporal lobe corresponding to the Wernicke (speech) area in the left hemisphere.
Case 8, a 26-year-old housewife, stimulated in approximately the same area, said there seemed to be a voice a way, way off. 'It sounded like a voice saying words, but was so faint I couldn't get it.'
Meditators, approaching satori, report an almost exactly similar phenomenon, namely the "hearing of men talking quietly at a great distance." If man's brain may be compared to a radio receiver, the location of the tuner is evidently in this area.
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An interesting effect associated with clairaudience is that reported by some meditators of hearing celestial music.
The Patanjali siddhi No. 41, "a Divine sense of Hearing" (Aranya 1977:352ff), is most appropriate here. It is obtained, says Patanjali, by samyama on the relationship between akasa and the power of hearing.
4.6) Empery
In Genesis (1:28) we are told that God gave man dominion over the earth and all it contained. This siddhi involves dominion over self and others, as in healing, over animals and weather, as well as other aspects of the natural environment, including the working of miracles. It makes every man a Prospero. The enormous power of such empery requires equally responsible behavior in not misusing it. Empery in its various forms is generally associated with full accomplishment of shamanism or sainthood, and it is not surprising that the major figures in religious history (e.g., Jesus) show it so prominently. We subcategorize as follows: .61 self, .62 others (higher healing), .63 animals, .64 miscellaneous miracles.
Essentially such empery results from a firm perception of the subtle reality beyond the gross hologram of sensuous reality, with the concomitant awareness that this subtle realm is the actual theater of action and the physical merely the realm of effects. Thus one transcends the prison of the three illusions - time, space, and personality (Gowan 1975:10) and in their place finds a "nonsensuous unity in all things."
Randall (1975:171) quotes LeShan on clairvoyant as opposed to sensory reality:
A person experiencing the world in terms of the Clairvoyant Reality sees individual identity as mainly illusory; objects and events are observed as merely parts of a larger pattern. Since the knower and the known are one, there is no barrier to the transfer of information between them, so that psi phenomena are normal in this world-view.
This leads to what LeShan calls Type I healing (our 4.6 variety).
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4.61) Empery over Self
The first dominion that man must gain is dominion over himself. The reason for this is obvious. To gain power over others before the purification of the self, and what saints have called "self-noughting" is most dangerous, since it involves the possible use of universal power for selfish ends. This is the definition of magic, and it has been proscribed by every great religious leader in history.
The struggle to replace the little selfish ego with the presence of God, or, as the Bible has it, "to put off the Old Adam with the New" is a difficult, lifelong effort, which, as many have found, is aided by submission to a guru or personal Saviour. Others find it easier to take the triple vow of poverty, chastity and obedience. These are all ways of self-mortification or purification. The more completely this process is accomplished the more clearly will come the subsequent vision of ultimate reality. The more impurities are admixed with the situation, the more the vision will be (as the Bardo Thodol tells one) a vision of the various orders of devas rather than the clear light of the Void.
4.62) Empery over Others (Higher Healing); Orthocognition
In Section 4.4 we spoke of a form of energy healing through "laying on of hands." In this section we discuss a higher form of healing which involves a completely different principle. This form does not need any physical contact, and can be carried on from a distance ("absent treatment"). Our name of this form of therapy is orthocognition or "correct thinking," since it involves an inner perception of the ideal situation, of which the physical manifestation is only a distorted reflection. This matter has been treated in detail elsewhere (Gowan 1975:320ff) which we quote: "Orthocognition involves the realization and visualization that numinous relationships exist. In other words, orthocognition is like having a correct map of the territory you are traversing in your mind; both would be helpful in not getting lost.
"The mere knowledge that something exists, and the correct visualization of one's relationship to it does much to remove superstitions and fear, and to put one on the right track in thinking.
"Orthocognition is no more than this - a first step in the syntaxic realm. Orthocognition has two aspects: 1) knowledge
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that the numinous element exists, and b) visualization of our relationship to it, and the consequences thereof. Knowledge that the numinous element exists may be expressed in the following hypothesis. It appears to us as:
1) An all-powerful, impersonal, immaterial force without characteristics or form and without will;
2) Existing outside of time and space, but available to us as a suggestible medium in a hierarchy of altered states of consciousness;
3) Having responsibility for the welfare and survival of all life generally, and specifically for the development and self-concept of man;
4) Receptive to cognitive will, as is a computer terminal when the proper order is encoded, and executing that will in a machine-like impersonal, uncognized, and sometimes unexpected manner, quickly, accurately, impartially, inexorably, appropriately, elegantly, and completely.
"This is essentially the doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy which Happold (11970:20) summarizes as follows:
1 ) The phenomenological world is only a partial reality.
2) Man's nature is such that he can intuit the noumenon.
3) He can therefore develop and eventually identify with Divinity.
4) This process is the chief end of man's life.
"Let us imagine that a man has been knocked unconscious and then thrown into a dark dungeon so that when he comes to he is in utter blackness. His successive levels of awareness will provide an analogy to our own developing orthocognition of ultimate reality.
"At level zero the man is not conscious.
"At level one he is barely conscious and does not know where he is
"At level two he is conscious of being somewhere in an enclosed space, but because of his concussion he does not have memory of whence he came.
"At level three he has explored his enclosed space and con-
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cluded - that he is a prisoner within it; moreover he begins to remember that he was once outside.
"Finally at level four, he recognizes the fact of his present condition, namely that he is a prisoner in a dungeon whose doors and dimensions he knows. He now remembers fully what freedom is like outside, and is beginning to formulate plans to escape.
"Orthocognition follows closely upon recognition of the illusory aspects of time, space, and personality. If the reader will refer to the section on the Three Illusions (4.13) he will see that orthocognition follows as a matter of course from this premise.
"Knowledge is power, and orthocognitive knowledge of the relationship between the conscious mind and the numinous element leads at once to power. This power must (like all tools) be used carefully and wisely. Basically the power involves the orthocognitive recognition of our relationship to the numinous element, and our visualization of this relationship as 'accomplish' (we use the untensed verb form to impress in the reader's mind that this action 'take' place outside of time). Since the action 'lie' outside of time in the 'durative topocosm' (an infinity of potential events), our visualization of it as having occurred, occurring, and being about to occur provides the nourishment to make the seed idea germinate and manifest in the physical world of space/time. (Notice how similar is the action of the Hopi Indian in the rain dance, when he performs a similar enactive representation to make manifest a hoped-for-future event which is within his heart.)
"The application of our relationship to the numinous element, and the consequences thereof, may be visualized in strengthening self-concept in seven vital areas:
1) my body and physical health
2) my wealth and possessions
3) my loved ones
4) my work and avocation
5) my interests, associations, and social relationships
6) my creations, my gifts to the society
7) my state, nation, culture, and world, especially regarding peace and prosperity.
"Each of these areas represents an expansion of self-concept away from egocentricity in the direction of freedom and altruism.
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Together they cover the totality of self-concept which in turn (since it represents the ego's view of itself) is directly enriched and nourished by the numinous element. Hence, as a consequence of our relationship to this impersonal element, we should endeavor each day to visualize whatever aspect of self-concept we want to actualize as already existing now in an ideal state and needing only our desire and will to become manifest. In other words, this part of orthocognition aids us to bring about the necessary environmental conditions for growth.
"Let us be honest enough to admit that orthocognition is a low form of syntaxic conceptualization, for it is tinged with personal and selfish will. This constitutes a danger, especially that we shall be responsible for willing some event which indirectly causes trouble to ourselves or our neighbor. (No responsible person would ever be guilty of directly willing such an event.) We should endeavor to purify our minds from selfish purpose, before such an attempt and ever try to ascend the self-concept scale in visualizing as many concrete conditions at the high end as at the low end. Such scruples also suggest that orthocognition is best practiced along with meditation, which may be much more effective in removing the selfish ego. It is important to realize, however, that orthocognition is distinct from meditation, and that it has a legitimate function of promoting positive reinforcement for our continuing this growth. The laborer in the vineyard has a right to his pay, and we have a right as we progress to be protected and made comfortable in our daily lives (though we must not allow comfort to degenerate into sloth).
"While the creative aspects of the mind (which indicate it is part of the noumenon) embrace all nature, the relative ease with which the power to affect the environment may be exercised, is expressed in a hierarchy of self concept going outward from the body image through the phenomenal and environmental selves to successively embrace 'my body, my possessions, my relations with my loved ones, my work, my interests, my relations, my creations, and my world.' The easiest of these to affect and to change is, of course, 'my self-concept,' then come events, things, and finally other persons, society, and the universe.
"It is important that we understand the uses and limitations of orthocognition. As one of the initial forms of syntaxic representation of the numinous element, it represents a way station to
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aid in our developmental progress, not a form to be cherished forever. Specifically, it has the disadvantage of looking at the universe in terms of the welfare of the personal ego or self-concept and of the modification of that environment for the benefit of the personal ego. Since the concept of the personal ego is itself an illusion, one may well ask what if any benefits are gained by compounding an illusory process. The interim benefits are that the self-concept develops through orthocognition from a lesser 'my' to a greater 'my' (as in going along the hierarchy from 'my body' to 'my world'). This gradual movement from egocentricity to freedom is truly developmental and encourages ego-diffusion; it also has the advantage of helping the ego to feel secure during such an operation; the reduction of anxiety is a helpful step in such a progression. The danger is the usual one in developmental progress, namely that any one stage may prove so tempting that one willingly remains there instead of pushing on. If there be two roads to reality, one through the desert of self-denial and mortification and the other in a milk-and-honey land of delight, the austere path offers less temptation to daily than the comfortable one. The stages of self-concept interest in orthocognition are stages to be gradually surmounted, for every 'my' that ties the ego to ownership or association delays development. The wise man, therefore, will realize orthocognition for what it is, an interim device, particularly suitable for us westerners for the gradual transcendence of self-concept by applying it more and more to the environmental self, and less and less to the personal self.
"The power of orthocognition is akin to the power of the dreamer in the lucid dream. Both help us become aware that we are dreaming and that the dream world we inhabit in the daytime is not more real than the dream world we inhabit asleep. Since both are dreams, we may expect that mental causes may change the percepts we 'see' awake just as they change the dream percepts. It is this awareness that the perceptual world is not 'loose and separate,' but a product of collective consciousness and, hence, changeable by mental means that is the freeing orthocognitive construct.
"We have discussed orthocognition as if it were always a deliberate and conscious attempt at control of the environment through visualization in the syntaxic mode, but we must note for completeness that there are many instances of such visualizations in other modes in which, without realizing that he is doing so, the
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individual sets in motion the same kind of archetype or mental picture which eventuates in a manifest material state or event.
"For the human mind is not merely endowed (as part of the noumenon) with the power to cognize nature, it is also endowed with the power to design nature. The end objective of consciousness is not mere experience but reification. Whether we realize it or not, our thoughts affect the plastic numinous element which tends (unless prevented by other thoughts) to transform these thoughts into events. This is the secret of the self-fulfilling prophecy, for what a man can predict or visualize is (to use Koko's words), 'As good as done already.' As Pearce (11973:11) states: 'Thinking is a shaping force in reality.'
"Life is like being stunned then put into a strait jacket then dropped from a great height with a parachute. The problem is one first has to come to, then get out of the strait jacket, then activate the parachute. When consciousness is imprisoned in space, time, and personality, it is put into this position. Orthocognition is the first dawning of consciousness that it is in this fix (i.e., like the lucid dreamer that he is having a dream). Then the problem is to get out of the situation and not be beguiled by all of its allurements. Like Apollo, we are set in a great chariot for a swing through the heavens. But will consciousness reap the regard of this journey through space and time, or will there be only the usual Pussycat's report?
Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
I've been to London to visit the Queen.
Pussycat, pussycat what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under her chair.
"When consciousness is encased in creaturehood, it is very difficult not to be about the business of the creature. So after all the effort of going to London we may content ourselves with frightening a little mouse, rather than seeing the Queen.
"Blofeld (1970:84) calls orthocognition "visualization" and says of it:
It produces quick results by utilizing forces familiar to man only at the deeper levels of consciousness ... wherewith mind creates and animates the whole universe; ordinarily they are
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not ours to command, until the false ego is negated or unless we employ yogic means to transcend its bounds....
"Since orthocognition involves a realization that the ego rather than being the central aspect of life is something to be transcended, it requires a radical switch in thinking. This from 'I-thinking' to 'not I-thinking' is made more difficult by the construction of our grammar. But since we can also rise by that which appears to cause our fall, we can deal with this problem grammatically. We can express the triple integral of the ego mathematically by SSS1 (where S= the integral sign). We can hence use the shortened symbol S1 to mean the transpersonal noumenon; so that when we say 'I visualize,' we are more accurate to say (or write) 'S'I visualize,' since only 'S' I is capable of bringing the visualization to manifestation. (See Table X, page 252 in Trance, Art, Creativity)
"it is sometimes loosely stated that an action taken in the body (orthocognition or a physical ritual, see Section 3.5 last 5 paragraphs) activates a cosmic source, but this is an inaccurate rendition of the event. What happens is that the S I situation takes place outside of time (and hence eternally and recurrently in time), and the calling forth of the function outside of time hence projects the manifestation into time in the here and now and in the future. This process which transforms thought into action can be performed syntaxically through orthocognition by the S I procedure which works in the durative topocosm. It can also be accomplished parataxically through the ritual repetition of a formula which sets up a vibration or cycle. Both processes are like turning on a tap to release a flow of water. They do not produce the water which flows; they merely release it or bring it from posse into esse.
"To program one's dreams and to program one's (dreaming awake) normal life are very similar functions. One involves creativity and the other healing; both are orthocognitive. For in both it is SI which brings design to an otherwise chaotic state.
"The stages of consciousness in man go from essential animal consciousness (mere reaction to stimuli) to self-consciousness (normal formal operations and some insight) to orthocognition (with its understanding that SI is imprisoned in time, space, and personality). Finally there comes cosmic consciousness which is at first transient in the psychedelic stage and continual in the unitive."
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The reader is invited to recheck the Sullivan-Van-Rhijn theory (Gowan 1975:2) which states that experience which cannot either be cognized or felt by the conscious mind, must appear, either in the body or the environment, usually in the form of illness or accident. Zukav (1979:56) quotes Jung to the same effect: "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate."
Roberts (1974:121) through "Seth" points out: "(Thoughts) have electromagnetic reality. They affect your physical being, and they are automatically translated by your nervous system into the stuff of your flesh and your experience."
Roberts (1974:320) has "Seth" echo these actualizations from the realm of all possibilities:
The 'you' that you presently conceive yourself to be represents the emergence into physical experience of but one probable state of your being, who then directs life, and 'frames' and defines all sense data... In your terms, probable events are brought into actuality by utilizing the body's nerve structure through certain intensities of will or conscious belief... These beliefs obviously have another reality besides the one with which you are familiar. They attract and bring into being certain events instead of others. Therefore, they determine the entry of experience of events from an endless variety of probable ones.
In actuality there may be a third kind of healing, which will be considered under Section 4.73, although the third kind is usually confused with the second, as neither involves a laying-on-of-hands. We will call this kind of healing "union-compassion" healing. While further remarks about it are reserved for the later section, we will indicate the rationale which brought it to our attention here.
In Trance, Art and Creativity (1975:19ff), we noted three modes of operation: 1) prototaxic or somatic, 2) parataxic or emotional, and 3) syntaxic or cognitive. It appears that there is a kind of healing for each mode, viz: 1) laying on of hands, 2) union compassion, and 3) orthocognitive. (Ed. Note: This is a late insight, made only after the bulk of this section was completed.)
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Like this book, Meek (1977:214) distinguishes three types of healing. Type A is magnetic healing "involving a flow of vital energy to the patient." Meek quotes Davis to the fact that prana from the healer's left hand acts like the north pole of a magnet (p. 216). Type B, or "bioplasmic healing" (p. 219) has to do with energy exchanges between the healer's etheric body and the patient's. This would supposedly be pranic energy. Type B does not occur alone. Type C (or Mind and Spirit Healing, p. 221) is similar to our "orthocognitive" healing and may be accomplished in absentia. We are inclined to feel that Meek's type A and B both concern pranic energy and should be combined. We accept type C as orthocognition, but would add our third type of gemeinschaftgefuhl healing, so while both Meek and the author recognize three types, we differ in their characteristics.
In order properly to understand healing, let us look at the problem of knowledge from another point of view. It has been said that the central problem of the cosmos is, "To what vivency is consciousness awake?" We may paraphrase this wisdom by asking, "What level of consciousness is aware of a particular situation?" Let us suppose that the higher levels of consciousness (the parataxic and the syntaxic) are not aware, and that only the somatic (or body) level is aware. Then the only feedback of which consciousness may be aware is the pain and illness of the body which is really the carrier of vital information, could the higher levels but decode it. As knowing progresses from skin (prototaxic) to full cognition (syntaxic) various awakenings in the about-to-be perceived event precede full cognition, like little serendipities, which the individual, far from understanding as due to his own awakening realization of order) attributes to accidents in the environment (and which Jung called synchronicity). Actually, these are the heralds of the cognitive dawning of a condition of order which has already taken place in some higher realm. The task of the orthocognitive healer is really to hasten this enlightenment of consciousness.
4.63) Empery over Animals
One of the more charming aspects of empery, since it recalls man's pristine position in the Garden of Eden, is his control over animals. This control is united with love, tenderness, and perfect innocence toward the lower forms of life, which we see in the "reverence for life" views of Schweitzer. But, of course, the most
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perfect example of gemeinschaftgefuhl extended not just to all humanity but to all creatures is that of St. Francis. Bishop (1974: 184-5) speaking of St. Francis says:
Especially he loved living creatures, and of them especially birds. Best of the birds, to him, were the cowled larks, earthcolored like monks, and humble, but such sweet singers! The larks returned his love. On the night before his death a great multitude came and wheeled above his roof, singing their farewell. One may remember his warm reception by the birds of La Verna. On another occasion a swarm of birds - wood pigeons, crows, rooks - assembled on a tree to hear his sermon, and at the end bowed their heads reverently down; and again a brawling band of swallows fell silent at his command. He tamed many birds for pets, or rather companions - his familiar hawk at La Verna, a loving moorhen, a family of robins, one of whom suffered death as penalty for gluttony, a pheasant who followed him like a dog. The birds in Giotto's fresco are identified as goldfinches, quail, sparrows, and pigeons. Francis proposed even that the state should undertake to throw grain for the birds on the roads every Christmas, as a present. There was a pet crow who went begging for the brothers, and who, at Francis's passing, came to die on his grave.
Sakuhar (1952:29) tells us of the empery of Shri Baba, a Twentieth-Century Indian avatar:
Baba was in the habit of borrowing oil from the shopkeepers of the village for his little lamps which he kept burning the whole night, both in the masjid and the temple. Once these merchants who were wont to supply him with oil gratis took it into their heads to refuse this little service to the Master. Quite unperturbed, the Saint filled his lamp containers with water and lighted the wicks - and lo, they started burning, and kept burning all throughout the silent watches of the night as if in defiance of the ungracious behavior of the shopkeepers who later repented and became his disciples,
Instances abound too of Baba's control over the elements. Christlike he could command the winds and the rain and the lightning to obey his behests. One evening there was a terrible and destructive storm at Shirdi and the little village was flooded with incessant rain. The many local deities were sought to be appeased but in vain. At last people flocked to the masjid and prayed to Baba to quell the storm. The great yogi came
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out to the edge of the masjid and ordered the storm to cease. At once the winds and the rain and the lightning obeyed his sweet will and became still.
Patanjali sutra No. 17 (Aranya 1977:317) is the nearest to this power, for it declares that by practicing samyama on sound, the yogin can gain knowledge of the sounds produced by all beings.
A full discussion of instances of empery over animals would make a delightful book, but we do not have the time here to pursue the subject in detail. Underhill (1964:94) speaks of Conrad of Offida as "inheriting the Franciscan power over animals." Mesmer (Buranelli 1975:203) had the power: "His gift of drawing animals remained, the gift he had first noticed in his childhood." Shamans traditionally cultivate empery, and Long (1954:356-62) has a short chapter on empery over nature on the part of the Hawaiian kahunas, especially over sharks and weather.
Rama (1978:87, 151, 157) describes mantras which give empery over (and hence protection from) bees, snakes, and tigers. Montagu (1950:19) describes empery over nature as one of the nineteen signs of sainthood. A chapter on empery over animals is contributed by E. Salverte in the collection by Garrison (1973: 239-52). Among other matters we learn that the art was known to Pythagoras.
4.64) Miscellaneous Miracles
We include under this category of empery, dominion over the natural elements (weather), over food and its multiplication, and transubstantiation (or the changing of one substance into another, such as water into wine). Those familiar with the New Testament will recall that Jesus is supposed to have wrought all these miracles. Because of the rarity of data in this area and the consequent difficulty of belief for most persons, we shall sketch the area but lightly, contenting ourselves with making only two points:
1) Other adepts besides Christ, born in East and West are said to have accomplished one or more of these miracles;
2) The hologram model, which makes sensuous reality a world of appearances, allows for a paradigm explaining such high-level miracles as orthocognition of correct thought-forms in place of the physical evidence.
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Primitive man with his medicine men and shamans has always felt that he could influence the environment magically. Whether in rain-making, the protection of the totem animal, fertility rites, hunting rituals or other miraculous effects, the stories of such interventions are legion and found in every culture.
4-7)Adamic Ecstasy
Aranya (1977:315) translates Patanjali's sutra No. 16 as stating that knowledge of the past and future can be obtained by samyama on the "changes of characteristics, of temporal changes, and of states. . ." Evidently every event in time produces a trace outside of time, and this trace can be recovered or precognized. The "cleansing of the doors of perception" or refining of the senses to be cognizant of higher levels, allows them in some manner to "see through" the hologram and perceive the original object and the reference beam, that is, to become conscious of ultimate reality (or more accurately of a more ultimate reality).
We quote from earlier work (1975:361ff) on such ecstasies:
"4.71 Adamic or Time Ecstasies ("Access" or Jhana 0)
"The next level of ecstasy is one to which Blake's great words 'the doors of perception are cleansed' apply. All things are seen in the pristine goodness which Adam found before he fell from grace (hence the name). This is the Hindu 'access' state in which the primary object does not fully occupy the mind, but comes and goes transiently. God is heard although not seen. The self is restored to primitive grace. Siddhis are most likely in this stage, particularly those of bodily lightness as though floating on air. There may also be light flashes, or waves before the eyes; also noise like running water or the muffled sound of men talking at a distance. Because of this level there is initial loosening of the time aspect of the triple illusion, there often appears to be renewal or restoration of that which has been lost in the past, hence a reestablishment of pristine glory; this can also become a siddhi in which the individual sees the activities of a former time as in a vision. Another common experience is being enveloped in fire or seeing it close by.
Leuba (1925:209) describes an Adamic Ecstasy (Participant is climbing a mountain):
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When all at once I experienced a sense of being raised above myself; I felt the presence of God.... I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God....
"Knox (1950:153) quotes George Fox in another Adamic Ecstasy:
Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I know nothing but pureness, innocency, and righteousness being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that I was come up into the state of Adam which he was in before he fell.
"Bucke (1923:v) tells about his own 'illumination:'
All at once without warning of any kind I found myself wrapped in a flame colored cloud.... Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation ... of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe.
"Bucke was surprised to find that such unusual experiences were more common than he had expected, and his book Cosmic Consciousness which catalogs a number of similar ecstasies (first printed in 1901 ) has gone through many reprintings.
"Among the many historical figures cited in the book, one of the most telling is that of Blaise Pascal, famous French scientist and mathematician who had an experience which literally changed his life. He wrote about it as follows (Bucke: 1929:274):
In the year of Grace, 1654, Monday, 23 November, day of St. Clement, Pope and Martyr. From about half past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve midnight, FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not the philosophers nor of the Wise. Assurance, joy, assurance, feeling, joy, peace...
"An even more famous example occurred to Moses on Mt. Sinai as related in Exodus 3:2-5:
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And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire, out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called him out of the midst of the bush, and said: Moses, Moses. And he said, here am 1. And He said, draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place wherein thou standest is holy ground.
"And perhaps the most famous experience of all is given in Acts 9:3-6:
And as he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined about him a light from heaven; and he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
"Adamic ecstasies show loss of worldliness, desire, sin, sorrow. It is significant that Adamic ecstasies also sometime involve the loss of sense of time. Laski (1962:112) quotes Jefferies who had a similar experience of the Roman legions when standing beside a Roman ruin. Laski quotes Toynbee on similar historical visions on site, and notes the abundance of ruins as triggers for such experiences. She quotes Wordsworth (p. 115) who at Stonehenge had a vision of ancient druids at their rites. One might well call these locus experiences. Since they tune in to the numinous aspects of a site in its durative nature, they are the syntaxic correlates of the prototaxic hauntings and apparitions.
"Auden (1956:27-8) muses on archetypes and sacred sites as triggers: 'Some sacred beings seem sacred to all imaginations at all times,' and 'many of us have sacred landscapes which probably all have much in common.'
"D. H. Lawrence in The Rainbow (1949:204-5) echoes a similar timelessness: 'Away from time, always outside of time... Here in the church, 'before' and 'after' were folded together, all was contained in oneness,' as does T. S. Eliot in 'Four Quartets.'
"Happold (1970:x368-70) quotes Thomas Traherne on the latter's Adamic ecstasy. Since such an ecstasy recovers 'le temps perdu' it constitutes a vision of the durative topocosm:
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Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehension of the world than I.... All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful.... All things were spotless, and pure, and glorious .... I saw all in the peace of Eden.... All time was eternity ....
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.... The men, 0 what venerable and reverend creatures ... and the young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty.... Boys and girls were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of day, and something infinite behind everything appeared....
"The difference between 'hearing the Lord' and 'seeing the Lord' which distinguishes Adamic ecstasies from Knowledge ecstasies, is illustrated in Exodus 33:9, 11, 18-23.
And it came to pass as Moses entered the tabernacle the cloudy pillar descended and stood at the door of the tabernacle, and the Lord talked with Moses. And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face.... And he said 'I beseech thee, show me thy glory.' And (the Lord) said 'Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me and live.... And it shall come to pass that while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft in the rock, and will cover thee with my hand, while I pass by. And I will take away my hand and thou shall see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen.
From which it is evident that Moses had an Adamic vision.
"Many saints are reputed to have had time ecstasies in which they had a vision of holy events. St. Bridget, while adoring a creche, had a vision of Jesus' birth. St. Francis received the Stigmata in a similar instance. St. Teresa, and many others have had such theophanies.
"Let us see what the mystics say about jhana 0, or the 'access' state. St. Teresa (Leuba, 1912:164) calls this 'The Sleep of the Powers' or the Orison of Union (in her Interior Castle where it is the fifth dwelling). As the last state before complete rapture, the soul is more and more absorbed in the complete contemplation of
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God, which is found more and more enjoyable. The intellectual and sensory powers seem asleep. Teresa calls this state 'a celestial madness.' Similar strong affective aspects are mentioned by St. Francois de Sales (Leuba, 1912:168) who calls it Amorous Abstraction and mentions the 'presence of the Bridegroom;' 'the soul hears his voice.' Mental activity is reduced to nil. Father Poulain (1912) Leuba (1925:178) calls this state Full Union. He says: 'The soul is fully occupied with the divine object; it is not diverted by any other thought; in short it has no distractions.'
"The Hindus also agree that this level involves ecstasy which they call 'samadhi.' The lowest level is samadhi 'with support' (sampajnata) in which samadhi is achieved (Eliade 1969:93) 'with the help of an object or a thought.' The yogi penetrates the essence of the object and assimilates it, but he is still differentiated from it. This samadhi level makes possible knowledge and puts an end to suffering. While there is not perfect correspondence between the yogic graces and the Christian, either here or in the next samadhi level, there is an outside-of-time aspect which corresponds to our Adamic Ecstasy. For example, in 'gripping' an object the yogi assimilates its past and future as well as its present."
4.72) Friendliness and Gemeinschaftgefuhl
The English word does not fully express the universal compassion inherent in the German word. Aranya (1977:330) translates Patanjali's sutra No. 23, as recommending friendliness, compassion and goodwill to all. Through this samyama the yogi "destroys all feelings of envy and hatred ... and gets completely free from harshness and malice." But even this does not give us the full range of the function.
Maslow (1954:217) explains gemeinschaftgefuhl thus:
This word, invented by Alfred Adler, is the only one available that describes well the flavor of the feelings for mankind expressed by self-actualizing subjects. They have for human beings in general a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection... Because of this they have a genuine desire to help the human race. It is as if they were all members of a single family.
This compassionate feeling for all humanity, transcending the bonds of family, kinship, friends, or one's cultural contempor-
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aries is seen in enlightened persons as Jesus, Gandhi, Schweitzer and Eleanor Roosevelt. One is reminded of what Einstein said: "Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures. . ."
This brotherhood feeling to all humans comes from a deeper feeling that the universe is beneficent, for "The fatherhood of God produces the brotherhood of man." In consonance with this idea Orme-Johnson and Farrow (1977:708) state:
The effect of the technique on friendliness ranges from a feeling of harmony within oneself and/or a greater degree of inner correlation or mind-body coordination; to the above feeling not only encompassing one's self but projecting outward to include objects or people in the vicinity; to an all encompassing friendliness radiating out into the universe, a sense of being an intense beacon light of friendliness filling all creation.
4.73) Union-Compassion Healing
This highest form of healing is only possible to those adepts who have access to gemeinschaftgefuhl (or world-compassion) through the grace of Adamic ecstasy. As we have indicated in Section 4.62, it is the parataxic cognate of the syntaxic orthocognitive healing, and the prototaxic laying-on-of-hands healing. (For the meaning of prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic consult Gowan 1975:19.)
Union-compassion healing is instantaneous: a number of Jesus' healings were of this type. The Master, with great love and compassion for the welfare of his brother-man or sister-woman, sees them as unified in the love of God, and out of this love-union-compassion comes the immediate change. This high level of healing is not possible for most mortals; and consequently, it is rare, but it is both theoretically required by the triplicity of the prototaxic, parataxic, syntaxic modes, and is evident in the work of the greatest avatars.
When a condition of health has been established (or better visualized) on the realm of all possibilities (the etheric), it may take some little time for it to manifest on the physical. This is why healing of the two lower kinds often takes time.
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In the highest form of healing which is instantaneous, we may wonder if the adept has not reached back into time and corrected a past condition, so that the results are expressed by an instantaneous change in the present state.
4.8) Infused Knowledge
There appear to be four levels of knowledge ecstasies each with a deeper infusion of cosmic wisdom (jhanas 1, 2, 3, 4). Some kind of transcendent knowledge is communicated so suddenly and completely that the mystic "knows everything." St. Thomas Aquinas, after a long career as scholar and philosopher, had such a visionary experience in chapel one Sunday. Declaring that his previous knowledge was as nothing compared with what had been revealed to him, he stopped in the middle of a book and never wrote another word. Jacob Boehme is quoted by Bucke (1901 :182): "The gate was opened to me that in one-quarter of an hour, I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a university. .. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the byss and the abyss. In many there is a vision of the Deity, and a great affective overload; even in intellectuals (according to
Ramakrishna, Younghusband 1930:27): "It is impossible to express in language the ecstasy of divine communication. . . ." The knowledge communicated is both general and ineffable. While it comprises "allness," its details are seldom discussed. Our guess is that at this level the mystic begins to experience the phenomenon of knowledge turning into state. As has been stated elsewhere (1975:379): "This integration or return to primordial unity is the finality of knowledge which in the end transmutes into being." In other words through knowledge more and more complete, the knower becomes the known.
The question of "infused powers" is a delicate one because it appears that such infusion may occur as a result of removing certain human elements of the conscious mind. It is as if in James' phrase the human consciousness is a bottleneck through which reality is filtered. Disturb this constraint, and exotic powers appear, as in the telepathic predilections of schizophrenics, the seeing of auras by Reichenbach's neurotics, the psychic powers following electric shock or other brain trauma.
Is it fair to call these manifestations which appear in subtraction, as higher powers which should appear in addition?
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Further, since these powers appear to be those of the prototaxic numinous with very little human component, is it fair to call them exotic powers of humanity? Where is the line separating the exhibition of numinous power shown in trance states from a more obviously human ability? Surely, no one would regard the best of Wordsworth or Tennyson as non-human numinous powers, although it is perfectly obvious that "Intimations of Immortality" is inspired verse.
We hazard the belief that the crucial component is "control," and that the cut line comes between possession trance and shamanistic behavior. If one is in control of the experience, so that one can will it to occur, with what suitable props may be necessary, one may be said to have infused power. It is a bit like whether an infielder has control of the ball in making a put-out in baseball.
The infusion of cosmic knowledge is a siddhi. Orme-Johnson and others (1978:708) describe the reactions of advanced TM meditators to this experience as follows:
Experiences of 'omniscience' do not seem to show such a clear developmental sequence. There was general agreement that the early stage could be described as a feeling of expansion of the mind and the expansion of the influence of the body. Four alternatives were given for the next stage:
a) a sense of universality and the ability to do anything;
b) a sense of perfection and of being all-pervasive, of being all that there is in nature;
c) a feeling of being stationed in the borderline between the manifest and the unmanifest levels of creation, a state of ultimate evenness;
d) an experience of the mind as infinite, radiating upward in a cone-shaped pattern.
Since we have elsewhere (1975:366ff) argued that the successive knowledge-contact jhanas are part of the process of stripping away the personality, it is rather difficult to state what is going on in a language which is referenced to the personal pronouns. The various degrees of knowledge-contact are accompanied in many saints by visions, and even in some cases contact with the numinous element. As creation is differentiation, yogic escalation is integration in which things are returned to their original, primordial order.
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It is probable that there are numerous specific powers represented under this heading, and that only our lowly position far away from them prevents our being able to separate them more specifically. We know that there are four jhanas involved (jhanas 1-4, see Gowan 1975:366-75). Patanjali's sutras numbers 33, 34, 44, 45, 49, and 52-4 (Aranya 1977:344ff) also discriminate. Remembering that mere words become less and less meaningful at these levels, let us continue for a little while.
Sutra 33 (Aranya 1977:344) states that "Taraka knowledge is the state of knowledge before attainment of discriminative enlightenment." Like the dawn before the sun, when this level is attained, the yogin comes to know everything. Sutra 34 states that "by practicing samyama on the heart, knowledge of the mind is acquired." This evidently allows knowledge to get past the fluctuations of the gunas and surmount the conception of ego.
Sutras 44 and 45 (Aranya 1977:358ff) have to do with samyamas on the bhutas or basic elements. With the conquest of these, the essence or real nature of objects becomes known and these properties can be changed at will. Consequently, a higher type of omniscience and other powers emerge.
Sutra 49 (Aranya 1977:368ff) states that to the yogin "established in the discernment between buddhi and Purusa come supremacy over all beings and omniscience." All forms of the gunas appear before the mind of the yogin, hence, he has knowledge of past, present, and future states. Sutras 52-4 discuss discriminative knowledge whereby the yogin can discriminate between the essence of two apparently identical objects. But it is also obvious that the verbal channel is inadequate to carry the full message.
4.9) Continuous Contact and Union: (jhanas 5-8)
These four levels of being are beyond descriptive knowledge as we know it, out of time and space, and also beyond personality. Consequently, while we have tried to describe them elsewhere (Gowan 1975:374-8), it is very difficult to say much about them except in poetry, music or parable. The easiest understood analogy is spiritual marriage, reflecting the continuous contact and union between the individual and general mind.
From The Interior Castle II: chapter 2:333-35), St. Teresa
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says of Spiritual Marriage (speaking of herself in the third person):
Let us now come to treat of the Divine and Spiritual Marriage, although this great favor cannot be fulfilled perfectly in us during our lifetime, for if we were to withdraw ourselves from God this great blessing would be lost. When granting this favor for the first time, His Majesty is pleased to reveal Himself to the soul through an imaginary vision of His most sacred Humanity, so that it may clearly understand what is taking place and not be ignorant of the fact that it is receiving so sovereign a gift. To other people the experience will come in a different way. To the person of whom we have been speaking the Lord revealed Himself one day, when she had just received Communion, in great splendour and beauty and majesty, as He did after His resurrection, and told her that it was time she took upon her His affairs as if thy were her own and that He would take her affairs upon Himself; and He added other words which are easier to understand than to repeat.
This, you will think, was nothing new, since on other occasions the Lord had revealed Himself to that soul in this way. But it was so different that it left her quite confused and dismayed: for one reason, because this vision came with great force; for another, because of the words which He spoke to her; and also because, in the interior of her soul, where He revealed Himself to her, she had never seen any visions but this. For you must understand that there is the greatest difference between all the other visions we have mentioned and those belonging to this Mansion, and there is the same difference between the Spiritual Betrothal and the Spiritual Marriage as there is between two betrothed persons and two who are united so that they cannot be separated any more.
"More austerely the Bhagavad Gita says of the mystical state, samadhi:3
The self-controlled practitioner, while enjoying the various sense objects through the senses which are disciplined and free from likes and dislikes, attains placidity of mind. With the attainment of such placidity of mind, all his sorrows come to an end, and the intellect of such a person of tranquil mind soon withdraws itself from all sides, and becomes firmly established in the supreme reality.
"Harding (1973:159) is definite about the advantages of the syntaxic mode of juncture between the conscious ego and the numinous element:
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But if a man who has had an ecstatic experience succeeds in holding to his conscious standpoint and its values, and also retains the new influx that has come to him from the very depths of the psyche, he will be obliged to endure the conflict that two such widely different components will necessarily create, and will be compelled to seek for a means of reconciling them. This attitude is the only safeguard against falling under the spell of the nonpersonal daemonic powers of the unconscious; it is the modern way of following John's advice to 'prove the spirits.' If the effort is successful, and inner marriage will be consummated, the split between the personal and the nonpersonal part of the psyche will be healed, and the individual will become a whole, a complete being.
"But perhaps the best metaphor is that of coming home. St. Augustine says: 'Thou has made us for thyself and we are not happy until we dwell in thee.' As Ruysbroeck says: 'God is the home of the soul.' One might quote Stevenson's epitaph as it so pertinently applies to the psyche:
Here he lies where he longed to be:
Home is the sailor, home from the sea;
And the hunter home from the hill.
"In Underhill's words (1960:367), 'The Transcendent is perceived by contact not vision.'
... Oh, wonder of wonders,' says Eckhart, 'when I think of the union the soul has with God.' And Suso says: 'In this rapture the soul disappears, yet not entirely. It acquires certain qualities of divinity, but does not naturally become divine.' Plotinus puts it: 'The soul neither sees nor distinguishes by seeing.' 'it ceases to be itself .... it belongs to God.' 'The perceiver is one with the thing perceived.' 'Ecstasy is a desire of contact .... and a striving after union.'
"Underhill (1960:416) lists the three marks of the state as: 1) absorption in the interests of the Infinite, 2) freedom and serenity flowing from consciousness of its authority, 3) a center of energy in the world and lives of others.
"Meister Eckhart tells us:
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"'The knower and the known are one ... God and I we are one.... The eye with which I see God is the same as that with which He sees me.'
"Cognitive knowledge (like carnal knowledge) has in its finality become union.
"This is the fifth state of consciousness of the yogis, a state in which the altered state of consciousness is permanent. It is also a stage where all aspects of self have been transcended. It is consequently very difficult to say anything about it, as words are not adequate. Paradoxical statements abound as in most limit situations. (Christians who may be offended when such a mystic says, 'I am become God' may be comforted by recollecting that what the mystic is really trying to describe is an ineffable situation in which the semantic aspect becomes distorted.) What is apparent is that development has reached some higher level where there is even less of space, time, and 'I-ness' and even more of the Absolute.
"Laski (1962:63) quotes Poulain on the unitive state as 1) a union that is almost permanent, persisting even mid exterior occupations, 2) transformation of the higher abilities (hence transforming union), 3) intellectual vision.
"We need not detain ourselves with vain quibbles about whether the mystic is absorbed into Deity or whether he retains his conscious individuality. Words are simply not relevant or adequate, for paradoxical opposites become both possible simultaneously at such exalted levels. What has happened is that the 'not-me' of the early numinosium has become the me, and in place of dissociation, incongruity, and discontinuity between the numinous element and the individual psyche, there has come association, congruity, and continuity.
"Jung states in the Secret of theGolden Flower: 'Every statement about the transcendental ought to be avoided because it is a laughable presumption on the part of the human mind, unconscious of its limitations.'
"While we are unable to describe in detail what is going on at these exalted levels, that does not mean that little is taking place. The real business of these high states is to make increasingly
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permanent and real the intimations of escape from the prison of time, space, and personality begun in the lower jhanas. For example, the Adamic Ecstasy (Jhana 0) with its time distortion starts the process of escape from time, but this feeling is experienced only in an ephemeral manner as if in trance: it is the first wiggle of the nascent butterfly in attempting to escape from the cocoon. Such transcendence becomes increasingly apparent at each higher level. Similarly the escape from the physical world of space is started at jhana 1, yet it is obvious from the descriptions of jhana 5, 6, and 7, that different aspects of this transcendence are being accomplished. Words may be inadequate to express the process of these high graces, and we may know little about what is going on, but we can intuit that the continued specifics of this transcendence are much involved.
"It is important to attempt to restate for our Western minds, which are not used to the concept, that for the Hindu yogi, extreme concentration on an object becomes 'grasping the object' first in knowledge of the essence of the object, and then in a 'passage from knowledge to state,' essentially becoming the object. Since the object is usually Isvara (the Lord), the result of this progression is deliverance. As Eliade (1969:96) explains:
The object is no longer known through associations.... it is grasped directly, in its existential nakedness....
Let us note that.... Samprajnata Samadhi is shown to be a state achieved through a certain knowledge'. . . This passage from knowledge to state must be kept constantly in mind... (it) leads to a fusion of all modalities of being...
This absolute knowledge reveals that 'knowledge and being are no longer discrete from each other.' So the yogi who penetrates to Asamprajnata Samadhi (samadhi without support of objects) becomes one with the Deity. As Eliade (1969:114) remarks: 'The human consciousness is eliminated... its constituent functions having been reabsorbed into the primordial substance.
"If creation may be compared to the mathematical process of differentiation, then yogic escalation may be compared to the process of integration, for it returns to an undifferentiated state or function.
"Thus we are enabled to see the grand theme of the great
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process of creation and salvation emerge namely, that in the juncture between the individual and the general mind, duality is abolished, and through knowledge more and more complete, the one becomes the other. Notice that in section 4.2 (Tantric Sex), if the word know is used in the carnal sense, the knower and the known are fused in union. This integration or return to primordial unity is the finality of knowledge which in the end transmutes into being. Thus the dichotomy of symbol and referent, verba and res, thought and action, Shiva and Shakti is resolved by their transcendence of duality in union. 'I am become God;' says Meister Eckhart, testifying truthfully to a mystic state which was as far beyond comprehension of the churchmen who excommunicated him as the fact that complete knowledge can become complete being is above us. The omega point is reached when 'the All shall know the All' for then All shall become All without differentiation. At every level, prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic, the upward escalation of humanity is a prefiguring of this 'divine, far-off event.'
"But if we in the West have difficulty in grasping such a concept of absolute thought becoming absolute state, we should remember that the very same idea was proclaimed by none other than Socrates in the Symposium when he concluded:
This is the life which men should lead above all others in the contemplation of Beauty absolute .... Dwelling in that realm alone, he will bring forth not images of beauty, but Beauty itself, and so would become immortal and be the friend of God.
FOOTNOTES:
*See Jones, D. E. Visions of Time: Experiments in Psychic Archeology Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Pub. House, 1979.
1 For a possible ingenious naturalistic explanation of this phenomenon in terms of diagonal polarization and lattice logic, see Zukav (1979:283ff).
375-89).
2 The force has been discussed in 3.5 as "prana." Psychic Observer (Box 8606 Washington, D.C. 20011 ), for Fall, 1978 has 49 different names for this life or vital force, including prana (the ancient vedic name), mana, elan-vital, od, orgone, eckankar, chi, dynamis, numen, and el. This list of 49 synonyms is reproduced in the Fall 1979 edition of Research Reporter, Box 57127, L.A. 90075.
3 Further to healing effects of radiation, see Florvik in Regush (1977:298-300).
4 The remainder of this chapter is quoted from the author's earlier work (1975:
CHAPTER V
Genius, Precocity and Reincarnation
"Man's genius is a deity.
-- Heraclitus
"Talk not of genius baffled.
Genius is master of man.
Genius does what it must.
Talent does what it can.
-- Bulwer-Lytton
5.0) Introduction1
Let us first define our terms. By "genius" we shall mean "possession of genii" (rather than a very high I.Q.). By "precocity" we shall mean not only accelerated accomplishment of developmental tasks, but the perfected completion of some extraordinary social skill at an amazingly young age. (These definitions avoid, to some extent, the tautology that if genius is defined as having a very high I.Q., and precocity is defined as a very high first derivative of intelligence with respect to time, namely rate, they are essentially the same.) Furthermore, our definition of genius is perhaps a poetic way of saying that access to right-hemisphere function is operant. Finally, let us define reincarnation negatively as disbelief that the soul is created at birth or conception, and that it cannot return to another reincarnation.
One reason that we favor the definition of genius as "possession by genii" rather than merely a very high I.Q. is that certain characteristics of genius point to access to transcendental power. This power reminds one of Otto's "numinous element" (Gowan 1975:3ff) in that it is possessive, overpowering, fascinating, and mysterious. But it also seems beneficent and revivifying, and while it appears to use the individual for its own expression, it revitalizes him in the process. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in J. W. N. Sullivan's biography of Beethoven (1927:63):
It is probable that every genius of the first order becomes aware of this curious relation towards his own genius. Even the most fully conscious type of genius, the scientific genius, as Clerk Maxwell and Einstein, reveals this feeling of being possessed. A power seizes them of which they are not normally aware except by obscure premonitions. With Beethoven, so extraordinarily creative, a state of more or less unconscious tumult
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must have been constant. But only when the consciously defiant Beethoven had succumbed, only when his pride and strength had been so reduced that he was willing, even eager, to die and abandon the struggle, did he find that his creative power was indeed indestructible and that it was its deathless energy that made it impossible for him to die.
The juxtaposition of the three words, genius, precocity, and reincarnation, in the heading require an explanation from the author who has been an avid student of the first two and a very reluctant one of the third. If one honestly faces the brutal question: "Why do you have the mind of a genius, and I have the mind of a cretin?" one is compelled either to abandon the concept of justice in the universe, or the idea that this is the first time around. This essay is hence an apologia for having opted for the side of justice.
Once the plunge is taken, it is rather easy to assign reincarnation as the reason for the precocity of genius. If geniuses merely grew wiser for longer periods than ordinary men, one could, of course, not make this connection; but the fact is that they have incredible rates of intellectual development, much as if they were recalling mental powers, rather than learning them for the first time. It was Socrates who first told us that, "The soul doth remember what she has learned before."
The previous point is important enough to state in another way. There seems to be no a-priori reason why genius should require precocity; it would seem just as feasible for the genius to continue developing after others had left off. But this is never the case. There is elevation both in the variable (intelligence) and in its derivative (rate of development), - thus the hint that there is a third variable (reincarnation) affecting the behavior of the other two is given.
Let us imagine that the principle of reincarnation contains a grain of truth, and that evolving entities whose capacities compass a much larger sweep of abilities than is generally shown in mortal personality desire to incarnate, which is for them a kind of imprisonment in time, space, and personality. Of these three, the last is the most constraining for it involves throwing the dice of the chromosomes so that what is expressed in the mortal personality is but a fraction of what is latent in the entity.
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Let us imagine that occasionally one of these entities is of a higher order, and has so many emergent powers activated that even the random mitosis of the genes results in many unusual abilities. Let us further imagine that of these nascent abilities, which must be developed by the environment to become fully manifested, society esteems only a few, leaving the others as odd, eerie, or discounting them altogether, and concentrating on only the most prosaic, in which the individual may excel.
We now have painted a pretty clear picture of the exotic powers of genius, which have been described heretofore. Moreover, we have provided a rationale for them, and have shown why they are more likely to occur in the able and talented.
If genius means "possession by genii" one may well ask, What produces in able persons the beneficent possession? What activates a gene to become expressive instead of dormant?
Those who believe in control/assistance from relatives and friends beyond the veil may retort that it is due to these effects; those who believe in reincarnation may aver that it is due to the cumulative effect of past lives; those who feel the wish for more personal control of destiny may state that it is due to the will of the individual calling forth those particular preconscious processes which can be beneficial in realizing a strongly held wish to dream. What is incontestable is that of two men equally endowed by nature, one will flower in adulthood, and one will wither; and both the efflorescence and the blight seem to come from other than obvious personal sources.
It may be asked, "What is the task of consciousness in the normal state in the physical world?" The Bible says it is to "build a house, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." Troward (1909:31) says that it is to develop "subjective will," so that in effect the conscious mind can control the subconscious ability to will and discriminate.
If we consider that in the normal state, consciousness is locked in a triple prison of time, space, and personality, so that it is in effect confined to a single individual cell in a multidimensional space-time, it would seem logical that its task, in the manner of a multiple mathematical integration, is to become aware (and hence functional) throughout time, space, and in every personality. This
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consummation "devoutly to be wished" is indeed de Chardin's "Omega Point," so progress toward it by any one personality in any one incarnation must be necessarily partial and incomplete.
If we admit that the vast majority of humans cannot and do not come to perfection or Buddhahood in a single lifetime, and if we also stipulate that there is some task to be accomplished here in line with the previous argument, then it must follow that those who do not succeed on the first try are enabled to try again. But this is tantamount to admitting the possibility of successive incarnations.
Which is more likely - that a merciful Supreme Being condemns all of his creatures (save the very elect who make it on the first try) to chaotic nescience, or that they are mercifully permitted to try it again? If we answer to the second alternative, we are accepting reincarnation over the one-shot Christian view. Surely, if there is reincarnation, a merciful and just Deity would allow some advantage to carry over from the former trial, not require a start from scratch so to speak. This admission allows for the inheritance of differential aptitudes, i.e., intelligence. And finally, if intelligence, more properly mental age, is a function of time, then its first derivative (precocity) will also be in evidence. We now have shown the connection between the three variables which form the title of this essay.
There is a fairly simple test of the previous argument. If humans of high intelligence are older hands in the incarnation process, then they should, on the average, exhibit more escalation into the creative, psychedelic, and unitive stages than others. The first witness for the affirmative in this matter is, of course, Bucke (1901:81) who clearly defines his 45 elect illuminants as being of greater than average intelligence, indeed most of them remarkably so. Au contraire, it may be argued that those whose theophany became a matter of historical record had the presence of mind to write it down, hence verbally facile to start with. The second witness for the affirmative is none other than Maslow (1954:199-234) in his famous "Characteristics of Self Actualizing People." If you look at his list of 85 or so people, all admittedly creative, they are all very much above average; he also notes that a number of them confessed to the "oceanic" experience of illumination.
It is possible to bring forward examples of men who were
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more saintly than bright, The Cure of Ars, and St. Joseph of Cupertino being two notable examples. In general, however (even without the use of reliable statistical treatment), we must say that the evidence, such as it is, indicates the more frequent propensity of the ablest to escalate into the three highest Eriksonian levels. This is true, moreover, of some very positivistic scientists, men whose scientific creed did not allow them to believe in such things. It may be instructive to take some testimony in this area.
The wise Jefferson believed in a natural aristocracy of man. In an egalitarian society it is not fashionable to think along these lines, but as any animal breeder knows, such inequalities exist among other species, and it is hard to see why they do not exist in ours. Sheldon (1947) called this fineness of texture the "t-component," and believed he could measure it somatically. In a perfectly open society (without caste, and where vertical movement was completely free) socioeconomic class would be correlated with this aspect, which is perhaps one reason why it has always correlated so well with intelligence, though the fact is generally unnoticed. The author is well aware the elitism and racist aspersions may be cast upon anyone impolitic enough to voice these ideas, yet while such egalitarian tendencies prevail in this area, it is at least inconsistent that no such onus attaches to being a powerful football player or a stunning actress. As usual, our prejudices are capricious rather than consistent.
While the "t-component" of fineness of protoplasm, as Sheldon remarks, is obvious in racehorses and show dogs, and putative in man, its temperamental component, natural socio-economic status, is something we fear to talk about in this egalitarian democracy. Nevertheless, the theory of reincarnation gives a logical explanation for this natural regality (an even better word is the original meaning of the word "geniality"). The Hindu four caste system was an early and mishandled attempt to activate this concept.
The relationship of SES to other variables such as intelligence is a very proscribed subject, though there is good evidence that the correlation is substantial. Havighurst's work Growing Up in River City contains some of the best statistics. If the Warner six class socioeconomic taxonomy is set with the lower middle class average IQ at 100, the deviation jump per class is between seven and nine points of IQ.
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To illustrate the power of the SES variable, we quote three isolated pieces of research:
1 ) Bonsall and SteffIre (1955) found that when gifted children and average children were matched on SES, and then given a personality test, the previous significant differences between gifted and non-gifted children became insignificant.
2) When Kinsey brought out his famous study of sexuality in males in 1947, to blunt criticism, he used excellent statistical controls, one of which was SES. One table in his book shows that when a youth of low SES background is to escalate upwardly mobile into a high SES adulthood, his earliest sex habits are those of the group into which he is moving.
3) When the children of the "Termites," (140 I.Q.), were tested, 33% of them were found to be gifted. This frequency is 16 times that in the normal population.
The variable we are talking about here is "natural" SES (the kind measured by a personality test), not the family SES. If genius, precocity, and natural SES are often found together, the reincarnation explanation is reinforced.
Supernormal powers are not always epiphenomena of yoga practices. Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, Book IV, No. 1 (Aranya 1977: 386) indicates that "they come with birth or are attained through herbs, incantations, austerities or concentration."
The eastern view is that powers evident from birth are products of past lives. The western view is that it is due to genetic endowment. The Goertzels (1978:313) after a survey of some psychics in their sample concluded, "There is a tendency for special abilities to run in families." While psychic powers may be explained as developmental (Gowan 1974:ch. 2), there are examples of at least some psychics (v. Eileen Garrett), who had such powers in childhood.
Underhill (1960:77) reports of St. Hildegarde: "Hildegard, plainly an unusual child, says she first experienced this when only three years old, and at five began to understand the visionary world in which she lived. . ." A similar precocity in regard to visions is also reported of St. Catherine of Siena (Underhill 1960:153):
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Even as a child, Catherine, like Hildegarde and other mystics, is said to have received vivid religious impressions... Her precocity was extraordinary. Before she was sixteen she had determined to consecrate her life to God....
The fact that precociousness exists with respect to psychedelic powers as well as with other intellectual powers, in no way negates the Developmental Stage Theory, but is simply another example of the influence of reincarnation (in this case highly developed incarnations) breezing through a quick review of previously acquired abilities and skills (much as a review of formerly learned material brings it above the memory threshold again, while taking much less time than on the first learning). Indeed, the evidence that these powers obey the same psychological laws as high talents in music or mathematics (namely occasional extreme precocity) is merely another indication that they are all of the same ilk.
It is possible that one cannot properly understand reincarnation from the point of view of individual personality. Let us imagine the existence of a tutelary spirit interested in building a multipersonal or transpersonal corporate entity out of the incarnations of an allied group of persons, much as an ideal number is built out of a family of complex imaginaries. Such a tutelary deity would have the same relationship to individual incarnations as the entire coral has to a single coral cell.
Suppose intelligence of high order represents merit stored in genes from previous incarnations. This results in precocity and escalation into higher stages, which is like the "kicking-in" of overdrive in a powerful automobile with automatic transmission. In humans, such mystic experience is an intuition of the reference beam in the hologram model, in place of the virtual image of physical reality.
Spiritual cloning could then begin. The first step in this process would be the development of synchronous neurone EEG firing in the individual brain and then between individual brains, which would lead to telepathy and hence group order in some sort of depersonalization process.
This writer is certainly not the first to link genius and precocity with reincarnation. Consider the following from Johnson (1953:379):
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A special form of the previous argument concerns the appearance from time to time of infant prodigies. We have a Mozart or a Chopin composing symphonies of great musical maturity or playing an instrument with outstanding skill at an early age, when the teaching or environment are completely inadequate as explanations. We occasionally come across mathematical prodigies - mere boys who can perform elaborate mathematical operations without any adequate teaching or training. We are told of Sir William Hamilton, who started to learn Hebrew at the age of three, and 'at the age of seven he was pronounced by one of the Fellows of Trinity College, Dublin, to have shown a greater knowledge of the language than many candidates for a fellowship. At the age of thirteen he had acquired considerable knowledge of at least thirteen languages. Among these, beside the classical and the modern European languages, were included Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Hindustani and even Malay.... He wrote at the age of fourteen, a complimentary letter to the Persian ambassador who happened to visit Dublin; and the latter said he had not thought there was a man in Britain who could have written such a document in the Persian language.
'A relative of his says, 'I remember him a little boy of six, when he would answer a difficult mathematical question, and run off gaily to his little cart.' Dr. Brinkley (Astronomer Royal of Ireland) said of him at the age of eighteen, 'This young man, I do not say will be, but is, the first mathematician of his age'.2
Genius at an early age cannot be conveniently ignored because of its rarity. It calls for an explanation. By recognizing preexistence, we may reasonably suppose that such outstanding gifts represent an overflow into the present life of great prior achievement in particular fields. In this connection we may recall Plata's theory of Reminiscence: the view that knowledge we acquire easily is 'old' knowledge with which our enduring self has in a previous state of being been acquainted. On the other hand, knowledge which we find difficult to assimilate, or in which we lack interest, may be that which we meet for the first time. So, too, Intuition is possibly to be regarded as based on wisdom assimilated through the experience of past lives.
In his classic Human Personality and its Survival after Death, (1903), F. W. H. Myers (himself one) wrote a chapter on "Genius." In view of his interest in parapsychology, one would
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expect it to be impregnated with other-worldly concepts. We quote some excerpts (Myers 1961:74- 83):
When I say 'The differentia of genius lies in an increased control over subliminal mentation,' I express, I think, a well-evidenced thesis, and I suggest an important inference, namely, that the man of genius is for us the best type of the normal man, in so far as he effects a successful cooperation of an unusually large number of elements of his personality reaching a stage of integration slightly in advance of our own. Thus much I wish to say: but my thesis is not to be pushed further: as though I claimed that all our best thought was subliminal, or that all that was subliminal was potentially 'inspiration.'
The monitions of the Daemon of Socrates - the subliminal self of a man of transcendent genius - have in all probability been described to us with literal truth; and did in fact convey to that great philosopher precisely the kind of clairvoyant or precognitive information which forms the sensitive's privilege today. We have thus in Socrates the ideal unification of human powers.
It must, however, be admitted that such complete unification is not the general rule for men of genius; that their inspirations generally stop short of telepathy or of clairvoyance. I think we may explain this limitation somewhat as follows. The man of genius is what he is by virtue of possessing a readier communication than most men possess between his supraliminal and his subliminal self.
The present writer does not agree with Myers that easy access to the right hemisphere is the only necessity for genius; he does agree that it is the sufficient one. The genius must have the talents of the left hemisphere which enable him to make thorough preparation in some chosen area of expertise. Then he must be able to enter the Cave of Aladdin through right hemisphere excitation and its consequent imagery. It is the easy access to both these tasks in genius which raises the suspicion that it is mere rehearsal of a previously learned lesson.
When the sculptor Vigeland was commissioned to do a statue of the great Norwegian mathematician, Abel, he boldly discarded conventions of the past, and posed Abel naked upheld by two gigantic forms. Stang (1965:83) describes Vigeland's concept:
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The two wingless figures which carry Abel on his flight were termed genii by Vigeland. This vague concept, these genii, occurs constantly in the artist's works - only occasionally in the finished work, more frequently in the studies in the round, and repeatedly in the drawings. As a rule these genii are symbols of poetic inspiration, sometimes of germination and growth, and occasionally of ideas themselves.
Speaking of the same genius or daemon, Oliver Wendell Holmes in a Phi Beta Kappa paper at Harvard said in part:
The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping stones: how we get from one to the other, we do not know: something carries us; we do not take the step. A creating and informing spirit which is with us, and not of us, is recognized everywhere in real and in storied life. It is the Zeus that kindled the rage of Achilles: it is the muse of Homer; it is the Daimon of Socrates . . . it shaped the forms that filled the soul of Michelangelo when he saw the figure of the great Lawgiven in the yet unhewn marble... it comes to the least of us as a voice that will be heard; it tells us what we must believe; it frames our sentences; it lends a sudden gleam of sense or eloquence ... so that ... we wonder at ourselves, or rather not at ourselves, but at this divine visitor who chooses our brain as his dwelling place, and invests our naked thought with the purple of the kings of speech or song.
Sullivan (1927:124) discusses the microgenic and ontogenic aspects of evolution as seen in the life development of a genius (Beethoven):
The human consciousness is a developing thing. It is nourished and fructified by experience but there must be, in addition, an inner principle of growth. A marked increase of consciousness, so far as the human race as a whole is concerned, seems to take aeons to manifest itself. But great artists appear who possess a higher degree of consciousness than that enjoyed by the ordinary man. And amongst such artists are some whose growth in awareness, in sensibility, in power of coordination, is apparent during their lifetime.
Geniuses are also apt to escalate fully to the creative and psychedelic developmental stages (Gowan 1974:48ff) and this is perceived by Sullivan (in discussion of the Beethoven Quartets),
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as A new level of consciousness (Sullivan 1927:125):
The actual process of what we have called a growth of consciousness is extremely obscure. When we speak of a new synthesis of spiritual elements, whether these elements be emotions or states of awareness or whatever we choose to call them, we must remember that the synthesis corresponds to a definitely new state of consciousness and is not to be described by tabulating its elements.
Harding (1973:151) also echoes this "otherness" of the artist's genius:
To the creative artist, his art (or his genius) is like a non-personal creative spirit, almost a divine being, that lives and creates quite apart from his ego consciousness. While the creative urge is on him he feels lifted out of himself; he is exalted, inspired by a spirit breathing through him. What he portrays is not invented by himself; it comes to him he knows not whence.
Hirsch (1931:321-31) described certain personality traits of genius as "oversensitive and bashful, sincere but melancholy, requiring solitude, and valuing friendship."
Arieti (1976:340-1) in distinguishing between talent and genius quotes Hirsch (1931) and Shopenhauer:
Some authors have felt it advisable to stress again the difference between talent and genius or the highest degree of creativity. Talent is seen as an inborn characteristic that has to be cultivated in order to bring about (in some cases) genius or great creativity. In his book Genius and Creative Intelligence (1931), Nathaniel Hirsch discussed, among many other aspects of the problem, the difference between talent and genius. He wrote (pp. 288-289): 'Geniuses themselves ... know that they are not of the same breed as talented persons and are cognizant of greater differences in relation to the talented than to any other group, including the peasant and the prince, the insane and the imbecile. By inherent nature they are antagonistic: the genius creates, the man of talent improves; the genius intuits, the man of talent analyzes and explores; the genius aspires, his life goal is creativity; the talented are animated by ambition and their life goal is power; the genius is ever a stranger in a strange land, a momentary sojourner in a strange inter-
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lude; the talented are those for whom the earth is a paradise and social adjustment a natural and frictionless vocation. But the genius also has talent, and the development of his talent enables him to objectify his creativity and render it permanent. Genius with but little talent is like a great intellect with poor linguistic abilities; talent without genius is like a brilliant tongue attached to a feeble head.'
Hirsh quoted the philosopher Schopenhauer, who wrote, '. . . talent is an excellence which lies rather in the greater versatility and acuteness of discursive than of intuitive knowledge. He who is endowed with talent thinks more quickly and more correctly than others; but the genius beholds another world from them all, although only because he has a more profound perception of the world which lies before them also, in that it presents in his mind more objectively and consequently in greater purity and distinctness.' Hirsh seems to approve of the concept of genius to which Schopenhauer, himself a genius, adhered. In The World As Will and Idea (Vol. IIII, on Genius), Schopenhauer wrote that the fundamental characteristic of genius is to see the particular in the universal. I believe that implied in Schopenhauer's statement is the qualification 'when such insight is not apparent.' One such case would be that of Newton, as reported in Chapter II, who saw the falling apple as a particular of the universal 'body subjected to gravity.'
Hirsh also wrote (pp. 291-292), 'Another characteristic of genius, according to Schopenhauer, proceeding from their unique kind of knowing, is objectivity of the mind of the genius. This is natural, since their thinking is separated from the bodily inclination and subjective desires. The works of genius are produced by an inner or 'instinctive necessity'; genius never proceeds from intention or choice, nor from utility nor gain. For the genius, his works are an end, sufficient and necessary in themselves; for others a means. '
5.1) Genius and its Relationship to Precocity and Reincarnation
In a short section, it would be impossible to discuss fully the psychology of genius; other more eminent authors have taken whole books for that purpose. Our task in this limited space is to advance two particular arguments:
1) Genius is precocious, and this relationship has significance.
2) The behavior of geniuses indicates much more likelihood of "possession by genii" (i.e., easy right hemi-
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We shall attempt to forward this line of reasoning with examples of genius from history. Since precocity is particularly found in non-verbal areas of mathematics and music, many of our cases will be drawn from these areas.
Tyrrell (1946:30-36) in an admirable passage, gives examples of the amazing powers of genius, and then tries to explain them as the synergic operation of right hemisphere inspiration and hemisphere cognition:
Out of this treasure-house much else may come besides the gems of literature and music. Lord Kelvin had a power of divination. He had 'at times to devise explanations of that which had come to him in a flash of intuition.' 'Edison had 'a weird ability to guess correctly.' ' 'Reiser states that Einstein, when faced with a problem, has 'a definite vision of its possible solution.' ' Sir Francis Galton thought without the use of words: 'It is a serious drawback to me in writing,' he says, 'and still more in explaining myself, that I do not so easily think in words as otherwise. It often happens that after being hard at work and having arrived at results that are perfectly clear and satisfactory to myself, when I try to express them in language I feel that I must begin by putting myself upon quite another intellectual plane. I have to translate my thoughts into a language that does not run very evenly with them.' ' Here again consciousness figures, not as the originator of thought, but as its struggling exponent.
There have been men possessing extraordinary powers of grasping intuitively the result of a calculation. Bidder could determine mentally the logarithm of any number to seven or eight places, and could instantly give the factors of any large number. 'He could not,' he said, 'explain how he did this; it seemed a natural instinct with him.' Myers gives a list of thirteen such persons, two of whom were men of outstanding ability (Gauss and Ampere), three of high ability (including Bidder) and one, Dase, little better than an idiot. 'He (Dase) could not be made to have the least idea of a proposition in Euclid': yet he received a grant from the Academy of Sciences at Hamburg on the recommendation of Gauss, for mathematical work. In
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twelve years he compiled tables which would have occupied most men for a lifetime. It is interesting to observe that the powers of seven men out of this list persisted only for a few years.
F. W. H. Myers, in his excellent chapter on Genius in Human Personality, says that, to be genius, a work must satisfy two requirements. 'it must involve something original, spontaneous, unteachable, unexpected; and it must also in some way win for itself the admiration of mankind.'
Does genius, then, consist of the entry of something into consciousness from beyond the conscious threshold? That in part may be; but it is surely not in itself sufficient to constitute genius. Things may enter into consciousness from without which are not of a particularly admirable kind. Genius, on the other hand, has been defined by Carlyle as 'an infinite capacity for taking pains.' But taking pains will not by itself induce inspiration; it is more likely to kill it. What, then, constitutes genius? I suggest that it is the combination of the two at their best. First the idea must well into consciousness from without; then consciousness must labor to express it. This needs an 'infinite capacity for taking pains.' The technical ability must work on the inspiration. Technical skill alone can produce a flawless piece of work, but not true greatness. That comes from beyond. Yet that which comes from beyond, if bereft of worthy expression, is not great, though it may be suggestive of greatness. Perhaps Coleridge's Kubla Khan was an example of this latter. In genius, inspiration and intelligence are united.
Bell (1937:149) describes the astounding memory of the mathematician Euler:
All his life Euler had been blessed with a phenomenal memory. He knew Virgil's Aeneid by heart, and although he had seldom looked at the book since he was a youth, could always tell the first and last lines of any page of his copy. His memory was both visual and aural. He also had a prodigious power for mental calculation, not only of the arithmetical kind but also of the more difficult type demanded in higher algebra and the calculus. All the leading formulas of the whole range of mathematics as it existed in his day were accurately stowed away in his memory.
As one instance of his prowess, Condorcet tells how two of Euler's students had summed a complicated convergent series
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(for a particular value of the variable) to seventeen terms, only to swer was found to be correct.
Allison (Scientific American 66:276, 1892) tells of the mathematical prodigy Reuben Field:
Reuben Field is a native of La Fayette County, Missouri, a very strong, heavy set man, about forty-five years old. He never went to school, even a day, for the sole reason that he was always regarded an idiot. He can neither read nor write, and his reasoning powers have never developed beyond those of a child of the most ordinary intellect. In the face of these facts, however, he has the keenest perception of the relation of numbers and quantities, and is able, as if by instinct, to solve the most intricate mathematical problems. He does not know figures on a blackboard, but he understands them perfectly in his mind. No one has ever been able to 'catch him' in multiplication or in division. He has been given problems as 'The circumference of the earth is, in round numbers, 25,000 miles. How many flax seed, allowing twelve to the inch, will it require to reach around it?' Within a minute he returns the answer: 19,008,000,000. If the distance to the sun or to any of the planets is taken, he answers with as great ease. If given the day of the month and the year on which an event occurred, he instantly gives the day of the week. But what is yet more remarkable is that he can tell the time at any hour, day or night, without ever missing it even a minute. If awakened out of a deep sleep in the darkness of night, and asked the time, he gives it at once. Once in my office I asked him the time. He replied at once: 'Sixteen minutes after three.' In order to test him, I drew him off upon some other question, not letting him know my object, and when seventeen minutes had passed, I looked at my watch, and asked him the time. He said: 'Twenty-seven minutes to four.'
Scripture (American Journal of Psychology 4:1-59, 1891) describes the remarkable powers of some mathematicians:
It is much to be regretted that no adequate life of Gauss has yet been written; nevertheless, the story of his discoveries is too well known to need mention. We are here interested in his talent for calculation, for Gauss was not only a mathematical genius, --- he was also an arithmetical prodigy, and that, too, at an age much earlier than any of the others.
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An anecdote of his early life, told by himself, is as follows: His father was accustomed to pay his workmen at the end of the week, and to add on the pay for overtime, which was reckoned by the hour at a price in proportion to the daily wages. After the master had finished his calculations and was about to pay out the money, the boy, scarce three years old, who had followed unnoticed the acts of his father, raised himself and called in his childish voice: 'Father, the reckoning is wrong, it makes so much,' naming a certain number. The calculation was repeated with great attention, and to the astonishment of all it was found to be exactly as the little fellow had said.
At the age of nine Gauss entered the reckoning class of the town school. The teacher gave out an arithmetical series to be added. The words were scarcely spoken when Gauss threw his slate on the table, as was the custom, exclaiming, 'There it lies!' The other scholars continue their figuring while the master throws a pitying look on the youngest of the scholars. At the end of the hour the slates were examined; Gauss's had only one number on it, the correct result alone. At the age of ten he was ready to enter upon higher analysis. At fourteen he had become acquainted with the works of Euler and Lagrange, and had grasped the spirit and methods of Newton's Principia.
He was always distinguished for his power of reckoning, and was able to carry on difficult investigations and extensive numerical calculations with incredible ease.
Of Dirichlet it is said that he possessed an 'extraordinary power of memory, by means of which he had at every moment completely before him what he had previously thought and worked out.'
Euler had a prodigious memory for everything; this gave him the power of performing long mathematical operations in his head. While instructing his children, the extraction of roots obliged him to give them numbers which were squares; these he reckoned out in his head. Troubled by insomnia, one night he calculated the first six powers of all the numbers under 20, and recited them several days afterwards.
The Scientific American (66:230, 1892) gives account of the lightning calculator, Inaudi:
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Dr. Marcel Baudoin, who has submitted Inaudi to a special examination, describes the latter's astonishing operations in the following words:
We must now make known what extraordinary feats Inaudi is capable of performing. Standing upon the stage near the prompter's box, he turns his back to the blackboards placed in the rear of the stage, and upon which the manager writes the known quantities of the problems given, in order to permit the audience to take account of the calculations effected. With his hands crossed upon his chest, he listens with extreme attention to the question addressed to him, repeats it, and has it repeated, if necessary, until he understands it perfectly. He furnishes a correct solution almost immediately, without ceasing to look straight into the faces of the spectators, without writing anything (he never writes in calculating), and without being disturbed, whatever noise be made. Do you wish an example? He adds in a few seconds seven numbers of from eight to ten figures, and all this mentally, through means peculiar to him. He subtracts two numbers of twenty-one figures in a few minutes, and as quickly finds the square root or the cubic root of a number of from eight to twelve figures, if such number is a perfect square. It takes him a little more time when in this extraction of square or cubic roots there is a remainder. He finds, too, with incredible celerity, the sixth or seventh root of a number of several figures. He performs an example in division or multiplication in less time than it takes to state it. What is still more astonishing, an hour after performing all these mental operations, and after finding a solution of problems that are very difficult to solve by arithmetic, he recalls, with most remarkable precision, all the figures that he has had to operate upon.
Scripture (American Journal of Psychology 4:1-59, 1891) after a long review of mathematical prodigies, has this to say about their unique powers of right-hemisphere visualization:
Imagination. One peculiarity in the imaginative powers of the arithmetical prodigies is worthy of remark, namely their visual images. Bidder said, 'if I perform a sum mentally it always proceeds in a visible form in my mind; indeed, I can conceive of no other way possible of doing mental arithmetic.' This was a special case of his vivid imagination. He had the faculty of carrying about with him a vivid mental picture of the numbers, figures and diagrams with which he was occupied, so that he saw, as it were, on a slate the elements of the problem he was
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working. He had the capacity for seeing, as if photographed on his retina, the exact figures, whether arithmetical or geometrical, with which he was occupied at the time. This faculty was also inherited, but with a very remarkable difference. The younger Bidder thinks of each number in its own definite place in a number-form; when, however, he is occupied in multiplying together two large numbers, his mind is so engrossed in the operation that the idea of locality in the series for the moment sinks out of prominence. Is a number-form injurious to calculating powers? The father seems to have arranged and used his figures as he pleased; the son seems to be hindered by the tendency of the figures to take special places. It would be interesting to know if the grandchild, who possesses such a vivid imagination and in whom the calculating power is still further reduced, also possesses a number-form. The vivid, involuntary visualizing seems to indicate a lack of control over the imagination, which possibly extends to figures, and this perhaps makes the difference.
Colburn said that when making his calculations he saw them clearly before him. It is said of Buxton that he preserved the several processes of multiplying the multiplicand by each figure of the lower line in their relative order, and place as on paper until the final product was found. From this it is reasonable to suppose that he preserved a mental image of the sum before him.
Of the other calculators we have no reports. Children in general do their mental problems in this way. Taine relates of one, that he saw the numbers he was working with as if they had been written on a slate.
The well-known case of Goethe's phantom, the case of Petrie, who works out sums by aid of an imaginary sliding rule, the chess-players who do not see the board, etc., are instances of the power of producing vivid visual imaginations that can be altered at will.
Reed (1974:87-8) in The Psychology of Anomalous Experience, says:
As far as adults are concerned, there have been several studies published of 'memory men' and 'lightning calculators.' Some of these have examined the nature of the visual imagery which often facilitates the remarkable skills of such people. For example, the calculating virtuoso Salo Finkelstein was found to
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image key numbers and the results of certain calculations whilst he continued to calculate. He could hold these images long enough to refer back to them, thus leaving himself free to concentrate on further stages of calculation. The images could be evoked voluntarily over a period of hours. They were projected at a convenient reading distance from his eyes. But such images were not 'photographic,' for subsequent learning could adversely affect the accuracy of the image of earlier material (retroactive interference). Furthermore he did not acquire an image of visually presented material by any instant 'snap-shot.' He seems to have learned digits by actively organizing and interrelating them in certain practised combinations. Finally, his visual images did not take the form of the original presentations. They appeared to him as though written in chalk on a freshly washed blackboard in his own handwriting. The Russian mnemonist, S. V. Shereshevskii (,S'), utilized voluntary visual imagery as a basic method in his astonishing displays of recall over many years (Luria, 1969). The material imaged included not only series of digits and written material, but scenes and personal situations.
To balance the testimony, we now turn to verbatim statements of some of the greatest of modern musicians and composers. We are primarily interested in the mechanics of inspiration, and the process by which the right hemisphere receives the information. Since most of these nineteenth century composers were orthodox Christians, we must expect that their words will be clothed in religious forms.
Here is what Brahms says (Abell 1964:19-21):
To realize that we are one with the Creator as Beethoven did is a wonderful and awe-inspiring experience. Very few human beings ever come into that realization, and that is why there are so few great composers or creative geniuses. . . I always contemplate all this before commencing to compose. This is the first step. When I feel the urge I begin by appealing directly to my Maker ... I immediately feel vibrations which thrill my whole being ... In this exalted state I see clearly what is obscure in my ordinary moods; then I feel capable of drawing inspiration from above as Beethoven did. . . Those vibrations assume the form of distinct mental images... Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in the mind's eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration. Measure by
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measure the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare, inspired moods . . . I have to be in a semi-trance condition to get such results - a condition when the conscious mind is in temporary abeyance, and the subconscious is in control, for it is through the subconscious mind, which is a part of Omnipotence that the inspiration comes (lbid.:19-21).
R. Strauss in talking about two operas (Elektra and Rosenkavalier) (Abell: 1964:145-6) has this to say, comparing the two:
While the ideas were flowing in upon me - the entire musical, measure by measure, it seemed to me that I was dictated to by two wholly different Omnipotent Entities . . . I was definitely conscious of being aided by more than an earthly Power, and it was responsive to my determined suggestions. A firm belief in this Power must precede the ability to draw on it purposefully and intelligently . . . I know I can appropriate it to some extent . . . I can tell you from my own experience that an ardent desire and fixed purpose combined with intense resolve brings results. Determined concentrated thought is a tremendous force, and this Divine Power is responsive to it. I am convinced that this is a law, and it holds good in any line of human endeavor.
The great Puccini has much the same story to tell (Abell 1964:156):
The great secret of all creative geniuses is that they possess the power to appropriate the beauty, the wealth, the grandeur, and the sublimity within their own souls, which are a part of Omnipotence, and to communicate those riches to others. The conscious purposeful appropriation of one's own soulforces is the supreme secret . . . I first grasp the full power of the Ego within me. Then I feel the burning desire and intense resolve to create something worthwhile. This desire, this longing, implies in itself the knowledge that I can reach my goal. Then I make a fervent demand for and from the Power that created me. This demand or prayer must be coupled with full expectation that this higher aid will be granted me. This perfect faith opens the way for vibration to pass from the dynamo which the soul-center is, into my consciousness, and the inspired ideas are born . . . The music of this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public ...
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Here is the composer Humperdinck, quoting his friend, the even greater composer, Richard Wagner (Abell 1964:181-7):
I am convinced that there are universal currents of Divine Thought vibrating the ether everywhere and that anyone who can feel these vibrations is inspired provided he is conscious of the process and possesses the knowledge and skill to present them . . . I have very definite impressions while in the trancelike condition which is the prerequisite of all true creative effort. I feel that I am one with this vibrating Force, that it is omniscient, and that I can draw upon it to an extent that is limited only by my own capacity to do so . . . One supreme fact which I have discovered is that it is not will-power but fantasy-imagination that creates ... Imagination is the creative force ... imagination creates the reality.
Now we hear from none other than Mozart who says in a letter to a friend (quoted in Vernon 1970:55):
All this fires my soul and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream.
And finally, Tschaikowsky, from another letter (quoted in Vernon 1970:57-8):
Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly . . . It takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms. I cannot define the creative process in any other way than by this simile . . .It would be vain to try to put into words and immeasurable sense of bliss which comes over me directly a new idea awakens in me and begins to assume a definite form. I forget everything and behave like a madman; everything within me starts pulsing and quivering; hardly have I begun the sketch, ere one thought follows another. In the midst of this magic process, it frequently happens that some external interruption awakes me from my somnambulistic state ... dreadful indeed are such interruptions . . . they break the thread of inspiration ...
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Table I3 indicates some of the many commonalities in these remarkable testimonies. For most, it will be seen that the process of such high creativity consists of three phases:
(1) the prelude ritual, which may be conscious or unconscious, ending often with an invocation,
(2) the altered state of consciousness, or creative spell, during which the creative idea is born, starting with vibrations, then mental images, then the flow of ideas which are finally clothed in form. This syndrome often proceeds with extreme and uncanny rapidity in what is always referred to as a trance, dream, revery, somnambulistic state, or similar altered condition, and
(3) the postlude in which positive emotions about the experience suffuse the participant. Both Brahms and Puccini enjoined on Arthur Abell a wait of a half-century before this testimony could be published, so sacred and private did they feel this revelation to be.
Let us analyze the initial effect experienced in the altered state of consciousness. It is vibrations, (the very word is used by Brahms, Puccini, and Wagner, while Tschaikowsky speaks of "pulsing and quivering"). For anyone familiar with physics, vibrations immediately suggests a resonance effect. (We all know how through sympathetic vibrations, that a depressed silent piano key will begin to sound when that exact pitch is played on another nearby instrument.) "Being in tune with the Infinite" may be more than a mere religious figure of speech of yesteryear. For the nearest modern physical model is that of a radio receiver, which, when tuned to the exact wavelength of the sending station, can amplify and recover sound made miles away. Resonance effects are also playing an important part in the development of recent particle physics, so it is clear that these statements of creative composers have guided us to an important behavioral science principle completely congruent with physical science models.
Let us now examine the function of very high intelligence in furthering this creative afflatus. The following are some speculations which need to be verified by future research:
1 ) High intelligence may be necessary for the energy and amplification necessary to receive the signal at all; this would correspond to the power aspects of a radio receiver.
2) High intelligence may be necessary for the ability to translate the vibrations into images and then to musical
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notation. This would correspond to the high fidelity aspects of the receiver.
3) High intelligence may be necessary for the intuitive leaps by which creative geniuses reach fully formed conclusions.
4) High intelligence is necessary for storing the memory bank with the words, notes, and numbers which can be actuated by the flash of inspiration.
Nowhere else is precocity found so abundantly as in music. Indeed, Fisher (1973) devoted an entire book to this subject alone, listing several hundred who acquired fame for composing or performance before their majority, and sometimes in childhood. We learn (p. 17) that Handel was considered "a first-rate musician at the age of fifteen," that Mozart (p. 19) "at the age of eight played in London." Of his performance Bach declared, "it surpasses all understanding." Mozart composed operettas before eleven, and at fourteen was admitted to two Philharmonic Academies. Schubert (p. 20) had a precocity which "would be incredible were it not verified by many of his contemporaries." He produced over 250 songs when seventeen and eighteen while holding a full-time job. In the case of Mendelssohn (p. 27), "By twelve his output included piano trios, a violin and piano sonata, quartets, fugues, motets, symphonies, operettas and a cantata." Paganini (p. 37) wrote his first sonata at eight and made his violin debut at nine. Liszt (p. 43) at the age of nineteen "was already a famous prodigy pianist and composer." Rubenstein (p. 46) made his debut at nine. These are only a few of the more famous musical prodigies.
We are fortunate to have a modern researcher who specializes in case histories of geniuses - Kathleen Montour (cf Stanley, George and Solano, Eds. 1978). We quote from Montour's account of two such who died young (1978:68ff):
The Histories of
Chatterton and Galois
Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol, England on November 20, 1752, a few months after his schoolmaster father had died and left his widowed mother to raise her impoverished family alone. Hardly any other fatherless boy from such poverty could have managed the success he did, but from the age of five Thomas had pride and ambition to exceed the expecta-
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tions of his class. Above all he had a burning need to earn recognition of his superiority. This was not satisfied during his brief stay on earth, but how many boys who died in a London slum before their eighteenth birthday were lauded by Dr. Johnson, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats?
At age four Thomas was called a confirmed dullard until some brightly colored capitals in one of his father's folios caught his eye and he was willing to learn his letters. His mother, realizing her son's distaste for primers, taught him to read with a blackletter Bible whose medieval script awakened in him an enduring love for antiquity. The former dullard, who Cox estimated had a childhood IQ of 170 (Cox, 1926, p. 663), now read continuously until bedtime. When he was eight he was sent to a charity school, Colston's Hospital, whose monkish blue uniform delighted the little antiquarian. But the school's rudimentary curriculum had been conceived to instill conformity and was entirely unsuitable for Thomas. He was not taught the classics or Latin and Greek, so he could never qualify to enter a university, which was impossible anyway since Colston's did not even supply scholarships. The little Bristolian supplemented this dry regimen by spending his pocket money to borrow books; between the ages of ten and eleven Thomas read at least seventy books on theology, philosophy, divinity, and history, not the usual boyish fare. By now his Muse, versifying, had seized him. When he was ten years and two months old his first little poem, piously entitled The Last Epiphany, appeared in Felix Farley's Journal. Some more religious verses of his were accepted by the Bristol newspaper. By the time the boy poet was eleven he was also writing satires.
When he was fourteen Thomas was apprenticed to a scrivener, condemned to spend his days copying documents instead of writing poetry. For all his talent and charm, the lowly apprentice knew that the gentry would not accept at its real worth poetry coming from a boy of his station. So he invented the fifteenth century poet-priest T. Rowley and presented as the work of Rowley his own production ingeniously disguised by elaborate forgery. He searched for a patron who would bring him quick wealth and acclaim but got nowhere. A group of Bristol men brought the clever youth into their society, lending him books and giving him stimulating company, but they exploited him by taking his 'Rowleys' for a fraction of their value. In retaliation Thomas published stinging satiric poems attacking their personalities. Having alienated the locals, he tried to interest Horace Walpole by corresponding with the famous critic and sending him Rowleys. The vain aristocrat
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was flattered and praised Thomas' efforts until the boy confessed he was only a poor sixteen-year-old apprentice, whereupon Walpole dropped him flat. Walpole was also stung by Thomas' poetic barbs. The latter thought his situation so grim that suicide seemed to be the only escape from his dismal surroundings. Twice Thomas left suicide notes lying about to be found. His master, Lambert, fearing a scandal, let Thomas out of his indenture. The boy was glad to win his freedom from Lambert, who had the effrontery to treat the haughty boy like a servant.
Much of the teen-aged author's writings were published in many London journals, for which he got little remuneration but many promises. With this encouragement and borrowed money he set off there to make his fortune. Initially, the great city was very receptive. For the first time in his life Thomas had his own money and could send presents back home to his doting family. The people with whom he mingled were more exciting than any he had known in Bristol. He had contacts with influential political editors and was even acquainted with Lord Mayor Beckford, the liberal hero of London. But the political winds changed and his publishers were imprisoned. Things got steadily worse. Beckford died suddenly. Thomas was not paid money owed him for his writing, so he could not pay his small but insurmountable debts. His last hope was that his Bristol surgeon friend, William Barrett, would recommend him as a ship's doctor because of his small knowledge of medicine, but Barrett refused to help him. Thomas had nowhere else to turn, and everything had gone wrong. In his last few days with no money for food, he was actually starving. He was still seventeen when he took his own life with arsenic.
Galois
Evariste Galois had a more secure start, but he came to know as much hardship as his English literary counterpart. He was born to the comfortable life of an upper-middle-class major's son on October 25, 1811 in Bourg-la-Reine, a town near Paris. He too had pride, ambition, and a sense of superiority like Chatterton's, but he also inherited political fervor and hatred of injustice from his parents. These qualities would ultimately lead to his undoing, as they had for Chatterton.
Evariste's educational picture was bright in the beginning, but only briefly. Until he was twelve he was educated at home by his mother, a woman with an excellent classical education. Then he was sent to the Lycee Louis-le-Grande in Paris. At
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first a good dutiful student who took all the prizes, he changed when he saw real tyranny for the first time as the school director mercilessly put down a student revolt. The boy was embittered against authority for good. But it was the awakening of his mathematical genius that was the greatest influence on his life.
His first exposure to mathematical writing was not just any ordinary text, but Legendre's elegant geometry. It took good students two years to master Legende but he read it from cover to cover as easily as a novel. With Legendre under his belt young Galois could not be satisfied with mere schoolbooks from which to learn algebra, so he read the original works of the best mathematicians of France. By the time he was fourteen he had mastered algebra at the level of a mature mathematician while his peers plodded along at the basics. His teacher, Richard, who had given France some of its best mathematicians, realized that the brilliant young pupil's thought inhabited the highest reaches of mathematics, but his other teachers demanded the youth comply with a curriculum he rightly viewed as inadequate for him. Instead of giving him the freedom to explore mathematics, they piled more and more onerous tasks on the recalcitrant youth.
The rebellious lad knew there was only one place where he belonged, the famous Ecole Polytechnique; not only would it serve his gifts, but also his politics, for the Polytechnique was a hotbed of republican sentiment. Galois had already made significant mathematical discoveries by the time he was seventeen, and on March 1, 1829 had published in the Annales de Mathematiques his first paper 'dealing with hitherto unprojected problems in equations' (Davidson, 1939, p. 97), so no one deserved to be there more than Evariste did. But because of his quirk for working mentally, he made a poor showing on the entrance examination, failing it twice and was never allowed in. Even more frustration buffeted the poor boy. Twice his submissions to the Academy of Sciences were carelessly lost by the referees, the great mathematicians Cauchy and Fourier. To the boy who was already beside himself by not winning recognition, it must have seemed like a conspiracy to keep him down. Then his father committed suicide over something his political enemies did to him. Following the Revolution of 1830 Evariste's sharp pen got him expelled from the university after only two semesters. He tried to support himself by giving private lessons on what are now considered important ideas in algebraic theory but got no takers then. His last desperate attempt to receive his due in mathematics from the Academy
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was returned by the famous mathematician Poisson with the comment 'incomprehensible'; it is now Galois theory, or the general solution of equations. He had had enough from hated academicians and society in general. Feeling oppressed because his mathematical genius was unappreciated, he turned away from it and devoted his energy to radical politics instead.
Though after his death he earned lasting repute for his mathematics, during his life Evariste received more acclaim as a patriot than he ever did as a mathematician. At the time he wrote the memoir rejected by Poisson he was a member of the artillery of the National Guard, which called itself the 'Friends of the People.' He was arrested twice, once for threatening the king and another time on a trumped-up charge. It was only on the second charge that he was actually put in prison, but the government now regarded him as a dangerous revolutionary. His short stay in prison was highly traumatic for the proud, sensitive youth. After his release he had an affair with a low woman who disillusioned him with love. Unfortunately, it was also a part of a plot to lure Evariste, frail and nearsighted, into a duel against two men. Knowing he would lose, Galois frantically scribbled down his ideas so that future mathematicians might decipher this issue of his desperation and allow them to survive him. The next day the young duelist, wounded in the intestines and left to die in a field, was found and brought to a hospital. There he died of peritonitis on May 31, 1832. A few days after the twenty-year-old youth had succumbed, Evariste Galois was given a heroic funeral for his patriotism, his genius overlooked by the mourners. The life of this tormented pioneer of algebraic theory was so brief that the work he left behind amounted to only sixty-one pages.
Montour (1976:173ff) also followed up three precocious modern youths in an article from which we quote:
History and biography are bountiful resources of precocity for this purpose. Catharine Cox's The Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses (Cox, 1926), revealed that a number of historical figures had dramatically shortened their academic training (even by early standards), thereby becoming able to start their careers much sooner. Paul Dudley, who according to Sibley was the youngest person to enter Harvard College (at age ten), received his A. B. degree at age fourteen in 1660 and went on to become a prominent jurist in colonial Massachusetts (Shipton, 1933). John Trumbull, the Early American lawyer-poet who authored M. Fingal and the Progress of Dulness, passed the entrance examination to Yale College when he was
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seven and a half but waited until he was thirteen before he entered. He remained there as a student, then as the recipient of a bachelor's degree, and after that, as a tutor for nine years (Bowden, 1962). Verrill Kenneth Wolfe, the modern counterpart of Dudley and Trumbull, graduated from Yale College in 1945 at the age of fourteen. He majored in music at Yale and spent seven more years studying it after graduation before entering medical school. He is now a professor of neuroanatomy at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
In more recent times we have seen the likes of three other remarkable men who entered college notably young and began to make their marks early in life because of it. The late Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, graduated from Tufts College at fourteen and wrote a book about his early life as a child prodigy called Ex-Prodigy (Wiener, 1953). A. A. Berle, Jr., Secretary of State under Franklin D. Roosevelt, entered Harvard College at age fourteen and graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, - also as precocious. Robert B. Woodward, the Nobel prize-winning chemist, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of nineteen in 1936 and was awarded his Ph.D. the very next year.
Three Examples of Verbal Precocity from 1920
An article published in the Literary Digest (November 13, 1920) provided the most finds when it came to tracing the typical grown-up 'child genius.' It gave the names of three boys who entered Harvard and Columbia while still rather young and who are still alive in 1975. 1 was able to ascertain what became of all three. It was possible to interview one man personally when he was on the Hopkins campus. Another has corresponded with me a few times. In the case of the third man, Who's Who in America contains an extensive listing on how his career has progressed.
L, Now a Physician
The first man, L., was twelve years old when he passed the Harvard entrance examinations and fourteen when he was admitted. At age three he was fluent in German and English, could read anything put before him in either language, and could answer questions about what he read. When he entered the first grade at age six he suffered the not uncommon fate of the advanced gifted child: the teacher did not realize that L could already read and more. His situation was finally improved only after he was seen by his teacher reading a newspaper in his father's office. During the months after that incident he
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was promoted until he was placed at his proper level in the fourth grade. He entered high school when he was about nine.
L's ambition right from childhood was to become a professor of classical languages. As a pre-schooler he began to teach himself Latin by translating books from Latin and back again, then comparing his versions with original Latin sources. When he entered the first grade he knew as much Latin as the average college sophomore did. In the same way he taught himself Greek and could compose Greek poetry by the time he reached high school.
M, Now a Professor
L's fellow underage member of the Harvard Class of 1924 is now a professor of classics at the University of California at Los Angeles. M was fifteen when he entered Harvard. He did this by skipping two grammar school grades and by telescoping his high school years from four years to three by carrying an extra load. He got his A. B. degree when he was eighteen, his M.A. at nineteen, and his Ph.D. at twenty-one in 1927. That year he became a member of the UCLA faculty, but his promotions came at an unusually slow rate because, beyond coauthoring two books, he did not publish much. This was probably due to his overwhelming interest in music, rather than teaching, research, or other professional concerns. He was made a full professor at age sixty-five.
Though he makes claims to be the contrary, M is an impressive letter writer and has made to me what seems to be very astute observations regarding success. He credits his 'family background of unstinting encouragement and sympathetic tastes' as an immeasurable asset to intellectual endowment, which the unfortunate L never enjoyed. He also mentions that gifted persons still face the fight 'to obtain a living, sometimes at the cost of unremunerative 'talents'.' M himself decided to defer to his all-exclusive interest in music, which was apparent from his early youth, over professional consideration.
Hollingworth's Child E, Now Dean of a College at Cambridge University
E, the third person in the article, was a man who was able to combine both a 'favorable background' and the right compromise of his 'unremunerative talent,' serving as proof of the validity of M's formula for success. In a book entirely devoted to children with IQ's over 180, Hollingworth (1942, pp. 134-158) recorded the details of his life as the case history of Child E. He was enrolled at Columbia University in 1920 at age twelve.
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Having been elected to membership in the Phi Beta Kappa Society, he graduated in 1923 at age fourteen. Shortly after his A.B. (which took him only three years), he earned more degrees; his master's degree from Columbia in 1924; his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1931; Master of Sacred Theology, General Theological Seminary, 1933 and 1934; and an honorary Doctorate of Sacred Theology degree in 1956 from General Theological Seminary. In 1969 he received an M.A. from Cambridge University.
E's parents took great pains to provide their unusual son with special educational advantages, including a trip to Denver in 1918 to witness a solar eclipse. His father wanted his son to enter Harvard and his mother favored New York University, but both allowed their son to go on to Columbia, his own choice. In turn, E became a minister in the Episcopal Church, his mother's fondest wish for him. By this move, E might have done a disservice to his visible creativity, but he found an outlet for it in his work as a theological scholar on such topics as Byzantine Egypt. His entry in Who's Who in America contains a long list of publications. In 1969 E was a lecturer in Divinity at Cambridge. Today he is Dean of Chapel of Cambridge's Jesus College, a position he has held since 1972.
Emerson like Jefferson believed in a natural aristocracy of intellect in "Politics and Society" (Miller 1967:286-307). Discussing "the permanent traits of the aristocracy" he called them "model men," "true pictures of excellence," and "living standards" (ibid:287). This caste is "not a man of rank, but a man of honor" - a gentleman. Speaking of "the terrible aristocracy that is in nature," he states (ibid:290): "I affirm that inequalities exist not in costume, but in powers of expression and action." He also declares (p. 291 ), "The existence of an upper class is not injurious as long as it is dependent on merit." Then he gives his prescription by which men may be recognized to enter this "superior class" (p. 292-8):
1 ) "a commanding talent" (which is used as with inventors to benefit all.)
2) "genius ... the power to affect the imagination." These powers "raise men above themselves," the first example of which is eloquence.
3) "elevation of sentiment, refining and inspiring manners."
From all this it is clear that Emerson viewed aristocracy of intellect as made up of three components, talent, eloquence, and moral
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ascendency. His definition of genius as eloquence is somewhat strange to our ears, although "power to affect the imagination" speaks to empery over right hemisphere functions of imagery and the like, and coincides from at least one point of view with Socrates' definition of his genius or daemon, as a familiar and benevolent attendant spirit.
5.2) Precocity as the End Product of Foetalization or Neoteny
If a "genius is a forerunner," is it possible the precocity in genius is an ontogenic earnest of neoteny in the species? We know that the evolution of human beings has telescoped the latter part of primate life in favor of a stretching out of the adolescent part. In work elsewhere (Gowan 1972:91-5) it was said:
"Man represents a unique combination of an animal base and a consciousness which soars to the stars. Nature produced him by a process which Bolk (1926) called the 'foetalization of the ape.' This involved an enlargement of the immature phase of primate development and its more prominent emphasis in the life span which made possible new and increased opportunities for complex learning and experience. Foetalization in man, then, describes a stretching out of the docile learning period into a larger proportion of the whole life span. During this plastic dependency and apprenticeship, mammalian family life and play extended conditioning and more complex learnings into developmental changes which transformed the primate into a human being.
"In all humans, this lengthened span of immaturity which reaches into the first three decades is devoted to learning and education, and hopefully to creative performance, before man becomes in senility more like an old ape - taciturn, solitary, hairy and immobile. Through foetalization, evolution provides opportunity for man to develop a creative mind before he degenerates into a reactive ape-like creature. Man, of course, does not become an ape, but without stimulation of his higher faculties, he, too, may experience premature senility (like the ape at an earlier age).
"Human beings often feel that they are the final and perfect product of evolution, which has somehow ceased with the production of this masterpiece. There is no reason to believe, however, that the forces of evolution are no longer in operation. Evidence of this continuation may be seen in differences between superior
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and more average individuals in any society, for the life style of the superior individual points the directional thrust of evolutionary progress for all mankind. Nature seems to have granted superior youth a little more time in the foetalization process and to have placed more emphasis on this period. In consequence, such fortunate individuals tend to have a youthful aspect, even in maturity.
"Furthermore, bright young males go through a process of continued foetalization which makes them appear younger and less mature (viewed in relation to their own ultimate growth and attainments) than more average youth. The Kinsey and Pomeroy study (1948) was one of the first to report this in regard to differential sexual practices, but such differences may well extend to other aspects of human behavior.
"Nature has also favored the superior youth by giving him more 'peak' to shoot at. In other words, because of the increased range of development for him, he is longer in the process of getting there, and being longer in process, he reaps the multiple benefits of that process. A third advantage results from individual efforts made by persons themselves, while in process of growth, to create new experiences and responses, preventing them from a premature atrophy into an unself-actualized old age. These efforts are interactions with the environment and are not concerned (as are the previous) with hereditary or genotypic characteristics.
"Perhaps it is desirable again to emphasize that foetalization is not feminization, but a process of slowing up of aging in superior males. It does not refer to effeminacy or to homosexuality. Superior male adults evidence a youthful quality which preserves their verbal ability, creative power, and dynamic process. John F. Kennedy represents a good example of this process which gave him a youthful vitality when he was actually in middle age. He is also a good example of male heterosexuality.
"It is possible that W. T. Sheldon came as near as anyone to identifying this quality when he talked about the 't-component' (1949, p. 21 ). He calls it 'the component of thorobredness' or 'the physical quality of the animal,' and he distinguishes it from gynandromorphy (or having a female type figure). This index of 'tissue fineness' has a psychological correlate in the 'occupational level' scale of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank. Males high in
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intelligence or the professions tend to show feminine interests (and females show the opposite). Indeed Walberg (1969), in a study entitled Physics, Femininity, and Creativity, traces the interesting relationship between these variables.
"We know that the relationship between an abnormal (XYY) chromosome male and the average (XY) male is that the latter compared with the former is brighter, more docile, more social and less destructive. Can we not extrapolate that the relationship between the average male and the superior individual is at least a small continuance of the same process, so that the latter becomes brighter, more docile, more social, and less destructive (more creative)?
"Indeed, it is remarkable that in many creative men, one finds a conscious attempt to explore 'feminine' interests and to gain the 'balance' and 'receptivity' which psychological femininity adds to the individual's powers. Interestingly enough, no less a person than Erikson studies this very facet in the heroic life of Gandhi (1969). Gandhi, as revealed by Erikson's psychoanalytic biography, deliberately sought to 'mother' his parents and early in life to assume nurturance of others. This in-depth analysis of a modern saint makes fascinating reading because of its uncovering of the developmental process and the conscious effort at feminization in Gandhi's life. (Our cultural values force us to regard this process as 'feminization,' but actually full paternity in the generativity stage involves nurturance, 'succorance' and other gentle virtues toward one's children which are undervalued or underemphasized in our violence-prone culture so that we regard expression of them as somehow 'feminine.')
"Some aspects of Gandhi's childhood and parental relations, as revealed by Erikson, provide a picture of a bright, precocious and creative child who early assumed a protective relationship toward others. Especially significant to Erikson are Gandhi's relationships with his mother and father. The close mother-son bond, often seen in creative men, is found here, but the specific trend in Gandhi's life appears to have evolved out of his special attachment-ambivalence toward his father whom, Erikson suggests, Gandhi sought to 'redeem.'
"Surely this process, for which we have used the somewhat inappropriate words 'foetalization' and 'feminization' (because no
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better ones exist), is far more a positive integration and summation of both sexual roles rather than a regression toward effeminacy or homosexuality. It is seen in the peculiar and concomitant relationships which such men have with their fathers - as that of equal. It is as if they wish to become their own fathers or to redeem the father. Thus Erikson says of Gandhi (1969, p. 102): 'The child is the father of the man makes new, special, and particular sense for special men; they indeed have (i.e.) become their own fathers, and in a way their father's fathers while not yet adult.' "
A similar idea was echoed by Professor Sylvester in a presidential address to the British Mathematical Association in 1869 as quoted by Bell (1937:405):
There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than mathematics ... or . . . seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being . . . The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of the soul do not drop early off, nor do its pores become clogged with the earthy particles blown from the dusty highway of life.
We are here dealing with profound issues, which are not easy to understand fully. Let us recapitulate the effects seen in male geniuses, (we omit the females out of ignorance, not prejudice). We find a higher level of neoteny than the average, an increased youthfulness, more evidence of the "t- component" in the body, a certain "feminization" of interests, more nurturance and compassion, a more balanced character structure. Is it not possible that all these effects are derivatives of a long series of incarnations, which has mellowed and smoothed the psyche like oak charcoal smooths out Bourbon Whisky? (The increased feminization could be caused by the input of feminine incarnations.) If we look at the phrase "gifted children," we are talking about "gifts" (i.e. something, not earned, at least in this life). Is there not some presumption that these gifts may have accumulated from merit acquired somewhere else?
Let us now turn from these fanciful speculations to more solid research.
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Cartmill, in a scholarly review (Science 199:1194-5) 1978 of S. J. Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny says in part:
In the second half of the book, Gould lays out his own ideas about ontogeny and phylogeny, which represent an exceptional creative synthesis of developmental biology and ecological theory. He begins by drawing a fundamental distinction between somatic growth and reproductive maturation. When the former is accelerated relative to the latter, ontogenetic trends are continued further in the descendant than in the ancestor, and recapitulation results; if the absolute time from conception to maturation stays constant, we get Haeckelian recapitulation by terminal addition and condensation. Evolutionary change that speeds up reproductive maturation relative to somatic growth produces the opposite result, pedomorphosis - that is, an adult descendant that looks like a juvenile ancestor. Gould is mainly interested in pedomorphosis, and he distinguishes two processes that yield it: progenesis (absolute acceleration of maturation, without comparable acceleration in somatic growth) and neoteny (retardation of growth without comparable retarded reproductive maturation).
The conclusion of the book, in which Gould tries to revive Bolk's theory that people are neotenic apes, is less convincing. Somatic growth in Homo, Gould notes, is both absolutely and relatively retarded compared to that of apes, and we retain into adulthood the short faces, bulging brain cases, hairless skins, and slender erect necks of fetal apes. Gould accounts for all this by showing that fetal rates of brain growth, facial elongation, and so on continue far longer after birth in Homo that in other anthropoids.
Gould acknowledges that some of man's distinctive traits cannot be explained by invoking neoteny, but argues that most of the standard counter-examples to Bolk's theory can be analyzed as effects of retarded somatic development.
In a carefully controlled study Keating (1976:90, 98) found:
The bright group evidenced formal operations far more frequently than the average groups of the same age. Thus the
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major finding was that brightness, psychometrically defined, implies cognitive developmental precocity within the stage theory of Piaget.
He summarizes (ibid.:98):
This research again confirms the empirical relationship of brightness and precocity and does so across differing traditions. Although it can offer no explanation of this relationship, it does allow for speculation on the topic. It seems that brightness leads to precocity.
Cohn (1979:317) notes the relationship between genius and precocity:
The argument that individuals experience different rates of intellectual development has been well established in the 20th century. Recently, Keating (1976) has shown that . . . 'brightness as measured by psychometric testing implies developmental precocity in reasoning.' 'Students . . . selected for high scores on psychometric tests . . . are indeed precocious in cognitive development, and not just good 'test-takers.' He adds: 'Since, according to Piaget, cognitive development proceeds as an interaction of the organism and the environment, the brighter individual would be at an advantage moving through the successive stages more quickly.' In addition, Keating's work (pp. 97- 98) suggests that such acceleration should occur within developmental stages, such as concrete operations or formal operations, rather than across stages.
We should not conclude this section without giving a few examples of precocity in different areas.
Underhill (1960:77) describes the psychic precocity of St. Hildegarde:
During childhood and adolescence she had constant interior visions and premonitions of the future, accompanied by much ill-health. Before dismissing these stories as absurdities we should remember that her career proves her a woman of genius; and that such spiritual and psychical precocity undoubtedly exists, and is the raw material from which a certain sort of mysticism may develop. A long series of instances, from the call of Samuel to that of Florence Nightingale (visited by an imperative sense of vocation when six years old),
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warns us that we are far from understanding the conditions underlying human greatness.
Hildegarde's account of her visions is unsensational and exact. They were pictures, she says, seen within the mind, 'neither in dream, sleep, nor any frenzy,' involving no hallucination and never interfering with her outward sight.
Another testimony to a child's ability to see through the sensory hologram is found in Wilson (1971:537):
In Man's Latent Powers (1938), Phoebe Payne describes the 'psychic aura' of living things: 'I remember well that as a tiny child my absorbing interest in flowers was due not only to their beauty, but to the curiosity of 'watching their wheels go round' in the form of their different emanations, some of which showed as a fuzz of luminous mist, while others radiated in a shower of minute sparks or 'prickles,' and I soon learned to associate a 'nice smell' with a flower from which there rose a column of silvery smoke. In the same way, my delight in playing with any kind of animal was partly caused by the fun of experimenting with different effects produced by tickling or clutching at the responsive 'something' with which it was surrounded. Throughout my early years I was unaware that not everyone experienced such contacts.'
Bell (1937:340ff) tells us of the precociousness of the Irish genius, W. R. Hamilton:
The tale of Hamilton's infantile accomplishments reads like a bad romance, but it is true: at three he was a superior reader of English and was considerably advanced in arithmetic; at four he was a good geographer; at five he read and translated Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and loved to recite yards of Dryden, Collins, Milton, and Homer - the last in Greek; at eight he added a mastery of Italian and French to his collection and extemporized fluently in Latin, expressing his unaffected delight at the beauty of the Irish scene in Latin hexameters when plain English prose offered too plebeian a vent for his nobly exalted sentiments; and finally, before he was ten he had laid a firm foundation for his extraordinary scholarship in oriental languages by beginning Arabic and Sanskrit.
The tally of Hamilton's languages is not yet complete. When William was three months under ten years old his uncle reports that 'His thirst for the Oriental languages is unabated. He is
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now master of most, indeed of all except the minor and comparatively provincial ones. The Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic are about to be confirmed by the superior and intimate acquaintance with the Sanskrit, in which he is already a proficient. The Chaldee and Syriac he is grounded in, also the Hindoostanee, Malay, Mahratta, Bengali, and others. He is about to commence the Chinese, but the difficulty of procuring books is very great. It cost me a large sum to supply him from London, but I hope the money was well expended.' To which we can only throw up our hands and ejaculate Good God! What was the sense of it all?
By thirteen William was able to brag that he had mastered one language for each year he had lived. At fourteen he composed a flowery welcome in Persian to the Persian Ambassador, then visiting Dublin, and had it transmitted to the astonished potentate.
On July 7, 1823, young Hamilton passed, easily first out of one hundred candidates, into Trinity College. His fame had preceded him, and as was only to be expected, he quickly became a celebrity; indeed his classical and mathematical prowess, while he was yet an undergraduate, excited the curiosity of academic circles in England.
Myers (1961:76-7) gives two examples of arithmetical prodigies:
I shall now endeavor, in response to your request, to give some account of my late brother Benjamin's faculty of arithmetical calculation. My brother very early manifested a marvelous power of mental calculation. When almost exactly six years of age Benjamin was walking with his father before breakfast, when he said, 'Papa, at what hour was I born?' He was told four A.M.
Ben - 'What o'clock is it at present?'
Ans. -'Seven fifty A.M.'
The child walked on a few hundred yards, then turned to his father and stated the number of seconds he had lived. My father noted down the figures, made the calculation when he got home, and told Ben he was 172,800 seconds wrong, to which he got a ready reply: 'No, papa, you have left out two days for the leap years - 1820 and 1824, ' which was the case.
In the year 1837 Vito Mangiamele, who gave his age as 10
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years and 4 months, presented himself before Arago in Paris. He was the son of a shepherd of Sicily, who was not able to give his son any instruction. By chance it was discovered that by methods peculiar to himself he resolved problems that seemed at the first view to require extended mathematical knowledge. In the presence of the Academy Arago proposed the following questions: 'What is the cubic root of 3,796,416?' In the space of about half a minute the child responded 156, which is correct. 'What satisfies the condition that its cube plus five times its square is equal to 42 times itself increased by 40?' Everybody understands that this is a demand for the root of the equation x 3 + 5x 2 - 4 2x - 40 = 0. In less than a minute Vito responded that 5 satisfied the condition; which is correct. The third question related to the solution of the equation x5 - 4x - 16779 = 0. This time the child remained four to five minutes without answering: finally he demanded with some hesitation if 3 would not be the solution desired. The secretary having informed him that he was wrong, Vito, a few moments afterwards, gave the number 7 as the true solution. Having finally been requested to extract the 10th root of 282,475,249 Vito found in a short time that the root is 7.
Bell (11937:221 ) describes the precocity of the mathematician Gauss who, before he was three, corrected his father:
One Saturday Gerhard Gauss was making out the weekly payroll for the laborers under his charge, unaware that his young son was following the proceedings with critical attention. Coming to the end of his long computations, Gerhard was startled to hear the little boy pipe up, 'Father, the reckoning is wrong, it should be . . . .' A check of the account showed that the figure named by Gauss was correct.
Before this the boy had teased the pronunciations of the letters of the alphabet out of his parents and their friends and had taught himself to read. Nobody had shown him anything about arithmetic, although presumably he had picked up the meaning of the digits 1, 2.... along with the alphabet. In later life he loved to joke that he knew how to reckon before he could talk. A prodigious power for involved mental calculations remained with him all his life.
Scripture (American Journal of Psychology 4:1-59, 1891) describes the precocity of the French electrical savant, Ampere:
Ampere.---The first talent shown by Andre Marie Ampere, 1775, at Lyon, 1836, at Marseilles, was for arithmetic. While
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still a child, knowing nothing of figures, he was seen to carry on long calculations by means of pebbles. To illustrate to what an extraordinary degree the love of calculation had seized upon the child, it is related that being deprived of his pebbles during a serious illness, he supplied their places with pieces of a biscuit which had been allowed him after three days strict diet.
As soon as he could read he devoured every book that fell into his hands. His father allowed him to follow his own inclination and contented himself with furnishing him the necessary books. History, travels, poetry, romances and philosophy interested him almost equally. His principal study was the encyclopedia in alphabetical order, in twenty volumes folio, each volume separately in its proper order. This colossal work was completely and deeply engraved on his mind. 'His mysterious and wonderful memory, however, astonishes me a thousand times less than that force united to flexibility which enables the mind to assimilate without confusion, after reading in alphabetical order matter so astonishingly varied.' Half a century afterwards he would repeat with perfect accuracy long passages from the encyclopedia relating to blazonry, falconry, etc.
At the age of eleven years the child had conquered elementary mathematics and had studied the application of algebra to geometry. The parental library was not sufficient to supply him with further books, so his father took him to Lyon, where he was introduced to higher analysis. He learned of himself according to his fancy, and his thought gained in vigor and originality. Mathematics interested him above everything. At eighteen he studied the Mecanique analytique of Lagrange, nearly all of whose calculations he repeated; he said often that he knew at that time as much mathematics as he ever did.
Remarkable memory for long passages - an ability akin to eidetic imagery - is particularly pronounced in children, between the ages of five and nine. Like eidetic imagery, this mnemonic ability often fades in adolescence. There are several possible explanations:
1) it is a carry-over from pre-literate times when the young were expected to learn the oral tradition by heart;
2) it is an ability that expresses itself early but is not then continuously stimulated by the culture;
3) it is an effect of transient memory of skills of past lives, which fades after early evidence, much as the recall of dreams fade after early morning.
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'We know very little about this ability, and more research into it would be useful.
At four, Francis Galton (Forrest 1974:6), who later was to be the first man to study genius psychologically wrote the following:
I can read any English book. I can say all the Latin substantives and adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry. I can cast my sums and multiply.... I can say the pence table. I read French a little, and I know the clock.
Forrest's biography of Galton's amazing versatility in later life confirms that he was a genius of the first order.
Arieti (1976:343) reports that "John Stuart Mill was reading at three," and learned algebra at eight. Goethe wrote Latin poetry at eight.
In each of the cases of Galton and Mill we are witness to very high ability of genius level coupled with very rich and concentrated early environmental stimulation.
Montour (Stanley, George and Solano 1978:59) describes the remarkable childhood of the youngest full professor:
Charles L. Fefferman appears to be the youngest person in recent history to be appointed a 'full' professor at a major university. Fefferman was born in Washington, D.C. on April 18, 1949, which means that when he became a full professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1971 he was only 22 years old. To have achieved this honor at the age when most students are only receiving their baccalaureate, Fefferman had to have been both extremely precocious mathematically and highly accelerated educationally.
Fefferman first showed a strong interest in mathematics when he was around nine years old. At that time he had begun studying science independently, but found that his rudimentary arithmetic would not explain college-level physics. His father, a Ph.D. in economics, taught his son as much mathematics as he knew. Very soon, however, it became necessary for a University of Maryland mathematics professor, James Hummel, to take over the boy's tutoring. As a junior high school student, Charles won a regional science fair with his mathematics ex-
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hibit. By the time he was 12 years old he was taking courses at the University of Maryland campus near his Silver Spring home. At Hummel's urging, Charles bypassed high school and entered college as a full-time student at 14 years of age.
As a student at the University of Maryland, Fefferman combined his studies with an active, normal life while making the first strides that would lead to a phenomenal career. He lived at home, socializing with friends still in junior high school, and yet found time to write his first scholarly article (this appeared in a German journal when he was 15). In 1966 he became the youngest student in the University of Maryland's history to receive a bachelor's degree. The barely seventeen-year-old youth had majored in both mathematics and physics. At the ceremony he was also awarded his high school diploma.
In 1969 Fefferman received his Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Princeton University shortly after his 20th birthday and stayed on there a year as a mathematics instructor. Subsequently, he became an assistant professor on the University of Chicago's faculty in 1970. 1n 1971 he won the Salem Prize for his outstanding work in Fourier analysis. That same year, one year after his appointment as an assistant professor, Fefferman was promoted to the rank of full professor. Fefferman has since returned to Princeton as a full professor of mathematics. In 1976 at barely age 27 he became the first recipient of the $150,000 Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation.
more saintly than bright, The Cure of Ars, and St. Joseph of Cupertino being two notable examples. In general, however (even without the use of reliable statistical treatment), we must say that the evidence, such as it is, indicates the more frequent propensity of the ablest to escalate into the three highest Eriksonian levels. This is true, moreover, of some very positivistic scientists, men whose scientific creed did not allow them to believe in such things. It may be instructive to take some testimony in this area.
The wise Jefferson believed in a natural aristocracy of man. In an egalitarian society it is not fashionable to think along these lines, but as any animal breeder knows, such inequalities exist among other species, and it is hard to see why they do not exist in ours. Sheldon (1947) called this fineness of texture the "t-component," and believed he could measure it somatically. In a perfectly open society (without caste, and where vertical movement was completely free) socioeconomic class would be correlated with this aspect, which is perhaps one reason why it has always correlated so well with intelligence, though the fact is generally unnoticed. The author is well aware the elitism and racist aspersions may be cast upon anyone impolitic enough to voice these ideas, yet while such egalitarian tendencies prevail in this area, it is at least inconsistent that no such onus attaches to being a powerful football player or a stunning actress. As usual, our prejudices are capricious rather than consistent.
While the "t-component" of fineness of protoplasm, as Sheldon remarks, is obvious in racehorses and show dogs, and putative in man, its temperamental component, natural socio-economic status, is something we fear to talk about in this egalitarian democracy. Nevertheless, the theory of reincarnation gives a logical explanation for this natural regality (an even better word is the original meaning of the word "geniality"). The Hindu four caste system was an early and mishandled attempt to activate this concept.
The relationship of SES to other variables such as intelligence is a very proscribed subject, though there is good evidence that the correlation is substantial. Havighurst's work Growing Up in River City contains some of the best statistics. If the Warner six class socioeconomic taxonomy is set with the lower middle class average IQ at 100, the deviation jump per class is between seven and nine points of IQ.
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To illustrate the power of the SES variable, we quote three isolated pieces of research:
1 ) Bonsall and SteffIre (1955) found that when gifted children and average children were matched on SES, and then given a personality test, the previous significant differences between gifted and non-gifted children became insignificant.
2) When Kinsey brought out his famous study of sexuality in males in 1947, to blunt criticism, he used excellent statistical controls, one of which was SES. One table in his book shows that when a youth of low SES background is to escalate upwardly mobile into a high SES adulthood, his earliest sex habits are those of the group into which he is moving.
3) When the children of the "Termites," (140 I.Q.), were tested, 33% of them were found to be gifted. This frequency is 16 times that in the normal population.
The variable we are talking about here is "natural" SES (the kind measured by a personality test), not the family SES. If genius, precocity, and natural SES are often found together, the reincarnation explanation is reinforced.
Supernormal powers are not always epiphenomena of yoga practices. Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, Book IV, No. 1 (Aranya 1977: 386) indicates that "they come with birth or are attained through herbs, incantations, austerities or concentration."
The eastern view is that powers evident from birth are products of past lives. The western view is that it is due to genetic endowment. The Goertzels (1978:313) after a survey of some psychics in their sample concluded, "There is a tendency for special abilities to run in families." While psychic powers may be explained as developmental (Gowan 1974:ch. 2), there are examples of at least some psychics (v. Eileen Garrett), who had such powers in childhood.
Underhill (1960:77) reports of St. Hildegarde: "Hildegard, plainly an unusual child, says she first experienced this when only three years old, and at five began to understand the visionary world in which she lived. . ." A similar precocity in regard to visions is also reported of St. Catherine of Siena (Underhill 1960:153):
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Even as a child, Catherine, like Hildegarde and other mystics, is said to have received vivid religious impressions... Her precocity was extraordinary. Before she was sixteen she had determined to consecrate her life to God....
The fact that precociousness exists with respect to psychedelic powers as well as with other intellectual powers, in no way negates the Developmental Stage Theory, but is simply another example of the influence of reincarnation (in this case highly developed incarnations) breezing through a quick review of previously acquired abilities and skills (much as a review of formerly learned material brings it above the memory threshold again, while taking much less time than on the first learning). Indeed, the evidence that these powers obey the same psychological laws as high talents in music or mathematics (namely occasional extreme precocity) is merely another indication that they are all of the same ilk.
It is possible that one cannot properly understand reincarnation from the point of view of individual personality. Let us imagine the existence of a tutelary spirit interested in building a multipersonal or transpersonal corporate entity out of the incarnations of an allied group of persons, much as an ideal number is built out of a family of complex imaginaries. Such a tutelary deity would have the same relationship to individual incarnations as the entire coral has to a single coral cell.
Suppose intelligence of high order represents merit stored in genes from previous incarnations. This results in precocity and escalation into higher stages, which is like the "kicking-in" of overdrive in a powerful automobile with automatic transmission. In humans, such mystic experience is an intuition of the reference beam in the hologram model, in place of the virtual image of physical reality.
Spiritual cloning could then begin. The first step in this process would be the development of synchronous neurone EEG firing in the individual brain and then between individual brains, which would lead to telepathy and hence group order in some sort of depersonalization process.
This writer is certainly not the first to link genius and precocity with reincarnation. Consider the following from Johnson (1953:379):
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A special form of the previous argument concerns the appearance from time to time of infant prodigies. We have a Mozart or a Chopin composing symphonies of great musical maturity or playing an instrument with outstanding skill at an early age, when the teaching or environment are completely inadequate as explanations. We occasionally come across mathematical prodigies - mere boys who can perform elaborate mathematical operations without any adequate teaching or training. We are told of Sir William Hamilton, who started to learn Hebrew at the age of three, and 'at the age of seven he was pronounced by one of the Fellows of Trinity College, Dublin, to have shown a greater knowledge of the language than many candidates for a fellowship. At the age of thirteen he had acquired considerable knowledge of at least thirteen languages. Among these, beside the classical and the modern European languages, were included Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Hindustani and even Malay.... He wrote at the age of fourteen, a complimentary letter to the Persian ambassador who happened to visit Dublin; and the latter said he had not thought there was a man in Britain who could have written such a document in the Persian language.
'A relative of his says, 'I remember him a little boy of six, when he would answer a difficult mathematical question, and run off gaily to his little cart.' Dr. Brinkley (Astronomer Royal of Ireland) said of him at the age of eighteen, 'This young man, I do not say will be, but is, the first mathematician of his age'.2
Genius at an early age cannot be conveniently ignored because of its rarity. It calls for an explanation. By recognizing preexistence, we may reasonably suppose that such outstanding gifts represent an overflow into the present life of great prior achievement in particular fields. In this connection we may recall Plata's theory of Reminiscence: the view that knowledge we acquire easily is 'old' knowledge with which our enduring self has in a previous state of being been acquainted. On the other hand, knowledge which we find difficult to assimilate, or in which we lack interest, may be that which we meet for the first time. So, too, Intuition is possibly to be regarded as based on wisdom assimilated through the experience of past lives.
In his classic Human Personality and its Survival after Death, (1903), F. W. H. Myers (himself one) wrote a chapter on "Genius." In view of his interest in parapsychology, one would
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expect it to be impregnated with other-worldly concepts. We quote some excerpts (Myers 1961:74- 83):
When I say 'The differentia of genius lies in an increased control over subliminal mentation,' I express, I think, a well-evidenced thesis, and I suggest an important inference, namely, that the man of genius is for us the best type of the normal man, in so far as he effects a successful cooperation of an unusually large number of elements of his personality reaching a stage of integration slightly in advance of our own. Thus much I wish to say: but my thesis is not to be pushed further: as though I claimed that all our best thought was subliminal, or that all that was subliminal was potentially 'inspiration.'
The monitions of the Daemon of Socrates - the subliminal self of a man of transcendent genius - have in all probability been described to us with literal truth; and did in fact convey to that great philosopher precisely the kind of clairvoyant or precognitive information which forms the sensitive's privilege today. We have thus in Socrates the ideal unification of human powers.
It must, however, be admitted that such complete unification is not the general rule for men of genius; that their inspirations generally stop short of telepathy or of clairvoyance. I think we may explain this limitation somewhat as follows. The man of genius is what he is by virtue of possessing a readier communication than most men possess between his supraliminal and his subliminal self.
The present writer does not agree with Myers that easy access to the right hemisphere is the only necessity for genius; he does agree that it is the sufficient one. The genius must have the talents of the left hemisphere which enable him to make thorough preparation in some chosen area of expertise. Then he must be able to enter the Cave of Aladdin through right hemisphere excitation and its consequent imagery. It is the easy access to both these tasks in genius which raises the suspicion that it is mere rehearsal of a previously learned lesson.
When the sculptor Vigeland was commissioned to do a statue of the great Norwegian mathematician, Abel, he boldly discarded conventions of the past, and posed Abel naked upheld by two gigantic forms. Stang (1965:83) describes Vigeland's concept:
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The two wingless figures which carry Abel on his flight were termed genii by Vigeland. This vague concept, these genii, occurs constantly in the artist's works - only occasionally in the finished work, more frequently in the studies in the round, and repeatedly in the drawings. As a rule these genii are symbols of poetic inspiration, sometimes of germination and growth, and occasionally of ideas themselves.
Speaking of the same genius or daemon, Oliver Wendell Holmes in a Phi Beta Kappa paper at Harvard said in part:
The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping stones: how we get from one to the other, we do not know: something carries us; we do not take the step. A creating and informing spirit which is with us, and not of us, is recognized everywhere in real and in storied life. It is the Zeus that kindled the rage of Achilles: it is the muse of Homer; it is the Daimon of Socrates . . . it shaped the forms that filled the soul of Michelangelo when he saw the figure of the great Lawgiven in the yet unhewn marble... it comes to the least of us as a voice that will be heard; it tells us what we must believe; it frames our sentences; it lends a sudden gleam of sense or eloquence ... so that ... we wonder at ourselves, or rather not at ourselves, but at this divine visitor who chooses our brain as his dwelling place, and invests our naked thought with the purple of the kings of speech or song.
Sullivan (1927:124) discusses the microgenic and ontogenic aspects of evolution as seen in the life development of a genius (Beethoven):
The human consciousness is a developing thing. It is nourished and fructified by experience but there must be, in addition, an inner principle of growth. A marked increase of consciousness, so far as the human race as a whole is concerned, seems to take aeons to manifest itself. But great artists appear who possess a higher degree of consciousness than that enjoyed by the ordinary man. And amongst such artists are some whose growth in awareness, in sensibility, in power of coordination, is apparent during their lifetime.
Geniuses are also apt to escalate fully to the creative and psychedelic developmental stages (Gowan 1974:48ff) and this is perceived by Sullivan (in discussion of the Beethoven Quartets),
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as A new level of consciousness (Sullivan 1927:125):
The actual process of what we have called a growth of consciousness is extremely obscure. When we speak of a new synthesis of spiritual elements, whether these elements be emotions or states of awareness or whatever we choose to call them, we must remember that the synthesis corresponds to a definitely new state of consciousness and is not to be described by tabulating its elements.
Harding (1973:151) also echoes this "otherness" of the artist's genius:
To the creative artist, his art (or his genius) is like a non-personal creative spirit, almost a divine being, that lives and creates quite apart from his ego consciousness. While the creative urge is on him he feels lifted out of himself; he is exalted, inspired by a spirit breathing through him. What he portrays is not invented by himself; it comes to him he knows not whence.
Hirsch (1931:321-31) described certain personality traits of genius as "oversensitive and bashful, sincere but melancholy, requiring solitude, and valuing friendship."
Arieti (1976:340-1) in distinguishing between talent and genius quotes Hirsch (1931) and Shopenhauer:
Some authors have felt it advisable to stress again the difference between talent and genius or the highest degree of creativity. Talent is seen as an inborn characteristic that has to be cultivated in order to bring about (in some cases) genius or great creativity. In his book Genius and Creative Intelligence (1931), Nathaniel Hirsch discussed, among many other aspects of the problem, the difference between talent and genius. He wrote (pp. 288-289): 'Geniuses themselves ... know that they are not of the same breed as talented persons and are cognizant of greater differences in relation to the talented than to any other group, including the peasant and the prince, the insane and the imbecile. By inherent nature they are antagonistic: the genius creates, the man of talent improves; the genius intuits, the man of talent analyzes and explores; the genius aspires, his life goal is creativity; the talented are animated by ambition and their life goal is power; the genius is ever a stranger in a strange land, a momentary sojourner in a strange inter-
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lude; the talented are those for whom the earth is a paradise and social adjustment a natural and frictionless vocation. But the genius also has talent, and the development of his talent enables him to objectify his creativity and render it permanent. Genius with but little talent is like a great intellect with poor linguistic abilities; talent without genius is like a brilliant tongue attached to a feeble head.'
Hirsh quoted the philosopher Schopenhauer, who wrote, '. . . talent is an excellence which lies rather in the greater versatility and acuteness of discursive than of intuitive knowledge. He who is endowed with talent thinks more quickly and more correctly than others; but the genius beholds another world from them all, although only because he has a more profound perception of the world which lies before them also, in that it presents in his mind more objectively and consequently in greater purity and distinctness.' Hirsh seems to approve of the concept of genius to which Schopenhauer, himself a genius, adhered. In The World As Will and Idea (Vol. IIII, on Genius), Schopenhauer wrote that the fundamental characteristic of genius is to see the particular in the universal. I believe that implied in Schopenhauer's statement is the qualification 'when such insight is not apparent.' One such case would be that of Newton, as reported in Chapter II, who saw the falling apple as a particular of the universal 'body subjected to gravity.'
Hirsh also wrote (pp. 291-292), 'Another characteristic of genius, according to Schopenhauer, proceeding from their unique kind of knowing, is objectivity of the mind of the genius. This is natural, since their thinking is separated from the bodily inclination and subjective desires. The works of genius are produced by an inner or 'instinctive necessity'; genius never proceeds from intention or choice, nor from utility nor gain. For the genius, his works are an end, sufficient and necessary in themselves; for others a means. '
5.1) Genius and its Relationship to Precocity and Reincarnation
In a short section, it would be impossible to discuss fully the psychology of genius; other more eminent authors have taken whole books for that purpose. Our task in this limited space is to advance two particular arguments:
1) Genius is precocious, and this relationship has significance.
2) The behavior of geniuses indicates much more likelihood of "possession by genii" (i.e., easy right hemi-
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We shall attempt to forward this line of reasoning with examples of genius from history. Since precocity is particularly found in non-verbal areas of mathematics and music, many of our cases will be drawn from these areas.
Tyrrell (1946:30-36) in an admirable passage, gives examples of the amazing powers of genius, and then tries to explain them as the synergic operation of right hemisphere inspiration and hemisphere cognition:
Out of this treasure-house much else may come besides the gems of literature and music. Lord Kelvin had a power of divination. He had 'at times to devise explanations of that which had come to him in a flash of intuition.' 'Edison had 'a weird ability to guess correctly.' ' 'Reiser states that Einstein, when faced with a problem, has 'a definite vision of its possible solution.' ' Sir Francis Galton thought without the use of words: 'It is a serious drawback to me in writing,' he says, 'and still more in explaining myself, that I do not so easily think in words as otherwise. It often happens that after being hard at work and having arrived at results that are perfectly clear and satisfactory to myself, when I try to express them in language I feel that I must begin by putting myself upon quite another intellectual plane. I have to translate my thoughts into a language that does not run very evenly with them.' ' Here again consciousness figures, not as the originator of thought, but as its struggling exponent.
There have been men possessing extraordinary powers of grasping intuitively the result of a calculation. Bidder could determine mentally the logarithm of any number to seven or eight places, and could instantly give the factors of any large number. 'He could not,' he said, 'explain how he did this; it seemed a natural instinct with him.' Myers gives a list of thirteen such persons, two of whom were men of outstanding ability (Gauss and Ampere), three of high ability (including Bidder) and one, Dase, little better than an idiot. 'He (Dase) could not be made to have the least idea of a proposition in Euclid': yet he received a grant from the Academy of Sciences at Hamburg on the recommendation of Gauss, for mathematical work. In
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twelve years he compiled tables which would have occupied most men for a lifetime. It is interesting to observe that the powers of seven men out of this list persisted only for a few years.
F. W. H. Myers, in his excellent chapter on Genius in Human Personality, says that, to be genius, a work must satisfy two requirements. 'it must involve something original, spontaneous, unteachable, unexpected; and it must also in some way win for itself the admiration of mankind.'
Does genius, then, consist of the entry of something into consciousness from beyond the conscious threshold? That in part may be; but it is surely not in itself sufficient to constitute genius. Things may enter into consciousness from without which are not of a particularly admirable kind. Genius, on the other hand, has been defined by Carlyle as 'an infinite capacity for taking pains.' But taking pains will not by itself induce inspiration; it is more likely to kill it. What, then, constitutes genius? I suggest that it is the combination of the two at their best. First the idea must well into consciousness from without; then consciousness must labor to express it. This needs an 'infinite capacity for taking pains.' The technical ability must work on the inspiration. Technical skill alone can produce a flawless piece of work, but not true greatness. That comes from beyond. Yet that which comes from beyond, if bereft of worthy expression, is not great, though it may be suggestive of greatness. Perhaps Coleridge's Kubla Khan was an example of this latter. In genius, inspiration and intelligence are united.
Bell (1937:149) describes the astounding memory of the mathematician Euler:
All his life Euler had been blessed with a phenomenal memory. He knew Virgil's Aeneid by heart, and although he had seldom looked at the book since he was a youth, could always tell the first and last lines of any page of his copy. His memory was both visual and aural. He also had a prodigious power for mental calculation, not only of the arithmetical kind but also of the more difficult type demanded in higher algebra and the calculus. All the leading formulas of the whole range of mathematics as it existed in his day were accurately stowed away in his memory.
As one instance of his prowess, Condorcet tells how two of Euler's students had summed a complicated convergent series
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(for a particular value of the variable) to seventeen terms, only to swer was found to be correct.
Allison (Scientific American 66:276, 1892) tells of the mathematical prodigy Reuben Field:
Reuben Field is a native of La Fayette County, Missouri, a very strong, heavy set man, about forty-five years old. He never went to school, even a day, for the sole reason that he was always regarded an idiot. He can neither read nor write, and his reasoning powers have never developed beyond those of a child of the most ordinary intellect. In the face of these facts, however, he has the keenest perception of the relation of numbers and quantities, and is able, as if by instinct, to solve the most intricate mathematical problems. He does not know figures on a blackboard, but he understands them perfectly in his mind. No one has ever been able to 'catch him' in multiplication or in division. He has been given problems as 'The circumference of the earth is, in round numbers, 25,000 miles. How many flax seed, allowing twelve to the inch, will it require to reach around it?' Within a minute he returns the answer: 19,008,000,000. If the distance to the sun or to any of the planets is taken, he answers with as great ease. If given the day of the month and the year on which an event occurred, he instantly gives the day of the week. But what is yet more remarkable is that he can tell the time at any hour, day or night, without ever missing it even a minute. If awakened out of a deep sleep in the darkness of night, and asked the time, he gives it at once. Once in my office I asked him the time. He replied at once: 'Sixteen minutes after three.' In order to test him, I drew him off upon some other question, not letting him know my object, and when seventeen minutes had passed, I looked at my watch, and asked him the time. He said: 'Twenty-seven minutes to four.'
Scripture (American Journal of Psychology 4:1-59, 1891) describes the remarkable powers of some mathematicians:
It is much to be regretted that no adequate life of Gauss has yet been written; nevertheless, the story of his discoveries is too well known to need mention. We are here interested in his talent for calculation, for Gauss was not only a mathematical genius, --- he was also an arithmetical prodigy, and that, too, at an age much earlier than any of the others.
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An anecdote of his early life, told by himself, is as follows: His father was accustomed to pay his workmen at the end of the week, and to add on the pay for overtime, which was reckoned by the hour at a price in proportion to the daily wages. After the master had finished his calculations and was about to pay out the money, the boy, scarce three years old, who had followed unnoticed the acts of his father, raised himself and called in his childish voice: 'Father, the reckoning is wrong, it makes so much,' naming a certain number. The calculation was repeated with great attention, and to the astonishment of all it was found to be exactly as the little fellow had said.
At the age of nine Gauss entered the reckoning class of the town school. The teacher gave out an arithmetical series to be added. The words were scarcely spoken when Gauss threw his slate on the table, as was the custom, exclaiming, 'There it lies!' The other scholars continue their figuring while the master throws a pitying look on the youngest of the scholars. At the end of the hour the slates were examined; Gauss's had only one number on it, the correct result alone. At the age of ten he was ready to enter upon higher analysis. At fourteen he had become acquainted with the works of Euler and Lagrange, and had grasped the spirit and methods of Newton's Principia.
He was always distinguished for his power of reckoning, and was able to carry on difficult investigations and extensive numerical calculations with incredible ease.
Of Dirichlet it is said that he possessed an 'extraordinary power of memory, by means of which he had at every moment completely before him what he had previously thought and worked out.'
Euler had a prodigious memory for everything; this gave him the power of performing long mathematical operations in his head. While instructing his children, the extraction of roots obliged him to give them numbers which were squares; these he reckoned out in his head. Troubled by insomnia, one night he calculated the first six powers of all the numbers under 20, and recited them several days afterwards.
The Scientific American (66:230, 1892) gives account of the lightning calculator, Inaudi:
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Dr. Marcel Baudoin, who has submitted Inaudi to a special examination, describes the latter's astonishing operations in the following words:
We must now make known what extraordinary feats Inaudi is capable of performing. Standing upon the stage near the prompter's box, he turns his back to the blackboards placed in the rear of the stage, and upon which the manager writes the known quantities of the problems given, in order to permit the audience to take account of the calculations effected. With his hands crossed upon his chest, he listens with extreme attention to the question addressed to him, repeats it, and has it repeated, if necessary, until he understands it perfectly. He furnishes a correct solution almost immediately, without ceasing to look straight into the faces of the spectators, without writing anything (he never writes in calculating), and without being disturbed, whatever noise be made. Do you wish an example? He adds in a few seconds seven numbers of from eight to ten figures, and all this mentally, through means peculiar to him. He subtracts two numbers of twenty-one figures in a few minutes, and as quickly finds the square root or the cubic root of a number of from eight to twelve figures, if such number is a perfect square. It takes him a little more time when in this extraction of square or cubic roots there is a remainder. He finds, too, with incredible celerity, the sixth or seventh root of a number of several figures. He performs an example in division or multiplication in less time than it takes to state it. What is still more astonishing, an hour after performing all these mental operations, and after finding a solution of problems that are very difficult to solve by arithmetic, he recalls, with most remarkable precision, all the figures that he has had to operate upon.
Scripture (American Journal of Psychology 4:1-59, 1891) after a long review of mathematical prodigies, has this to say about their unique powers of right-hemisphere visualization:
Imagination. One peculiarity in the imaginative powers of the arithmetical prodigies is worthy of remark, namely their visual images. Bidder said, 'if I perform a sum mentally it always proceeds in a visible form in my mind; indeed, I can conceive of no other way possible of doing mental arithmetic.' This was a special case of his vivid imagination. He had the faculty of carrying about with him a vivid mental picture of the numbers, figures and diagrams with which he was occupied, so that he saw, as it were, on a slate the elements of the problem he was
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working. He had the capacity for seeing, as if photographed on his retina, the exact figures, whether arithmetical or geometrical, with which he was occupied at the time. This faculty was also inherited, but with a very remarkable difference. The younger Bidder thinks of each number in its own definite place in a number-form; when, however, he is occupied in multiplying together two large numbers, his mind is so engrossed in the operation that the idea of locality in the series for the moment sinks out of prominence. Is a number-form injurious to calculating powers? The father seems to have arranged and used his figures as he pleased; the son seems to be hindered by the tendency of the figures to take special places. It would be interesting to know if the grandchild, who possesses such a vivid imagination and in whom the calculating power is still further reduced, also possesses a number-form. The vivid, involuntary visualizing seems to indicate a lack of control over the imagination, which possibly extends to figures, and this perhaps makes the difference.
Colburn said that when making his calculations he saw them clearly before him. It is said of Buxton that he preserved the several processes of multiplying the multiplicand by each figure of the lower line in their relative order, and place as on paper until the final product was found. From this it is reasonable to suppose that he preserved a mental image of the sum before him.
Of the other calculators we have no reports. Children in general do their mental problems in this way. Taine relates of one, that he saw the numbers he was working with as if they had been written on a slate.
The well-known case of Goethe's phantom, the case of Petrie, who works out sums by aid of an imaginary sliding rule, the chess-players who do not see the board, etc., are instances of the power of producing vivid visual imaginations that can be altered at will.
Reed (1974:87-8) in The Psychology of Anomalous Experience, says:
As far as adults are concerned, there have been several studies published of 'memory men' and 'lightning calculators.' Some of these have examined the nature of the visual imagery which often facilitates the remarkable skills of such people. For example, the calculating virtuoso Salo Finkelstein was found to
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image key numbers and the results of certain calculations whilst he continued to calculate. He could hold these images long enough to refer back to them, thus leaving himself free to concentrate on further stages of calculation. The images could be evoked voluntarily over a period of hours. They were projected at a convenient reading distance from his eyes. But such images were not 'photographic,' for subsequent learning could adversely affect the accuracy of the image of earlier material (retroactive interference). Furthermore he did not acquire an image of visually presented material by any instant 'snap-shot.' He seems to have learned digits by actively organizing and interrelating them in certain practised combinations. Finally, his visual images did not take the form of the original presentations. They appeared to him as though written in chalk on a freshly washed blackboard in his own handwriting. The Russian mnemonist, S. V. Shereshevskii (,S'), utilized voluntary visual imagery as a basic method in his astonishing displays of recall over many years (Luria, 1969). The material imaged included not only series of digits and written material, but scenes and personal situations.
To balance the testimony, we now turn to verbatim statements of some of the greatest of modern musicians and composers. We are primarily interested in the mechanics of inspiration, and the process by which the right hemisphere receives the information. Since most of these nineteenth century composers were orthodox Christians, we must expect that their words will be clothed in religious forms.
Here is what Brahms says (Abell 1964:19-21):
To realize that we are one with the Creator as Beethoven did is a wonderful and awe-inspiring experience. Very few human beings ever come into that realization, and that is why there are so few great composers or creative geniuses. . . I always contemplate all this before commencing to compose. This is the first step. When I feel the urge I begin by appealing directly to my Maker ... I immediately feel vibrations which thrill my whole being ... In this exalted state I see clearly what is obscure in my ordinary moods; then I feel capable of drawing inspiration from above as Beethoven did. . . Those vibrations assume the form of distinct mental images... Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in the mind's eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration. Measure by
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measure the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare, inspired moods . . . I have to be in a semi-trance condition to get such results - a condition when the conscious mind is in temporary abeyance, and the subconscious is in control, for it is through the subconscious mind, which is a part of Omnipotence that the inspiration comes (lbid.:19-21).
R. Strauss in talking about two operas (Elektra and Rosenkavalier) (Abell: 1964:145-6) has this to say, comparing the two:
While the ideas were flowing in upon me - the entire musical, measure by measure, it seemed to me that I was dictated to by two wholly different Omnipotent Entities . . . I was definitely conscious of being aided by more than an earthly Power, and it was responsive to my determined suggestions. A firm belief in this Power must precede the ability to draw on it purposefully and intelligently . . . I know I can appropriate it to some extent . . . I can tell you from my own experience that an ardent desire and fixed purpose combined with intense resolve brings results. Determined concentrated thought is a tremendous force, and this Divine Power is responsive to it. I am convinced that this is a law, and it holds good in any line of human endeavor.
The great Puccini has much the same story to tell (Abell 1964:156):
The great secret of all creative geniuses is that they possess the power to appropriate the beauty, the wealth, the grandeur, and the sublimity within their own souls, which are a part of Omnipotence, and to communicate those riches to others. The conscious purposeful appropriation of one's own soulforces is the supreme secret . . . I first grasp the full power of the Ego within me. Then I feel the burning desire and intense resolve to create something worthwhile. This desire, this longing, implies in itself the knowledge that I can reach my goal. Then I make a fervent demand for and from the Power that created me. This demand or prayer must be coupled with full expectation that this higher aid will be granted me. This perfect faith opens the way for vibration to pass from the dynamo which the soul-center is, into my consciousness, and the inspired ideas are born . . . The music of this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public ...
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Here is the composer Humperdinck, quoting his friend, the even greater composer, Richard Wagner (Abell 1964:181-7):
I am convinced that there are universal currents of Divine Thought vibrating the ether everywhere and that anyone who can feel these vibrations is inspired provided he is conscious of the process and possesses the knowledge and skill to present them . . . I have very definite impressions while in the trancelike condition which is the prerequisite of all true creative effort. I feel that I am one with this vibrating Force, that it is omniscient, and that I can draw upon it to an extent that is limited only by my own capacity to do so . . . One supreme fact which I have discovered is that it is not will-power but fantasy-imagination that creates ... Imagination is the creative force ... imagination creates the reality.
Now we hear from none other than Mozart who says in a letter to a friend (quoted in Vernon 1970:55):
All this fires my soul and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream.
And finally, Tschaikowsky, from another letter (quoted in Vernon 1970:57-8):
Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly . . . It takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms. I cannot define the creative process in any other way than by this simile . . .It would be vain to try to put into words and immeasurable sense of bliss which comes over me directly a new idea awakens in me and begins to assume a definite form. I forget everything and behave like a madman; everything within me starts pulsing and quivering; hardly have I begun the sketch, ere one thought follows another. In the midst of this magic process, it frequently happens that some external interruption awakes me from my somnambulistic state ... dreadful indeed are such interruptions . . . they break the thread of inspiration ...
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Table I3 indicates some of the many commonalities in these remarkable testimonies. For most, it will be seen that the process of such high creativity consists of three phases:
(1) the prelude ritual, which may be conscious or unconscious, ending often with an invocation,
(2) the altered state of consciousness, or creative spell, during which the creative idea is born, starting with vibrations, then mental images, then the flow of ideas which are finally clothed in form. This syndrome often proceeds with extreme and uncanny rapidity in what is always referred to as a trance, dream, revery, somnambulistic state, or similar altered condition, and
(3) the postlude in which positive emotions about the experience suffuse the participant. Both Brahms and Puccini enjoined on Arthur Abell a wait of a half-century before this testimony could be published, so sacred and private did they feel this revelation to be.
Let us analyze the initial effect experienced in the altered state of consciousness. It is vibrations, (the very word is used by Brahms, Puccini, and Wagner, while Tschaikowsky speaks of "pulsing and quivering"). For anyone familiar with physics, vibrations immediately suggests a resonance effect. (We all know how through sympathetic vibrations, that a depressed silent piano key will begin to sound when that exact pitch is played on another nearby instrument.) "Being in tune with the Infinite" may be more than a mere religious figure of speech of yesteryear. For the nearest modern physical model is that of a radio receiver, which, when tuned to the exact wavelength of the sending station, can amplify and recover sound made miles away. Resonance effects are also playing an important part in the development of recent particle physics, so it is clear that these statements of creative composers have guided us to an important behavioral science principle completely congruent with physical science models.
Let us now examine the function of very high intelligence in furthering this creative afflatus. The following are some speculations which need to be verified by future research:
1 ) High intelligence may be necessary for the energy and amplification necessary to receive the signal at all; this would correspond to the power aspects of a radio receiver.
2) High intelligence may be necessary for the ability to translate the vibrations into images and then to musical
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notation. This would correspond to the high fidelity aspects of the receiver.
3) High intelligence may be necessary for the intuitive leaps by which creative geniuses reach fully formed conclusions.
4) High intelligence is necessary for storing the memory bank with the words, notes, and numbers which can be actuated by the flash of inspiration.
Nowhere else is precocity found so abundantly as in music. Indeed, Fisher (1973) devoted an entire book to this subject alone, listing several hundred who acquired fame for composing or performance before their majority, and sometimes in childhood. We learn (p. 17) that Handel was considered "a first-rate musician at the age of fifteen," that Mozart (p. 19) "at the age of eight played in London." Of his performance Bach declared, "it surpasses all understanding." Mozart composed operettas before eleven, and at fourteen was admitted to two Philharmonic Academies. Schubert (p. 20) had a precocity which "would be incredible were it not verified by many of his contemporaries." He produced over 250 songs when seventeen and eighteen while holding a full-time job. In the case of Mendelssohn (p. 27), "By twelve his output included piano trios, a violin and piano sonata, quartets, fugues, motets, symphonies, operettas and a cantata." Paganini (p. 37) wrote his first sonata at eight and made his violin debut at nine. Liszt (p. 43) at the age of nineteen "was already a famous prodigy pianist and composer." Rubenstein (p. 46) made his debut at nine. These are only a few of the more famous musical prodigies.
We are fortunate to have a modern researcher who specializes in case histories of geniuses - Kathleen Montour (cf Stanley, George and Solano, Eds. 1978). We quote from Montour's account of two such who died young (1978:68ff):
The Histories of
Chatterton and Galois
Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol, England on November 20, 1752, a few months after his schoolmaster father had died and left his widowed mother to raise her impoverished family alone. Hardly any other fatherless boy from such poverty could have managed the success he did, but from the age of five Thomas had pride and ambition to exceed the expecta-
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tions of his class. Above all he had a burning need to earn recognition of his superiority. This was not satisfied during his brief stay on earth, but how many boys who died in a London slum before their eighteenth birthday were lauded by Dr. Johnson, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats?
At age four Thomas was called a confirmed dullard until some brightly colored capitals in one of his father's folios caught his eye and he was willing to learn his letters. His mother, realizing her son's distaste for primers, taught him to read with a blackletter Bible whose medieval script awakened in him an enduring love for antiquity. The former dullard, who Cox estimated had a childhood IQ of 170 (Cox, 1926, p. 663), now read continuously until bedtime. When he was eight he was sent to a charity school, Colston's Hospital, whose monkish blue uniform delighted the little antiquarian. But the school's rudimentary curriculum had been conceived to instill conformity and was entirely unsuitable for Thomas. He was not taught the classics or Latin and Greek, so he could never qualify to enter a university, which was impossible anyway since Colston's did not even supply scholarships. The little Bristolian supplemented this dry regimen by spending his pocket money to borrow books; between the ages of ten and eleven Thomas read at least seventy books on theology, philosophy, divinity, and history, not the usual boyish fare. By now his Muse, versifying, had seized him. When he was ten years and two months old his first little poem, piously entitled The Last Epiphany, appeared in Felix Farley's Journal. Some more religious verses of his were accepted by the Bristol newspaper. By the time the boy poet was eleven he was also writing satires.
When he was fourteen Thomas was apprenticed to a scrivener, condemned to spend his days copying documents instead of writing poetry. For all his talent and charm, the lowly apprentice knew that the gentry would not accept at its real worth poetry coming from a boy of his station. So he invented the fifteenth century poet-priest T. Rowley and presented as the work of Rowley his own production ingeniously disguised by elaborate forgery. He searched for a patron who would bring him quick wealth and acclaim but got nowhere. A group of Bristol men brought the clever youth into their society, lending him books and giving him stimulating company, but they exploited him by taking his 'Rowleys' for a fraction of their value. In retaliation Thomas published stinging satiric poems attacking their personalities. Having alienated the locals, he tried to interest Horace Walpole by corresponding with the famous critic and sending him Rowleys. The vain aristocrat
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was flattered and praised Thomas' efforts until the boy confessed he was only a poor sixteen-year-old apprentice, whereupon Walpole dropped him flat. Walpole was also stung by Thomas' poetic barbs. The latter thought his situation so grim that suicide seemed to be the only escape from his dismal surroundings. Twice Thomas left suicide notes lying about to be found. His master, Lambert, fearing a scandal, let Thomas out of his indenture. The boy was glad to win his freedom from Lambert, who had the effrontery to treat the haughty boy like a servant.
Much of the teen-aged author's writings were published in many London journals, for which he got little remuneration but many promises. With this encouragement and borrowed money he set off there to make his fortune. Initially, the great city was very receptive. For the first time in his life Thomas had his own money and could send presents back home to his doting family. The people with whom he mingled were more exciting than any he had known in Bristol. He had contacts with influential political editors and was even acquainted with Lord Mayor Beckford, the liberal hero of London. But the political winds changed and his publishers were imprisoned. Things got steadily worse. Beckford died suddenly. Thomas was not paid money owed him for his writing, so he could not pay his small but insurmountable debts. His last hope was that his Bristol surgeon friend, William Barrett, would recommend him as a ship's doctor because of his small knowledge of medicine, but Barrett refused to help him. Thomas had nowhere else to turn, and everything had gone wrong. In his last few days with no money for food, he was actually starving. He was still seventeen when he took his own life with arsenic.
Galois
Evariste Galois had a more secure start, but he came to know as much hardship as his English literary counterpart. He was born to the comfortable life of an upper-middle-class major's son on October 25, 1811 in Bourg-la-Reine, a town near Paris. He too had pride, ambition, and a sense of superiority like Chatterton's, but he also inherited political fervor and hatred of injustice from his parents. These qualities would ultimately lead to his undoing, as they had for Chatterton.
Evariste's educational picture was bright in the beginning, but only briefly. Until he was twelve he was educated at home by his mother, a woman with an excellent classical education. Then he was sent to the Lycee Louis-le-Grande in Paris. At
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first a good dutiful student who took all the prizes, he changed when he saw real tyranny for the first time as the school director mercilessly put down a student revolt. The boy was embittered against authority for good. But it was the awakening of his mathematical genius that was the greatest influence on his life.
His first exposure to mathematical writing was not just any ordinary text, but Legendre's elegant geometry. It took good students two years to master Legende but he read it from cover to cover as easily as a novel. With Legendre under his belt young Galois could not be satisfied with mere schoolbooks from which to learn algebra, so he read the original works of the best mathematicians of France. By the time he was fourteen he had mastered algebra at the level of a mature mathematician while his peers plodded along at the basics. His teacher, Richard, who had given France some of its best mathematicians, realized that the brilliant young pupil's thought inhabited the highest reaches of mathematics, but his other teachers demanded the youth comply with a curriculum he rightly viewed as inadequate for him. Instead of giving him the freedom to explore mathematics, they piled more and more onerous tasks on the recalcitrant youth.
The rebellious lad knew there was only one place where he belonged, the famous Ecole Polytechnique; not only would it serve his gifts, but also his politics, for the Polytechnique was a hotbed of republican sentiment. Galois had already made significant mathematical discoveries by the time he was seventeen, and on March 1, 1829 had published in the Annales de Mathematiques his first paper 'dealing with hitherto unprojected problems in equations' (Davidson, 1939, p. 97), so no one deserved to be there more than Evariste did. But because of his quirk for working mentally, he made a poor showing on the entrance examination, failing it twice and was never allowed in. Even more frustration buffeted the poor boy. Twice his submissions to the Academy of Sciences were carelessly lost by the referees, the great mathematicians Cauchy and Fourier. To the boy who was already beside himself by not winning recognition, it must have seemed like a conspiracy to keep him down. Then his father committed suicide over something his political enemies did to him. Following the Revolution of 1830 Evariste's sharp pen got him expelled from the university after only two semesters. He tried to support himself by giving private lessons on what are now considered important ideas in algebraic theory but got no takers then. His last desperate attempt to receive his due in mathematics from the Academy
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was returned by the famous mathematician Poisson with the comment 'incomprehensible'; it is now Galois theory, or the general solution of equations. He had had enough from hated academicians and society in general. Feeling oppressed because his mathematical genius was unappreciated, he turned away from it and devoted his energy to radical politics instead.
Though after his death he earned lasting repute for his mathematics, during his life Evariste received more acclaim as a patriot than he ever did as a mathematician. At the time he wrote the memoir rejected by Poisson he was a member of the artillery of the National Guard, which called itself the 'Friends of the People.' He was arrested twice, once for threatening the king and another time on a trumped-up charge. It was only on the second charge that he was actually put in prison, but the government now regarded him as a dangerous revolutionary. His short stay in prison was highly traumatic for the proud, sensitive youth. After his release he had an affair with a low woman who disillusioned him with love. Unfortunately, it was also a part of a plot to lure Evariste, frail and nearsighted, into a duel against two men. Knowing he would lose, Galois frantically scribbled down his ideas so that future mathematicians might decipher this issue of his desperation and allow them to survive him. The next day the young duelist, wounded in the intestines and left to die in a field, was found and brought to a hospital. There he died of peritonitis on May 31, 1832. A few days after the twenty-year-old youth had succumbed, Evariste Galois was given a heroic funeral for his patriotism, his genius overlooked by the mourners. The life of this tormented pioneer of algebraic theory was so brief that the work he left behind amounted to only sixty-one pages.
Montour (1976:173ff) also followed up three precocious modern youths in an article from which we quote:
History and biography are bountiful resources of precocity for this purpose. Catharine Cox's The Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses (Cox, 1926), revealed that a number of historical figures had dramatically shortened their academic training (even by early standards), thereby becoming able to start their careers much sooner. Paul Dudley, who according to Sibley was the youngest person to enter Harvard College (at age ten), received his A. B. degree at age fourteen in 1660 and went on to become a prominent jurist in colonial Massachusetts (Shipton, 1933). John Trumbull, the Early American lawyer-poet who authored M. Fingal and the Progress of Dulness, passed the entrance examination to Yale College when he was
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seven and a half but waited until he was thirteen before he entered. He remained there as a student, then as the recipient of a bachelor's degree, and after that, as a tutor for nine years (Bowden, 1962). Verrill Kenneth Wolfe, the modern counterpart of Dudley and Trumbull, graduated from Yale College in 1945 at the age of fourteen. He majored in music at Yale and spent seven more years studying it after graduation before entering medical school. He is now a professor of neuroanatomy at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
In more recent times we have seen the likes of three other remarkable men who entered college notably young and began to make their marks early in life because of it. The late Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, graduated from Tufts College at fourteen and wrote a book about his early life as a child prodigy called Ex-Prodigy (Wiener, 1953). A. A. Berle, Jr., Secretary of State under Franklin D. Roosevelt, entered Harvard College at age fourteen and graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, - also as precocious. Robert B. Woodward, the Nobel prize-winning chemist, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of nineteen in 1936 and was awarded his Ph.D. the very next year.
Three Examples of Verbal Precocity from 1920
An article published in the Literary Digest (November 13, 1920) provided the most finds when it came to tracing the typical grown-up 'child genius.' It gave the names of three boys who entered Harvard and Columbia while still rather young and who are still alive in 1975. 1 was able to ascertain what became of all three. It was possible to interview one man personally when he was on the Hopkins campus. Another has corresponded with me a few times. In the case of the third man, Who's Who in America contains an extensive listing on how his career has progressed.
L, Now a Physician
The first man, L., was twelve years old when he passed the Harvard entrance examinations and fourteen when he was admitted. At age three he was fluent in German and English, could read anything put before him in either language, and could answer questions about what he read. When he entered the first grade at age six he suffered the not uncommon fate of the advanced gifted child: the teacher did not realize that L could already read and more. His situation was finally improved only after he was seen by his teacher reading a newspaper in his father's office. During the months after that incident he
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was promoted until he was placed at his proper level in the fourth grade. He entered high school when he was about nine.
L's ambition right from childhood was to become a professor of classical languages. As a pre-schooler he began to teach himself Latin by translating books from Latin and back again, then comparing his versions with original Latin sources. When he entered the first grade he knew as much Latin as the average college sophomore did. In the same way he taught himself Greek and could compose Greek poetry by the time he reached high school.
M, Now a Professor
L's fellow underage member of the Harvard Class of 1924 is now a professor of classics at the University of California at Los Angeles. M was fifteen when he entered Harvard. He did this by skipping two grammar school grades and by telescoping his high school years from four years to three by carrying an extra load. He got his A. B. degree when he was eighteen, his M.A. at nineteen, and his Ph.D. at twenty-one in 1927. That year he became a member of the UCLA faculty, but his promotions came at an unusually slow rate because, beyond coauthoring two books, he did not publish much. This was probably due to his overwhelming interest in music, rather than teaching, research, or other professional concerns. He was made a full professor at age sixty-five.
Though he makes claims to be the contrary, M is an impressive letter writer and has made to me what seems to be very astute observations regarding success. He credits his 'family background of unstinting encouragement and sympathetic tastes' as an immeasurable asset to intellectual endowment, which the unfortunate L never enjoyed. He also mentions that gifted persons still face the fight 'to obtain a living, sometimes at the cost of unremunerative 'talents'.' M himself decided to defer to his all-exclusive interest in music, which was apparent from his early youth, over professional consideration.
Hollingworth's Child E, Now Dean of a College at Cambridge University
E, the third person in the article, was a man who was able to combine both a 'favorable background' and the right compromise of his 'unremunerative talent,' serving as proof of the validity of M's formula for success. In a book entirely devoted to children with IQ's over 180, Hollingworth (1942, pp. 134-158) recorded the details of his life as the case history of Child E. He was enrolled at Columbia University in 1920 at age twelve.
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Having been elected to membership in the Phi Beta Kappa Society, he graduated in 1923 at age fourteen. Shortly after his A.B. (which took him only three years), he earned more degrees; his master's degree from Columbia in 1924; his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1931; Master of Sacred Theology, General Theological Seminary, 1933 and 1934; and an honorary Doctorate of Sacred Theology degree in 1956 from General Theological Seminary. In 1969 he received an M.A. from Cambridge University.
E's parents took great pains to provide their unusual son with special educational advantages, including a trip to Denver in 1918 to witness a solar eclipse. His father wanted his son to enter Harvard and his mother favored New York University, but both allowed their son to go on to Columbia, his own choice. In turn, E became a minister in the Episcopal Church, his mother's fondest wish for him. By this move, E might have done a disservice to his visible creativity, but he found an outlet for it in his work as a theological scholar on such topics as Byzantine Egypt. His entry in Who's Who in America contains a long list of publications. In 1969 E was a lecturer in Divinity at Cambridge. Today he is Dean of Chapel of Cambridge's Jesus College, a position he has held since 1972.
Emerson like Jefferson believed in a natural aristocracy of intellect in "Politics and Society" (Miller 1967:286-307). Discussing "the permanent traits of the aristocracy" he called them "model men," "true pictures of excellence," and "living standards" (ibid:287). This caste is "not a man of rank, but a man of honor" - a gentleman. Speaking of "the terrible aristocracy that is in nature," he states (ibid:290): "I affirm that inequalities exist not in costume, but in powers of expression and action." He also declares (p. 291 ), "The existence of an upper class is not injurious as long as it is dependent on merit." Then he gives his prescription by which men may be recognized to enter this "superior class" (p. 292-8):
1 ) "a commanding talent" (which is used as with inventors to benefit all.)
2) "genius ... the power to affect the imagination." These powers "raise men above themselves," the first example of which is eloquence.
3) "elevation of sentiment, refining and inspiring manners."
From all this it is clear that Emerson viewed aristocracy of intellect as made up of three components, talent, eloquence, and moral
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ascendency. His definition of genius as eloquence is somewhat strange to our ears, although "power to affect the imagination" speaks to empery over right hemisphere functions of imagery and the like, and coincides from at least one point of view with Socrates' definition of his genius or daemon, as a familiar and benevolent attendant spirit.
5.2) Precocity as the End Product of Foetalization or Neoteny
If a "genius is a forerunner," is it possible the precocity in genius is an ontogenic earnest of neoteny in the species? We know that the evolution of human beings has telescoped the latter part of primate life in favor of a stretching out of the adolescent part. In work elsewhere (Gowan 1972:91-5) it was said:
"Man represents a unique combination of an animal base and a consciousness which soars to the stars. Nature produced him by a process which Bolk (1926) called the 'foetalization of the ape.' This involved an enlargement of the immature phase of primate development and its more prominent emphasis in the life span which made possible new and increased opportunities for complex learning and experience. Foetalization in man, then, describes a stretching out of the docile learning period into a larger proportion of the whole life span. During this plastic dependency and apprenticeship, mammalian family life and play extended conditioning and more complex learnings into developmental changes which transformed the primate into a human being.
"In all humans, this lengthened span of immaturity which reaches into the first three decades is devoted to learning and education, and hopefully to creative performance, before man becomes in senility more like an old ape - taciturn, solitary, hairy and immobile. Through foetalization, evolution provides opportunity for man to develop a creative mind before he degenerates into a reactive ape-like creature. Man, of course, does not become an ape, but without stimulation of his higher faculties, he, too, may experience premature senility (like the ape at an earlier age).
"Human beings often feel that they are the final and perfect product of evolution, which has somehow ceased with the production of this masterpiece. There is no reason to believe, however, that the forces of evolution are no longer in operation. Evidence of this continuation may be seen in differences between superior
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and more average individuals in any society, for the life style of the superior individual points the directional thrust of evolutionary progress for all mankind. Nature seems to have granted superior youth a little more time in the foetalization process and to have placed more emphasis on this period. In consequence, such fortunate individuals tend to have a youthful aspect, even in maturity.
"Furthermore, bright young males go through a process of continued foetalization which makes them appear younger and less mature (viewed in relation to their own ultimate growth and attainments) than more average youth. The Kinsey and Pomeroy study (1948) was one of the first to report this in regard to differential sexual practices, but such differences may well extend to other aspects of human behavior.
"Nature has also favored the superior youth by giving him more 'peak' to shoot at. In other words, because of the increased range of development for him, he is longer in the process of getting there, and being longer in process, he reaps the multiple benefits of that process. A third advantage results from individual efforts made by persons themselves, while in process of growth, to create new experiences and responses, preventing them from a premature atrophy into an unself-actualized old age. These efforts are interactions with the environment and are not concerned (as are the previous) with hereditary or genotypic characteristics.
"Perhaps it is desirable again to emphasize that foetalization is not feminization, but a process of slowing up of aging in superior males. It does not refer to effeminacy or to homosexuality. Superior male adults evidence a youthful quality which preserves their verbal ability, creative power, and dynamic process. John F. Kennedy represents a good example of this process which gave him a youthful vitality when he was actually in middle age. He is also a good example of male heterosexuality.
"It is possible that W. T. Sheldon came as near as anyone to identifying this quality when he talked about the 't-component' (1949, p. 21 ). He calls it 'the component of thorobredness' or 'the physical quality of the animal,' and he distinguishes it from gynandromorphy (or having a female type figure). This index of 'tissue fineness' has a psychological correlate in the 'occupational level' scale of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank. Males high in
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intelligence or the professions tend to show feminine interests (and females show the opposite). Indeed Walberg (1969), in a study entitled Physics, Femininity, and Creativity, traces the interesting relationship between these variables.
"We know that the relationship between an abnormal (XYY) chromosome male and the average (XY) male is that the latter compared with the former is brighter, more docile, more social and less destructive. Can we not extrapolate that the relationship between the average male and the superior individual is at least a small continuance of the same process, so that the latter becomes brighter, more docile, more social, and less destructive (more creative)?
"Indeed, it is remarkable that in many creative men, one finds a conscious attempt to explore 'feminine' interests and to gain the 'balance' and 'receptivity' which psychological femininity adds to the individual's powers. Interestingly enough, no less a person than Erikson studies this very facet in the heroic life of Gandhi (1969). Gandhi, as revealed by Erikson's psychoanalytic biography, deliberately sought to 'mother' his parents and early in life to assume nurturance of others. This in-depth analysis of a modern saint makes fascinating reading because of its uncovering of the developmental process and the conscious effort at feminization in Gandhi's life. (Our cultural values force us to regard this process as 'feminization,' but actually full paternity in the generativity stage involves nurturance, 'succorance' and other gentle virtues toward one's children which are undervalued or underemphasized in our violence-prone culture so that we regard expression of them as somehow 'feminine.')
"Some aspects of Gandhi's childhood and parental relations, as revealed by Erikson, provide a picture of a bright, precocious and creative child who early assumed a protective relationship toward others. Especially significant to Erikson are Gandhi's relationships with his mother and father. The close mother-son bond, often seen in creative men, is found here, but the specific trend in Gandhi's life appears to have evolved out of his special attachment-ambivalence toward his father whom, Erikson suggests, Gandhi sought to 'redeem.'
"Surely this process, for which we have used the somewhat inappropriate words 'foetalization' and 'feminization' (because no
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better ones exist), is far more a positive integration and summation of both sexual roles rather than a regression toward effeminacy or homosexuality. It is seen in the peculiar and concomitant relationships which such men have with their fathers - as that of equal. It is as if they wish to become their own fathers or to redeem the father. Thus Erikson says of Gandhi (1969, p. 102): 'The child is the father of the man makes new, special, and particular sense for special men; they indeed have (i.e.) become their own fathers, and in a way their father's fathers while not yet adult.' "
A similar idea was echoed by Professor Sylvester in a presidential address to the British Mathematical Association in 1869 as quoted by Bell (1937:405):
There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than mathematics ... or . . . seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being . . . The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of the soul do not drop early off, nor do its pores become clogged with the earthy particles blown from the dusty highway of life.
We are here dealing with profound issues, which are not easy to understand fully. Let us recapitulate the effects seen in male geniuses, (we omit the females out of ignorance, not prejudice). We find a higher level of neoteny than the average, an increased youthfulness, more evidence of the "t- component" in the body, a certain "feminization" of interests, more nurturance and compassion, a more balanced character structure. Is it not possible that all these effects are derivatives of a long series of incarnations, which has mellowed and smoothed the psyche like oak charcoal smooths out Bourbon Whisky? (The increased feminization could be caused by the input of feminine incarnations.) If we look at the phrase "gifted children," we are talking about "gifts" (i.e. something, not earned, at least in this life). Is there not some presumption that these gifts may have accumulated from merit acquired somewhere else?
Let us now turn from these fanciful speculations to more solid research.
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Cartmill, in a scholarly review (Science 199:1194-5) 1978 of S. J. Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny says in part:
In the second half of the book, Gould lays out his own ideas about ontogeny and phylogeny, which represent an exceptional creative synthesis of developmental biology and ecological theory. He begins by drawing a fundamental distinction between somatic growth and reproductive maturation. When the former is accelerated relative to the latter, ontogenetic trends are continued further in the descendant than in the ancestor, and recapitulation results; if the absolute time from conception to maturation stays constant, we get Haeckelian recapitulation by terminal addition and condensation. Evolutionary change that speeds up reproductive maturation relative to somatic growth produces the opposite result, pedomorphosis - that is, an adult descendant that looks like a juvenile ancestor. Gould is mainly interested in pedomorphosis, and he distinguishes two processes that yield it: progenesis (absolute acceleration of maturation, without comparable acceleration in somatic growth) and neoteny (retardation of growth without comparable retarded reproductive maturation).
The conclusion of the book, in which Gould tries to revive Bolk's theory that people are neotenic apes, is less convincing. Somatic growth in Homo, Gould notes, is both absolutely and relatively retarded compared to that of apes, and we retain into adulthood the short faces, bulging brain cases, hairless skins, and slender erect necks of fetal apes. Gould accounts for all this by showing that fetal rates of brain growth, facial elongation, and so on continue far longer after birth in Homo that in other anthropoids.
Gould acknowledges that some of man's distinctive traits cannot be explained by invoking neoteny, but argues that most of the standard counter-examples to Bolk's theory can be analyzed as effects of retarded somatic development.
In a carefully controlled study Keating (1976:90, 98) found:
The bright group evidenced formal operations far more frequently than the average groups of the same age. Thus the
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major finding was that brightness, psychometrically defined, implies cognitive developmental precocity within the stage theory of Piaget.
He summarizes (ibid.:98):
This research again confirms the empirical relationship of brightness and precocity and does so across differing traditions. Although it can offer no explanation of this relationship, it does allow for speculation on the topic. It seems that brightness leads to precocity.
Cohn (1979:317) notes the relationship between genius and precocity:
The argument that individuals experience different rates of intellectual development has been well established in the 20th century. Recently, Keating (1976) has shown that . . . 'brightness as measured by psychometric testing implies developmental precocity in reasoning.' 'Students . . . selected for high scores on psychometric tests . . . are indeed precocious in cognitive development, and not just good 'test-takers.' He adds: 'Since, according to Piaget, cognitive development proceeds as an interaction of the organism and the environment, the brighter individual would be at an advantage moving through the successive stages more quickly.' In addition, Keating's work (pp. 97- 98) suggests that such acceleration should occur within developmental stages, such as concrete operations or formal operations, rather than across stages.
We should not conclude this section without giving a few examples of precocity in different areas.
Underhill (1960:77) describes the psychic precocity of St. Hildegarde:
During childhood and adolescence she had constant interior visions and premonitions of the future, accompanied by much ill-health. Before dismissing these stories as absurdities we should remember that her career proves her a woman of genius; and that such spiritual and psychical precocity undoubtedly exists, and is the raw material from which a certain sort of mysticism may develop. A long series of instances, from the call of Samuel to that of Florence Nightingale (visited by an imperative sense of vocation when six years old),
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warns us that we are far from understanding the conditions underlying human greatness.
Hildegarde's account of her visions is unsensational and exact. They were pictures, she says, seen within the mind, 'neither in dream, sleep, nor any frenzy,' involving no hallucination and never interfering with her outward sight.
Another testimony to a child's ability to see through the sensory hologram is found in Wilson (1971:537):
In Man's Latent Powers (1938), Phoebe Payne describes the 'psychic aura' of living things: 'I remember well that as a tiny child my absorbing interest in flowers was due not only to their beauty, but to the curiosity of 'watching their wheels go round' in the form of their different emanations, some of which showed as a fuzz of luminous mist, while others radiated in a shower of minute sparks or 'prickles,' and I soon learned to associate a 'nice smell' with a flower from which there rose a column of silvery smoke. In the same way, my delight in playing with any kind of animal was partly caused by the fun of experimenting with different effects produced by tickling or clutching at the responsive 'something' with which it was surrounded. Throughout my early years I was unaware that not everyone experienced such contacts.'
Bell (1937:340ff) tells us of the precociousness of the Irish genius, W. R. Hamilton:
The tale of Hamilton's infantile accomplishments reads like a bad romance, but it is true: at three he was a superior reader of English and was considerably advanced in arithmetic; at four he was a good geographer; at five he read and translated Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and loved to recite yards of Dryden, Collins, Milton, and Homer - the last in Greek; at eight he added a mastery of Italian and French to his collection and extemporized fluently in Latin, expressing his unaffected delight at the beauty of the Irish scene in Latin hexameters when plain English prose offered too plebeian a vent for his nobly exalted sentiments; and finally, before he was ten he had laid a firm foundation for his extraordinary scholarship in oriental languages by beginning Arabic and Sanskrit.
The tally of Hamilton's languages is not yet complete. When William was three months under ten years old his uncle reports that 'His thirst for the Oriental languages is unabated. He is
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now master of most, indeed of all except the minor and comparatively provincial ones. The Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic are about to be confirmed by the superior and intimate acquaintance with the Sanskrit, in which he is already a proficient. The Chaldee and Syriac he is grounded in, also the Hindoostanee, Malay, Mahratta, Bengali, and others. He is about to commence the Chinese, but the difficulty of procuring books is very great. It cost me a large sum to supply him from London, but I hope the money was well expended.' To which we can only throw up our hands and ejaculate Good God! What was the sense of it all?
By thirteen William was able to brag that he had mastered one language for each year he had lived. At fourteen he composed a flowery welcome in Persian to the Persian Ambassador, then visiting Dublin, and had it transmitted to the astonished potentate.
On July 7, 1823, young Hamilton passed, easily first out of one hundred candidates, into Trinity College. His fame had preceded him, and as was only to be expected, he quickly became a celebrity; indeed his classical and mathematical prowess, while he was yet an undergraduate, excited the curiosity of academic circles in England.
Myers (1961:76-7) gives two examples of arithmetical prodigies:
I shall now endeavor, in response to your request, to give some account of my late brother Benjamin's faculty of arithmetical calculation. My brother very early manifested a marvelous power of mental calculation. When almost exactly six years of age Benjamin was walking with his father before breakfast, when he said, 'Papa, at what hour was I born?' He was told four A.M.
Ben - 'What o'clock is it at present?'
Ans. -'Seven fifty A.M.'
The child walked on a few hundred yards, then turned to his father and stated the number of seconds he had lived. My father noted down the figures, made the calculation when he got home, and told Ben he was 172,800 seconds wrong, to which he got a ready reply: 'No, papa, you have left out two days for the leap years - 1820 and 1824, ' which was the case.
In the year 1837 Vito Mangiamele, who gave his age as 10
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years and 4 months, presented himself before Arago in Paris. He was the son of a shepherd of Sicily, who was not able to give his son any instruction. By chance it was discovered that by methods peculiar to himself he resolved problems that seemed at the first view to require extended mathematical knowledge. In the presence of the Academy Arago proposed the following questions: 'What is the cubic root of 3,796,416?' In the space of about half a minute the child responded 156, which is correct. 'What satisfies the condition that its cube plus five times its square is equal to 42 times itself increased by 40?' Everybody understands that this is a demand for the root of the equation x 3 + 5x 2 - 4 2x - 40 = 0. In less than a minute Vito responded that 5 satisfied the condition; which is correct. The third question related to the solution of the equation x5 - 4x - 16779 = 0. This time the child remained four to five minutes without answering: finally he demanded with some hesitation if 3 would not be the solution desired. The secretary having informed him that he was wrong, Vito, a few moments afterwards, gave the number 7 as the true solution. Having finally been requested to extract the 10th root of 282,475,249 Vito found in a short time that the root is 7.
Bell (11937:221 ) describes the precocity of the mathematician Gauss who, before he was three, corrected his father:
One Saturday Gerhard Gauss was making out the weekly payroll for the laborers under his charge, unaware that his young son was following the proceedings with critical attention. Coming to the end of his long computations, Gerhard was startled to hear the little boy pipe up, 'Father, the reckoning is wrong, it should be . . . .' A check of the account showed that the figure named by Gauss was correct.
Before this the boy had teased the pronunciations of the letters of the alphabet out of his parents and their friends and had taught himself to read. Nobody had shown him anything about arithmetic, although presumably he had picked up the meaning of the digits 1, 2.... along with the alphabet. In later life he loved to joke that he knew how to reckon before he could talk. A prodigious power for involved mental calculations remained with him all his life.
Scripture (American Journal of Psychology 4:1-59, 1891) describes the precocity of the French electrical savant, Ampere:
Ampere.---The first talent shown by Andre Marie Ampere, 1775, at Lyon, 1836, at Marseilles, was for arithmetic. While
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still a child, knowing nothing of figures, he was seen to carry on long calculations by means of pebbles. To illustrate to what an extraordinary degree the love of calculation had seized upon the child, it is related that being deprived of his pebbles during a serious illness, he supplied their places with pieces of a biscuit which had been allowed him after three days strict diet.
As soon as he could read he devoured every book that fell into his hands. His father allowed him to follow his own inclination and contented himself with furnishing him the necessary books. History, travels, poetry, romances and philosophy interested him almost equally. His principal study was the encyclopedia in alphabetical order, in twenty volumes folio, each volume separately in its proper order. This colossal work was completely and deeply engraved on his mind. 'His mysterious and wonderful memory, however, astonishes me a thousand times less than that force united to flexibility which enables the mind to assimilate without confusion, after reading in alphabetical order matter so astonishingly varied.' Half a century afterwards he would repeat with perfect accuracy long passages from the encyclopedia relating to blazonry, falconry, etc.
At the age of eleven years the child had conquered elementary mathematics and had studied the application of algebra to geometry. The parental library was not sufficient to supply him with further books, so his father took him to Lyon, where he was introduced to higher analysis. He learned of himself according to his fancy, and his thought gained in vigor and originality. Mathematics interested him above everything. At eighteen he studied the Mecanique analytique of Lagrange, nearly all of whose calculations he repeated; he said often that he knew at that time as much mathematics as he ever did.
Remarkable memory for long passages - an ability akin to eidetic imagery - is particularly pronounced in children, between the ages of five and nine. Like eidetic imagery, this mnemonic ability often fades in adolescence. There are several possible explanations:
1) it is a carry-over from pre-literate times when the young were expected to learn the oral tradition by heart;
2) it is an ability that expresses itself early but is not then continuously stimulated by the culture;
3) it is an effect of transient memory of skills of past lives, which fades after early evidence, much as the recall of dreams fade after early morning.
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'We know very little about this ability, and more research into it would be useful.
At four, Francis Galton (Forrest 1974:6), who later was to be the first man to study genius psychologically wrote the following:
I can read any English book. I can say all the Latin substantives and adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry. I can cast my sums and multiply.... I can say the pence table. I read French a little, and I know the clock.
Forrest's biography of Galton's amazing versatility in later life confirms that he was a genius of the first order.
Arieti (1976:343) reports that "John Stuart Mill was reading at three," and learned algebra at eight. Goethe wrote Latin poetry at eight.
In each of the cases of Galton and Mill we are witness to very high ability of genius level coupled with very rich and concentrated early environmental stimulation.
Montour (Stanley, George and Solano 1978:59) describes the remarkable childhood of the youngest full professor:
Charles L. Fefferman appears to be the youngest person in recent history to be appointed a 'full' professor at a major university. Fefferman was born in Washington, D.C. on April 18, 1949, which means that when he became a full professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1971 he was only 22 years old. To have achieved this honor at the age when most students are only receiving their baccalaureate, Fefferman had to have been both extremely precocious mathematically and highly accelerated educationally.
Fefferman first showed a strong interest in mathematics when he was around nine years old. At that time he had begun studying science independently, but found that his rudimentary arithmetic would not explain college-level physics. His father, a Ph.D. in economics, taught his son as much mathematics as he knew. Very soon, however, it became necessary for a University of Maryland mathematics professor, James Hummel, to take over the boy's tutoring. As a junior high school student, Charles won a regional science fair with his mathematics ex-
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hibit. By the time he was 12 years old he was taking courses at the University of Maryland campus near his Silver Spring home. At Hummel's urging, Charles bypassed high school and entered college as a full-time student at 14 years of age.
As a student at the University of Maryland, Fefferman combined his studies with an active, normal life while making the first strides that would lead to a phenomenal career. He lived at home, socializing with friends still in junior high school, and yet found time to write his first scholarly article (this appeared in a German journal when he was 15). In 1966 he became the youngest student in the University of Maryland's history to receive a bachelor's degree. The barely seventeen-year-old youth had majored in both mathematics and physics. At the ceremony he was also awarded his high school diploma.
In 1969 Fefferman received his Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Princeton University shortly after his 20th birthday and stayed on there a year as a mathematics instructor. Subsequently, he became an assistant professor on the University of Chicago's faculty in 1970. 1n 1971 he won the Salem Prize for his outstanding work in Fourier analysis. That same year, one year after his appointment as an assistant professor, Fefferman was promoted to the rank of full professor. Fefferman has since returned to Princeton as a full professor of mathematics. In 1976 at barely age 27 he became the first recipient of the $150,000 Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation.
Montour (Stanley, George and Solano 1978:57) describes the amazing development of another prodigy:
In September of 1945 Merrill Kenneth Wolf of Cleveland, Ohio, became quite possibly the youngest American ever to receive the baccalaureate when he took his B.A. in music from Yale College at the age of barely fourteen (his birthdate was 28 August 1931). Because Yale was on a special accelerated schedule during W.W. II, Wolf completed his degree requirements in less than the usual number of academic years.
Prior to his Yale career, Wolf had a most amazing development history, being highly precocious both verbally and musically. When he was an infant of only four months he began to speak his first words. At the age of six months he said his first full sentence, 'Put on another record.' In a personal communication to the writer dated 3 February 1976, Dr. Wolf explained the context of this remark: 'Phonograph recording was still a
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very imperfect technique in 1931, and the pianola, which we now think of as a saloon accessory, was an important medium of classical musical reproduction. It was another pianola roll I was asking for, and the device served as my first - in some ways, my best - piano teacher. About a year and a half later, my mother discovered me playing the piano myself, and apparently imitating tolerably well what I had seen the mechanical device do in the way of depressing given keys to obtain given sounds. Confronted with this, my father taught me to read music, and lessons with a professional teacher then followed, at age 3.' By this time his non-musical education had commenced; his father was using flashcards printed with whole words, not just letters, to teach the baby how to read. On his first birthday Kenny was given a first-grade reader, for which he was by then ready.
When he went to school for the first time at the age of six he was placed in the sixth grade. On his first day of school his classmates were being given a final examination, which the little boy took and easily passed. His presence disrupted the class, however, and therefore his parents were asked to take him home. When he was eight he found the junior high school mathematics class he was attending so boring that he lasted only two days before asking to be kept home.
Montour (Stanley, George and Solano 1978:54) tells of the precocity of Phillipa Schuyler:
In 1940 Phillipa Schuyler was nine years old, but according to the Clinic for Gifted Children at New York University she had the mental age of a sixteen year old, which meant that her IQ was 185. At that age she read Plutarch for fun, wrote poetry dedicated to her dolls, and had composed more than 60 piano pieces. The little girl who had a contract to create new compositions for an NBC radio program was generally acclaimed as a genius, but her parents disagreed. To George S. Schuyler, a black journalist and former H. L. Mencken protege, and his wife Josephine, the daughter of a white Texas banking family, their child's precocity was largely due to the special diet of uncooked meat and other raw foods she was raised on.
Whatever the reasons for Phillipa's achievements were, her parents succeeded in helping her to grow up right and begin an eventful career (perhaps partly by the way in which they kept her unaware of the publicity she received). Phillipa graduated from her convent elementary school when she was ten, and was educated at home after that so she wouldn't feel out of
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place. The girl liked to describe her experiences with music, and became well-known as a pianist and composer. She was placed on the National Guild of Piano Teacher's honor roll after she entered their tournament at age four and played 10 compositions, six of which she herself had written. She was so popular that when she was nine a day in her honor was proclaimed at the New York World's Fair. At age fifteen she made her professional debut as a pianist-composer in the Lewisohn Stadium with the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra.
Further information of Phillipa as a musical prodigy is given by Fisher (1973:74-5):
Philippa knew all four alphabets (printed and written-capital and small) and the numerals as well, by the time she was eighteen months old. Not long afterwards a writer for the New York Herald Tribune devoted two columns to her achievements, headlining his story 'NEGRO BABY 21/2 READS, WRITES, SPELLS, AND QUOTES OMAR KHAYYAM.' Her spelling vocabulary of several hundred words included such choice tidbits as Constantinople and rhinoceros.
The same interviewer who saw Philippa at 2 1/2 visited her again when she was five. She could now add, subtract, multiply, divide, and so on; but she could also discuss such things as cosmic rays, and the difference between war and revolution. In between she dashed to the piano, playing, singing, doing dance steps while the adults talked. Her compositions ran the gamut from 'Nigerian Dance' to settings of nursery rhymes and fairy tales to 'Vegetable Dance,'
Philippa finished grammar school when she was ten, even though she had spent part of each year giving solo piano recitals (mostly for charity) all over the country. Deems Taylor, who had interviewed her reluctantly on radio when she was six, discussed music gravely with her between her selections, coming to the startling conclusion: 'This is no infant. This is a born musician.'
Montour (Stanley, George and Solano 1978:55) describes two "Quiz-Kid" prodigies:
Joel Kupperman, who was called a 'midget Euclid' by Time magazine (Time 1943), reportedly had an IQ over 200 and was
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able to hold his own with older contestants when he came on the show at age seven. In an effort to keep him in a grade lockstep with his peers, Joel was given special work. Somewhere along the line, however, he opted to accelerate his school progress. He got his A.B. (Bachelor of Arts) degree from the University of Chicago at barely eighteen, an S.B. (Bachelor of Science) degree a year later, and a master's degree the following year. He went to Cambridge University to study philosophy and received his Ph.D. in 1963 at age 27, after taking a couple of years off. He was made a full professor at the University of Connecticut in 1972 at age 36. He has a number of publications in his specialty, ethics and aesthetics.
In the opinion of Life magazine (Life 1940), George Van Dyke Tiers was also something of a prodigy. He took his S.B. degree at age 19, his S.M. (Master of Science) at age 23, and his Ph.D. at age 29, all from the University of Chicago. He had a Coffin fellowship during his graduate study years and received the Carbide Award of the American Chemistry Society in 1959 at approximately age 32. He has been a research associate with the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company since 1951.
The case of William James Sidis, son of Harvard psychology professor Boris Sidis, is sometimes held up as a horrible example of the supposition that prodigies burn themselves out at an early age. Montour (Stanley, George and Solano 1978:53) after reviewing Sidis' life has this to say:
Sidis always expressed great animosity towards his father for parading his accomplishments and having him branded as a freak. As a result, he strenuously avoided academic life and all publicity until his death in 1946 at age 46. Although it meant dying penniless and alone, Sidis managed to thwart his father's aim to produce the ideal man in his son.
We do not detail here the unhappy life of William Sidis as a proto-typical example of the burnt-out prodigy. On the contrary, William Sidis, often taken as the norm, was a notable exception. Sidis is the only celebrated prodigy who we know failed almost totally intellectually and vocationally. We do not know how he might have turned out with far less parental pressure. Children of his extreme cognitive ability need much thoughtful loving help in order to develop well intellectually and personally.
Montour (1978:68) quotes Sarton on the precocity of genius:
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When it 'explodes. . at the beginning ... of life' (Sarton, 1921, p. 373), youthful genius allows its possessor no escape from the tumult of mental activity it brings. Sarton, who recognized that there were distinctions in the nature of genius, held genius to be less adaptable to environment, less tractable by education, and far more exclusive and despotic. Of its intensity he said: 'if the necessary opportunities do not arise, ordinary abilities may remain hidden indefinitely; but the stronger the abilities the smaller need the inducement to awaken them. In the extreme case ... of genius, the ability is so strong that if need be it will force its own outlet.'
She also talks about some of the problems of precocity (ibid:74):
The ambitious youth who comes into his gift early and who has an honest assessment of his intellectual powers is in a difficult position, because whichever way he turns he is resented. If he does not want to waste time furthering his career and tries to move ahead like any grown-up with talent would, adult society views him as an impertinent upstart. Likewise, because he has a sense of purpose and superiority, his carefree peer group, unaware of matters with which he is concerned, finds their brilliant member smug and insufferable.
Koestler (1964:703-4) relates:
A related phenomenon is the dazzling multitude of infant prodigies among scientists. For every Mozart, there are about three Pascals, Maxwells, Edisons. To quote only a few examples: the greatest Renaissance astronomer before Copernicus, Johann, Mueller, from Koenigsburg, called Regiomontanus (1436-1476) published at the age of twelve the best astronomical yearbook for 1448 ... went to the University of Leipzing when he was eleven, and at seventeen enjoyed European fame, he died at forty. Pascal had laid the foundations for the modern treatment of conic sections before he was sixteen. Jeremiah Horroacks (1619-1641) applied Kepler's laws to the orbit of the moon, and made other fundamental contributions to astronomy before his death at the age of twenty-one.... Clerk Maxwell ... had his first mathematical paper read before the Royal Society at the age of fifteen....
In this section we have attempted (albeit clumsily) to deal with an important but obscure subject. Evidence from biology suggests that nature telescopes the time allotted for the accomplish-
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ment of developmental tasks which the organism finds simple, and spreads out the time allotted for the accomplishment of higher tasks which the organism finds difficult. (One may recall that in Huxley's Brave New World, new lives were decanted as adolescents, having passed childhood in utero or more accurately in vitero.) If geniuses are earnest of future course of evolution, then we may expect to find similar trends in their lives, and these characteristic effects may give us clues as to the ongoing course of developmental progress both in the individual and in the species. Precocity, as the derivative of development with respect to time is the measure of this change.
5.3) Reincarnation or Something Grander?
It is best not to pour new wine into old bottles. Reincarnation is an old bottle since it assumes the reality of successive incarnations following one another in an orderly sequence. But, if in accordance with the Pribram-Bohm hologram model we locate the theater of real action outside of time and space, then we reduce the holographic virtual image which appears in time and space as a multiple-manifesting appearance - an explicate apparition in the world of effect which only mirrors the permutations of an implicate reality in the world of causes. Instead of the successive reincarnations as the reference standard, we are then enabled to regard the subtle prototype as the template which gives form to the other appearances - remembering always that this ideal is outside of time and space and in another order of reality.
Let us consider the time sequence in a dream, calling it t1. Now compare this sequence t1with real time when the dreamer awakes, which we will call T1.It is obvious that t1 bears only an imaginary relationship to T1, since it is not in any past, present or future segment of T14. Now let the dreamer fall asleep again on night 2 and dream another dream whose time sequence is t 2. He again awakes to real time T 2 ; and again there is no real relationship. Let us repeat this cycle at pleasure, and an interesting conclusion will emerge: Not only does tx bear no real relationship to Tx, but the relationship between the various t's (the dream sequences) is random, whereas the relationship between the various T's is real and sequential.
Let us now compare the successive dreams to successive incarnations so called of an entity which is awake in some transcen-
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dent real time. Whereas the real time sequence is real, it is impossible to say the same of the dream sequences: each separate incarnation has its own separate time. Herein is one of the pitfalls of looking at reincarnation as a series of sequential incarnations.
Neo-Platonism of every variety has always insisted that this world is a dull and adumbrated counterfeit of a shining higher vivency wherein the very stones are precious. Countless mystics bear witness to this phenomenon. Miller (1957:84) quotes Thoreau:
We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow. Beauty and music are not mere traits and exceptions; they are the rule and character... I have seen an attribute of another world and condition of things. It is a wonderful fact that I should be affected, and thus deeply and powerfully, more than by aught else in all my experience - that this fruit should be borne in me, sprung from a seed finer than the spores of fungi, floated from other atmospheres!. . . Here these invisible seeds settle, and bear flowers and fruits of immortal beauty.
Nowhere is there a clearer vision of this paradise than that of the English mystic Thomas Traherne (Happold 1970:369):
The corn was orient and the immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me... The men! 0 what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem!... And the young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty!... Boys and girls tumbling in the streets and playing were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die. All things abided eternally as they were in their proper places...
Leuba (1972:255) calls this phenomenon of a peculiar appearance of light or brilliance like gemstones in common objects "photism" and he describes many instances of it in both religious and non-religious subjects. As a skeptic of things mystical, he regards it as a mental aberration.
That this occasional ability to see ultimate reality behind
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the hologram of sensuous reality is not confined to mystics like Traherne, but is (as Wordsworth said), often found in our childhood is seen in the following from the autobiography of the psychic Eileen Garrett (1968:24):
It soon became obvious that I saw things differently, and knew things instinctively. I saw people, not merely as physical bodies, but as if each were set within a nebulous egg-shaped covering of his own. This surround, as I called it for want of a better name, consisted of transparent changing colors, or could become dense and heavy in character - for these coverings changed according to the variation in people's moods. I had always seen such surrounds encircling every plant, animal and person, and therefore paid less attention to the actual body contained within. When I referred to these misty surrounds, no one knew what I meant, although it was very difficult for me to believe that others did not see these enveloping each living organism. From their tone and color, I could tell whether a person was ill or well, and this was equally true of the plants and animals.
In a lecture on "Visionary Experience" (Huxley 1977:191 ff) asked the question, "Why are precious stones precious?" His answer:
Why should precious stones have always been regarded as extremely precious? Well, this question was asked some fifty years ago by the distinguished American philosopher, George Santayana, and he came up with this answer. He said, I think, that they are precious because, of all objects in this world of transience, this world of perpetual perishing, they seem to be the nearest to absolute permanence; they give us, so to say, a kind of visible image of eternity or unchangeableness.
And here I shall quote from another philosopher of antiquity, Plotinus, the great neoplatonic philosopher, who in a very interesting and profoundly significant passage says, 'In the intelligible world, which is the world of platonic ideas, everything shines; consequently, the most beautiful thing in our world is fire.'
Now, it is an interesting fact that we will speak about diamonds having fire, that the most precious, most valuable diamonds are those with the greatest amount of fire, and the whole art of cutting diamonds is of course the art of making
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them as brilliant as possible and making them show off the greatest amount of fire within. And indeed it can be said that all precious stones are in a sense crystallized fire. It is very significant in this context that we find in the Book of Ezekiel, when he is describing the Garden of Eden, he says it is full of stones of fire - which are simply precious stones - so that we see, I think quite definitely, that the reason why precious stones are precious is precisely this, that they remind us of this strange other world at the back of our heads to which some people can obtain access, and to which some people are given access spontaneously.
In Heaven and Hell, Huxley (1963:100-109) returns to this theme:
Every paradise abounds in gems, or at least in gem-like objects resembling, as Weir Mitchell puts it, 'transparent fruit.' Here, for example, is Ezekiel's version of the Garden of Eden. 'Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold.'
In describing their Other Worlds, the Celts and Teutons speak very little of precious stones, but have much to say of another and, for them, equally wonderful substance - glass. The Welsh had a blessed land called Ynisvitrin, the Isle of Glass; and one of the names of the Germanic kingdom of the dead was Glasberg. One is reminded of the Sea of Glass in the Apocalypse.
Most paradises are adorned with buildings, and, like the trees, the waters, the hills and fields, these buildings are bright with gems. We are familiar with the New Jerusalem. 'And the building of the wall of it was of jasper, and the city was of pure gold, like unto clear glass.... And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones.'
Hence man's otherwise inexplicable passion for gems and hence his attribution to precious stones of therapeutic and magical virtue. The causal chain, I am convinced, begins in the psychological Other World of visionary experience, descends to earth and mounts again to the theological Other World of heaven. In this context the words of Socrates, in the Phaedo, take on a new significance. There exists, he tells us, an ideal world above and beyond the world of matter. 'in this other earth the colors are much purer and much more brilliant than
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they are down here.... The very mountains, the very stones have a richer gloss, a lovelier transparency and intensity of hue. The precious stones of this lower world, our highly prized cornelians, jaspers, emeralds, and all the rest, are but the tiny fragments of these stones above. In the other earth there is no stone but is precious and exceeds in beauty every gem of ours.'
In other words, precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary. 'The view of that world,' says Plato, 'is a vision of blessed beholders'; for to see things 'as they are in themselves' is bliss unalloyed and inexpressible.
These views are very near to those of Transcendentalism, as we hear from Miller (1957:23) quoting C. M. Ellis:
That belief we term Transcendentalism which maintains that man has ideas, that come not through the five senses or the powers of reasoning, but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the world.
In Transcendentalism, with Emerson and Thoreau we get echoes of Eastern reincarnation, as witness the obscure transcendentalist poet, Hedge (Miller 1957:271):
Will its life with mine begun
Cease to be when that is done?
Or another consciousness
With the self-same forms impress?
Or - more wonderful - within
New creations do begin;
Hues more bright and forms more rare
Than reality doth wear,
Flash across my inward sense
Born of mind's omnipotence.
In introspecting on the elements making up a reincarnation, Johnson (1953:384) wrote as follows:
We are, of course, here in a region of speculative thought, and the ideas put forward are of the 'revelatory' character on the value of which each person must form his own opinion. In
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two interesting books of Geraldine Cummins5 which are the product of automatic writing, there are given communications purporting to come from F. W. H. Myers, one of the distinguished scholars who founded the London Society for Psychical Research. He made the following writings: 'As there are certain centers in the brain, so in psychic life there are a number of souls all bound together by one spirit, depending for their nourishment on that spirit.... It explains many of the difficulties that people will assure you can only be removed by the doctrine of reincarnation.... Many soul-men do not seek another earth-life, but their spirit manifests itself many times on earth. There may be contained within that spirit twenty souls, a hundred souls, a thousand souls. The number varies. What the Buddhists would call the karma I had brought with me from a previous life is, very frequently, not that of my life, but of the life of a soul that preceded me by many years on earth, and left for me the pattern which made my life.... When your Buddhist speaks of the cycle of births, of man's continual return to earth, he utters but a half-truth. I shall not live again on earth, but a new soul, one who will join our group, will shortly enter into the pattern or karma I have woven for him on earth. . . . You may say to me that for the soul-man, one earth-life is not enough. But as we evolve here we enter into those memories and experiences of other lives that are to be found in the existence of the souls that preceded us and are of our group. I do not say that this theory which I offer you can be laid down as a general rule. But undoubtedly it is true in so far as it is what I have learned and experienced.'
Whiteman (1961:81) from his "separation (OOB) experiences" is another writer who believes in the "monad" theory of personality:
All these types of experiences ... thus point to a very great difference in structure between our free personal consciousness in a separated state . . . and the normal state of our personality when we are immersed in the world. If the former be described as a monad which is the expression of our proper personality, then these experiences . . . exhibit the physical personality ... as a constellation of monads.... The process of separation is essentially a simplification of the physical personality by the sloughing off of some or all of the improperly harmonized monads in it.
This view is better explicated by Prof. Price in the introduction to Whiteman (1961:xvi):
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Dr. Whiteman's own theory of these sub-personalities is formulated in terms of the Leibnizian terminology of monads. A person's true or higher self is one single monad. Let us call it A. But in earthly life it is combined with several other monads, B, C, and D, and the lower self is a rather loosely unified group consisting of the higher self together with these others.... In other-worldly experience, however, this rather loose-knit combination is temporarily dissolved ... and then these monads B, C, and D are liable to present themselves.
We may compare this construct with the Kahuna view of the high spirit, the middle spirit, and the low spirit in man (Long 1954:100ff).
Krippner (1975:183) advances the theory of the late William Wolf with regard to the reincarnation of energy complexes:
His paper, which appeared in the Journal for the Study of Consciousness, was titled 'Are We Ever Reborn?' In it, he described how during the body's disintegration and diffusion at death, many of the energy complexes and combinations that had constituted the body during its lifetime do not break down completely into elementary particles. Instead, they remained as structured, combined entities for varying periods of time.
Those energy clusters from human beings who lived some years ago, according to Wolf, might well float around in the cosmos, ready to be picked up and then assimilated by some organism that happens to be present. Not only must the organism be present at the right time and place to assimilate the energy complex, but its process of development must be such that the assimilation can take place. If this occurs, the energy cluster becomes a part of the living person and may function as a quality of that person's memory. Wolf described the energy complexes by stating: 'We might best view them as configurations, structures, or organized units of primary undifferentiated energy, which may have become assembled thousands of years ago and may have been part of succeeding generations of human or any kind of nonhuman organism.... Such a transmitter might well be an energy configuration, a pattern or template for something like DNA, RNA, an enzyme, a protein, polypeptide or similar compound.'
Wolf reiterated that these complexes could be picked up by an organism providing that they would 'fit a lock' or 'fill a vacuum,' reflecting a particular need of the organism.
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The idea of reincarnation as the reason for genius is reinforced by Stearn (1976:72-3) who is asking a scientist for his reasons for believing in reincarnation. The reply:
We are always meeting people we feel we have known before. Some people discover talents and powers at an early age they had no way of acquiring in this world, like Mozart's writing music at the age of five, and another child prodigy of eighteen months playing popular tunes on the piano.
When we reflect on the enormous loss to the psyche when it leaves the state of the numinous element and dips into spacetime and the existence of an individual ego, there must be some countervailing advantage to this perilous descent into mortality and finiteness. That advantage is clearly the cognitive consciousness, whose possession gives not only the opportunity to observe and experience nature, but also to co-design the world of experience. It is this latter opportunity which is the precious one, for it takes the conscious will to direct the numinous element to manifest events.6
Let us remember that human life is but the projection of a greater individuality into the restricted cognitive ego, bound into space-time, where it takes a flight through the eight developmental stages, hopefully to return again to the Spacious Now, having completed the developmental cycle in ego-integrity and altruism. Presumably, this process is to gain the cognitive experience which this life affords as an added facet of the larger individuality. But consider some of the difficulties that can befall during this mortal interlude. For one thing, the ego may get enmeshed in mortality, arrested in the developmental process and fail to complete it, thus being consigned, (as the Bardo Thodol tells us) to an endless recyclement until it breaks out of its circle. But there is an inverse peril for those who become developed. It is that the individuality, while still in its ego dream, will become enough enlightened to understand that the laws of physics which govern the spacetime world are only a special case of the laws of metaphysics which govern the domain of the Eternal Now.
We have called this partial awakening orthocognition, and like the lucid dream (in which the dreamer knows he is dreaming) this insight gives the option of conscious use of the expanded laws of metaphysics to the still partly selfish ego-consciousness; in short the creative man gains psychedelic powers over his environment. The danger of not renouncing the world
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before we gain power to transcend it is that we will never want to renounce it at all, and that the individuality in the diminished form of an incompletely developed ego will trap itself in a garden of earthly delights. This is why true mystics would rather endure suffering than suffer the temptation of enjoyment. It is also why orthocognition, despite its wakening powers, should be used with wise restraint. For power corrupts, and we must be sure before we use it that our hearts and desires are pure. A worse fate than not getting one's desire is to get it and find it was the wrong thing to have in the first place.
At intervals during this ordinary-reality dream, certain aspects of the psyche gain the upper hand, so that the ego (either in trance or meditation) does not pay attention to ordinary reality. When this happens, the larger individuality takes over, and the person is not bound by the laws of ordinary reality. Hence, these people during this situation (which we call dissociation or trance), may walk on fire, levitate, prophesy, become clairvoyant and telepathic, and influence nature directly to name some of the more important examples. To be sure, in the prototaxic mode, these effects can be accomplished only by the temporary exclusion of the ego (which because of its reality relating properties could not tolerate consciousness under these circumstances). But in the syntaxic mode when the ego expands to greater understanding, it can be allowed to remain though with various degrees of light dissociation. The proper function of altered states of consciousness, which allow the operation of the laws of non-ordinary reality, is to permit the conscious ego to design and order the natural events or ordinary reality in harmony with goodness.
It is the business of the ego to attend to ordinary reality; it is the business of other parts of the psyche to relate to nonordinary reality, that is, the noumenon outside our space and time. While we may look at our ordinary reality as 'real,' it is actually the other way around, for it is non-ordinary reality that is the ultimate real. Actually the laws of physics in our ordinary reality are only a special case of the laws of metaphysics in non-ordinary reality, for our ordinary reality is but a special and restricted area in the larger domain, with special and restricted laws. During our little life here, the ego appears as an artifact of the eight developmental stages, rising in the first and setting in the last, in order to gain cognition and will in a space/time-bound situation, hopefully to return to the Eternal Now fortified with the cognitive experience gained here. But all the while the real existence of the individuality is in the Spacious Present of Non-ordinary reality.
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Suppose it is determined that the best way for the numinous element (which appears to us in a present state of hypnotized and unindividualized subjective preconsciousness) to gain rational consciousness is to project a series of nascent individualized egos into time/space experience. There, hopefully, they develop, effloresce, and eventually return to the undifferentiated spirit fortified with the jeweled experience of initiation and selection in will and consciousness. (At least this is one way of looking at it for us in the dream.) This, then, is the experience which we call life.
5.4) Conclusion7
"I dreamt I was walking through an enormous field of wild red roses. 'How many roses are there here?' said a voice. 'Oh, at least a million,' I answered. 'Are there any sports among them?' the voice queried. 'Yes, here is one,' said 1, appropriately sighting one which had flects of white on its petals. 'And how many such sports do you think there are here?' asked the voice. 'Oh, probably a thousand, if one assumes that once every thousand roses there is some mutant variation.' 'And could these mutants be developed into distinctive colors and patterns?' inquired the voice. 'Of course, for that is the way our domestic varieties originated,' I replied. 'Ah,' said the voice, 'but you had to have a gardener who believed in the possibility of such development and then set about to accomplish it.' 'That is true,' I agreed.
"There are many more children than roses, and they are much more important. Do some of them have talents and potential in exotic abilities which we do not even understand, and so cannot begin to stimulate? The gardener has produced a domesticated rose much bigger and more beautiful than the wild variety; could we do the same with children? But who will be the gardener for humanity? What are the talents of man? Are we sure we know them all? What if any are the boundaries of his abilities? Or are they as evanescent as was the limit of the four minute mile? What might we accomplish if we truly educated our children for the maximization of all talents which they possess?
"A century ago lightning calculators were exhibited as sideshow freaks. Since my dream I am haunted by the nagging possibility that some children possess similar exotic talents, which, because they are not appreciated by society, are not cultivated or stimulated, and we are therefore back looking at the wild rose
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mutation, rather than visualizing what it might become with husbandry. What are some of the possible powers of mankind?
"Could empathy, for example extend to telepathy? Could spatial visualization extend to non-spatial visualization? Could intellectual accretion and learning become telescoped into instantaneous knowledge and understanding? Some otherwise saintly and truthful mystics have told us that this is so. And it might not be amiss to check out this possibility.
"Hunt and Draper (1977:20) tell us of the powers of the electrical wizard Nicola Tesla:
He was conscious of certain phenomena before his eyes which others could not see. He envisioned objects and hypotheses with such reality and clarity that he was uncertain whether they did nor did not exist.
"Before we regard Tesla's powers as miraculous or his biographers as liars, let us remember that when a picture of the scene is chromokeyed behind a newscaster as he describes a news event, we do not react in disbelief, nor do we when we see a virtual image in a holographic display. Science has sanctified these miracles, so we believe them though most of us cannot explain their technology. If geniuses like Tesla are forerunners, then it might be useful to recognize the possibility of such unusual talents and begin to study how to develop them in others.
"in conclusion, let me go back to the speech of Huxley's minister of education (1963:208) on the child and his potentialities:
How does he do his thinking, perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a non-visualizer? Does his mind work with image or with words, with both at once, or with neither? How close to the surface is his storytelling faculty? Does he see the world as Wordsworth and Traherne saw it when they were children? And if so, what can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of common day? Or in more general terms, how can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their capacity for intense non-verbal experience? How can we reconcile analysis with vision? "
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FOOTNOTES:
1 We exclude from this discussion the putative relationship between genius and madness. For such a study, see Becker (1978).
2 Quoted in "The Ancient Wisdom" by A. Besant, from North British Review, September 1866.
3 Table 1 is here suppressed. It may be found in The Gifted Child Quarterly 20:4:384, Winter 1976.
4 An exception may be made here for precognitive and retrocognitive dreams.
5 Geraldine Cummins: The Road to Immortality, Beyond Human Personality (Nicholson, 1932 and 1935 respectively). (5pring, 1978).
6 This and the next five paragraphs are quoted from earlier work (1975:385ff).
7 Quoted from the author's earlier work, Gifted Child Quarterly 22:11:20-22.
CHAPTER VI1
Altered States of Consciousness: A Taxonomy
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impressions of its truth has ever remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the finest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness quite different... No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded...
-William James
ABSTRACT
An altered state of consciousness is any state where the left hemisphere is in abeyance. Contrary to popular supposition, the ordinary state of consciousness is an unusual state, impossible to maintain for long, and secured only by a modicum of perceptual intake, and continual interior discourse. In most altered states the right hemisphere is active and produces exterior hallucinations or interior imagery. This right hemisphere function of altered states of consciousness can be placed in a taxonomy; if the right hemisphere function is then mediated by the left hemisphere, it gives rise to syntaxic (creative) products and to higher jhanas. If it is expressed directly by the right hemisphere it gives rise to parataxic non-verbal
(i.e., artistic), creativity. If it is unable to be expressed by either it is outletted in prototaxic (somatic) fashion on the body, often in a trance state, the extreme form of which is schizophrenia.
Altered States of Consciousness and the Right Hemisphere
Let us start by boldly defining an altered state of consciousness as any state where left hemisphere function is in abeyance. This definition requires that we look first at the normal state of consciousness and the left hemisphere function which supports it. In the first place, this normal state represents both a high and recent level of awareness which cannot be sustained as long as a day, and requires rest, involving both sleep and dreams to restore the organism [1, p. 256]. It is also a state which is fuzzy both at or near birth and death, and is lost in any severe mental or physical ill health. Finally, even in good health and in the prime of life, it is apparently precariously secured by only two tethers: continual internal discourse and a modicum of sensory perceptual intake. If either of these are radically disturbed - by the reduction of meditation or the
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augmentation of dissociation in the former, or by sensory deprivation or sensory overload in the latter - then the normal state of consciousness is obscured. Apparently the normal state of consciousness is indeed a very special state.
One is tempted to digress long enough to note two corollaries with fascinating implications:
1. since the normal state is such a special state, it must have evolved for a special purpose; and
2. since sensory percepts are dependent upon the normal state, and the physical world is the physics of the normal state, it follows that this physics must be a very special state also.
What is so special about the normal state? Deep thinkers from James [2] to Bearden [3] have hypothesized that the function of the normal state is to excise some aspect of reality (as a Nicoll prism polarizes light) so that some other aspect can be paid attention to. The author has elsewhere suggested that consciousness is located in time, space, and personality so it may focus on developmental process [4, p. 10].
The fish does not realize that water is rare in the universe, that what he considers his natural environment is an anomaly in many ways and that he himself is an early evolutionary form. In the same way we do not realize that our normal state of consciousness with its three apparent (but illusionary) properties of location in the space of the physical world, location in time, and location in personality is also an anomaly, and that we are likewise an early evolutionary form. As the function of water is to provide an environment in which the fish may find himself and develop, so the function of the normal state of consciousness is to allow the developing ego-consciousness to be oriented in space, time, and personality, as a kind of matrix in which there can be escalation of consciousness from the prototaxic mode through the parataxic mode to the syntaxic mode. The differentiation and focusing of this consciousness from a dim generalized consciousness of flora, and the more particularized but still undifferentiated consciousness of fauna, is one of the chief tasks of human development and evolution. But this should not blind us to the fact that the normal state of consciousness is a kind of prison (perhaps better would be a confining matrix like a seed bed for sprouts) and that ultimate reality is completely outside it.
Einstein understood this well, when he said (N. Y. Times, March 29, 1972):
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "Universe." A part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires, and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this
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prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security.
In our efforts to show the near equivalence between the physiology of right hemisphere function and the psychology of altered states of consciousness, we cite some earlier researchers who have provided such evidence, though they did not grasp the overriding connection. The split-brain research of Sperry, Gazzinga, and Bogen [5-7], has received extensive coverage, and we shall assume readers are familiar with it. What continually appears from this pioneer research is the visual and spatial nature of the right hemisphere function. We call attention to the visual image aspect because it keeps occurring in altered states of consciousness as the herald of the numinous, being found in archetypes, dreams, creativity, orthocognition, healing, telepathy and other psychic manifestations.
Fischer reports [8]:
It has been known for some time that the left hemisphere - the "dominant" in most right-handed and in two-thirds of the left-handed people - functions as a digital, analytical, sequence perceiving and field articulating brain hemisphere concerned with speech, language, writing, and arithmetic; while the "minor" or right hemisphere is in charge of analogical, synthesis-oriented, non-verbal information processing visuospatial gestalts and fields, metaphoric signification through intuition, imagery and music.
During most ordinary activities of our daily routine (i.e., when neither hyper- nor hypo-aroused) we may "feel free" to shift from the cognitive mode of the "major" or Aristotelian (an Apollonian) hemisphere to that of the "minor" or Platonic (a Dionysian) hemisphere and vice versa. While a hemisphere-specific task is solved by the appropriate hemisphere, the activity of the other is repressed or inhibited. Moreover, Aristotelian logic and language may be interhemispherically integrated with Platonic imagery. But when levels of subcortical arousal are raised (as during creative, hyperphrenic, catatonic, and ecstatic states) or become lowered (as in the hypo-aroused meditative states), there is a gradual shift of information processing from the Aristotelian to the Platonic (cortical) hemisphere. I posit that such loss of Aristotelian freedom to make rational decisions is implicit in the findings of Goldstein and Stolzfus who claim that states of stimulation, excitation, anxiety, and hallucination correspond to a progressive narrowing of interhemispheric EEG amplitude differences with eventually complete reversal of their relationships.
These findings are in agreement with and account for the non-verbal, visuo-spatial and audio-spatial symbolic nature of dreams and hallucinations and we may now describe dreams and hallucinatory trips as truly exciting voyages from the rational, Aristotelian cognitive mode into the intuitive, metaphorical and timeless spaces of the Platonic hemisphere.
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Hence the source of imagination may be found in those hallucinatory and meditative states of self-awareness during which visuo-spatial symbols and meaning become the ordering structure and function of in-sight. During these states the Aristotelian laws of "symmetry," "identity," and "tertium non datur" lose their validity: time may be reversible, things and signs may become symbols for other meanings; in short, the prevailing "laws" strangely resemble those which govern the realm of subatomic particle physics.
Even the turning left or right of eye or head movements during thinking and problem-solving may indicate which side of the brain is operating. Bakan related such movements to right or left hemisphere dependency [9]. He noted that left movers have higher hypnotic susceptibility scores, emit more alpha waves under controlled conditions, all of which would tend to be compatible with right hemisphere dominance. It also appears that the right hemisphere may function better at low levels of stimulus arousal, such as an altered state of consciousness.
When right hemisphere function is active, it may produce what has been known throughout history as auditory or visual hallucinations [1]. The very word testifies to the assumption that since the physical world is ultimately real, any construct of consciousness for which there is not a physical referent is pathological. But this simplistic view conveniently forgets the fact that sensory phenomena are junior to the state of consciousness, and are after all artifacts of the normal state. As the title of one of Castaneda's books implies, the person with the active right hemisphere may indeed "see" a "separate reality." [10] Don Juan is not the only one advising a new order of "seeing"; A Course in Miracles suggests the same thing from a Christian point of view [11] .
We are accustomed to think of imagery as something on the order of hallucination because of our implicit assumption that physical reality is "real" and "tangible." But this may be naive. As Samples has indicated in The Metaphoric Mind, thoughts are essentially metaphors of reality [ 12]. Ferguson declares that Professors Pribram of Stanford and Bohm of the University of London have proposed theories which in a nutshell state that, "Our brains mathematically construct concrete reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension, a realm of meaningful patterned primary reality that transcends time and space [13]. The brain is a hologram interpreting a holographic universe." Indeed the Pribram-Bohm hologram model of things suggests that what we think is sensuous reality is merely a virtual image" projected by a holographic pattern imprinted in the brain. All this makes George Kelly's wise words true with a vengeance: "We are constrained to experience events in the manner in which we anticipate them." The left brain may have evolved to deal with this reality, while the right brain deals with another.
If the physical universe has no more reality than the holographic (virtual) image we see in exhibitions, then the subordinate position of imaginative imagery to percepts of "reality" would be removed, and creative imagination
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would emerge as one of the central building blocks of consciousness. Hence its development, stimulation, control and perfection would become both the aim of education and that of the life development of the individual. Such a view, which would elevate the controlled creative imagination to that of co-creator and would raise man from a reactive being to one with control over his future and destiny, would revolutionize both culture and education, and enormously actualize the latent potential of mankind.
A Taxonomy of States of Consciousness
The various states of consciousness can be placed in a taxonomy which exemplifies a paradigm of relationship between the conscious ego in man and what Otto refers to as "the numinous element" [ 14, p. 7], what Jung calls the "collective unconscious" [15], and what Sullivan calls "the not-me." [16, p. 162] In religious terms its nearest cognates would be Emerson's "Oversoul" or the Christian "Holy Ghost." The level of developmental maturity at the time of the juncture determines whether the affect will be dreadful and awful (using such words in their original meanings), as in schizophrenia and possession trance, or benign and transcendental as in samadhi and mystic rapture. [4, p. 2]:
This historical relationship is typified in various styles of the human condition in today's world in an associated paradigm of three modes of cognitive relationship to experience. These modes were discovered independently by Sullivan [ 16, p. xiv] and Van Rhijn [ 17], and may be described using the Sullivan terminology as follows: prototaxic (experience occurring before symbols), parataxic (experience using symbols in a private or autistic way), and syntaxic (experience which can be communicated). Sullivan coined the phrase "consensual validation" to characterize the consequent validation of symbolic representation which he pointed out led to healthy development.
Van Rhijn's theory is that the subconscious receives a mixed input of stimulus, memory, and libido loadings which is then fed to the higher areas of the cortex. Using Sullivan's terminology, it may percolate through the symbolic level into conscious thought - the most desirable result. If rejected there, it may still find expression through parataxic representation as a presentational sign which includes gesture, body language, myth, ritual, and art. If rejected there, it may still find a lower outlet through prototaxic representation which includes the symptom formation of psychosomatic illness manifestations. Thus the mental health potentiality of full cognition and the mental illness potential of less than full cognition is reinforced. Less than full symbolic cognition of experience results at best in parataxic and presentational images of art and archetype, which is the organism's way of working off the excess energy unused in full cognition, and at worst in neurosis, and psychosomatic externalization of the misspent energy onto the psyche, body, and immediate environment.
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Speaking of the Van Rhijn hypothesis, Caldwell says [ 18, p. 282]:
The levels of symbolic translation are laid out in a hierarchy of sophistication. At the top . . . is direct verbal symbolization. Below it are presentational symbolizations, which include gesture, myth, ritual, and art. Below this are the more primitive "symptom formations," the term psychoanalysis uses for the psychosomatic and physiological manifestations of neurosis such as headaches, eczema, colitis, and the like.
We have elsewhere presented in detail our thesis concerning the prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic modes of experience particularly in relation to the developmental characteristics of the numinous element [ 19]. Those readers not familiar with this explication may wish to consult Development of the Psychedelic Individual for clarification. Here we give the bare outlines of the theory without the supporting evidence for our espousal of it and without any of the developmental aspects.
It appears in three modes, prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic, whose delineation composes the content of this paper. Each mode has a number of sub-routines to which we give the name of "procedures." These aspects take place in an altered state of consciousness, involving some kind of juncture or union between the individual and the general, and are often accompanied (especially in the prototaxic mode) by some dissociation or hair-raising, uncanny affect involving awe or dread in some instances. In addition, there may be psychic or psychedelic effects or manifestations.
The stereotypic names for the prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic modes are respectively trance, art, and creativity, which is the title of the book where these matters are explained in further detail [4]. Each will now be discussed in summary fashion with a comparison of the procedures in the mode. As Will be seen from Table 6-1, the "taxonomy" consists of a gradual stepwise change in the direction of increase in ego control and creativity as one proceeds to the right. There is also an increase in positive emotion and in mental health. While a child might stereotype this hierarchy as from "bad" to "good," it would be more accurate to say that one ascends a parameter which appears to have the following characteristics:
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LEFT
RIGHT
weak ego
strong ego
loss of will
evidence of will
loss of memorability
memorability
ego function excursed
ego function preserved
somatic activity
cognitive activity
superstition
enlightenment
non self-actualizations
self-actualization
motor automatisms
cognitive representations
possession
illumination
madness, angst, anxiety
high mental health
horror, fear, dread
love, compassion, charity
trance
creativity
negative affect
positive affect
crudity of effect
refinement of effect
dissociation
association
lack of control of preconscious
control of preconscious
TABLE 6-1 THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CONSCIOUS MIND AND THE NUMINOUS ELEMENT IN THREE MODES OF EXPERIENCE
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The various properties of trance states are compared in Table 6-2. As we inspect the table, we should remember that the most important result is the finding that each of the properties undergoes a graduated step-wise change from negative to positive as we proceed across the table from heavy to light trance. We will not stop to detail the particulars found in each table cell, but the overall ordered progression found in the table indicates that scientific investigation has gained a logical purchase on a previously unordered set of phenomena.
In the parataxic mode, the numinous element which inspired such awe and dread in the former mode is veiled in images, images which may be seen through the procedures of the mode: archetype, dreams, ritual, myth, and art. This veiling allows the ego to be present, and gradually through the procedures, the normal state of consciousness emerges.
Table 6-3 illustrates the progression of parataxic procedures across five properties - state of consciousness, direction of action, modality, goodness/ badness, and numinous aspect. The prototaxic mode and the syntaxic mode are shown for comparison anchor points on either side.
1. State of consciousness progresses from trance in the prototaxic through REM states in the early parataxic to the normal state;
2. direction of action starts with action being impressed on the individual and ends with action being expressed by the individual;
3. the cognitive modality changes from being excursed in the prototaxic through pictorial, oral, and then expressions in enactive, iconic, and symbolic levels;
4. goodness/badness varies from very bad in the prototaxic to very good in the syntaxic; and
5. finally the numinous aspect loses the dreadful characteristics of the prototaxic and in the parataxic evolves from "worrisome" in archetype, "paranormal" in dreams, "religious" in myth, "magical" in ritual, and finally "creative" in art.
The gradual changes and progressions in all five properties in this mode clearly demonstrates the taxonomy of increasing ego consciousness and control.
We now come to the principal item of this discussion, the syntaxic mode, and its components. Let us remember that the syntaxic mode is characterized by full
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TABLE 6-2: PROPERTIES OF VARIOUS TRANCE STATES COMPARED (table IV T.A.C.)
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TABLE 6-3: PROPERTIES OF PARATAXIC PROCEDURES (table V T.A.C.)
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cognitive representation of experience. The mode is divided into three sections:
1 . creative, embracing the procedures of tantric sex, creativity, biofeedback, orthocognition1 , and meditation. These very diverse functions represent some aspect of mental control over the body and external events;
2. psychedelic, embracing the graces of response experience, Adamic ecstasy, knowledge ecstasy, knowledge-contact ecstasy of the first, second, and third degrees; and
3. unitive, embracing four theoretical higher graces of ineffable contact, transcendental contact, ineffable union, and transcendental union.
These fifteen procedures/graces are detailed with their properties in Table 6-4.
So much has been written about tantric sex, creativity, biofeedback, orthocognition1, and meditation elsewhere [4, pp. 245-351] and by others, that we shall omit further reference here in the interests of brevity, remembering that these are all functions of the normal state of consciousness, and that this journal is interested in altered states.
Table 6-4, "Properties of Syntaxic Procedures and Graces," represents a further effort to develop a taxonomy of these areas. On the left are the three highest developmental stages, the creative or sixth stage, the psychedelic or seventh stage, and the unitive or eighth stage [19, Chapter 2]. In the next column, the Yogic Stage, the same levels have been described as the third, fourth, and fifth stages of man.
The next column is headed "stability," which is generally permanent in the ordinary state, transient in altered states of psychedelia, and again (believed) permanent in the unitive state. Siddhis is the Hindu term for higher powers, such as levitation, which conventional wisdom calls paranormal. Siddhis appear as epiphenomena in the transition from creative to unitive levels. The next column is headed "Jhanas, " (sometimes spelled Jnanas), which means levels of knowledge. Goleman has described the eight jhanas at the bottom of the table, and we have extended the jhana numbers back to minus signs, so as to have a complete numbering system in the syntaxic mode [20].
Next on the table we come to the procedures/graces. The first five are those in the Creative stage, the first procedure being tantric sex, which must be included, because there is too much Eastern evidence considering this as a possible developmental process, to leave it out [21]. The next procedure is creativity, also a developmental process, as the writer has elsewhere indicated [221. The next procedure is biofeedback, another technique of development [4, p. 314] , then comes orthocognition [4, p. 320], about which there will be later discussion. The final procedure in this stage is meditation [4, p. 332], which seems to prepare consciousness in some way for the spectacular psychedelic levels to follow. These procedures of the creative stage may not be as ordered as are here indicated, but may be more like sampling from a buffet.
1Orthocognition is our word for spiritual or mental healing; it is cognate with "a demonstration" in Christian or Religious Science, or a "Miracle" in early Christian writing.
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TABLE VI-4: PROPERTIES OF SYNTAXIC PROCEDURES AND GRACES (table VIII T.A.C.)
In the Psychedelic stage we refer to "graces" rather than procedures. Whereas procedures are within the control of the will, graces appear to come without conscious volition2, and are characterized by immediacy, transcendence, bliss, mind- expansion, vividness, loss of sense of time, unity, deliverance, verisimilitude, transiency, and subsequent change in behavior [4, pp. 354-355]. Curiously, they can be divided into six levels of ecstasy, each having characteristic
2 Since we hypothesize that right hemisphere function is active and dominant here, it must follow that 'will' seems confined to left hemisphere cognitive (normal) states, as a general rule.
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properties, which seem agreed upon by those mystics in both East and West who have experienced them.
Response Experience [23], is the first grace (jhana -1) which is the same as what Maslow called "peak experience," and the "nature/mystic experience" testified to by many artists, composers, poets, and others [24]. Nature, especially water and mountains, acts as the trigger, though giving birth to a child can also serve. We quote a characteristic example from Jones [25, pp. 196-197]:
I was walking all alone in the forest, trying to make out my plan of life .... Suddenly, I felt the walls between the visible and the invisible grow thin, and the Eternal seemed to break through into the world where I was. I saw no flood of light, I heard no voice. But I felt as though I was face to face with a higher order of reality.
The next grace, jhana 0, has been called "the access state," but we shall call it "the Adamic ecstasy." In Blake's great words: "The doors of perception are cleansed" and all things are seen in the pristine glory which Adam found them before he fell. Two curious things happen in this experience:
1. a voice, usually identified as God's, is heard, and
2. there is some transcendence of time.
The conscious mind "slips a clutch" as Huxley says, and briefly expands into the Eternal Now, so that often memories of the past or future are brought back. Moses' Adamic ecstasies are described in Exodus 3:2-5, and 33:9-23, and St. Paul's in Acts 9:3-6. Here is George Fox's account of his [26, p. 153 ] :
Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the Paradise of God. All things were new, and all the Creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can describe. I knew nothing but pureness, innocency, and rightousness ... so that I came up into the state of Adam ... before he fell ....
It will help us to understand these difficult matters, if we hypothesize that time, space, and personality are being "loosened" as constraints on consciousness in these upward steps. The auditory anomaly and the time transcendence on the access state are supplanted in jhana 1 with space transcendence and visual anomalies, and we find reported what has come to be known as a "knowledge ecstasy." The vision is in line with the sectarian beliefs of the participant, but is always awe-inspiring. We forego the many Christian visions which could be detailed here, in favor of the testimony of Jacob Boehme [24, p. 182] :
The gate opened to me so that in a quarter of an hour, I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a university ... for I saw and knew the being of all things, the byss and the abyss ....
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There now occur three levels of knowledge-contact ecstasies, jhana 2, 3, and 4, which are curious in that a) consciousness seems in someway to be transcending personality, and b) language seems to convey less and less of what is going on. To use physical language (admittedly incomplete) at the first knowledge-contact level the person is touched by the numinous element, and at the second level pierced or penetrated, while at the third level they merge. It is amazing that the language of sexual love can so well convey to us what is going on at a much higher level, but this probably says more about our state than about the experiences. It is also amazing that mystics of both East and West can agree so well as to distinguish between the graces, but the evidence is there [4, p. 369]. We have now gone as far as Christian mysticism can carry us.
But the Hindus talk of higher jhanas in the unitive stage, and here we follow Goleman [20], who identifies jhanas 5 through 8 as ineffable contact, transcendental contact, ineffable union, and transcendental union. This involves an expansion of consciousness in which time, space, and personality having been transcended, there is a state of neither perception nor non-perception. Such a paradox indicates that verbal description is now completely inadequate. However, we may perhaps poetically say that if creation is differentiation, then yogic escalation may be compared to mathematical integration, since it returns to an undifferentiated state or function. What we are seeing here is the anomaly of knowledge turning into state, or to put it another way: in the juncture between the individual and the general mind, duality becomes successively abolished through loosening constraints on the consciousness of time, space, and personality, so that ultimately through knowledge more and more complete, the one becomes the other, and union is reached. This is the "Omega Point" of Teilhard de Chardin.
This concludes our analysis of Table 4, which is a very primitive effort at understanding some of the properties of the syntaxic procedures and graces, since it is an initial effort at putting these matters into some kind of taxonomic order. There are probably many gaps and errors in it, but we are seeing through a glass darkly a first attempt of humanistic psychology to look at transcendental functions.
Before concluding, a word about "orthocognition" is in order. An orthocognitive concept is one which orients us to a larger view of reality, as the Copernician view did over the Ptolemaic, and as the Mendeleev periodic table of the elements did over the classical "four elements" - earth, air, fire, and water. Orthocognition involves the use of the right cerebral hemisphere to see or make imagery. This "seeing" or imaging may be creative, it may be for healing - to " see" a desired state of affairs - which is exactly the use of the word by both Don Juan [10] and A Course in Miracles [11]. The Pribram-Bohm model states that sensory reality is a virtual image caused by holographic imprinting in the brain [13] . If such a hypothesis is considered orthocognitive, then these various graces may be merely graduated levels of increasingly coherent and synchronous
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cerebral functioning when the right hemisphere is active and dominant, and the left hemisphere is in resonance. Such a view is consistent with the concepts of Jaynes about the origins of consciousness [1].
In conclusion, we are looking at altered states of consciousness with a new scientific rigor. It now looks as if most of the altered states along with the normal state of consciousness can be ordered into a taxonomy which goes in its principal dimension from the experiencing of events in a prototaxic and somatic manner to an experiencing of events in a syntaxic and cognitive manner, along with which there are increases in control, memorability, and positive affect. Once these altered states were the provinces of mystics, schizophrenics, and other psychological deviates. It now begins to look as though theories about right hemisphere functions and holographic processes in the brain may allow scientific inquiry a far larger share in these unusual experiences. Such development allows for their more general acceptance by many intellectuals who previously were put off by the sectarian and occult explanations which were the only ones available. But this knowledge, though yet incomplete, does even more: events that can be reported similarly by independent observers, and then ordered into a taxonomy, acquire face validity; and having found that El Dorado actually exists, and in possession of a rudimentary map of how to get there, it is logical to expect that more average persons may try the journey. This makes life a great adventure.
Artists, mystics and poets have all seen this coming.
Thoreau said in 1848 in Walden: "That day is yet to dawn, for the sun is only a morning star." That dawn is now occurring, and we are privileged to witness the breaking of a glorious new day.
REFERENCES
1 . J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, 1976.
2. W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans Green, New
York, 1902.
T. E. Bearden, Photon Quenching and the Paranormal, Unpublished report,
Systems Development Corp., Huntsville, Alabama, April 20, 1977.
4. J. C. Gowan, Trance Art and Creativity, The Creative Education Foundation,
Buffalo, 1975.
5. M. S. Gazzaniga, One Brain, Two Minds, American Scientist, 60, pp.
311-317, 1972.
6. R. W. Sperry, Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Experience, American Psychologist, 23, pp. 723-733, 1968.
7. R. E. Ornstein, Right and Left-Handed Thinking, Psychology Today, pp. 87-90, May 1973.
8. R. Fischer, Hallucinations Can Reveal Creative Imagination, Fields Within Fields, 11, pp. 29-33, 1974.
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9. P. Bakan, The Eyes Have It, Psychology Today, pp. 64-70, April 197 1.
10. C. Castaneda, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations With Don Juan, Simon and Schuster, New York, 19 7 1.
11. Anonymous, A Course in Miracles, Foundation for Inner Peace, New York, 1976.
12. R. Samples, The Metaphoric Mind, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1976.
13. M. Ferguson, Editorial, The Brain/Mind Bulletin, Interface Press, July 4, 1977.
14. R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press, London, 1928.
15. C. G. Jung, Collected Works: II, Psychology and Religion, Pantheon, New York, 1958.
16. H. S. Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, Norton, New York, 1953.
17. C. H. Van Rhijn, Symbolists: Psychotherapy by Symbolic Representation, The Uses of LSD in Psychotherapy, H. Abramson (ed.), Josiah Macy Foundation, New York, 1960.
18. W. V. Caldwell, LSD Psychotherapy, Grove Press, New York, 1968.
19. J. C. Gowan, The Development of the Psychedelic Individual, The Creative Education Foundation, Buffalo, 1974.
20. D. Goleman, The Buddha on Meditation and States of Consciousness, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 4: 1, pp. 1-44, 1972.
21. P. Rawson, Tantra, Thames and Hudson, London, 1973.
22. J. C. Gowan, The Development of the Creative Individual, R. Knapp, San Diego, 1972.
23. M. Laski, Ecstasy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1962.
24. C. M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1901.
25. R. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, Macmillan, London, 1932.
26. R. Knox, Enthusiasm, Oxford University Press, London, 1950.
1 (This chapter first appeared in Journal of Altered States of Consciousness 4:2:141-156, 1978-9, copyright 1978 by author.)
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CHAPTER VII
Form as the Devolution of Cosmic Substance
The universe comes into manifestation when the three gunas are in the same phase.
-Patanjali
"Attention! Attention!" sang the mynah birds in prophet Aldous Huxley's last novel Island. This is not mere local color; the birds are telling us a secret; the secret of life is attention. Let us take three examples of heightened attention; a woman under hypnosis, under the spell of orgiastic love- making, and under mystic rapture. All three examples involve total attention to the situation, with the blotting out of all extraneous stimuli, a "feminine" passivity, an altered state of consciousness, and the production of unusual side effects. The individual is absorbed in the experience; indeed, in a certain sense the individuality is lost in the experience. We are told by Indian gurus that eventually the knower who pays full attention becomes the known, in other words, knowledge with the highest attention changes into state.
If full attention reaches ultimately the limitless and unbounded void, then inattention is the precursor and cause of imagery. It also seems to be the cause of the world of appearances. The three metaphorical examples in the previous paragraph all are combined in the imagery of cosmic connubial bliss of the Tantra (Rawson 1973:18-9), in which Shiva and Shakti "are so deeply joined that they are unconscious of their differences and beyond time." Or to put it more austerely as Asvaghosha does (Hakeda 1967:50):
Mind, though pure in its self nature from the very beginning, is accompanied by ignorance. Being defiled by ignorance, a defiled (state or level of) Mind comes into being. But, though defiled, the Mind itself is eternal and immutable. Only the Enlightened are able to understand this.
What is called the essential nature of Mind is always beyond thoughts. It is, therefore, defined as 'immutable.' When the one World of Reality is yet to be realized, the Mind seems
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mutable and not in perfect Unity. Suddenly a thought arises; this is called ignorance.
As Wilber (1977:110) continues:
Ignorance, in other words, is ignorance of the non-dual and non-conceptual mode of knowing, which would instantly reveal the universe to be Mind-only. It is thus ignorance of Mind-only which literally creates the conventional and symbolic universe of separate things extended in space and succeeding one another in time; and since the major instrument of ignorance is thought, it is thought itself which is ultimately responsible for the seeming existence of the conventional universe.
The word 'thought,' as Asvaghosha uses it, refers not so much to the process of full-blown logical intellection that we use, for instance, in solving a math problem, but rather to the very root process whereby we create distinctions and dualisms. Thus when Asvaghosha says, 'Suddenly, a thought arises,' he is referring to the Primary Dualism that Brown described as 'Let there be a distinction.' Thought, conceptualization, ratiocination, distinctions, dualisms, measurements, symbolic-map knowledge - all are different names for that maya whereby we seemingly divide the One into the Many and generate the spectrum of consciousness.
Perhaps this will become clearer if we proceed to the teachings of the Lankavatara Sutra. Throughout this profound text passages such as the following can be found: 'It is like an image reflected in a mirror, it is seen but it is not real; the one Mind is seen as a duality by the ignorant when it is reflected in the mirror constructed by their memory.... The existence of the entire universe is due to memory that has been accumulated since the beginningless past but wrongly interpreted.' Accordingly to the Lankavatara, the 'existence of the entire universe' occurs when the one Mind is reflected upon by memory wrongly interpreted. This 'reflection' creates 'two worlds from one' and thus propels us into the conceptual world of space, time, and objects.
To understand this process of 'reflection by memory wrongly interpreted,' we need only recall that the genesis of time involves the mistaking of present memory for real knowledge of a 'past.' For it is only through this 'memory wrongly interpreted' that we create the convincing illusion of knowing time past, and then -- projecting this 'knowledge' forward in expecta-
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tion - we create time future, whereas all memory and expectation, and thus all time, exists nowhere but in this present moment. In this fashion do we conjure up, out of this moment, the fantastic illusion called 'time;' and since 'time' is just another name for space and objects (space-time-objects being a single continuum), the Lankavatara claims the entire universe of separate objects extended in space and succeeding one another in time is actually generated by thought-memory wrongly interpreted, which 'reflects' the one Mind and thus apparently creates two worlds from one.
In another place Wilber (1977:319) after quoting Benoit and Krishnamurti on the subject concludes: "Here Krishnamurti is agreeing completely with Benoit that the machinery of image production is inattention, (i.o.) or as Benoit calls it, passive attention."
After this rather rambling introduction to a very profound subject, let us explain where the author is coming from. We have been on the track of creativity, trying to induce its precursors during the process of incubation. We have found (Gowan 1978, in press) that the precursor is imagery. What then are the precursors of imagery? It now looks as though a better method might be to work from the opposite end and deduce a series of de-gradations of cosmic substance, which hopefully will end up in the position stated herein.
Let us try for a little while to perform a nearly impossible task, namely to look at the process of material manifestation from the Absolute point of view. From this stance it would appear that matter is the end product of a series of de-volutions or de-gradations of spirit. This process involves a series of breakings or severances of perfect primordial symmetry. As the Hindus have it, "The universe manifests when the three gunas are in the same phase." Brown declares (1972:v): "A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart." And Ghykha (1977:86) states Curie's principle: "In order that a phenomenon should be produced in a system it is necessary that certain elements of symmetry should be missing."
Realizing that at best we are developing analogies for a process which is magnificently grander than any homologue, we can also look at another facet of the elephant by considering each devolution as a mathematical differentiation of a function which is transcendental. The differential shares only derivative characteristics
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of the function in a much diminished state of one less dimension. If human life in this world represents, say, a triple differentiation of ultimate reality, then our task (or better the task of consciousness), must be to free itself from the triple bonds of time, space, and personality, by successive integration back to the Absolute.
Heidegger (1961:51), after quoting Heraclitus, on the original conflict (division), which produced the whole creation says of this polemos:
This conflict, as Heraclitus thought it, first caused the realm of being to separate into opposites; it first gave rise to position and order and rank. In such separation cleavages, intervals, distances and joints opened. In the ausein-andersetzung (setting apart), a world comes into being. Conflict does not split, much less destroy unity. It constitutes unity. It is a binding together - a logos. Polemos and logos are the same.
In this remarkable, and somewhat equivocal passage, Heidegger seems to be saying that despite the polemos which produces the phenomenological world, the logos, or original collectedness, continues in the noumenal world, and that ultimately these two are the same. We shall see that both Brown (1972) and Wilber (1977) refer to exactly the same process of cosmic mitosis. Let us now turn to their investigation of this devolution process.
Following Wilber (1977) we have attempted to lay out levels in the spectrum of consciousness in Table V II- 1. What we have essentially in this table are a number of different names or designations, mostly from Eastern sources for a hierarchy of descending order (from top to bottom) and increasing entropy. This taxonomy consists of five states and four interspersed bands or filters. The filters act like polarizing lenses which successively minify the radiation by one dimension. Hence, each filter reduces the cosmic glory until it "fades into the light of common day." For this reason as one goes down the column one goes in the direction of decreasing mental health, and increasing dissociation. This is seen clearly, of course, in the case of the Lilly numbers. In the second column comes the name Wilber has given the level (with the last two added); in the third column the Indian sheath name; in the fourth column remarks for helping the reader orient himself. The fifth column as letter designations, and the sixth Mahayana names. The seventh contains a conjecture as to where the Brown words
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TABLE VII-1: LEVELS IN THE SPECTRUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AFTER WILBUR (1977)
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would go, supposing them to be commensurate, and the last column contains conjectures about the relevant body or vehicle of consciousness in the domain. It should be emphasized that the table purports to be a rough map of unfamiliar territory, and there may be cell misplacement. (For a fuller explanation of the Sullivan-Van Rhijn theory which underlies the prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic remarks at the F, G, and H level, please refer to Gowan 1975:2.) Van Rhijn's contribution (1968) is more relevant here, since he posits that experience which can be assimilated and dealt with cognitively (syntaxic) is beneficial; experience which can only be dealt with emotionally (parataxic) is less beneficial, and finally experience which cannot be dealt with at all (prototaxic) is projected onto the body and the environment, producing poor physical and mental health.
What exactly does mathematician Brown mean by his "void to form, form to indication, indication to truth, and truth to existence?" Actually, Brown did not quite say this. What he did say (1972:101) is:
It is, I am afraid, the intellectual block which most of us come up against at the points where, to experience the world clearly, we must abandon existence to truth, truth to indication, indication to form, and form to void, that has so held up the development of logic and mathematics.
It should be remembered that Brown is using these terms in an exact and mathematical meaning. For example: "Existence" means an existence theorem (i.e., There exists at least one "a"); "truth" means the truth value of a statement (i.e., A = B).
Brown says (1972:101):
There is a tendency, especially today, to regard existence as the source of reality, and thus a central concept. But as soon as it is formally examined, existence is seen to be highly peripheral, and as such, especially corrupt (in the formal sense) and vulnerable.
Brown explains in an appendix (1972:127) the "formal examination" as follows:
Now the distinction between existing and not existing is not applied like the distinction between true and not-true. If a
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statement "s" is true, then the complementary is false. But if a thing "t" exists, then its complementary thing "not-t" is not necessarily non-existent.
So much for existence. This brings Brown to truth, of which he says (1972:101):
The concept of truth is more central, although still recognizably peripheral. If the weakness of present day science is that it centers around existence, the weakness of present-day logic is that it centers round truth... Throughout the essay, we find no need of the concept of truth ... (truth=open to proof). . . At no point is it a necessary inhabitant of the calculating forms. These forms thus are not only precursors of existence, they are also precursors of truth.
Regarding his calculus of indications (marks), Brown has this to say regarding truth-value (1972:113):
We have a choice of whether to associate the unmarked state with truth and the marked state with untruth (or the opposite). Although it is quite immaterial, from the point of view of calculation which we do, the latter arrangement is in fact easier from the point of view of interpretation.
Since the calculus of indications (which is the substance of his book The Laws of Form), Brown notes (1972:112) that it applies "to a language structure in which sentences can be true or false." Thus truth yields to indication.
But indication depends upon a mark. As Brown puts it (1972:4) under knowledge:
Let a state distinguished by the distinction be marked with a mark (an inverted L), of distinction. Let the state be known by the mark. Call the state the marked state. Call the space cloven by any distinction together with the entire content of the space, the form of the distinction.
We are now back to the Primary Duality: "Let there be a distinction," and hence back to the evolution of form out of the void. Brown describes this in the first sentence of the book (1972: v): "The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart."
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And quoting this opening paragraph, Wilber (1977:108) remarks:
It is with precisely this original act of severance which creates the phenomenal universe that we are now concerned: the very first movement whereby we sever a space, create two worlds from one, and land ourselves squarely in a world of appearances.
It does no good to argue that Brown's world is conceptual while Wilber's is phenomenological. Both are ultimately conceptual and the laws of form apply equally to either.
The alert and captious reader may at this juncture interpose that despite an effort to be clear the author has jumbled together several universes: the total physical universe, the subset of the inanimate universe, the subset of the animate universe, the subset of the conceptual universe, and perhaps others (which would include the logical universe of Brown). But the strength of Brown's approach in The Laws of Form is that the laws underlying all these universes and their subsets are the same, for the laws are simply the way our minds cognize plenums, and whatever exterior forms the plenums take, the basic laws are the same, with only exterior modifications of constants, zero-points and other mensuration to distinguish them.
Indeed, further, the laws relating to the genesis of any microcosm of the universe, such as a newly discovered scientific principle, or a newly created musical opus, are precisely the same; each act of individual creativity in time is a miniscopic homologue of the whole act of creation, and each contains within it a holographic isomorphism with that major act.
Finally, and most miraculously, the universe contains within it the means to know and inspect itself. It is not mere creation; it is creation that knows itself to be creation. Says Brown (1972: 105):
Now the physicist himself who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself, constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and record. Thus we cannot
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escape the fact that the world as we know it is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself. This is indeed amazing.
But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition whatever it sees, is only partially itself... In this condition it will always partially elude itself.
So that in the last analysis, the process of self-observation is self-defeating, for it entails the Primary Duality.
One way of understanding the devolution of manifestation better is to look at the opposite process - namely integration. If we inspect the testimony of saints and sages (Gowan 1975:351ff and especially Table VIII, p. 247), we shall see the reverse process, including its discrete levels, laid out in matching fashion. Since this table has been explained in great detail elsewhere (Gowan 1975, 1978),* we shall forbear much further here. Suffice it to say that the table represents an escalation of consciousness out of time, space and personality. It also represents a healing of the dichotomy between knower and known, which, as we have seen earlier, is the primary dualism. As Eliade (1969:96) explains:
The object is no longer known through association... it is grasped directly in its existential nakedness... Let us note that ... Samprajnata Samadhi, [Ed. Jhanas 5-8], is shown to be a 'state achieved through a certain knowledge.' This passage from knowledge to state must constantly be kept in mind... (it) leads to a fusion of all modalities of being.
This absolute knowledge reveals that "knowledge and being are no longer discrete from each other." So the yogi who penetrates to this samadhi without support of objects becomes (as Meister Eckhart truly testified), one with the Deity. If creation may be compared to the mathematical process of differentiation, then this escalation may be compared to the process of integration, for it returns to an undifferentiated state. This fusion of knower and known, of noumenon and phenomenon, of subject and object reveals that the integration process is achieved through a juncture of the individual and general minds, in which duality is abolished, and through knowledge more and more complete, the one becomes the other.
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It may seem incongruous to return to tantric sexual rites for a prefiguration of this restoration, but notice how closely the following description imitates the essential unification:
I cannot tell you how it is for others, but when the man I love enters me, all at once I am suffused with an exquisite wholeness; it is more than physical; it is some escape into a primordial completeness. I do not need an orgasm to validate that experience for me. As I lie enfolded in him, and he in me, we are one, whole, beyond time and space, almost beyond personality. There is content, security, and rest that I cannot begin to describe in words. I should die if I could continue in that state very long, and for me the orgasm is the release from this overwhelming bliss back into mortality.
Or as Rawson (1973:19) puts it: "Shiva and Shakti within man and the world are so deeply joined that they are unaware of their differences and beyond time." It should be clear that Teilhard de Chardin's "Omega point" is far more than even exalted sexual union, but what is amazing is that the tantric model is so isomorphic.
From a Christian vantage point, Plotinus (Russell 1945: 288ff) identified the nous as the second division of the Trinity (the first was the ineffable Godhead, and the third the individual soul; these are not equal as in the orthodox Christian Trinity, but in a descending hierarchy). "Nous is the image of the One; it is engendered because the One in its self-quest has vision; this seeing is nous" (ibid:289). But Plotinus insists the seer and the seen are one, hence nous may be considered the light by which the One sees itself. We have avoided translating the word nous because while the nearest English word is "spirit," it is obvious that something more is here meant - something more intellectual in the manner of St. John's "logos," (the word).2 Whatever words are used, it is perfectly obvious that the process concerns the primary dualistic split, and hence is germane to our discussion.
In Rawson's view (1973:19), once division from the primary cosmic copula has been made "the female objective (Shakti) performs her dance of illusion, persuading the male subject that he is not one but many, and generating in her womb the world of multiplied objects in what seems to be a sequence in time." This is a very significant point with great practical consequence. It means that since the archetypal feminine is a generating entity
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outside time and space, every manifestation in time and space (every entrance from posse to esse from our point of view) will be multiple, that is, we will experience it as a series or sequence in time with space held constant, or in space with time held constant.
When a numinous thought-form is to be actualized in our world of experience, despite its specific nature, its non-categorical and numinous quality dictates that it be experienced in multiples which may be distributed over either space or time (if distributed over both, the experience will hardly be noticed as coincidences). Thus with regard to accidents, the result may be a series of very similar mishaps at the same or near times in widely separated spots, or at the same spot over various times. What appears determined is the thought form (often with amazingly coincidental specifics), but the results are at least partly under the control of wise/brave utilization of humans connected with the situation at the time of crisis.
We notice such coincidences with regard to dramatic events, but similar ones exist in creative thought-forms. When the zeitgeist is opportune, the same non-categorical impulse will be manifested in several dedicated scientists, artists or researchers at the same time in several places, and they will each add an idiosyncratic flavor to a common discovery, or a new idea. Jung (Campbell 1971: 505ff) commented extensively on this in his essay on synchronicity.3 Although nowhere does he explicitly state that the translation from the numinous archetype to the phenomenal reality will result in multiple manifestations.
A glimpse of the same animating fecundity in nature is afforded by Gaster (1950:17) in his concept of the "durative topocosm"
Seasonal rituals are functional in character. Their purpose is to revive the topocosm, that is the entire complex of any given locality conceived of as a living organism. But this topocosm... possesses a ... durative aspect, representing not only actual and present community, but also the ideal of community, an entity of which the latter is but the present manifestation. Accordingly, seasonal rituals are accompanied by myths which are designed to present the purely functional acts in terms of ideal and durative situations.... What the king does on the punctual plane, the God does on the durative... The pattern is based on the conception that life is vouchsafed in a series of leases which have annually to be renewed.
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Ultimate reality, in the guise of the durative topocosm, cannot adequately present itself through a language of tensed verbs. Hence, it must do so through a metaphor of continual recurrence, and we should learn to recognize such usage as signifying the advent of the numinous archetype in which time and space are transcended.
But there is more wisdom here in the fecundity of Shakti than practical knowledge; the essential point is that in every individual act of creation (differentiation), and in every individual act of salvation (integration), there is a microcosmic reenactment of the primal creation and the ultimate "Omega point"; each separate act of evolution and involution is a holographic miniportion, containing within it the model of all creation and resolution. As Gandhi said: "We are all tarred with the same brush," and all creation is stamped with the same die.
Thus each individual life, and each individual creative experience which makes up that life, is in the process of defining and exemplifying that creation; therefore, every human being has the potentiality of creation, not just of ideas, but of actual reality. Consciousness is in the process of becoming, in the process of manifesting, in the process of building, what, to us, is a future event of perfection (but in actuality is outside time). All that precedes that dawn is prologue, including the dream world in which consciousness seems housed in our personality. But that rehearsal is a necessary part of its evolution, as seen in time, for when housed in us, it is able, if but in the blink of a human lifetime, to become complete in little things, and to prefigure that "Divine faroff event" of the poet, when, all having been brought to perfection, the All shall fully cognize (and become) the All.
1 Locked in time, we must call this a process. But to consciousness outside of time, it would appear as a symmetrical transform in the time dimension of space.
2 For its more exact meaning, see Heidegger 1961:109 where it means "original collectedness."
*Given herein as Chapter 6.
3 Further to this subject see Vaughn, A. "The Riddle of Coincidence" FATE 33:1:65-73, 1980.
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CHAPTER VIII
The Three-Fold Body of Buddha
When one realizes the great void is full of chi,
One realizes that there is no such thing as nothingness.
-Needham (1956: IV:33) quoting Chaing Tsai
The Avatamsaka Sutra tells us that Buddha (which we take to mean All that Is1 ) has a three-fold body:
1) an aspect of Essence (dharma-kaya)
2) an aspect of potentiality (sambhoga-kaya)
3) an aspect of manifestation (nirmana-kaya).
These notes, made during a trip to Japan (May 1978), detail some gleanings on the relationship between these three aspects.
Following Husserl (1962), we may restrict the verb "to be" (or "is-ness") to signify manifestation in the here and now, in other words, existence condensed into one time and space. This usage will distinguish it from potentiality, which is diffused through time and space, and consists of a plenum of possibilities, like an electron cloud. Hence, the usage "can be" or "may become" is appropriate in English, although we shall use also the integration symbol "S"in front of "is" (viz. Sis). These two levels, the punctual and the durative, underlie all thought, and a distinction between them is necessary for clear discourse.
But there is a third, or anterior level of Essence, which appears to us only as "voidness" or sunyata (emptyness). There is no way to convey this concept in English accurately, so we will use the double integral sign before "to be" (viz: 'God SSis.")
It is important to stress that when consciousness is awake at a particular level, levels above the reach of consciousness will seem void. Since this rule should work oppositely, we coin the word "diov," (void backward), to indicate how a level below the reach of consciousness will appear. If Essence appears void to form, then manifestation appears diov to spirit. Or we can set up a table of opposites:
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TABLE OF OPPOSITES - VOID vs DIOV
In this formulation, the realm of potentiality would be viewed as an intermediate change state in which imagery and thought forms condense from the void so that they can later manifest in the material world. Fung (1958:279 quotes Chaing Tsai on this:
When the chi condenses, its visibility becomes apparent, so that there are then the shapes of individual things. When it disperses, its visibility is no longer apparent, and there are no shapes. At the time of its condensation, can one say otherwise than that this is but temporary? But at the time of its dispersing can one hastily say that it does not exist?
Peirce (Gardner 1978) was only one of many savants to notice the essential triplicities in nature. Many thinkers have used various names to distinguish the components of this grand triplicity. We append a table:
TABLE VIII-1 TRIPLICITIES2
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We quote Prof. Price in his introduction to Whiteman (1961:xvi):
According to Dr. Whiteman, St. Paul holds that there are two non-physical bodies, a 'psychical body' and a 'spiritual body.' Does Dr. Whiteman himself accept this view? In some passages it seems that he does.... He also expresses approval of the Buddhist doctrine of the Trikaya, the three bodies of a Buddha.
In the previous chapter we have noted that the emergence of form is caused by the devolution of cosmic substance from essence to potentiality to physical manifestation, which in turn is caused by inattention. This inattention allows the natural pressure towards formation first to condense into the various pseudo creative thought-forms and imagery which populate the multidimensional vivency of all possibilities. This never-never land of "maybe," which consciousness visits in dreams and other altered states, provides a first level of manifestation for the myriad mirage thought forms each of which is a denial that consciousness is one, and hence, therefore, is its own statement of an independent, abortive, and often malignant creation.
The primary responsibility of consciousness is to prevent such thought forms from arising, but as this is too difficult for most, a secondary objective (especially for the novice) is through orthocognition (Gowan 1 975:320ff) to prevent the thought-forms in the realm of "may-be" from manifesting themselves in the physical body or the environment. Thus these thought forms are like tulpas (David-Neel, 1931); and Bearden (1977) is correct in surmising that there is a constant tulpoid pressure for external manifestation. For example, a cancer is really an internal tulpa, and the business of consciousness is to dissolve these manifested thought-forms and force them back to the vivency of potentiality. Mrs. Eddy (1896:392) was correct in advising us to "stand porter at the door of thought." Wilber (1977:312-4) advised active mobilization to prevent unwanted thought - forms from arising. This involves "attention, stopping, and passive awareness."
In general the beauty and level of consciousness of a manifested thing, person or event (TEPE) indicates the level of its generating entity in the next higher vivency. We may think of these generating entities as devas, tutelary deities, or guardian angels,
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although it constrains our understanding of their function to anthropomorphize them. Given the existence of such archetypes, there arises an unsolved question between the difference (if any) between those which produce an order or genus of natural phenomena (e.g., insects, crabs), and those which produce tulpoid manifestations. Is the birth or hatching process itself a type of tulpoid activity? What is evident is the constant pressure for generation and manifestation. There must be something about form in the here-and-now which is attractive to the life-force. Perhaps it is that the grounding of consciousness in the focus of here and now is necessary for the developing ego before it can awaken to the diffused aspects of being out of time and space in the realm of potentiality.
In connection of the manifestation and demanifestation of tulpoid thought forms, it was serendipic to read in Hearn (1971: 57) on the definition of the Japanese word nazoraeru, which means according to him: "To substitute in imagination one object or action for another so as to bring about some magical or miraculous result." Here is a graphic description of orthocognition, though without the positive aspects which we have associated with it. The action opens the consciousness to the possibilities of the realm of potentiality.
In The Paradox of Instruction, Bubba Free John (Franklin Jones 1977) gives a clear picture of the three levels and the yogas or practices which approach them:
There are three manifest dimensions: gross, subtle, and causal. And there are three traditional ways of practice toward release, each involved in manipulation and experiences in one of the three dimensions. These are the gross path (the way of yogis), the subtle path (the way of saints), and the causal path (the way of sages). Each path, being a portion of the whole or great path, pursues a specific and absolute Goal, via a method of regression or return, toward the Condition which pertains at the original or terminal position of the dimension it assumes.
The practitioners of the gross path take their stand in the gross physical condition and seek the Goal by activity there. In general, they seek either a religious and magical harmony in the gross condition or else ascent to the subtle. Kundalini yoga
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is perhaps the most effective and also easiest (if worked through the extraordinary agency of an accomplished yogi) of the ascending methods developed in this path, and achieves entrance into the subtle dimensions by exploitation and manipulation of the life-current as vital force (prana), or the finer elements of gross or lower life. The gross path of ascent involves manipulation of all the faculties below the brows, and seeks entrance to the subtle dimension, which begins at the place between and behind the brows (midbrain).
The subtle path, exemplified by traditions such as shabd yoga (or nada yoga), bypasses all involvement with gross or lower energy manipulation, including the kundalini, and begins with concentration on the life-current as internal sound and light at the door of the subtle dimension behind the brows (ajna chakra), thus controlling and absorbing the mind. Since the Goal of such approaches is escape to cognition above the gross level, their methods need not magically improve the karmas below, and so they merely step aside from yogic attention to the gross aspect of the Play. The traditions of the subtle path, like the kundalini and other examples of the gross path, pursue the Goal by entering the subtle realms.
The causal path, exemplified by the tradition of jnana yoga, sees no more reason to begin in the subtle dimension than the tradition of shabd or nada yoga sees reason to begin in the gross dimension. The practitioners of jnana yoga bypass the subtle dimension as well as the gross dimensions, and apply themselves to the causal dimension, the dimension of manifest consciousness without subtle or gross appearances. Jnana yoga proceeds by a penetrating enquiry into the nature of one's conscious existence, and thus involves neither manipulation of gross or subtle energies, nor manipulation of the mind corresponding to each of these two dimensions, but only investigation of the causal field of simple consciousness in its first modification (prior to the subtle and gross appearances), which is the separate self sense, the ego-I.
We quote Gaddis (1967:278) referring to Gustav's Stromberg's Soul of the Universe, (D. McKay 1948):
Dr. Stromberg conceived of a realm or dimension that exists beyond our senses and from which the world we see around us has emerged. This realm is of a non-physical or quasi-physical
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nature. From it emerge fields of force or energy that are the pattern-molds that form all living things - men, animals and vegetation. These patterns are filled in by the 'matter' of our world. They are the organizing principles of all life, and determine whether a fertilized ovum will produce a human being, a horse or a dog. He believed that the electromagnetic fields in all living things discovered by Dr. H. S. Burr and his associates were parts of these energy patterns. . . It was the doctor's opinion that the mind and consciousness of man exist in this energy pattern, and the physical brain is merely the instrument of mind. Memory, then must be carried in this pattern structure.
This remarkable statement of a brilliant scientist is notable for identifying the psychic realm as the plenum of potentiality from which thought-forms emerge, and prescient in its description of holographic patterns which determine consciousness and so sensory reality.3
Stace (1960:14) tells us that the mystical consciousness involves "the apprehension of an ultimate non-sensuous unity in all things." This consciousness (ibid:20) is beyond the senses, beyond the understanding, beyond all expression... pure unitary consciousness wherein all awareness of the world and its multiplicity is completely obliterated. It is ineffable peace.
Jung (1973) in his investigations of synchronicity stated that, "The void is the organizer of sensuous reality," (p. 71 ) and categorized (p. 73) the successive steps in the devolution of cosmic substance as follows:
1) Tao present, existence not begun;
2) Things exist, but not begun to be separated;
3) Things separated but affirmation and negation not
begun;
4) Affirmation and negation in being; Tao faded.
Consider how near the modern physicist has approached this point from the scientific side. Zukav (1979:90) quotes Heisenberg on probability waves. Such a wave is defined as:
It meant a tendency for something. It was a quantative version of the old concept of 'potentia' of Aristotle. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and actuality.
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Describing Finkelstein's new theory of process, Zukav (1979:295) says: "The basic events of Finkelstein's theory do not exist in space and time. They are prior to space and time... Space, time, mass, and energy are secondary qualities....
As Henry Stapp concludes after a review of Bell's theorem (quoted by Zukav 1979:311): "Everything we know about nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental processes of nature lie outside space-time, but generate events that can be located in space-time."
Speaking of newest discoveries in physics, Zukav (1979: 296) finds "hitherto unsuspected powers of the mind to mould reality. . ." and concludes, "The philosophy of physics is becoming indistinguishable from the philosophy of Buddhism, which is the philosophy of enlightenment."
What is human life but an experience for consciousness to be awake and aware at the level of manifestation? Troward (1909) tells us that the subjective consciousness acts as if it were under hypnosis. But what is this except the same consciousness asleep at the potentiality level? Our aim, the aim of consciousness, must be to awaken at the potentiality level as well, so that it becomes master of manifestation, and not merely a reactive creature to it. That accomplished, the final task of consciousness is to awaken at the essential level (or level of essence). When consciousness permeates fully all these levels of essence, potentiality, and manifestation, the whole body of the Buddha is evident, and complete, as the Sutra says.
The opening of consciousness to such an experience is, of course, what we have described as a grace, theophany or peak experience. Suddenly, and for a few seconds, which afterwards seems much longer, consciousness awakens in the realm of potentiality, finding itself outside of time and space, with all things possible. The English mystic Traherne has left us an account of this state (Happold 1970:368-70):
Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehension of the world than I ... All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful... All things were spotless, pure, and glorious... All time was eternity...
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The corn was orient and the immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor was ever sown... All things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of day....
Like nine-day kittens, our eyes are opened; and consciousness is awakened in this vivency of manifestation which we call physical reality, proof of which is conveyed to us solely by the senses. Yet intuition suggests that other vivencies of (which are to us) potentiality and essence also exist. Can consciousness awake in these realms, and if so, with what meta-senses must it be equipped? Thoreau (1955) tells us that, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake." To what realm does consciousness awake: the aspect of manifestation, of potentiality or of essence? Most of our lives when awake is spent with consciousness only aware of the manifestation level. The task of consciousness must be to perfect those meta-senses which may be required in the higher vivencies to bring those realms from potentiality and essence to manifestation, so that consciousness may also dawn in them. How shall this be done? Creativity is a prime mover; orthocognition is a second, and meditation is a third (Gowan 1975:ch. 4). All broaden the reach of consciousness by awakening it to its regnant powers of creativity, not just in ideas but in manifestation. "Thy will be done on earth (manifestation) as it is in heaven (essence)."
We come close here to the Socratic concept of ideals. And as Socrates says in closing The Symposium: "Dwelling in that communion only, he would create not images of Beauty, but Beauty herself, and so would become immortal and become the friend of God." Notice that if attention "dwells in that communion only," then the creation of the mind is not merely of images, but is transcended to the creation of a real object - Beauty - and this lifts consciousness to the godlike level.
I looked at the lion, all dignity and magnificence. I thought: "There is a noble spirit imprisoned here in this beast, but the lion's consciousness is so busy playing lion, it does not realize the fact." I looked at the monkey all intelligence and comedy. I thought: "There is a lively spirit imprisoned here, but the monkey's consciousness is so busy playing monkey, that it does not realize the fact."
Then I looked in the mirror. There is more in man than the
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magnificence of the lion or the intelligence of the monkey; there is art, music, science, and most of all the realization that his consciousness does not have to spend all its time playing to the brutish humors and appetites which unite our species to the animal world. For I can help to loosen that imprisoned splendor, and for a little while, each day at least, to let consciousness play at being God.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Or more accurately, all that is, Sis and SSis. The Buddha can also be considered as the ideal perfected person.
2 Let A, B, C, represent a triplicity with each taking three phases (e.g., A 1 , A 2 , A 3 ,) the phases being essence, potentiality, and manifestation. Then A 1 , A 1 , A 1 represents the void (absolute), and A 3 , A 3 , A 3 represents manifestation, and there are seven (7) other intermediate stages of the three gunas.
3 Some Eastern sources believe that certain vibrations of sounds and the electromagnetic spectrum, have the creative, preservative, and destructive properties of the Hindu trinity, and can, therefore, be used for materialization, healing, and dematerialization. See Hamel, P. Through Music to the Self (Boulder: Shamballa Pub. 1979:108) quoting Ouspensky: "Objective music .... can promote .... definite physical phenomena....."
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CHAPTER IX
Summary
9.1) Recapitulation
Let us conclude by recapitulating in outline form what we have learned by this patient examination of a large body of unusual data:
1) We have found that there are useful paradigms which may help to explain some of these remarkable effects:
a) The Pribram-Bohm Hologram Model: "Our brains mathematically construct concrete reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension, a realm of meaningful patterned primary reality that transcends time and space." Mystic experience is nothing but an occasional glimpse of the reference beam, thus dissolving the hologram.
b) The Two-Fluid Model Near Zero-Order State: When a system is near total order, there is not enough disorder to go around, so it breaks into two sub-systems, one of which is "normal," containing both order and disorder, and the other of which is exceptional, in containing total order, as a result of which, microscopic order becomes macroscopic.
c) As Einstein said, time, space, and personality are the three illusions to be overcome in that order.
d) Our apprehension of numinous meta-events is received through periodic vibrations caused by tuned resonance in the right hemisphere.
e) The three-fold body of Buddha (all that is) consists of a realm of essence (void), a realm of potentiality, and a realm of manifestation.
f) Photon-quenching in the visual octave allows the sheltering of animal life from tulpoid forces.
g) Prigogine's theory of Dissipative Structures represent the manner in which Bohm's implicate components of reality become explicate, that is, how increasing order develops in complex structures.
2) The effects of increasing order are discontinuous, emer-
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gent and integrative. Discontinuous means that there is a sudden, sharp escalation into a higher state. Emergence means the onset of some higher power or ability not previously seen. Integrative means that the new operations have some holistic, boundary-breaking synergic quality which binds together in a single Gestalt, aspects which before were not seen capable of such unification.
The human being has both material and psychological powers and abilities that we do not know fully. But it is now possible to construct a taxonomy of some of these powers and abilities (Table II-1). These paranormal powers are not miraculous, but simply expansions of presently known abilities. At this time such powers are best glimpsed in geniuses and saints.
4) The construct of man's possession of an etheric (or vital energy) body in the realm of potentiality is useful in explaining the origin of pranic energy, which appears as an associated vitalizing fluid. Pranic energy (also called "od" by Reichenbach and orgone by Reich) also appears to give rise in the medium to ectoplasm, a silver-gray sticky viscous ropy substance half-way between the etheric and the physical worlds, hence, sometimes visible and sometimes not.
5) The effects of most aspects of physical mediumship appear to be accomplished through the use of ectoplasm extruded through the natural orifices of the entranced medium. These effects include both psychokinesis and materialization.
6) Evidence that the realm of all potentiality (the etheric) is outside of time and space is given by the remarkable data of telepathy and precognition. Our time and space-bound personalities are not able to intuit this transcendence as we have to think in tensed verbs. The mathematical operation of integration over space and time offers some intuition for escape from this prison.
7) The remarkable aspects of fire-walking and psychic heat appear to indicate that pranic energy exchanges between the physical and psychic realms must take place, hence, the conservation of energy law must be further extended.
8) The regnancy of mind in the creation of bodily conditions is seen clearly in the stigmata of some saints.
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9) Prana (od or orgone energy), while not the same as electromagnetic energy, has a "big-brother" relationship to it. In addition it is polarized, released through the fingertips, related to breath, can be passed by touching, comes originally from the sun, and is absorbed by water and plant life.
10) Saintly development appears gradually to free the body from the routine performance of the five animal functions of sex, eating, sleeping, excretion, and breathing; it also confers powers at the time of death.
11 ) Levitation constitutes clear evidence of the regnancy of a transcendent order of reality - (the reference beam in the hologram paradigm) and that sensory reality is but the virtual image imprinted on the brain, and subject to sudden perceptual changes under the proper conditions of order.
12) In the siddhis, commencing with levitation, what we are seeing is a taxonomic progression of the transcendence of the Cosmic spirit in man, which involves a cleansing and renewing of various sensory modalities and functions first in the body (powers), and then in the mind (abilities) to accommodate a new order of reality.
13) There appear to be three kinds of spiritual healing:
a) prototaxic, (somatic), laying on of hands, (4.4)
b) parataxic, (emotions), agape-love, (4.7)
c) syntaxic, (cognition), orthocognitive, (4.6)
14) Empery (dominion) over self, others (healing), and nature is one of the abilities of the enlightened individual.
15) Higher abilities (jhanas) are successive graces, outlined by saints and Hindu yogis, as noted in Table VI-4.
16) There is a relationship between genius (possession by genii), precocity (early manifestation of extraordinary powers), and reincarnation. Geniuses tend to be "old" reincarnates, and their precociousness attests to "remembering" of past powers. Genius requires both high abilities in the left hemisphere, and easy access to the right.
17) It is possible to construct a taxonomy of altered states of consciousness, Tables VI-1, 2, 3, 4).
18) Form is the devolution of cosmic substance caused by inattention to cosmic bliss.
19) The Buddha (which we take to mean "All that Is") has
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a three-fold body:
a) an aspect of essence (void),
b) an aspect of potentiality, and
c) an aspect of manifestation.
The relation of these three is the relation of a function to its first and second derivative.
20) The entire gestalt forms a single pattern, uniform, ordered and beneficent.
9.2) Unsolved Problems and Needed Research
Despite the fact that this book has addressed itself to a serious attempt to explain, or at least develop paradigms for understanding psychic phenomena, candor compels us to admit to many unsolved problems where further research is necessary. Some of the most important are as follows:
1) The question of complete isomorphic representation by the physical realm of action in the etheric realm. Assuming that the etheric realm is the realm of action, and that events in the physical world are the results of such action, do effects in the physical world duplicate exactly actions at a higher level, or is it merely an illusory matter of "saving the appearances?" If the former is true then it will someday be possible to construct a paraphysics which will explain in scientific terms each paraphysical operation (such as materialization and dematerialization for example). If the latter is true, then such explanations will fail, since they will be found to be like so many irrational dreams, which seem reasonable when we are dreaming them, but are seen to be irrational when we awake.
2) The nature of pranic energy. (This question is, of course, a special case of No.1.) If pranic energy is basically etheric, how does it get transformed into physical effects which involve electromagnetic properties including magnetism, ionization, etc. If it is basically physical, how can it be transmitted through leaded walls? If the misassumption lies in considering it either one or the other, how can it be both at the same time? This research (which can build on the work of Reichenbach, Reich, Burr, Coblenz, and many others) is badly needed, comparatively easy to do, and a priority item in a large funded program.
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3) The desirability and ethics involved in the deliberate cultivation of the siddhis. This issue is probably the biggest moral dilemma opened up by this book. The use of the universal psychic laws of the universe for personal advantage is magic, and has been proscribed by an imposing number of saints and holy men. At the same time there are others, equally qualified, who perform such siddhis, teach them to their disciples, and see no objection to them. The issue is not so much the use of psychic power by a saint, but a question of timing in whether they are deliberately developed while the aspirant still retains enough of the "little selfish ego" to misuse them for personal gain. This book is able to give no definitive answer to this dilemma, and the author confesses to unease about it.
4) The nature and properties of ectoplasm. (Another special case of No. 1.) In particular, it would be useful to have various levels of materialization (such as invisible, but exerting a force, invisible to eyesight, but obscuring infra-red rays, visible as a cloudy substance, visible as a solid substance, etc.) explicated in more detail. We need to know whether ectoplasm is produced in the lungs by the action of breathing on prana? Under what circumstances is it stable and permanent (if any), or does it always dissolve away? These are some examples of unsolved questions.
5) The location of the "radio set" in the brain, with respect to sending and receiving psychic impressions and telepathy. Is it localized in the brain at all? If so, is it in the limbic region, the raphe system, the area in the right hemisphere corresponding to Broca's in the left, or some other spot in the body? We also need to know the chemistry, if any, involved.
6) The Properties of Unbonded Water. Ordinary water is nearly 100% hydrogen bonded (see Sect. 4.5 for explanation). Holy water or magnetized water is water whose hydrogen bonding is reduced only a few percent from that. What might be the curative and other properties of water not hydrogen bonded at all?
7) Waterman declares (see Section 5.3) that the way of psychic development is through lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences. Is this, in fact, a general method of deliverance, or is his thesis due to idiosyncratic characteristics?
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8) Evidence from Wilber (1978), Zukav (1979), and Eastern sources suggests that existence is but Shakti's dance of maya (illusion), wherein things are created, preserved, destroyed, and then recreated in the twinkling of an eye. This idea is not so far-fetched as it may seem at first. If our consciousness is like being connected up to the terminal of a cosmic time-sharing computer, each one of us may believe he or she has continual consciousness when what we have is only a series of very short operations interspersed with longer "down" intervals. The concept of "microgeny" suggests that things go from essence to potentiality to manifestation, and back again in accordance with the very rapid and continuing permutations of the gunas. This concept is hardly yet a theory, much less a paradigm, but it contains advantages which suggest that it should be further explored.
9) Evidence from Zukav (1979:271) and other sources suggests that there may be a fundamental "mis-alignment" between logical models of reality, and the experiential reality they are supposed to represent. The concept states that the complete isomorphism may be impossible because symbols and models follow Aristotlean rules of thought, ("Things are either A or not-A"), and experience may be more complex. We need a lot more inquiry into conditions where logical models may suffice, and conditions where they do not do so completely. It may be that only certain classes of experience are impervious to logical modeling, and that these classes have characteristic properties or distinguishing marks. Further investigation of this area would be useful.
10) The work of Prof. Burr at Yale on bioenergetic forces seems unduly neglected. There is recent evidence that small electric charges with small potentials between two portions of pathological living tissue may be helpful in the regeneration process. Indeed, it is further possible that the magnetic effects of laying-on-of-hands healing may induce such electrical results. This whole area needs much further investigation.
11) The concept of non-locality. Certain recent discoveries in physics, specifically in electron-spin, suggest either that information from one particle is transmitted to another at greater than the speed of light or that the two separated particles are connected in some hyper-
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space. If everything is somehow connected to everything else, telepathy needs no further explanation. More scientific investigation here is desirable.
12) Science differs from art in being capable of measurement and prediction. To become a true science, psychic science needs units and yardsticks which will allow measurements to be expressed in intellectually negotiable form.
13) We have called attention in at least two places (Sects. 3.1 and 4.5) to "photographic-visual anomalies," that is to exceptional events where the camera and the eye saw different percepts, - one seeing something, and the other nothing. We hazard the guess that the easiest explanation for this effect is that the two systems are employing light of significantly different wavelengths. But this supposition leads to a very interesting conclusion: some "things" may be "real," (visually manifest), at certain wavelengths and not at others. This possibility and related experiments deserves a great deal more attention than it so far has received. It may be that "reality" of a visual kind "creeps up" from the lower end of the electromagnetic spectrum, - (after all, our bodies are nearly translucent to x-rays).
14) If one reinspects some testimony on early abnormal powers in Section 2.4, and also the precocity of genius in Section 5.2, a neat puzzle comes into focus. Is the early manifestation of exotic powers (as in eidetic imagery) an example of an ephemeral vestige of an archaic ability which will inevitably fade with the fuller development of the modern ego (left-hemisphere dominance), or do these unusual powers fade in most persons simply because they are neither reinforced nor cultivated by society and education? The answer to this conundrum is important and easily feasible to answer through research.
15) One of the more obvious differences between the numinous and the ordinary state of consciousness, between art and science, between the right hemisphere and the left, is that the former can handle non-categorical constructs, and the latter can only handle categorical. It may be, however, that this inability to do with a concept that has several levels of meaning is a fatal weakness of left-hemisphere logic. The complementarity
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principle of physics (light as both waves and photons) shows how necessary it may be to create a non-categorical calculus of thought. Hence, the full understanding of these numinous regions may have to wait upon the construction of such a meta-lingual system.
9.3) Epilogue
Finally, we would like to end these essays by appending a general statement of belief, taken from earlier work (1975:380ff). Nearly a century ago Evelyn Underhill in closing her famous treatise on mysticism (1911:378) said: "In mysticism, I believe, lies the essence of the religious life. Without the mystical element, religion is external and strengthless." We would suggest that the intervening years have only served to alter the statement slightly: "In mysticism, I believe lies the essence of life itself; - for it is science, in the meanwhile, that has so notably advanced the mystic view. In keeping with these sentiments we offer the following:1
"1) It should now be clear that the object of existence is the union of the individual mind with the General Mind. In order to achieve this we must escape from three illusions as one does in awakening from a dream. The first is the illusion of the reality of time, the second is the illusion of the reality of space, and the third is the illusion of the reality of the separate self. There are three aspects to this quest, as there are three modes or levels of action. The first aspect is the freeing of the mind from the tyranny of percepts; the second is the escape into the eternal now, and the third is the loss of sense of self through the diffusion of the ego in developmental process. Since the three illusions are properties of the normal state of consciousness, liberation comes only through an altered state of consciousness.
"2) The level of this liberation may be either prototaxic, parataxic, or syntaxic, through what we have popularly called trance, art, or creativity. At each level one escapes in some measure from the physical world, from time, and from self. The prototaxic vehicle which accomplishes this is trance. As we have seen, it produces spectacular liberation from the ordinary laws of physics, from time, and from selfhood, but at the price of the loss of conscious cognition and memorability, and the outletting of psychic energy at the kinesthetic level
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instead of at an aesthetic or cognitive one.
"This disvaluing of the prototaxic manifestation of the numinous element in people is not that it is evil, but that it fails to meet the full potential of the human being. It is as de Condren suggested some centuries ago 'the receiving of the effects of God and his holy communications in a very animal and carnal way.'
"3) The parataxic solution offers a bridge between prototaxic and syntaxic, containing some elements of both. Its highest outlet is in art where it offers an aesthetic ASC as a temporary freeing of the artist from physics, from time, and from selfhood. It has the advantage that there is feeling and some cognition involved though at an iconic (image) representation, rather than the author of the art. Nevertheless, the production of art objects means that the parataxic mode has social value in utility and beauty, in addition to increased individual benefit.
"The domain of the numinousium contains an infinity of event-like elements, real in their realm, but only potential in ours (see Table X, Trance,Art, Creativity). From out this multiple infinity a single chain of events is realized in our space time, by the reifying action of those conscious minds involved with the events. We speak of 'event-like elements' in the numinousium rather than 'events,' for since that field transcends time as we know it (as ever growing later), our concept of an event as something that occurs in time, and our concept of one prior event causing a subsequent one, are merely the traces of a meta-event-like element which exists in the eternal now, and 'which never was' (in our reality), but 'is always happening' (in the eternal now). It is like the pattern in a textile made by the skillful weaving of the warp and woof by a master-weaver. All the thread colors are in all parts of the textile, but only those colors selected by the pattern of the weaver show forth on the surface.
"4) Whereas prototaxic man is insulated from the numinous element by the necessity to enter an altered state of consciousness (wherein he generally loses consciousness, will and memorability) in order to contact it, and whereas parataxic man is in a kind of semi-conductor position in which there is a fail-safe precaution built in on the energy discharge so that (at best or worst), he produces
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only images, syntaxic man, with his knowledge of orthocognition and its derivative power, acquires corresponding responsibility. For his conscious mind is in contact with the numinous element (or to put it the other way, it has reached the conscious level at last through his mind). Consequently, he has literally become a co-creator, and whatever he thinks, is liable to become an event in our space-time. With this awesome power goes the responsibility to purify his desires to the extended aspects of his environmental self, and to wish for nothing except that which is good and beneficial to others and to mankind.
"5) We should become more aware of the curious symbiotic relationship between the ego and perceptual intake. The conscious ego appears to owe its stability to a narrow range of perceptual inflow; while the environment appears to owe its stability to continued cognizance by the totality of conscious egos. If perceptual intake is restricted, or expanded beyond certain limits, the normal state of consciousness, as we know it is replaced by an altered state in which cognitive function is much reduced. A fish swimming in the sea regards the ocean as fixed and given; so we regard the normal state of consciousness. But it appears that in reality this normal state is a very 'special state' which has been contrived in order for us to attend to perceptual events in space/ time. Any considerable interference with that perceptual intake will shift consciousness into another state or mode. Such considerations suggest that not only is our normal state of consciousness a recent and specialized development, but that it is uniquely related to, and sustained by, the perceptual universe. If the rule works as well backward as forward, one wonders if the perceptual world of experience is not somehow related to and sustained by the collective consciousness which designs and observes it.
"6) Let us look at the development of consciousness, that most significant aspect of life. Consciousness has an irresistible tendency to form; for every level of consciousness therefore, there is a vehicle, of which the physical body is only one example. Satprem (1968:307) quotes Sri Aurobindo on this journey of consciousness:
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If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our blirth into matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that is taking place in nature, then man, as he is, cannot be the last term in that evolution; he is too imperfect an expression of the spirit. Mind itself is too limited a form and instrumentation; mind is only a middle term of consciousness; the mental being can only be a transitional being.
"The ordinary consciousness in the physical body tends to altered states of consciousness, and seems (as in the case of sleep) to require these intervals for proper rest and restoration.
Tart (1971 :3) says in this regard:
One of the most persistent and unusual aspects of human behavior.... is man's dissatisfaction with the ordinary state of consciousness and the consequent development of innumerable methods of altering it.
"The succession of conscious states is toward higher integration, not toward lower dissociation, toward more control of the environment, rather than less, and toward more grand perceptions of beneficence rather than toward the opposite. This principle is one of those facts (like the existence of the stars) which would be considered remarkable if we did not take it for granted. The process of integration in growth has the complementary virtues of being obvious in fact and transcendental in implication. It restores man from a reactive creature, differentiated in time, to an integrated part of the noumenon. As Eliade 1969:199-200) says:
The idea of yoga.... is to live in an eternal present, outside of time. The man, liberated in life, no longer possesses a personal consciousness .... but a witnessing consciousness, which is pure lucidity and spontaneity.
"7) Regarding the three illusions:
a) The percepts of waking and dreaming (and hence all physical reality) are equally illusory, being governed by the generalized preconscious. This does not mean that the ordinary world of physical reality is without laws, but only that its supposed laws represent special cases of more general cosmic laws.
b) The consciousness of the ego as being bound in time and space and as being in one point in that space
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time is equally illusory. It is a kind of fiction invented to give the experience of cognition and development, and hence the scenario of life is a self-designed dream.
c) The idea of the ego itself as a separate bit of consciousness is also an illusion. Human life is but the history of the growth, development, and diffusion of this illusion. In order to encourage the gradual transformation of this process it is useful to encourage the enhancement of self-concept from its initial narrow sense of 'my body' to its ultimate broad sense of 'my world,' passing through the intermediate stages of my possessions, my loved ones, my work, my associations, and my creations.
"The physical world is of course not unreal, but it is only a special case of the larger vivency of the collective unconscious into which our individual egos are launched to gain the experience of cognition and will in a time and space-bound world. We are held prisoner in this restricted space-time with its physical laws by our sense of ego, reinforced by what we call the 'normal' state of consciousness. (Actually it is a very special state of consciousness in which intelligence is particularized.) But even in our ego-consciousness we can escape the restrictive laws of the physical world into the larger laws of the metaphysical world by passing into an ASC.
"8) Lama Govinda (1966:17) points out that (since the syntaxic mode embraces the lower modes as well) '. . the essential nature of words is neither exhausted by their present meaning, nor is their importance confined to this usefulness as a transmitter of thought' - for they express at the same time qualities which are not translatable into concepts. He continues, - that it is precisely this parataxic quality in poetry and oratory which stirs us so deeply. This statement by the lama is indicative of the fact that the three cognitive modes are 'epigenetic' in Erikson's sense - that is, each succeeding one builds on the previous, and contains it, although emphasizing a new and emergent aspect. He again senses this hierarchy in stating (Ibid) 'if art can be called... the formal expression of reality ... then the creation of language may be called the greatest achievement of art.'
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"The same intuitive grasp of the hierarchy of the three modes is evidenced by Satprem (1964:60) in his biography of Sri Aurobindo when he declares, speaking of growing enlightenment: 'Once in possession of these . . . the seeker begins to know ... things as they are, for he no longer catches the external signs, gestures, all that immured dumb show, nor the veiled face of things, but the pure vibration in each thing . . .'
"Satprem (1964:55 says further:
'The task of the apprentice yogi ... is finally to become conscious in what men call death, for to the degree that we have been conscious in our life we shall become conscious in our death.
He (1964:103) quotes Sri Aurobindo as saying:
Matter is the starting point of our evolution; enclosed in it consciousness has gradually evolved; so the more consciousness emerges, the more it must recover its sovereignty and affirm its independence.
Finally he (1964:178) paraphrases Sri Aurobindo in stating:
Our sole problem is to lift ourselves to even higher planes by an individual evolution and our single life to transcribe and incarnate materially the truth of the plane to which we belong.
"In a dream the perceptual events seem to be real, but actually are illusory, permuted about by unconscious forces, and the lucid dreamer knows that this is so, and that he is dreaming; in our normal state of consciousness, the percepts also seem to be real, but actually are equally illusory, being controlled and permuted by the collective unconscious, and the enlightened man like the lucid dreamer knows that this is so, and that he, too, is, in reality, in a dream. The dream state is to ordinary every-day 'reality' as that reality is to ultimate reality; each state is the dream-state of the one above it.
"It appears that those who have successfully practiced the disciplines of the psychedelic stage and have reaped its enormous benefits fall into three classes. Curiously enough these categories are best delineated by
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another triple paradigm (Bruner's classification of concept formulation):
(1) enactive (when the learning is in the muscles);
(2) iconic (when the learning depends on signs [icons]; and
(3) symbolic (when the learning has been completely integrated as a concept).
"in the first two states, when the learning is less than fully complete symbolically, it can be approximated in the first instance through a system of body training (Hatha-yoga), and the following of ritual (such as Zen or alpha wave biofeedback), and in the second instance by recourse to icon-like archetypes which stand in the place of a concept which is too vague for complete cognitive formulation, but which indicates by a shadowy presence its substantive nature.
"In the final instance, full psychedelic power is obtained, orthocognition is established, and the juncture of the conscious mind and the numinous element which presents itself as the collective preconscious brings not only creativity and serendipity, but literally the positive control of all aspects of man's self-concept from body-image outward to complete altruism. This 'heaven on earth' 'Omega point' is a literal re-establishment of the pristine Adamic estate, at present glimpsed only in ecstasies and visions. It is contained, of course, within the 'durative topocosm' which exists throughout time, and waits only on man's developing mind to again bring it to physical manifestation. It is in this concept, that psychology comes to aid man in understanding what was formerly called 'the mystic path' in a more modern and useful way.
"Our egos are ephemeral, transitory events, which develop (like waves), effloresce, and diffuse, carrying back with them to the Spirit which originated them the precious experience of rational consciousness. This individualized process is carried out in eight stages of development, discovered by Erikson:
In stage 1, the ego is absent;
in stage 2, it rises and differentiates;
in stage 3, it explores love of self and parents;
in stage 4, it stops trying to make people and starts trying to make things;
in stage 5, it reaches its zenith of separatism in the adolescent identity-crisis;
in stage 6, it begins diffusion in love of the beloved and in creativity;
in stage 7, it further diffuses in parental succorance, and psychedelic experiences;
in stage 8, it sets in illumination, knowing that its destiny is to transcend self;
in stage 9, it is again absent.
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"The central issue in the development of man is the relationship between the generalized impersonal mind (which we call the preconscious) and the particularized conscious manifestation of it (which we call our individual consciousness). Each of these aspects of intelligence brings to their psychedelic union its own peculiar and characteristic powers, and each needs the support of the other. The generalized mind, which exists in a hypnotized impersonal state has genie-like powers over the environment including ourselves, but lacks conscious will and personality. The particular conscious mind has the regnancy of individual will, consciousness, and rational thought, but lacks the generalized powers, which can only be wisely and usefully released in a union of the two (which we call the psychedelic state).
"In the unitive state, these two aspects are joined; and as in a closed electrical circuit, the current flows, empowering the human consciousness with quasi-divine authority, and humanizing the impersonal preconscious with the rationalizing of human conscious evaluation in place of the dark archetypes of the collective subconscious. To be sure, not all these methods are of equal value, for some allow for much more rational control than others, and it is this rational control of the process which is the continuum on which they should be evaluated.
"To the extent that each individual human mind shares in the generalized preconscious, it becomes a creator, just as the generalized preconscious is. Therefore, every human has the potentiality of creation, not just of ideas but of actual reality; and from this it follows that whatever people believe in, becomes real in an existential sense. The enormous implications of this concept (which among other things solves the problem of the origin of evil) are extremely important for each of us to understand, so that we do not, by negative thoughts, add to the sum total of evil in the world, but instead contribute to its opposite - the good.
"The numinous element appears in the process of becoming, in the process of manifesting, in the process of building toward what is to us a future event of perfection. All that precedes that dawn is prologue, including the dream world in which we live, for this can be conceptualized as no more than the numinous element trying out different facets of its power and energy through the medium of our individualized lives, much as a concert artist tries out themes before a symphony concert. But that rehearsal is a
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necessary part of its evolution, for when housed in us, it is able, if but in the blink of a man's lifetime, to blend its awesome power with the personal element which it alone lacks: it is able in a finite life to become complete and to pre-figure the 'far-off Divine event' of the poet, when all having been brought to perfection, the All will fully cognize the All. Thus each individual life is part of an eternal prologue in which the numinous element is being perfected and completed to a new and more glorious dawn. Thoreau, that rustic seer, said of this process, 'That day is yet to dawn, for the sun is only a morning star!"'
FOOTNOTE:
1 The remainder of this chapter is quoted from earlier work (1975:380ff).
ADDENDUM: Siddhis are produced by a sanayama or 3-fold simultaneous use of concentration (samadhi), meditation (dhyana), and fixity (dharama). The first two produce an increase in order which flows thru the whole system. But fixing the attention on a particular part produces an inflow of order from the whole system to the specific part. One could say that order in general is lessened to produce more order in one spot. (The analogue would be that of a hydraulic ram which uses the fall of a lot of water over a small height to produce the raising of a small amount to a considerable height. The amount of order introduced into the small subsystem is so large that it produces a siddhi in line with theory in Chapter 1. The kind of siddhi depends on the particular sanayama employed which fixes total order on some specific object or body part.
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CORRECTIONS, ADDITIONS, COMMENTARY
(page/paragraph/line - continued paragraph numbered zero)
33/commentary on chapter: Siddhis and Two-fluid model: Reflections after this chapter emphasize the importance of the siddhis in inducing the near-vacuum state which produces and "two-fluid" model, which two concepts seem central in explaining psychic phenomena. (Here refer to addendum on pages 46 and 372.) The following additional commentary may be useful in amplifying these ideas.
The brilliant scientist, Werner Heisenberg, once said: "What we see is not nature, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Since we do not ask the right questions of nature, she does not tell us the right answers. The writer wonders if this concept is relevant in regard to those phenomena now considered miraculous and psychic. Do we in fact misinterpret the significance of what we see in this area, because we lack the insight to unravel the complex mechanisms and ideas which have produced such anomalous experience? Perhaps if we backed off the subject for a bit, and proposed some new theoretical considerations, we might further our cause.
Generally speaking, when a problem such as the psychic area proves sticky, it is because we are not in possession of powerful enough constructs. When one is looking for more powerful constructs, one usually finds that mathematics and physics furnish helpful paradigms. Intuition suggests that the two-fluid model in atomic physics may be just such a paradigm. Let us completely forget psychics for a few moments while we investigate the physical model carefully for possible isomorphic relevance.
To explain the two fluid model in non-scientific parlance, let us suppose that there is an assemblage of N people who wear nothing but sheets, as many as are at hand. Let us stipulate that while sheets cannot be divided, within the group they are always distributed as evenly as possible. Further let the number of sheets X, which starts out much larger than N gradually shrink, until at last it becomes less than N. Here a very spectacular event happens: suddenly the heretofore homogenous group is divided into two
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pacts - those who still have one sheet, and those who are naked; it is obvious that the behavior of these two subgroups will differ considerably.
To get a gut reaction on a profound problem, we have anthropomorphized the metaphor. Let us now change it by reducing the assemblage from persons to atoms, and the sheets to quanta packets of heat. This change in operators does not change the process, and it is at once obvious that we have the two fluid model (best exemplified by the superfluidity and superconductivity properties of Helium 3 under 2 degrees Kelvin).
In trying to visualize the two-fluid model, it may be helpful to realize that it is an inevitable consequence of the fact that energy comes in quantum packets, and consequently that when the entropy in a system has been so diluted "that there are not enough of the packets to go around" some of the stuff of the system must lack any packets at all. There are hence two kinds of stuff in the system: stuff without energy packets, and stuff with one energy packet each; these two form the two fluids.
Let us at once note, as important, the fact that the two fluids are very different in behavior. The one ordinary fluid carrying all the entropy of the system has no changed properties since the usual statistical laws govern. The other, an extraordinary fluid with no entropy, has no electrical resistance nor surface boundary. Quantum mechanical laws pertain here in macroscopic form. Conditions when quantum mechanical laws supersede the law of averages are conditions which favor "miracles." Since, however, this paper is not a scientific treatise, we will not further dwell on the other remarkable properties of the non-entropic liquid but proceed to use it as an isomorphic metaphor.
What has been described heretofore is a "spontaneous" example of the two-fluid model which occurs naturally because zero (with its unique properties) is the number below one. We shall now describe a more complex model which can occur only with intelligent intervention, since it consists of the division of a system into two sub-systems, one of which contains no entropy packets (and the other several entropy packets per unit of stuff) though some artificial separation process. Supposing that there is some way in which this can be done, the consequence will be that in a rather normal system (in fairly high entropy), a small sub-system can be so purified of entropy that it will be in total order, with consequent remarkable properties, while the larger sub-system takes on the excess entropy distributed over a larger extent, and hence relatively unnoticed. Naturally the lower the total entropy in the system, the easier it will be to achieve this goal, so that as a limiting case the goal is spontaneously achieved when the entropy packets per unit of stuff in the system have been reduced to unity, and not some multiple of it.
The spontaneous example of the two fluid model which must occur in physics because zero is the number below one, can hence be generalized to a contrived example of the two fluid model when some mechanism is employed to counteract the "spreading as-evenly-as- possible law," and produce units with no packets of entropy in the presence of others of more than one packet of entropy apiece. It is suggested that one such possible mechanism is siddhis meditation, which directs total order into a small subgroup at the expense of higher entropy in the larger subgroup.
Siddhis are produced by a sanayama, or 3-fold simultaneous use of concentration (samadhi), meditation (dhyana), and fixity (dharama). The first two produce an increase in order which flows through the whole system. But fixing the attention on a particular part produces an inflow of order from the whole system of the specific part. One could say that order in general is lessened to produce more order in one spot. (The analogue would be that of a hydraulic ram which uses the fall of a lot of water over a small height to produce the raising of a small amount to a considerable height.) The amount of order introduced into the small sub-system is so large that it produces a siddhi (miracle). The kind of siddhi depends on the particular sanayama employed which fixes total order on some specific object or body part.
Siddhis are important to psychic science because they involve almost every discrete phenomenon studied under that discipline, such as telepathy, precognition, levitation, psychokinesis, mind-reading, and many others, as catalogued in Gowan (1980). The most authoritative description of the siddhis is Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, Book III on paranormal powers, (Aranya, 1977). In the West, the Transcendental Meditation Move-
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ment, through its siddhis teaching, has experience and documentation on this subject, (Orme-Johnson and Farrow, 1977). Keeping these facts in mind, let us now turn to taking testimony from these sources. (Here reread page 38).
Domash views meditation as the conscious exploration of very low or ordered mental temperatures. The genesis of pure consciousness is seen as a phase transition of the nervous system to a state of long-range order among neurons. Similarities exist between this state of pure awareness and macroscopic quantum mechanisms, such as superconductivity and superfluidity. This "fifth yogic state" can be modeled in terms of the two-fluid model characteristic of superfluids, in which special laws of nature, not seen during ordinary high entropy, become evident. It may be that such siddhis as levitation, as well as telepathy, precognition, and other paranormal powers are effects of this change of laws from statistical to quantum.
A close reading of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, Book III on paranormal power, (siddhis), (Aranya 1977:278-348), reveals that this ancient sage predicted the existence of the siddhis and accounted for them in a completely compatible manner. This is not the place to argue the relative merits of Transcendental Meditation or other ministries in the facilitation of such states for the average human, since our aim is to bring out the compatibility of some psychic phenomena with very recent discoveries in physics.
The advantages of the two-fluid model are:
1) It offers a first scientific explanation of some paranormal phenomena;
2) It provides an explanation why saints in a very high state of order develop spontaneous and unsought siddhis;
3) It suggests further developments, explorations, and research experiments.
There are limits to the scope of this model in explaining psychic phenomena; it is not claimed that it can account for all such manifestations. Nevertheless, the siddhis approach to paranormal phenomena as enhanced powers of the right hemisphere of human beings in a high state of order, using the two-fluid paradigm is a very useful one, since it gives us a first view of the paranormal as compatible with the quantum mechanical principles of modern physics.
18/3/ microgeny: The following compatible quotation purporting to come via automatic writing from the dead Myers is found in Geraldine Cummins The Road to Immortality (1955:59): "Even when man is awake . . . his consciousness is broken by gaps of unconsciousness forty or fifty times a second." (A similar conclusion is reached by E. D. Fawcett on page 328 of The Individual and Reality.)
86/3 I.V. Patrovsky of Prague advises that dowsing is caused by muscular tension, which generates electromagnetic impulses of wave length 3-70 cm which penetrate down to dielectric water and are reflected back.
88/4 Work of Burr: further to this topic see Russell, E. Design for Destiny. Sudbury, England, Nevill Spearman, 1921 which gives (p. 178-9) extensive bibliography of Burr's writings including his Blueprint for Immortality, Sudbury: Spearman, 1950?
97/0/17 We guess that the reason the siddhis come spontaneously in the cases of some Christian mystics is that the "disorder packets" are not numerous enough to go around, and consequently there is a natural separation in accordance with the two fluid model, - (see previous comment on chapter 1 ). In the yogic siddhis, there may be artificial means used to separate the entropy in individuals in a higher state of disorder; this is apparantly the theoretical reason for proscriptions against its use. The heat entropy Helium 3 model is very helpful here, presuming that it is an exact isomorph.
98/3/6 We now suggest that the specific power possessed by the "control" is that this disincarnate spirit is able to effect a siddhi, in other words go into samadhi, whereas the departed communicators are not.
112/0/6 This concentration of thought resembles a siddhi, and one is justified in wondering if materialization, and other phenomena of similar type are caused by a siddhi on the part of the departed control. This would explain why it is necessary to have a control, (a departed person who has learned siddhi technique), and would also explain why there seem to be so many East and American Indians as controls (since they belong to a culture which through Vedic or Shamanistic techniques has more access to the siddhi technique).
162 Commentary on SHC. Reflection after writing this section suggest more emphasis on the very rapid, (almost instantaneous) aspect of this combustion which has received insufficient attention. (Note 164 under Gaddis No. 8; also 162, 1st Paragraph, No. 4; and again 165/3/3-4). An almost instantaneous flash of light would explain the lack of burning of more distant objects in the room (which would certainly occur if the time were sufficient for heat to build up). Is it possible that SHC is a kind
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of aborted translation, so that the flash of light does not fully destroy the body? SHC phenomena should be re-examined with this very rapid co- mbustion hypothesis in mind. If correct, this hypothesis would make SHC akin to an aborted translation process, and would suggest that SHC might well be placed under Mortem effects, (3.7) instead of under 3.3.
162/5 1. V. Patrovsky of Prague advises that SHC should never be associated with alcohol, as the two are not connected. He believes a possible explanation is that deuterium oxide from heavy water becomes concentrated in elder people and by some cosmic impulse a nuclear reaction may arise.
176/3/12 Further accounts of these pioneers in radionics may be found in Russell, E. W. Report on Radionics. Suffolk, England: Neville Spearman, 1973. Our tentative hypothesis in regard to the healing properties of radionics is that 1) there is a universal intelligence, 2) mankind has access to it through the right hemisphere, 3) but it cannot speak, and hence must communicate its information through various forms of apparatus known as radionic. In other words, radionic hardware is much like an Ouija board, or a dowser's wand, enabling the subliminal self to communicate without words, and facilitating this response.
178/3 1. V. Patrovsky of Prague advises luminescence may be identified as Russell's effect, such as action of butterfly wings, flowers, woods, metals on photographic plate. Crystals such as those of flint, feldspar, and fluorite may exhibit electro-luminescence by piezoelectric effect. Some metals fluoresce by heating or absorbing ultra-violet rays. Flowers may exhibit chemi-luminescence when oxidized by air.
223/2 1. V. Patrovsky of Prague advises that a local healer Zezulka was able to generate both A.C. and D.C. electromagnetic fields, and thus activate water. "Physical changes in water are paramagnetic nuclear resonance, Peschke effects, and the breaking of hydrogen bonding caused by the A.C. field. Low frequencies may form free radicals, charged ions, and trace of hydrogen peroxide, all with positive effects on living matter. All living matter in general may be influenced by magnetic, electrostatic, and biophysical effects (PEER and EMPT effects) which cause changes in large molecules of hemoglobin, DNA, etc."
223/2/4 1. V. Patrovsky of Prague disputes that these finger emanations are capable of being photographed by Kirlian photography. He states that "all we see on Kirlian photographs are coronal discharges modulated by changes in skin resistance which depends on emotional activity."
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225/0/5 1. V. Patrovsky of Prague advises that this "sick" magnetism is nothing but positive ionization, which may be neutralized by flame or water.
227/2/5 Correspondent Patrovsky and others have advised us that the "90% water" is too high, and that the figure is nearer 60-70%.
263/5 Genius and reincarnation: cf Russell, E. Design for Destiny Neville Spearman, Sudbury, England, 1971, p. 108 for similar views.
270/Myers on genius: For what it may be worth we quote the following from Geraldine Cummins The Road to Immortality 1955:63-4: (The extract purports to be a communication from the dead Myers.) "Now this speculation ... is interesting when applied to genius. The souls who have preceded us on earth naturally stamp us mentally and morally. If a certain type of psyche is continually being evolved in the one group, you will find that eventually that type if it be musical, will have a musical genius as its representative on earth. It will harvest all the tendencies of those vanished lives, and it will then have the amazing unconscious knowledge which is the property of genius."
313/0 Group Soul: Another writer who believed in this was Myers. We quote from G. Cummins The Road to Immortality 1955:51 (automatic writing purporting to come from the dead Myers): "The higher the ego climbs on the ladder of consciousness, the nearer it draws to other kindred souls. I have already told you that there may be a thousand, a hundred, or merely twenty souls all fed by one spirit. Their consciousness of comrade-souls increases on the higher levels of existence. In time they are able to enter into other souls' memories, perceive their experiences and be sensible of them as if they were theirs. Mind becomes communal in the last stages, for the spirit, the unifying principle, is tending all the time to produce greater harmony, and therefore greater unity. These various individuals are merging more and more, becoming one in experience and in mind, and thus attaining to undreamt-of levels of intellectual power."
313/0 Reincarnation and disincarnates: For similar views see Russell, E. Design for Destiny. Neville Spearman, Sudbury, England, 1971 p. 126 quoting Oliver Lodge, source Hibbert Journal, 1921, quoted in F. B. Bond The Company of Avalon, Oxford: Blackwell, 1924.
(page 390)
Adamic Ecstasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Altered States of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 320
Animal Senses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Apports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125
Auras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Automatic Disposal of Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Body Size and Weight Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .207, 209
Body of Buddha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .348
Calm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Chastity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
Clairaudience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Clairvoyance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Cold Wind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .165
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Continence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
Continuous Contact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
Cosmogenic P owers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76, 214
Developmental Aspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 72
Dowsing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .86
Electromagnetic Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .172
Elongation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 208
Empery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
Over Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Endothermic Reactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Epilog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
Etheric Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Exothermic Reactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .160
Exotic Abilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47
Exotic Factors of Intellect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 52
Externalization of Sensorium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .211
Extraordinary Strength . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .210
Firewalking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 149
Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
Friendliness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
Gemeinschaftgefuhl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .252
Gems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
Genius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262, 273
Healing
Laying-On-Of-Hands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .223
Orthocognitive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .237
Union-Compassion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253
Human Oddities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Incorruptibility of Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189
Independence from Physical Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
inedia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Infused Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .254
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1, 262
Invisibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Knowledge of Stars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .217
Levitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Among Mystics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .190
Among Paragnosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Among TM Adepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .202
Theories About . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Luminosity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Materialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Mediumship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 99
Miraculous Hearing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . 234
Miraculous Sight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Miraculous Touch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .222
Mortem Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Needed Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 360
Non-Somnia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 187
Odor of Sanctity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 211
Operations of Increasing Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
Orthocognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
Out-Of-Body Experience (OBE) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130
Paradigms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .10
Paranormal Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Physical Mediumship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .98
Poltergeist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Prana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Precocity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
Premonition of Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Pribran-Bohm Hologram Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Precognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Psychic Heat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Psychic Surgery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .228
Psychokinesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Psychometry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Recapitulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
Reincarnation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
Siddhis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Space and Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 130
Spontaneous Human Combustion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .162
Stars, Arrangement of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Stigmata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
Telepathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Teleportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Time Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Time Warp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Transfiguration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
Union-Compassion Healing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253
Unsolved Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .360
Vision of Cosmic Beings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .218
Through Opaque Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
TABLE 1
THE ERIKSON-PIAGET-GOWAN PERIODIC DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE CHART
DEVELOPMENTAL
LEVELS
(see below)
ATTENTIONAL
MODES (see across)
---------------------------------
DEVELOPMENTAL
LEVELS (see below)
LATENCY
3 it, they
THE WORLD
IDENTITY
1 I, me
THE EGO
CREATIVITY
2 thou
THE OTHER
INFANT
ERIKSON
(Affective)
PIAGET
(Cognitive)
TRUST vs. MISTRUST
1
SENSORIMOTOR vs.
CHAOS
AUTONOMY vs.
SHAME AND DOUBT
2
PREOPERATIONAL
vs. AUTISM
INITIATIVE vs
GUILT
3
INTUITIVE vs.
IMMOBILIZATION
YOUTH
ERIKSON
(Affective)
PIAGET-GOWAN
(Cognitive)
INDUSTRY vs.
INFERIORITY
4
CONCRETE OPER'NS
vs. NON-CONSERVATION
IDENTITY vs.
ROLE DIFFUSION
5
FORMAL OPERATIONS
vs. DEMENTIA PRAECOX
INTIMACY vs.
ISOLATION
6
CREATIVITY vs
AUTHORITARIANISM
ADULT
ERIKSON
(Affective)
GOWAN
(Cognitive)
GENERATIVITY vs.
STAGNATION
7
PSYCHEDELIA vs.
CONVENTIONALISM
EGO-INTEGRITY
vs. DESPAIR
8
ILLUMINATION vs.
SENILE DEPRESSION
.
TABLE 2-1
TAXONOMY OF EXOTIC POWERS AND ABILITIES
0 PHYLOGENIC - (other species)
1. PHYLOGENIC- Mankind (SOI Factors of Intellect)
2. ONTOGENIC
.1 extensions of sensory modalities
.11 smell
.12 taste
.13 sight
.14 touch
.15 hearing
.16 unclassified
.2 extensions of mental abilities
.21 temporal
.22 spatial
.23 figural (art)
.24 musical
.25 mathematical
.26 verbal
.27 semantic
.28 behavioral
.29 unclassified
3. COSMOGENIC: Physical (Body Powers)
.0 sensitivity to psychic impressions, telepathy, dowsing, (18, 19)*
.1 physical mediumship, communication with dead, poltergeist phenomena, apports, psychokinesis, materializations
.2 OBE bilocation, time warp, teleportation, clairvoyance, (38,47)
.3 endo - and exothermic reactions, firewalking, psychic heat, SHC
.4 stigmata
.5 luminosity, aura, electromagnetic effects, (40)
.6 independence from physical functions, inedia, non-somnia, (30)
.7 mortem excursus, knowing time of death, post mortem effects, incorruptibility, (22, 39)
.8 levitation, (42)
.9 invisibility, (21)
.X body size and weight changes, elongation, abnormal strength, (24,45)
.Y externalization of sense organs, odor of sanctity, (see 4.3-5), (48)
4. COSMOGENIC: Mental (Knowledge Abilities)
.0 knowledge of arrangement and motion of stars, (27, 28)
.1 vision of cosmic beings, (26, 32)
.2 calm (31)
.3 vision through opaque objects, miraculous sight, (25)
.4 miraculous touch, ability to heal through laying on of hands, understanding of body system, (29)
.5 miraculous hearing, (41)
.6 empery over self, others (healing), animals, weather, miracles, (17)
.7 adamic ecstasy, cleansing doors of perception, gemeinschaftgefuhl, (23, 16)
.8 Infused knowledge, omniscience (jhanas 1-4), (33, 34, 44, 45,49)
.9 Continuous contact and union, (jhanas 5-8) (35, 36)
The numbers in parentheses refer to Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (see Table III-1)
(page 64)
TABLE III-1
PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRA BOOK III ON SUPERNORMAL POWERS
PAGE
SUTRA
INDEX
SAMYAMA ON
GIVES KNOWLEDGE OF, OR POWER OVER
315
16
4.7
changes
past and future
317
17
4.6
word
cries of all creatures
324
18
3.0
latent impressions
past lives
326
19
3.0
notions
thoughts of others
327
21
3.9
body
invisibility
328
22
3.7
karma, portents
time of death
330
23
4.7
gemeinschaftgefuhl
same (compassion)
331
24
3.x
physical strength
same
332
25
4.3
effulgent light
hidden or distant objects
334
26
4.1
solar entrance
cosmic regions
340
27
4.0
lunar entrance
arrangement of stars
341
28
4.0
pole star
motion of stars
341
29
4.4
navel
body system
342
30
3.6
trachea
hunger and thirst
343
31
4.2
bronchial tube
restlessness
343
32
4.1
coronal light
cosmic beings (siddhas)
344
33
4.8
intuition
all knowledge
344
34
4.8
heart
mind stuff (chitta)
345
35
4.9
buddhi
Purusa (pure consciousness)
348
36
3.y
Purusa
cosmic senses
(The previous are knowledges en route; the following are external powers.)
TABLE III GADDIS (1967) DOCUMENTATION OF "MASTERY OVER FIRE"
PAGE
DATE
N
n
TYPE
REMARKS
L
t
CITE (GADDIS)
116
.
1
.
A
St Francis de Paula
.
.
Thurston 1952
117
16xx
1
.
B
Claris ASC
.
.
.
117
186x
1
.
C
Home, transfer ASC
(see quote below)(1)
.
.
SPR:VI:103
Adair 1924
Burton 1944
121
1917
1
.
C
medium, transfer ASC
.
.
SPR:35 1924
121
1927
1
.
C
12 yr old boy
.
.
.
122
1871
1
.
C
blacksmith
.
.
NYC Herald 9/7/1871
122
1883
10
.
D
Indian firedance ASC
.
.
B. of Ethnology 1883-4
125
1948
1
.
C
Honolulu fakir
.
.
Long 1948
126
.
gr
.
D
Greek religious rite ASC
.
30'
.
127
1952
gr
.
D
Voodoo dancers ASC
.
1'
Bach 1952
129
1936
gr
.
D
Guiana dancers ASC
.
.
Forbes 1936
130
1760
2
.
A
St Medard hysterics ASC
.
.
Dingwall 1947
193
1950
45
1
W
Fiji fire walk
25'
.
Wright 1950
135
1962
30
.
W
Buenos Aires s.soc'y ASC
.
.
.
138
1935
1
2
W
Kuda Bux in England
11'
5"
Price 1936
140
1938
1
.
W
Kuda Bux at Radio City
20'
.
.
141
.
gr
.
W
Fiji fire walk ASC
25'
15"
Hocken
142
1933
.
.
W
India and Burma
50'
.
Miles 1933
142
1901
1
.
W
Tahitian in Honolulu
.
.
O'Brien 1921
142
.
1
.
W
transfer to author ASC
90'
.
Stevenson
143
.
1
.
W
transfer to author ASC
(see quote below)(2)
.
.
Long 1945:31-7
144
1899
2
.
W
transfer to 2 children
.
.
J. Polynes. Socy 2:1899
145
1899
3
1
W
transfer to 4 Englishmen
(see quote below)(3)
.
.
(ibid:)
146
1936
35
1
W
transfer to American
gr
.
J. Borderline Res. 1949
146
194x
1
.
W
transfer to author
30
.
Menard 1954
147
1933
1
.
W
transfer to author
India
.
.
Long 1948:42-5
148
1922
200
.
W
transfer to many
(see quote below)
13'
.
Thurston 1952:18
150
1949
567
9
W
transfer to many
(Univ. of Hawaii)
(see quote below)
15'
.
Kenn 1949
(use "back" function to return to text)
General notes: page is the page in the Gaddis book; the date is the approximate date when the occurence took place; N is the number of successful persons; n is the number of burned persons; in each case they somehow disobeyed instructions; Type represents the kind of fire mastery where A - general mastery; B - enduring a blazing pyre; C - handling hot coals; D - a fire dance; W - fire-walking; ASC refers to the fact that the candidates were known to be in a trance or altered state of consciousness, transfer refers to the fact that the ability to pass through fire was transferred by the adept to some one else, not adept in the art, such as a bystander, an observer or the author of the account; I - the length of the firepit in feet; t - the time the participant was observed in the firepit or the time to transit it. Cite - the bibliographic source to be found in the bibliography (SPR
Society for Psychical Research).
Special notes:
1. (Gaddis 1967:118) The Earl of Crawford wrote: "I have frequently seen Home when in a trance go to the fire and take out large red-hot coals and carry them about in his hands. . . . Eight times I have myself held a red-hot coal in my hands without injury. . . ."
2. (Brigham, Long:31f) Dr William T. Brigham of Bishop Museum, Honolulu: "I watched him with my mouth open and he was nearly across,-a distance of 150 It when someone gave me a shove. . . . I do not know what madness seized me but I ran. The heat wag unbelievable. . . . I was never so relieved in my life as I was to find that I was safe, and there was not a blister on my feet."
3. (Journal of Polynesian Soc'y N.Z. March 1899) Col Gudgeon, British resident in Tahiti: "I knew quite well that I was walking on red-hot stones, and could sense the heat, yet I was not burned. I felt something resembling slight electric shocks. . . ."
4. (Thurston, 1952:187ff) Bishop of Mysore, Monsignor Despartes: (a witness): "There must have been 200 people who passed over the embers, and 100 who went right through the middle of the flames" A Caucasian police chief told the bishop: "We felt as though we were in a furnace, but the fire did not burn us."
5. (Kenn, 1949) "Walkers interviewed afterward reported that their minds "were a blank" or that "they were under a spell." Their feet felt "only warm but had a tingling sensation, like the foot going to sleep"
6. It is notable in this table that it is the hands and feet which seem to have the immunity, rather than the whole body. This fact raises the issue of whether the auras which proceed from hands (and putatively the feet, see section 4,15) have a countervailing influence.
Table IV: Properties of Various Trance States Compared
Property
Schizo-
phrena
(*)
Possession
Mediumship
Hypnotism
Shamanism
Glossolalia
Mystic
Experience
(*)
Ego
Absent
Absent
Absent
Absent
Partly
Present
Partly
Present
Present
Memorability
None
None
None
None
Some
Some
Much
Possessor
?
Demon
Spirit
Hypnotist
Familiar
Deity
Deity
Personal
Value
Minus
Minus
Neutral
Plus
Plus
Plus
Very Plus
Social
Value
Minus
Minus
Plus
Plus
Plus
Plus
Very Plus
Sought?
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Induced?
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Considered
Illness
Illness
Talent
Therapy
Vocation
Grace
Theophany
Speech
Understood
Some
Some
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Physical
Symptoms
Yes
Yes
Few
Few
Few
Few
None
Trance
Learned
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
DNA
(*) For Comparison Only (use "Back" function to return to text)
(page 177)
TABLE V PROPERTIES OF PARATAXIC PROCEDURES
PROCEDURE
STATE OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
DIRECTION
OF ACTION
MODALITY
GOODNESS/
BADNESS
NUMINOUS
ASPECT
Prototaxcic
Mode*
Trance
impressed**
(excursion)
very bad
dreadful
1. Archetype
REM state
impressed**
pictorial
bad
worrisome
2. Dream
REM state
impressed**
pictorial
B/G
paranormal
3. Myth
normal
(neutral)
oral
-
religious
4.Ritual
normal
expressed**
enactive
G/B
magical
5. Art
normal
expressed**
pictorial
good
creative
Syntaxic
Mode*
normal and
higher ASC
expressed**
symbolic
very good
psychedelic
*for comparison only, not a part of parataxic mode.
**on individual, or by individual
(page 247)
Table VIII: PROPERTIES OF SYNTAXIC PROCEDURES AND GRACES
(after Laski, 1962 and Goleman, 1972)
.
D
E
V
E
L
O
P
E
S
T
A
G
E
Y
O
G
I
C
S
T
A
G
E
S
A
M
A
D
H
I
S
T
A
B
I
L
I
T
Y
S
I
D
D
H
I
S
J
H
A
N
A
Procedure
or Grace
A
F
F
E
C
T
C
O
G
N
I
T
I
O
N
P
U
R
I
F
I
C
A
T
I
O
N
I
L
L
U
M
I
N
A
T
I
O
N
T
R
A
N
S
E
N
D
E
N
C
E
U
N
I
O
N
Details of Glory
Remarks
C
R
E
A
T
I
V
E
6
3
N
O
N
E
O
S
C
S
T
A
B
L
E
N
O
N
E
S
O
M
E
-6+
Tantric sex
O
.
.
.
.
.
Prototaxic
sexual union
-5+
Creativity
I
x
.
.
.
.
Creative
Illumination
-4+
Biofeedback
I
x
.
.
.
.
Alpha bliss
-3+
Orthocognition
I
x
.
.
.
.
Orthocognitive
inner security
-2+
Meditation*
I
x
.
.
.
.
Meditative
contact bliss
P
S
Y
C
H
E
D
E
L
I
C
7
4
S
A
G
I
K
A
L
P
A
A
S
C
T
R
A
N
S
I
E
N
T
Y
E
S
-1+
Response Exp.**
E
x
x
.
(sense
presence)
Nature - mystic
oceanic, peak exp.
0+
Adamic ecstasy
E
x
x
.
(hear)
Cleansing doors
of perception
1
Knowledge
ecstasy
E
x
x
x
(see)
Pratyhara
hindering thoughts cease
2
Knowledge
contact #1
E
x
x
x
(touch)
Primary object
transcended
3
Knowledge
contact #2
e
x
x
x
(penetrating)
Rapture ceases
4
Knowledge
contact #3
e
x
x
x
(merge)
All feelings cease
U
N
I
T
I
V
E
8
5
N
I
R
G
I
K
A
L
P
A
A
S
C
S
T
A
B
L
E
Y
E
S
5
Ineffable
contact
e
.
x
x
x
.
Consciousness of
infinite space
6
Transcendental
contact
e
.
.
x
x
.
Objectless infinite
consciousness
7
Ineffable
union
e
.
.
.
x
x
Awareness of
"no-thing-ness"
8
Transcendental
union
e
.
.
.
x
x
Neither perception
nor non-perception
(use "Back" function to return to text)
O = orgasm I = Inspiration E = ecstasy e = beyond ecstasy; *Goleman places meditation in yogic stage 4
**Laski denies that this experience is a true ecstasy, although the testimony of many poets and nature mystics would indicate that it is
+Easten lore does not mention negative jhanas; they are added for clarity.
The "zero" jhana is known as the "access" state.
TABLE VII-1 LEVELS IN THE SPECTRUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS - AFTER WILBER (1977)
Lilly
p.181
Spectrum Level Name
p. 143
Sheath
p. 176
Description or Remarks
173
Mahayana Names
p. 169
Brown
p. 109
Body
p. 168
3
(Cosmic Mind)
.
"The Void"
A
citta
Void
.
6
Transpersonal
Bands
ananda
"cosmic filter"
A
alaya-vijnana
.
karuna causal
12
Existential
vijnana
space-time created (p. 120-33)
"Primary Dualism"
B
manas
Form
.
24
Biosocial Bands
mano
"cultural filter (p. 135)
Castaneda's "tonal"
C
.
.
suksma subtle
48
-48
Ego
Prana
ordinary man (p. 136)
("syntaxic") (Gowan 1975)
D
manovijnana
indication
.
96
-24
Philosophic Band
.
"personal filter" (p. 158-9)
super-ego
(E)
.
.
.
196
-12
Persona/Shadow
anna
("parataxic") (p. 150-1)
compartmentalized or split person with "good me" and "bad me," neurotic, psychotic
F
.
truth
sthula gross
384
-6
(Five Senses)
.
("perceptual filter")
(G)
5 vijnanas
5 senses
.
.
768
-3
(Environment)
.
("prototaxic")
(H)
.
existence
.
Note: Material in parenthesis has been added and is not found in Wilber.
TABLE VIII-1 - TRIPLICITIES2
ESSENCE
POTENTIALITY
MANIFESTATION
(Buddha)
FATHER
HOLY GHOST
SON
(Christian)
CAUSAL
SUBTLE
GROSS
(Jones)
CAUSAL
ASTRAL
PHYSICAL
(Occult)
(nilplicate)
implicate
explicate
(Bohm)
void
thought-forms
things
.
double integral SS(f)
single integral S(f)
(f) = function
math
function
df/dx
d2f/dx2
math
S(f)(x)
(f)(x)
df/dx
math
1 . J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, 1976.
2. W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans Green, New
York, 1902.
T. E. Bearden, Photon Quenching and the Paranormal, Unpublished report,
Systems Development Corp., Huntsville, Alabama, April 20, 1977.
4. J. C. Gowan, Trance Art and Creativity, The Creative Education Foundation,
Buffalo, 1975.
5. M. S. Gazzaniga, One Brain, Two Minds, American Scientist, 60, pp.
311-317, 1972.
6. R. W. Sperry, Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Experience, American Psychologist, 23, pp. 723-733, 1968.
7. R. E. Ornstein, Right and Left-Handed Thinking, Psychology Today, pp. 87-90, May 1973.
8. R. Fischer, Hallucinations Can Reveal Creative Imagination, Fields Within Fields, 11, pp. 29-33, 1974.
(page 334)
9. P. Bakan, The Eyes Have It, Psychology Today, pp. 64-70, April 197 1.
10. C. Castaneda, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations With Don Juan, Simon and Schuster, New York, 19 7 1.
11. Anonymous, A Course in Miracles, Foundation for Inner Peace, New York, 1976.
12. R. Samples, The Metaphoric Mind, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1976.
13. M. Ferguson, Editorial, The Brain/Mind Bulletin, Interface Press, July 4, 1977.
14. R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press, London, 1928.
15. C. G. Jung, Collected Works: II, Psychology and Religion, Pantheon, New York, 1958.
16. H. S. Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, Norton, New York, 1953.
17. C. H. Van Rhijn, Symbolists: Psychotherapy by Symbolic Representation, The Uses of LSD in Psychotherapy, H. Abramson (ed.), Josiah Macy Foundation, New York, 1960.
18. W. V. Caldwell, LSD Psychotherapy, Grove Press, New York, 1968.
19. J. C. Gowan, The Development of the Psychedelic Individual, The Creative Education Foundation, Buffalo, 1974.
20. D. Goleman, The Buddha on Meditation and States of Consciousness, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 4: 1, pp. 1-44, 1972.
21. P. Rawson, Tantra, Thames and Hudson, London, 1973.
22. J. C. Gowan, The Development of the Creative Individual, R. Knapp, San Diego, 1972.
23. M. Laski, Ecstasy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1962.
24. C. M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1901.
25. R. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, Macmillan, London, 1932.
26. R. Knox, Enthusiasm, Oxford University Press, London, 1950.
1 (This chapter first appeared in Journal of Altered States of Consciousness 4:2:141-156, 1978-9, copyright 1978 by author.)
(page 335)
CHAPTER VII
Form as the Devolution of Cosmic Substance
The universe comes into manifestation when the three gunas are in the same phase.
-Patanjali
"Attention! Attention!" sang the mynah birds in prophet Aldous Huxley's last novel Island. This is not mere local color; the birds are telling us a secret; the secret of life is attention. Let us take three examples of heightened attention; a woman under hypnosis, under the spell of orgiastic love- making, and under mystic rapture. All three examples involve total attention to the situation, with the blotting out of all extraneous stimuli, a "feminine" passivity, an altered state of consciousness, and the production of unusual side effects. The individual is absorbed in the experience; indeed, in a certain sense the individuality is lost in the experience. We are told by Indian gurus that eventually the knower who pays full attention becomes the known, in other words, knowledge with the highest attention changes into state.
If full attention reaches ultimately the limitless and unbounded void, then inattention is the precursor and cause of imagery. It also seems to be the cause of the world of appearances. The three metaphorical examples in the previous paragraph all are combined in the imagery of cosmic connubial bliss of the Tantra (Rawson 1973:18-9), in which Shiva and Shakti "are so deeply joined that they are unconscious of their differences and beyond time." Or to put it more austerely as Asvaghosha does (Hakeda 1967:50):
Mind, though pure in its self nature from the very beginning, is accompanied by ignorance. Being defiled by ignorance, a defiled (state or level of) Mind comes into being. But, though defiled, the Mind itself is eternal and immutable. Only the Enlightened are able to understand this.
What is called the essential nature of Mind is always beyond thoughts. It is, therefore, defined as 'immutable.' When the one World of Reality is yet to be realized, the Mind seems
(page 336)
mutable and not in perfect Unity. Suddenly a thought arises; this is called ignorance.
As Wilber (1977:110) continues:
Ignorance, in other words, is ignorance of the non-dual and non-conceptual mode of knowing, which would instantly reveal the universe to be Mind-only. It is thus ignorance of Mind-only which literally creates the conventional and symbolic universe of separate things extended in space and succeeding one another in time; and since the major instrument of ignorance is thought, it is thought itself which is ultimately responsible for the seeming existence of the conventional universe.
The word 'thought,' as Asvaghosha uses it, refers not so much to the process of full-blown logical intellection that we use, for instance, in solving a math problem, but rather to the very root process whereby we create distinctions and dualisms. Thus when Asvaghosha says, 'Suddenly, a thought arises,' he is referring to the Primary Dualism that Brown described as 'Let there be a distinction.' Thought, conceptualization, ratiocination, distinctions, dualisms, measurements, symbolic-map knowledge - all are different names for that maya whereby we seemingly divide the One into the Many and generate the spectrum of consciousness.
Perhaps this will become clearer if we proceed to the teachings of the Lankavatara Sutra. Throughout this profound text passages such as the following can be found: 'It is like an image reflected in a mirror, it is seen but it is not real; the one Mind is seen as a duality by the ignorant when it is reflected in the mirror constructed by their memory.... The existence of the entire universe is due to memory that has been accumulated since the beginningless past but wrongly interpreted.' Accordingly to the Lankavatara, the 'existence of the entire universe' occurs when the one Mind is reflected upon by memory wrongly interpreted. This 'reflection' creates 'two worlds from one' and thus propels us into the conceptual world of space, time, and objects.
To understand this process of 'reflection by memory wrongly interpreted,' we need only recall that the genesis of time involves the mistaking of present memory for real knowledge of a 'past.' For it is only through this 'memory wrongly interpreted' that we create the convincing illusion of knowing time past, and then -- projecting this 'knowledge' forward in expecta-
(page 337)
tion - we create time future, whereas all memory and expectation, and thus all time, exists nowhere but in this present moment. In this fashion do we conjure up, out of this moment, the fantastic illusion called 'time;' and since 'time' is just another name for space and objects (space-time-objects being a single continuum), the Lankavatara claims the entire universe of separate objects extended in space and succeeding one another in time is actually generated by thought-memory wrongly interpreted, which 'reflects' the one Mind and thus apparently creates two worlds from one.
In another place Wilber (1977:319) after quoting Benoit and Krishnamurti on the subject concludes: "Here Krishnamurti is agreeing completely with Benoit that the machinery of image production is inattention, (i.o.) or as Benoit calls it, passive attention."
After this rather rambling introduction to a very profound subject, let us explain where the author is coming from. We have been on the track of creativity, trying to induce its precursors during the process of incubation. We have found (Gowan 1978, in press) that the precursor is imagery. What then are the precursors of imagery? It now looks as though a better method might be to work from the opposite end and deduce a series of de-gradations of cosmic substance, which hopefully will end up in the position stated herein.
Let us try for a little while to perform a nearly impossible task, namely to look at the process of material manifestation from the Absolute point of view. From this stance it would appear that matter is the end product of a series of de-volutions or de-gradations of spirit. This process involves a series of breakings or severances of perfect primordial symmetry. As the Hindus have it, "The universe manifests when the three gunas are in the same phase." Brown declares (1972:v): "A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart." And Ghykha (1977:86) states Curie's principle: "In order that a phenomenon should be produced in a system it is necessary that certain elements of symmetry should be missing."
Realizing that at best we are developing analogies for a process which is magnificently grander than any homologue, we can also look at another facet of the elephant by considering each devolution as a mathematical differentiation of a function which is transcendental. The differential shares only derivative characteristics
(page 338)
of the function in a much diminished state of one less dimension. If human life in this world represents, say, a triple differentiation of ultimate reality, then our task (or better the task of consciousness), must be to free itself from the triple bonds of time, space, and personality, by successive integration back to the Absolute.
Heidegger (1961:51), after quoting Heraclitus, on the original conflict (division), which produced the whole creation says of this polemos:
This conflict, as Heraclitus thought it, first caused the realm of being to separate into opposites; it first gave rise to position and order and rank. In such separation cleavages, intervals, distances and joints opened. In the ausein-andersetzung (setting apart), a world comes into being. Conflict does not split, much less destroy unity. It constitutes unity. It is a binding together - a logos. Polemos and logos are the same.
In this remarkable, and somewhat equivocal passage, Heidegger seems to be saying that despite the polemos which produces the phenomenological world, the logos, or original collectedness, continues in the noumenal world, and that ultimately these two are the same. We shall see that both Brown (1972) and Wilber (1977) refer to exactly the same process of cosmic mitosis. Let us now turn to their investigation of this devolution process.
Following Wilber (1977) we have attempted to lay out levels in the spectrum of consciousness in Table V II- 1. What we have essentially in this table are a number of different names or designations, mostly from Eastern sources for a hierarchy of descending order (from top to bottom) and increasing entropy. This taxonomy consists of five states and four interspersed bands or filters. The filters act like polarizing lenses which successively minify the radiation by one dimension. Hence, each filter reduces the cosmic glory until it "fades into the light of common day." For this reason as one goes down the column one goes in the direction of decreasing mental health, and increasing dissociation. This is seen clearly, of course, in the case of the Lilly numbers. In the second column comes the name Wilber has given the level (with the last two added); in the third column the Indian sheath name; in the fourth column remarks for helping the reader orient himself. The fifth column as letter designations, and the sixth Mahayana names. The seventh contains a conjecture as to where the Brown words
(page 339)
TABLE VII-1: LEVELS IN THE SPECTRUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AFTER WILBUR (1977)
(page 340)
would go, supposing them to be commensurate, and the last column contains conjectures about the relevant body or vehicle of consciousness in the domain. It should be emphasized that the table purports to be a rough map of unfamiliar territory, and there may be cell misplacement. (For a fuller explanation of the Sullivan-Van Rhijn theory which underlies the prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic remarks at the F, G, and H level, please refer to Gowan 1975:2.) Van Rhijn's contribution (1968) is more relevant here, since he posits that experience which can be assimilated and dealt with cognitively (syntaxic) is beneficial; experience which can only be dealt with emotionally (parataxic) is less beneficial, and finally experience which cannot be dealt with at all (prototaxic) is projected onto the body and the environment, producing poor physical and mental health.
What exactly does mathematician Brown mean by his "void to form, form to indication, indication to truth, and truth to existence?" Actually, Brown did not quite say this. What he did say (1972:101) is:
It is, I am afraid, the intellectual block which most of us come up against at the points where, to experience the world clearly, we must abandon existence to truth, truth to indication, indication to form, and form to void, that has so held up the development of logic and mathematics.
It should be remembered that Brown is using these terms in an exact and mathematical meaning. For example: "Existence" means an existence theorem (i.e., There exists at least one "a"); "truth" means the truth value of a statement (i.e., A = B).
Brown says (1972:101):
There is a tendency, especially today, to regard existence as the source of reality, and thus a central concept. But as soon as it is formally examined, existence is seen to be highly peripheral, and as such, especially corrupt (in the formal sense) and vulnerable.
Brown explains in an appendix (1972:127) the "formal examination" as follows:
Now the distinction between existing and not existing is not applied like the distinction between true and not-true. If a
(page 341)
statement "s" is true, then the complementary is false. But if a thing "t" exists, then its complementary thing "not-t" is not necessarily non-existent.
So much for existence. This brings Brown to truth, of which he says (1972:101):
The concept of truth is more central, although still recognizably peripheral. If the weakness of present day science is that it centers around existence, the weakness of present-day logic is that it centers round truth... Throughout the essay, we find no need of the concept of truth ... (truth=open to proof). . . At no point is it a necessary inhabitant of the calculating forms. These forms thus are not only precursors of existence, they are also precursors of truth.
Regarding his calculus of indications (marks), Brown has this to say regarding truth-value (1972:113):
We have a choice of whether to associate the unmarked state with truth and the marked state with untruth (or the opposite). Although it is quite immaterial, from the point of view of calculation which we do, the latter arrangement is in fact easier from the point of view of interpretation.
Since the calculus of indications (which is the substance of his book The Laws of Form), Brown notes (1972:112) that it applies "to a language structure in which sentences can be true or false." Thus truth yields to indication.
But indication depends upon a mark. As Brown puts it (1972:4) under knowledge:
Let a state distinguished by the distinction be marked with a mark (an inverted L), of distinction. Let the state be known by the mark. Call the state the marked state. Call the space cloven by any distinction together with the entire content of the space, the form of the distinction.
We are now back to the Primary Duality: "Let there be a distinction," and hence back to the evolution of form out of the void. Brown describes this in the first sentence of the book (1972: v): "The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart."
(page 342)
And quoting this opening paragraph, Wilber (1977:108) remarks:
It is with precisely this original act of severance which creates the phenomenal universe that we are now concerned: the very first movement whereby we sever a space, create two worlds from one, and land ourselves squarely in a world of appearances.
It does no good to argue that Brown's world is conceptual while Wilber's is phenomenological. Both are ultimately conceptual and the laws of form apply equally to either.
The alert and captious reader may at this juncture interpose that despite an effort to be clear the author has jumbled together several universes: the total physical universe, the subset of the inanimate universe, the subset of the animate universe, the subset of the conceptual universe, and perhaps others (which would include the logical universe of Brown). But the strength of Brown's approach in The Laws of Form is that the laws underlying all these universes and their subsets are the same, for the laws are simply the way our minds cognize plenums, and whatever exterior forms the plenums take, the basic laws are the same, with only exterior modifications of constants, zero-points and other mensuration to distinguish them.
Indeed, further, the laws relating to the genesis of any microcosm of the universe, such as a newly discovered scientific principle, or a newly created musical opus, are precisely the same; each act of individual creativity in time is a miniscopic homologue of the whole act of creation, and each contains within it a holographic isomorphism with that major act.
Finally, and most miraculously, the universe contains within it the means to know and inspect itself. It is not mere creation; it is creation that knows itself to be creation. Says Brown (1972: 105):
Now the physicist himself who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself, constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and record. Thus we cannot
(page 343)
escape the fact that the world as we know it is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself. This is indeed amazing.
But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition whatever it sees, is only partially itself... In this condition it will always partially elude itself.
So that in the last analysis, the process of self-observation is self-defeating, for it entails the Primary Duality.
One way of understanding the devolution of manifestation better is to look at the opposite process - namely integration. If we inspect the testimony of saints and sages (Gowan 1975:351ff and especially Table VIII, p. 247), we shall see the reverse process, including its discrete levels, laid out in matching fashion. Since this table has been explained in great detail elsewhere (Gowan 1975, 1978),* we shall forbear much further here. Suffice it to say that the table represents an escalation of consciousness out of time, space and personality. It also represents a healing of the dichotomy between knower and known, which, as we have seen earlier, is the primary dualism. As Eliade (1969:96) explains:
The object is no longer known through association... it is grasped directly in its existential nakedness... Let us note that ... Samprajnata Samadhi, [Ed. Jhanas 5-8], is shown to be a 'state achieved through a certain knowledge.' This passage from knowledge to state must constantly be kept in mind... (it) leads to a fusion of all modalities of being.
This absolute knowledge reveals that "knowledge and being are no longer discrete from each other." So the yogi who penetrates to this samadhi without support of objects becomes (as Meister Eckhart truly testified), one with the Deity. If creation may be compared to the mathematical process of differentiation, then this escalation may be compared to the process of integration, for it returns to an undifferentiated state. This fusion of knower and known, of noumenon and phenomenon, of subject and object reveals that the integration process is achieved through a juncture of the individual and general minds, in which duality is abolished, and through knowledge more and more complete, the one becomes the other.
(page 344)
It may seem incongruous to return to tantric sexual rites for a prefiguration of this restoration, but notice how closely the following description imitates the essential unification:
I cannot tell you how it is for others, but when the man I love enters me, all at once I am suffused with an exquisite wholeness; it is more than physical; it is some escape into a primordial completeness. I do not need an orgasm to validate that experience for me. As I lie enfolded in him, and he in me, we are one, whole, beyond time and space, almost beyond personality. There is content, security, and rest that I cannot begin to describe in words. I should die if I could continue in that state very long, and for me the orgasm is the release from this overwhelming bliss back into mortality.
Or as Rawson (1973:19) puts it: "Shiva and Shakti within man and the world are so deeply joined that they are unaware of their differences and beyond time." It should be clear that Teilhard de Chardin's "Omega point" is far more than even exalted sexual union, but what is amazing is that the tantric model is so isomorphic.
From a Christian vantage point, Plotinus (Russell 1945: 288ff) identified the nous as the second division of the Trinity (the first was the ineffable Godhead, and the third the individual soul; these are not equal as in the orthodox Christian Trinity, but in a descending hierarchy). "Nous is the image of the One; it is engendered because the One in its self-quest has vision; this seeing is nous" (ibid:289). But Plotinus insists the seer and the seen are one, hence nous may be considered the light by which the One sees itself. We have avoided translating the word nous because while the nearest English word is "spirit," it is obvious that something more is here meant - something more intellectual in the manner of St. John's "logos," (the word).2 Whatever words are used, it is perfectly obvious that the process concerns the primary dualistic split, and hence is germane to our discussion.
In Rawson's view (1973:19), once division from the primary cosmic copula has been made "the female objective (Shakti) performs her dance of illusion, persuading the male subject that he is not one but many, and generating in her womb the world of multiplied objects in what seems to be a sequence in time." This is a very significant point with great practical consequence. It means that since the archetypal feminine is a generating entity
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outside time and space, every manifestation in time and space (every entrance from posse to esse from our point of view) will be multiple, that is, we will experience it as a series or sequence in time with space held constant, or in space with time held constant.
When a numinous thought-form is to be actualized in our world of experience, despite its specific nature, its non-categorical and numinous quality dictates that it be experienced in multiples which may be distributed over either space or time (if distributed over both, the experience will hardly be noticed as coincidences). Thus with regard to accidents, the result may be a series of very similar mishaps at the same or near times in widely separated spots, or at the same spot over various times. What appears determined is the thought form (often with amazingly coincidental specifics), but the results are at least partly under the control of wise/brave utilization of humans connected with the situation at the time of crisis.
We notice such coincidences with regard to dramatic events, but similar ones exist in creative thought-forms. When the zeitgeist is opportune, the same non-categorical impulse will be manifested in several dedicated scientists, artists or researchers at the same time in several places, and they will each add an idiosyncratic flavor to a common discovery, or a new idea. Jung (Campbell 1971: 505ff) commented extensively on this in his essay on synchronicity.3 Although nowhere does he explicitly state that the translation from the numinous archetype to the phenomenal reality will result in multiple manifestations.
A glimpse of the same animating fecundity in nature is afforded by Gaster (1950:17) in his concept of the "durative topocosm"
Seasonal rituals are functional in character. Their purpose is to revive the topocosm, that is the entire complex of any given locality conceived of as a living organism. But this topocosm... possesses a ... durative aspect, representing not only actual and present community, but also the ideal of community, an entity of which the latter is but the present manifestation. Accordingly, seasonal rituals are accompanied by myths which are designed to present the purely functional acts in terms of ideal and durative situations.... What the king does on the punctual plane, the God does on the durative... The pattern is based on the conception that life is vouchsafed in a series of leases which have annually to be renewed.
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Ultimate reality, in the guise of the durative topocosm, cannot adequately present itself through a language of tensed verbs. Hence, it must do so through a metaphor of continual recurrence, and we should learn to recognize such usage as signifying the advent of the numinous archetype in which time and space are transcended.
But there is more wisdom here in the fecundity of Shakti than practical knowledge; the essential point is that in every individual act of creation (differentiation), and in every individual act of salvation (integration), there is a microcosmic reenactment of the primal creation and the ultimate "Omega point"; each separate act of evolution and involution is a holographic miniportion, containing within it the model of all creation and resolution. As Gandhi said: "We are all tarred with the same brush," and all creation is stamped with the same die.
Thus each individual life, and each individual creative experience which makes up that life, is in the process of defining and exemplifying that creation; therefore, every human being has the potentiality of creation, not just of ideas, but of actual reality. Consciousness is in the process of becoming, in the process of manifesting, in the process of building, what, to us, is a future event of perfection (but in actuality is outside time). All that precedes that dawn is prologue, including the dream world in which consciousness seems housed in our personality. But that rehearsal is a necessary part of its evolution, as seen in time, for when housed in us, it is able, if but in the blink of a human lifetime, to become complete in little things, and to prefigure that "Divine faroff event" of the poet, when, all having been brought to perfection, the All shall fully cognize (and become) the All.
1 Locked in time, we must call this a process. But to consciousness outside of time, it would appear as a symmetrical transform in the time dimension of space.
2 For its more exact meaning, see Heidegger 1961:109 where it means "original collectedness."
*Given herein as Chapter 6.
3 Further to this subject see Vaughn, A. "The Riddle of Coincidence" FATE 33:1:65-73, 1980.
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CHAPTER VIII
The Three-Fold Body of Buddha
When one realizes the great void is full of chi,
One realizes that there is no such thing as nothingness.
-Needham (1956: IV:33) quoting Chaing Tsai
The Avatamsaka Sutra tells us that Buddha (which we take to mean All that Is1 ) has a three-fold body:
1) an aspect of Essence (dharma-kaya)
2) an aspect of potentiality (sambhoga-kaya)
3) an aspect of manifestation (nirmana-kaya).
These notes, made during a trip to Japan (May 1978), detail some gleanings on the relationship between these three aspects.
Following Husserl (1962), we may restrict the verb "to be" (or "is-ness") to signify manifestation in the here and now, in other words, existence condensed into one time and space. This usage will distinguish it from potentiality, which is diffused through time and space, and consists of a plenum of possibilities, like an electron cloud. Hence, the usage "can be" or "may become" is appropriate in English, although we shall use also the integration symbol "S"in front of "is" (viz. Sis). These two levels, the punctual and the durative, underlie all thought, and a distinction between them is necessary for clear discourse.
But there is a third, or anterior level of Essence, which appears to us only as "voidness" or sunyata (emptyness). There is no way to convey this concept in English accurately, so we will use the double integral sign before "to be" (viz: 'God SSis.")
It is important to stress that when consciousness is awake at a particular level, levels above the reach of consciousness will seem void. Since this rule should work oppositely, we coin the word "diov," (void backward), to indicate how a level below the reach of consciousness will appear. If Essence appears void to form, then manifestation appears diov to spirit. Or we can set up a table of opposites:
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TABLE OF OPPOSITES - VOID vs DIOV
In this formulation, the realm of potentiality would be viewed as an intermediate change state in which imagery and thought forms condense from the void so that they can later manifest in the material world. Fung (1958:279 quotes Chaing Tsai on this:
When the chi condenses, its visibility becomes apparent, so that there are then the shapes of individual things. When it disperses, its visibility is no longer apparent, and there are no shapes. At the time of its condensation, can one say otherwise than that this is but temporary? But at the time of its dispersing can one hastily say that it does not exist?
Peirce (Gardner 1978) was only one of many savants to notice the essential triplicities in nature. Many thinkers have used various names to distinguish the components of this grand triplicity. We append a table:
TABLE VIII-1 TRIPLICITIES2
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We quote Prof. Price in his introduction to Whiteman (1961:xvi):
According to Dr. Whiteman, St. Paul holds that there are two non-physical bodies, a 'psychical body' and a 'spiritual body.' Does Dr. Whiteman himself accept this view? In some passages it seems that he does.... He also expresses approval of the Buddhist doctrine of the Trikaya, the three bodies of a Buddha.
In the previous chapter we have noted that the emergence of form is caused by the devolution of cosmic substance from essence to potentiality to physical manifestation, which in turn is caused by inattention. This inattention allows the natural pressure towards formation first to condense into the various pseudo creative thought-forms and imagery which populate the multidimensional vivency of all possibilities. This never-never land of "maybe," which consciousness visits in dreams and other altered states, provides a first level of manifestation for the myriad mirage thought forms each of which is a denial that consciousness is one, and hence, therefore, is its own statement of an independent, abortive, and often malignant creation.
The primary responsibility of consciousness is to prevent such thought forms from arising, but as this is too difficult for most, a secondary objective (especially for the novice) is through orthocognition (Gowan 1 975:320ff) to prevent the thought-forms in the realm of "may-be" from manifesting themselves in the physical body or the environment. Thus these thought forms are like tulpas (David-Neel, 1931); and Bearden (1977) is correct in surmising that there is a constant tulpoid pressure for external manifestation. For example, a cancer is really an internal tulpa, and the business of consciousness is to dissolve these manifested thought-forms and force them back to the vivency of potentiality. Mrs. Eddy (1896:392) was correct in advising us to "stand porter at the door of thought." Wilber (1977:312-4) advised active mobilization to prevent unwanted thought - forms from arising. This involves "attention, stopping, and passive awareness."
In general the beauty and level of consciousness of a manifested thing, person or event (TEPE) indicates the level of its generating entity in the next higher vivency. We may think of these generating entities as devas, tutelary deities, or guardian angels,
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although it constrains our understanding of their function to anthropomorphize them. Given the existence of such archetypes, there arises an unsolved question between the difference (if any) between those which produce an order or genus of natural phenomena (e.g., insects, crabs), and those which produce tulpoid manifestations. Is the birth or hatching process itself a type of tulpoid activity? What is evident is the constant pressure for generation and manifestation. There must be something about form in the here-and-now which is attractive to the life-force. Perhaps it is that the grounding of consciousness in the focus of here and now is necessary for the developing ego before it can awaken to the diffused aspects of being out of time and space in the realm of potentiality.
In connection of the manifestation and demanifestation of tulpoid thought forms, it was serendipic to read in Hearn (1971: 57) on the definition of the Japanese word nazoraeru, which means according to him: "To substitute in imagination one object or action for another so as to bring about some magical or miraculous result." Here is a graphic description of orthocognition, though without the positive aspects which we have associated with it. The action opens the consciousness to the possibilities of the realm of potentiality.
In The Paradox of Instruction, Bubba Free John (Franklin Jones 1977) gives a clear picture of the three levels and the yogas or practices which approach them:
There are three manifest dimensions: gross, subtle, and causal. And there are three traditional ways of practice toward release, each involved in manipulation and experiences in one of the three dimensions. These are the gross path (the way of yogis), the subtle path (the way of saints), and the causal path (the way of sages). Each path, being a portion of the whole or great path, pursues a specific and absolute Goal, via a method of regression or return, toward the Condition which pertains at the original or terminal position of the dimension it assumes.
The practitioners of the gross path take their stand in the gross physical condition and seek the Goal by activity there. In general, they seek either a religious and magical harmony in the gross condition or else ascent to the subtle. Kundalini yoga
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is perhaps the most effective and also easiest (if worked through the extraordinary agency of an accomplished yogi) of the ascending methods developed in this path, and achieves entrance into the subtle dimensions by exploitation and manipulation of the life-current as vital force (prana), or the finer elements of gross or lower life. The gross path of ascent involves manipulation of all the faculties below the brows, and seeks entrance to the subtle dimension, which begins at the place between and behind the brows (midbrain).
The subtle path, exemplified by traditions such as shabd yoga (or nada yoga), bypasses all involvement with gross or lower energy manipulation, including the kundalini, and begins with concentration on the life-current as internal sound and light at the door of the subtle dimension behind the brows (ajna chakra), thus controlling and absorbing the mind. Since the Goal of such approaches is escape to cognition above the gross level, their methods need not magically improve the karmas below, and so they merely step aside from yogic attention to the gross aspect of the Play. The traditions of the subtle path, like the kundalini and other examples of the gross path, pursue the Goal by entering the subtle realms.
The causal path, exemplified by the tradition of jnana yoga, sees no more reason to begin in the subtle dimension than the tradition of shabd or nada yoga sees reason to begin in the gross dimension. The practitioners of jnana yoga bypass the subtle dimension as well as the gross dimensions, and apply themselves to the causal dimension, the dimension of manifest consciousness without subtle or gross appearances. Jnana yoga proceeds by a penetrating enquiry into the nature of one's conscious existence, and thus involves neither manipulation of gross or subtle energies, nor manipulation of the mind corresponding to each of these two dimensions, but only investigation of the causal field of simple consciousness in its first modification (prior to the subtle and gross appearances), which is the separate self sense, the ego-I.
We quote Gaddis (1967:278) referring to Gustav's Stromberg's Soul of the Universe, (D. McKay 1948):
Dr. Stromberg conceived of a realm or dimension that exists beyond our senses and from which the world we see around us has emerged. This realm is of a non-physical or quasi-physical
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nature. From it emerge fields of force or energy that are the pattern-molds that form all living things - men, animals and vegetation. These patterns are filled in by the 'matter' of our world. They are the organizing principles of all life, and determine whether a fertilized ovum will produce a human being, a horse or a dog. He believed that the electromagnetic fields in all living things discovered by Dr. H. S. Burr and his associates were parts of these energy patterns. . . It was the doctor's opinion that the mind and consciousness of man exist in this energy pattern, and the physical brain is merely the instrument of mind. Memory, then must be carried in this pattern structure.
This remarkable statement of a brilliant scientist is notable for identifying the psychic realm as the plenum of potentiality from which thought-forms emerge, and prescient in its description of holographic patterns which determine consciousness and so sensory reality.3
Stace (1960:14) tells us that the mystical consciousness involves "the apprehension of an ultimate non-sensuous unity in all things." This consciousness (ibid:20) is beyond the senses, beyond the understanding, beyond all expression... pure unitary consciousness wherein all awareness of the world and its multiplicity is completely obliterated. It is ineffable peace.
Jung (1973) in his investigations of synchronicity stated that, "The void is the organizer of sensuous reality," (p. 71 ) and categorized (p. 73) the successive steps in the devolution of cosmic substance as follows:
1) Tao present, existence not begun;
2) Things exist, but not begun to be separated;
3) Things separated but affirmation and negation not
begun;
4) Affirmation and negation in being; Tao faded.
Consider how near the modern physicist has approached this point from the scientific side. Zukav (1979:90) quotes Heisenberg on probability waves. Such a wave is defined as:
It meant a tendency for something. It was a quantative version of the old concept of 'potentia' of Aristotle. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and actuality.
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Describing Finkelstein's new theory of process, Zukav (1979:295) says: "The basic events of Finkelstein's theory do not exist in space and time. They are prior to space and time... Space, time, mass, and energy are secondary qualities....
As Henry Stapp concludes after a review of Bell's theorem (quoted by Zukav 1979:311): "Everything we know about nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental processes of nature lie outside space-time, but generate events that can be located in space-time."
Speaking of newest discoveries in physics, Zukav (1979: 296) finds "hitherto unsuspected powers of the mind to mould reality. . ." and concludes, "The philosophy of physics is becoming indistinguishable from the philosophy of Buddhism, which is the philosophy of enlightenment."
What is human life but an experience for consciousness to be awake and aware at the level of manifestation? Troward (1909) tells us that the subjective consciousness acts as if it were under hypnosis. But what is this except the same consciousness asleep at the potentiality level? Our aim, the aim of consciousness, must be to awaken at the potentiality level as well, so that it becomes master of manifestation, and not merely a reactive creature to it. That accomplished, the final task of consciousness is to awaken at the essential level (or level of essence). When consciousness permeates fully all these levels of essence, potentiality, and manifestation, the whole body of the Buddha is evident, and complete, as the Sutra says.
The opening of consciousness to such an experience is, of course, what we have described as a grace, theophany or peak experience. Suddenly, and for a few seconds, which afterwards seems much longer, consciousness awakens in the realm of potentiality, finding itself outside of time and space, with all things possible. The English mystic Traherne has left us an account of this state (Happold 1970:368-70):
Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehension of the world than I ... All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful... All things were spotless, pure, and glorious... All time was eternity...
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The corn was orient and the immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor was ever sown... All things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of day....
Like nine-day kittens, our eyes are opened; and consciousness is awakened in this vivency of manifestation which we call physical reality, proof of which is conveyed to us solely by the senses. Yet intuition suggests that other vivencies of (which are to us) potentiality and essence also exist. Can consciousness awake in these realms, and if so, with what meta-senses must it be equipped? Thoreau (1955) tells us that, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake." To what realm does consciousness awake: the aspect of manifestation, of potentiality or of essence? Most of our lives when awake is spent with consciousness only aware of the manifestation level. The task of consciousness must be to perfect those meta-senses which may be required in the higher vivencies to bring those realms from potentiality and essence to manifestation, so that consciousness may also dawn in them. How shall this be done? Creativity is a prime mover; orthocognition is a second, and meditation is a third (Gowan 1975:ch. 4). All broaden the reach of consciousness by awakening it to its regnant powers of creativity, not just in ideas but in manifestation. "Thy will be done on earth (manifestation) as it is in heaven (essence)."
We come close here to the Socratic concept of ideals. And as Socrates says in closing The Symposium: "Dwelling in that communion only, he would create not images of Beauty, but Beauty herself, and so would become immortal and become the friend of God." Notice that if attention "dwells in that communion only," then the creation of the mind is not merely of images, but is transcended to the creation of a real object - Beauty - and this lifts consciousness to the godlike level.
I looked at the lion, all dignity and magnificence. I thought: "There is a noble spirit imprisoned here in this beast, but the lion's consciousness is so busy playing lion, it does not realize the fact." I looked at the monkey all intelligence and comedy. I thought: "There is a lively spirit imprisoned here, but the monkey's consciousness is so busy playing monkey, that it does not realize the fact."
Then I looked in the mirror. There is more in man than the
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magnificence of the lion or the intelligence of the monkey; there is art, music, science, and most of all the realization that his consciousness does not have to spend all its time playing to the brutish humors and appetites which unite our species to the animal world. For I can help to loosen that imprisoned splendor, and for a little while, each day at least, to let consciousness play at being God.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Or more accurately, all that is, Sis and SSis. The Buddha can also be considered as the ideal perfected person.
2 Let A, B, C, represent a triplicity with each taking three phases (e.g., A 1 , A 2 , A 3 ,) the phases being essence, potentiality, and manifestation. Then A 1 , A 1 , A 1 represents the void (absolute), and A 3 , A 3 , A 3 represents manifestation, and there are seven (7) other intermediate stages of the three gunas.
3 Some Eastern sources believe that certain vibrations of sounds and the electromagnetic spectrum, have the creative, preservative, and destructive properties of the Hindu trinity, and can, therefore, be used for materialization, healing, and dematerialization. See Hamel, P. Through Music to the Self (Boulder: Shamballa Pub. 1979:108) quoting Ouspensky: "Objective music .... can promote .... definite physical phenomena....."
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CHAPTER IX
Summary
9.1) Recapitulation
Let us conclude by recapitulating in outline form what we have learned by this patient examination of a large body of unusual data:
1) We have found that there are useful paradigms which may help to explain some of these remarkable effects:
a) The Pribram-Bohm Hologram Model: "Our brains mathematically construct concrete reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension, a realm of meaningful patterned primary reality that transcends time and space." Mystic experience is nothing but an occasional glimpse of the reference beam, thus dissolving the hologram.
b) The Two-Fluid Model Near Zero-Order State: When a system is near total order, there is not enough disorder to go around, so it breaks into two sub-systems, one of which is "normal," containing both order and disorder, and the other of which is exceptional, in containing total order, as a result of which, microscopic order becomes macroscopic.
c) As Einstein said, time, space, and personality are the three illusions to be overcome in that order.
d) Our apprehension of numinous meta-events is received through periodic vibrations caused by tuned resonance in the right hemisphere.
e) The three-fold body of Buddha (all that is) consists of a realm of essence (void), a realm of potentiality, and a realm of manifestation.
f) Photon-quenching in the visual octave allows the sheltering of animal life from tulpoid forces.
g) Prigogine's theory of Dissipative Structures represent the manner in which Bohm's implicate components of reality become explicate, that is, how increasing order develops in complex structures.
2) The effects of increasing order are discontinuous, emer-
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gent and integrative. Discontinuous means that there is a sudden, sharp escalation into a higher state. Emergence means the onset of some higher power or ability not previously seen. Integrative means that the new operations have some holistic, boundary-breaking synergic quality which binds together in a single Gestalt, aspects which before were not seen capable of such unification.
The human being has both material and psychological powers and abilities that we do not know fully. But it is now possible to construct a taxonomy of some of these powers and abilities (Table II-1). These paranormal powers are not miraculous, but simply expansions of presently known abilities. At this time such powers are best glimpsed in geniuses and saints.
4) The construct of man's possession of an etheric (or vital energy) body in the realm of potentiality is useful in explaining the origin of pranic energy, which appears as an associated vitalizing fluid. Pranic energy (also called "od" by Reichenbach and orgone by Reich) also appears to give rise in the medium to ectoplasm, a silver-gray sticky viscous ropy substance half-way between the etheric and the physical worlds, hence, sometimes visible and sometimes not.
5) The effects of most aspects of physical mediumship appear to be accomplished through the use of ectoplasm extruded through the natural orifices of the entranced medium. These effects include both psychokinesis and materialization.
6) Evidence that the realm of all potentiality (the etheric) is outside of time and space is given by the remarkable data of telepathy and precognition. Our time and space-bound personalities are not able to intuit this transcendence as we have to think in tensed verbs. The mathematical operation of integration over space and time offers some intuition for escape from this prison.
7) The remarkable aspects of fire-walking and psychic heat appear to indicate that pranic energy exchanges between the physical and psychic realms must take place, hence, the conservation of energy law must be further extended.
8) The regnancy of mind in the creation of bodily conditions is seen clearly in the stigmata of some saints.
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9) Prana (od or orgone energy), while not the same as electromagnetic energy, has a "big-brother" relationship to it. In addition it is polarized, released through the fingertips, related to breath, can be passed by touching, comes originally from the sun, and is absorbed by water and plant life.
10) Saintly development appears gradually to free the body from the routine performance of the five animal functions of sex, eating, sleeping, excretion, and breathing; it also confers powers at the time of death.
11 ) Levitation constitutes clear evidence of the regnancy of a transcendent order of reality - (the reference beam in the hologram paradigm) and that sensory reality is but the virtual image imprinted on the brain, and subject to sudden perceptual changes under the proper conditions of order.
12) In the siddhis, commencing with levitation, what we are seeing is a taxonomic progression of the transcendence of the Cosmic spirit in man, which involves a cleansing and renewing of various sensory modalities and functions first in the body (powers), and then in the mind (abilities) to accommodate a new order of reality.
13) There appear to be three kinds of spiritual healing:
a) prototaxic, (somatic), laying on of hands, (4.4)
b) parataxic, (emotions), agape-love, (4.7)
c) syntaxic, (cognition), orthocognitive, (4.6)
14) Empery (dominion) over self, others (healing), and nature is one of the abilities of the enlightened individual.
15) Higher abilities (jhanas) are successive graces, outlined by saints and Hindu yogis, as noted in Table VI-4.
16) There is a relationship between genius (possession by genii), precocity (early manifestation of extraordinary powers), and reincarnation. Geniuses tend to be "old" reincarnates, and their precociousness attests to "remembering" of past powers. Genius requires both high abilities in the left hemisphere, and easy access to the right.
17) It is possible to construct a taxonomy of altered states of consciousness, Tables VI-1, 2, 3, 4).
18) Form is the devolution of cosmic substance caused by inattention to cosmic bliss.
19) The Buddha (which we take to mean "All that Is") has
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a three-fold body:
a) an aspect of essence (void),
b) an aspect of potentiality, and
c) an aspect of manifestation.
The relation of these three is the relation of a function to its first and second derivative.
20) The entire gestalt forms a single pattern, uniform, ordered and beneficent.
9.2) Unsolved Problems and Needed Research
Despite the fact that this book has addressed itself to a serious attempt to explain, or at least develop paradigms for understanding psychic phenomena, candor compels us to admit to many unsolved problems where further research is necessary. Some of the most important are as follows:
1) The question of complete isomorphic representation by the physical realm of action in the etheric realm. Assuming that the etheric realm is the realm of action, and that events in the physical world are the results of such action, do effects in the physical world duplicate exactly actions at a higher level, or is it merely an illusory matter of "saving the appearances?" If the former is true then it will someday be possible to construct a paraphysics which will explain in scientific terms each paraphysical operation (such as materialization and dematerialization for example). If the latter is true, then such explanations will fail, since they will be found to be like so many irrational dreams, which seem reasonable when we are dreaming them, but are seen to be irrational when we awake.
2) The nature of pranic energy. (This question is, of course, a special case of No.1.) If pranic energy is basically etheric, how does it get transformed into physical effects which involve electromagnetic properties including magnetism, ionization, etc. If it is basically physical, how can it be transmitted through leaded walls? If the misassumption lies in considering it either one or the other, how can it be both at the same time? This research (which can build on the work of Reichenbach, Reich, Burr, Coblenz, and many others) is badly needed, comparatively easy to do, and a priority item in a large funded program.
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3) The desirability and ethics involved in the deliberate cultivation of the siddhis. This issue is probably the biggest moral dilemma opened up by this book. The use of the universal psychic laws of the universe for personal advantage is magic, and has been proscribed by an imposing number of saints and holy men. At the same time there are others, equally qualified, who perform such siddhis, teach them to their disciples, and see no objection to them. The issue is not so much the use of psychic power by a saint, but a question of timing in whether they are deliberately developed while the aspirant still retains enough of the "little selfish ego" to misuse them for personal gain. This book is able to give no definitive answer to this dilemma, and the author confesses to unease about it.
4) The nature and properties of ectoplasm. (Another special case of No. 1.) In particular, it would be useful to have various levels of materialization (such as invisible, but exerting a force, invisible to eyesight, but obscuring infra-red rays, visible as a cloudy substance, visible as a solid substance, etc.) explicated in more detail. We need to know whether ectoplasm is produced in the lungs by the action of breathing on prana? Under what circumstances is it stable and permanent (if any), or does it always dissolve away? These are some examples of unsolved questions.
5) The location of the "radio set" in the brain, with respect to sending and receiving psychic impressions and telepathy. Is it localized in the brain at all? If so, is it in the limbic region, the raphe system, the area in the right hemisphere corresponding to Broca's in the left, or some other spot in the body? We also need to know the chemistry, if any, involved.
6) The Properties of Unbonded Water. Ordinary water is nearly 100% hydrogen bonded (see Sect. 4.5 for explanation). Holy water or magnetized water is water whose hydrogen bonding is reduced only a few percent from that. What might be the curative and other properties of water not hydrogen bonded at all?
7) Waterman declares (see Section 5.3) that the way of psychic development is through lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences. Is this, in fact, a general method of deliverance, or is his thesis due to idiosyncratic characteristics?
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8) Evidence from Wilber (1978), Zukav (1979), and Eastern sources suggests that existence is but Shakti's dance of maya (illusion), wherein things are created, preserved, destroyed, and then recreated in the twinkling of an eye. This idea is not so far-fetched as it may seem at first. If our consciousness is like being connected up to the terminal of a cosmic time-sharing computer, each one of us may believe he or she has continual consciousness when what we have is only a series of very short operations interspersed with longer "down" intervals. The concept of "microgeny" suggests that things go from essence to potentiality to manifestation, and back again in accordance with the very rapid and continuing permutations of the gunas. This concept is hardly yet a theory, much less a paradigm, but it contains advantages which suggest that it should be further explored.
9) Evidence from Zukav (1979:271) and other sources suggests that there may be a fundamental "mis-alignment" between logical models of reality, and the experiential reality they are supposed to represent. The concept states that the complete isomorphism may be impossible because symbols and models follow Aristotlean rules of thought, ("Things are either A or not-A"), and experience may be more complex. We need a lot more inquiry into conditions where logical models may suffice, and conditions where they do not do so completely. It may be that only certain classes of experience are impervious to logical modeling, and that these classes have characteristic properties or distinguishing marks. Further investigation of this area would be useful.
10) The work of Prof. Burr at Yale on bioenergetic forces seems unduly neglected. There is recent evidence that small electric charges with small potentials between two portions of pathological living tissue may be helpful in the regeneration process. Indeed, it is further possible that the magnetic effects of laying-on-of-hands healing may induce such electrical results. This whole area needs much further investigation.
11) The concept of non-locality. Certain recent discoveries in physics, specifically in electron-spin, suggest either that information from one particle is transmitted to another at greater than the speed of light or that the two separated particles are connected in some hyper-
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space. If everything is somehow connected to everything else, telepathy needs no further explanation. More scientific investigation here is desirable.
12) Science differs from art in being capable of measurement and prediction. To become a true science, psychic science needs units and yardsticks which will allow measurements to be expressed in intellectually negotiable form.
13) We have called attention in at least two places (Sects. 3.1 and 4.5) to "photographic-visual anomalies," that is to exceptional events where the camera and the eye saw different percepts, - one seeing something, and the other nothing. We hazard the guess that the easiest explanation for this effect is that the two systems are employing light of significantly different wavelengths. But this supposition leads to a very interesting conclusion: some "things" may be "real," (visually manifest), at certain wavelengths and not at others. This possibility and related experiments deserves a great deal more attention than it so far has received. It may be that "reality" of a visual kind "creeps up" from the lower end of the electromagnetic spectrum, - (after all, our bodies are nearly translucent to x-rays).
14) If one reinspects some testimony on early abnormal powers in Section 2.4, and also the precocity of genius in Section 5.2, a neat puzzle comes into focus. Is the early manifestation of exotic powers (as in eidetic imagery) an example of an ephemeral vestige of an archaic ability which will inevitably fade with the fuller development of the modern ego (left-hemisphere dominance), or do these unusual powers fade in most persons simply because they are neither reinforced nor cultivated by society and education? The answer to this conundrum is important and easily feasible to answer through research.
15) One of the more obvious differences between the numinous and the ordinary state of consciousness, between art and science, between the right hemisphere and the left, is that the former can handle non-categorical constructs, and the latter can only handle categorical. It may be, however, that this inability to do with a concept that has several levels of meaning is a fatal weakness of left-hemisphere logic. The complementarity
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principle of physics (light as both waves and photons) shows how necessary it may be to create a non-categorical calculus of thought. Hence, the full understanding of these numinous regions may have to wait upon the construction of such a meta-lingual system.
9.3) Epilogue
Finally, we would like to end these essays by appending a general statement of belief, taken from earlier work (1975:380ff). Nearly a century ago Evelyn Underhill in closing her famous treatise on mysticism (1911:378) said: "In mysticism, I believe, lies the essence of the religious life. Without the mystical element, religion is external and strengthless." We would suggest that the intervening years have only served to alter the statement slightly: "In mysticism, I believe lies the essence of life itself; - for it is science, in the meanwhile, that has so notably advanced the mystic view. In keeping with these sentiments we offer the following:1
"1) It should now be clear that the object of existence is the union of the individual mind with the General Mind. In order to achieve this we must escape from three illusions as one does in awakening from a dream. The first is the illusion of the reality of time, the second is the illusion of the reality of space, and the third is the illusion of the reality of the separate self. There are three aspects to this quest, as there are three modes or levels of action. The first aspect is the freeing of the mind from the tyranny of percepts; the second is the escape into the eternal now, and the third is the loss of sense of self through the diffusion of the ego in developmental process. Since the three illusions are properties of the normal state of consciousness, liberation comes only through an altered state of consciousness.
"2) The level of this liberation may be either prototaxic, parataxic, or syntaxic, through what we have popularly called trance, art, or creativity. At each level one escapes in some measure from the physical world, from time, and from self. The prototaxic vehicle which accomplishes this is trance. As we have seen, it produces spectacular liberation from the ordinary laws of physics, from time, and from selfhood, but at the price of the loss of conscious cognition and memorability, and the outletting of psychic energy at the kinesthetic level
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instead of at an aesthetic or cognitive one.
"This disvaluing of the prototaxic manifestation of the numinous element in people is not that it is evil, but that it fails to meet the full potential of the human being. It is as de Condren suggested some centuries ago 'the receiving of the effects of God and his holy communications in a very animal and carnal way.'
"3) The parataxic solution offers a bridge between prototaxic and syntaxic, containing some elements of both. Its highest outlet is in art where it offers an aesthetic ASC as a temporary freeing of the artist from physics, from time, and from selfhood. It has the advantage that there is feeling and some cognition involved though at an iconic (image) representation, rather than the author of the art. Nevertheless, the production of art objects means that the parataxic mode has social value in utility and beauty, in addition to increased individual benefit.
"The domain of the numinousium contains an infinity of event-like elements, real in their realm, but only potential in ours (see Table X, Trance,Art, Creativity). From out this multiple infinity a single chain of events is realized in our space time, by the reifying action of those conscious minds involved with the events. We speak of 'event-like elements' in the numinousium rather than 'events,' for since that field transcends time as we know it (as ever growing later), our concept of an event as something that occurs in time, and our concept of one prior event causing a subsequent one, are merely the traces of a meta-event-like element which exists in the eternal now, and 'which never was' (in our reality), but 'is always happening' (in the eternal now). It is like the pattern in a textile made by the skillful weaving of the warp and woof by a master-weaver. All the thread colors are in all parts of the textile, but only those colors selected by the pattern of the weaver show forth on the surface.
"4) Whereas prototaxic man is insulated from the numinous element by the necessity to enter an altered state of consciousness (wherein he generally loses consciousness, will and memorability) in order to contact it, and whereas parataxic man is in a kind of semi-conductor position in which there is a fail-safe precaution built in on the energy discharge so that (at best or worst), he produces
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only images, syntaxic man, with his knowledge of orthocognition and its derivative power, acquires corresponding responsibility. For his conscious mind is in contact with the numinous element (or to put it the other way, it has reached the conscious level at last through his mind). Consequently, he has literally become a co-creator, and whatever he thinks, is liable to become an event in our space-time. With this awesome power goes the responsibility to purify his desires to the extended aspects of his environmental self, and to wish for nothing except that which is good and beneficial to others and to mankind.
"5) We should become more aware of the curious symbiotic relationship between the ego and perceptual intake. The conscious ego appears to owe its stability to a narrow range of perceptual inflow; while the environment appears to owe its stability to continued cognizance by the totality of conscious egos. If perceptual intake is restricted, or expanded beyond certain limits, the normal state of consciousness, as we know it is replaced by an altered state in which cognitive function is much reduced. A fish swimming in the sea regards the ocean as fixed and given; so we regard the normal state of consciousness. But it appears that in reality this normal state is a very 'special state' which has been contrived in order for us to attend to perceptual events in space/ time. Any considerable interference with that perceptual intake will shift consciousness into another state or mode. Such considerations suggest that not only is our normal state of consciousness a recent and specialized development, but that it is uniquely related to, and sustained by, the perceptual universe. If the rule works as well backward as forward, one wonders if the perceptual world of experience is not somehow related to and sustained by the collective consciousness which designs and observes it.
"6) Let us look at the development of consciousness, that most significant aspect of life. Consciousness has an irresistible tendency to form; for every level of consciousness therefore, there is a vehicle, of which the physical body is only one example. Satprem (1968:307) quotes Sri Aurobindo on this journey of consciousness:
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If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our blirth into matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that is taking place in nature, then man, as he is, cannot be the last term in that evolution; he is too imperfect an expression of the spirit. Mind itself is too limited a form and instrumentation; mind is only a middle term of consciousness; the mental being can only be a transitional being.
"The ordinary consciousness in the physical body tends to altered states of consciousness, and seems (as in the case of sleep) to require these intervals for proper rest and restoration.
Tart (1971 :3) says in this regard:
One of the most persistent and unusual aspects of human behavior.... is man's dissatisfaction with the ordinary state of consciousness and the consequent development of innumerable methods of altering it.
"The succession of conscious states is toward higher integration, not toward lower dissociation, toward more control of the environment, rather than less, and toward more grand perceptions of beneficence rather than toward the opposite. This principle is one of those facts (like the existence of the stars) which would be considered remarkable if we did not take it for granted. The process of integration in growth has the complementary virtues of being obvious in fact and transcendental in implication. It restores man from a reactive creature, differentiated in time, to an integrated part of the noumenon. As Eliade 1969:199-200) says:
The idea of yoga.... is to live in an eternal present, outside of time. The man, liberated in life, no longer possesses a personal consciousness .... but a witnessing consciousness, which is pure lucidity and spontaneity.
"7) Regarding the three illusions:
a) The percepts of waking and dreaming (and hence all physical reality) are equally illusory, being governed by the generalized preconscious. This does not mean that the ordinary world of physical reality is without laws, but only that its supposed laws represent special cases of more general cosmic laws.
b) The consciousness of the ego as being bound in time and space and as being in one point in that space
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time is equally illusory. It is a kind of fiction invented to give the experience of cognition and development, and hence the scenario of life is a self-designed dream.
c) The idea of the ego itself as a separate bit of consciousness is also an illusion. Human life is but the history of the growth, development, and diffusion of this illusion. In order to encourage the gradual transformation of this process it is useful to encourage the enhancement of self-concept from its initial narrow sense of 'my body' to its ultimate broad sense of 'my world,' passing through the intermediate stages of my possessions, my loved ones, my work, my associations, and my creations.
"The physical world is of course not unreal, but it is only a special case of the larger vivency of the collective unconscious into which our individual egos are launched to gain the experience of cognition and will in a time and space-bound world. We are held prisoner in this restricted space-time with its physical laws by our sense of ego, reinforced by what we call the 'normal' state of consciousness. (Actually it is a very special state of consciousness in which intelligence is particularized.) But even in our ego-consciousness we can escape the restrictive laws of the physical world into the larger laws of the metaphysical world by passing into an ASC.
"8) Lama Govinda (1966:17) points out that (since the syntaxic mode embraces the lower modes as well) '. . the essential nature of words is neither exhausted by their present meaning, nor is their importance confined to this usefulness as a transmitter of thought' - for they express at the same time qualities which are not translatable into concepts. He continues, - that it is precisely this parataxic quality in poetry and oratory which stirs us so deeply. This statement by the lama is indicative of the fact that the three cognitive modes are 'epigenetic' in Erikson's sense - that is, each succeeding one builds on the previous, and contains it, although emphasizing a new and emergent aspect. He again senses this hierarchy in stating (Ibid) 'if art can be called... the formal expression of reality ... then the creation of language may be called the greatest achievement of art.'
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"The same intuitive grasp of the hierarchy of the three modes is evidenced by Satprem (1964:60) in his biography of Sri Aurobindo when he declares, speaking of growing enlightenment: 'Once in possession of these . . . the seeker begins to know ... things as they are, for he no longer catches the external signs, gestures, all that immured dumb show, nor the veiled face of things, but the pure vibration in each thing . . .'
"Satprem (1964:55 says further:
'The task of the apprentice yogi ... is finally to become conscious in what men call death, for to the degree that we have been conscious in our life we shall become conscious in our death.
He (1964:103) quotes Sri Aurobindo as saying:
Matter is the starting point of our evolution; enclosed in it consciousness has gradually evolved; so the more consciousness emerges, the more it must recover its sovereignty and affirm its independence.
Finally he (1964:178) paraphrases Sri Aurobindo in stating:
Our sole problem is to lift ourselves to even higher planes by an individual evolution and our single life to transcribe and incarnate materially the truth of the plane to which we belong.
"In a dream the perceptual events seem to be real, but actually are illusory, permuted about by unconscious forces, and the lucid dreamer knows that this is so, and that he is dreaming; in our normal state of consciousness, the percepts also seem to be real, but actually are equally illusory, being controlled and permuted by the collective unconscious, and the enlightened man like the lucid dreamer knows that this is so, and that he, too, is, in reality, in a dream. The dream state is to ordinary every-day 'reality' as that reality is to ultimate reality; each state is the dream-state of the one above it.
"It appears that those who have successfully practiced the disciplines of the psychedelic stage and have reaped its enormous benefits fall into three classes. Curiously enough these categories are best delineated by
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another triple paradigm (Bruner's classification of concept formulation):
(1) enactive (when the learning is in the muscles);
(2) iconic (when the learning depends on signs [icons]; and
(3) symbolic (when the learning has been completely integrated as a concept).
"in the first two states, when the learning is less than fully complete symbolically, it can be approximated in the first instance through a system of body training (Hatha-yoga), and the following of ritual (such as Zen or alpha wave biofeedback), and in the second instance by recourse to icon-like archetypes which stand in the place of a concept which is too vague for complete cognitive formulation, but which indicates by a shadowy presence its substantive nature.
"In the final instance, full psychedelic power is obtained, orthocognition is established, and the juncture of the conscious mind and the numinous element which presents itself as the collective preconscious brings not only creativity and serendipity, but literally the positive control of all aspects of man's self-concept from body-image outward to complete altruism. This 'heaven on earth' 'Omega point' is a literal re-establishment of the pristine Adamic estate, at present glimpsed only in ecstasies and visions. It is contained, of course, within the 'durative topocosm' which exists throughout time, and waits only on man's developing mind to again bring it to physical manifestation. It is in this concept, that psychology comes to aid man in understanding what was formerly called 'the mystic path' in a more modern and useful way.
"Our egos are ephemeral, transitory events, which develop (like waves), effloresce, and diffuse, carrying back with them to the Spirit which originated them the precious experience of rational consciousness. This individualized process is carried out in eight stages of development, discovered by Erikson:
In stage 1, the ego is absent;
in stage 2, it rises and differentiates;
in stage 3, it explores love of self and parents;
in stage 4, it stops trying to make people and starts trying to make things;
in stage 5, it reaches its zenith of separatism in the adolescent identity-crisis;
in stage 6, it begins diffusion in love of the beloved and in creativity;
in stage 7, it further diffuses in parental succorance, and psychedelic experiences;
in stage 8, it sets in illumination, knowing that its destiny is to transcend self;
in stage 9, it is again absent.
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"The central issue in the development of man is the relationship between the generalized impersonal mind (which we call the preconscious) and the particularized conscious manifestation of it (which we call our individual consciousness). Each of these aspects of intelligence brings to their psychedelic union its own peculiar and characteristic powers, and each needs the support of the other. The generalized mind, which exists in a hypnotized impersonal state has genie-like powers over the environment including ourselves, but lacks conscious will and personality. The particular conscious mind has the regnancy of individual will, consciousness, and rational thought, but lacks the generalized powers, which can only be wisely and usefully released in a union of the two (which we call the psychedelic state).
"In the unitive state, these two aspects are joined; and as in a closed electrical circuit, the current flows, empowering the human consciousness with quasi-divine authority, and humanizing the impersonal preconscious with the rationalizing of human conscious evaluation in place of the dark archetypes of the collective subconscious. To be sure, not all these methods are of equal value, for some allow for much more rational control than others, and it is this rational control of the process which is the continuum on which they should be evaluated.
"To the extent that each individual human mind shares in the generalized preconscious, it becomes a creator, just as the generalized preconscious is. Therefore, every human has the potentiality of creation, not just of ideas but of actual reality; and from this it follows that whatever people believe in, becomes real in an existential sense. The enormous implications of this concept (which among other things solves the problem of the origin of evil) are extremely important for each of us to understand, so that we do not, by negative thoughts, add to the sum total of evil in the world, but instead contribute to its opposite - the good.
"The numinous element appears in the process of becoming, in the process of manifesting, in the process of building toward what is to us a future event of perfection. All that precedes that dawn is prologue, including the dream world in which we live, for this can be conceptualized as no more than the numinous element trying out different facets of its power and energy through the medium of our individualized lives, much as a concert artist tries out themes before a symphony concert. But that rehearsal is a
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necessary part of its evolution, for when housed in us, it is able, if but in the blink of a man's lifetime, to blend its awesome power with the personal element which it alone lacks: it is able in a finite life to become complete and to pre-figure the 'far-off Divine event' of the poet, when all having been brought to perfection, the All will fully cognize the All. Thus each individual life is part of an eternal prologue in which the numinous element is being perfected and completed to a new and more glorious dawn. Thoreau, that rustic seer, said of this process, 'That day is yet to dawn, for the sun is only a morning star!"'
FOOTNOTE:
1 The remainder of this chapter is quoted from earlier work (1975:380ff).
ADDENDUM: Siddhis are produced by a sanayama or 3-fold simultaneous use of concentration (samadhi), meditation (dhyana), and fixity (dharama). The first two produce an increase in order which flows thru the whole system. But fixing the attention on a particular part produces an inflow of order from the whole system to the specific part. One could say that order in general is lessened to produce more order in one spot. (The analogue would be that of a hydraulic ram which uses the fall of a lot of water over a small height to produce the raising of a small amount to a considerable height. The amount of order introduced into the small subsystem is so large that it produces a siddhi in line with theory in Chapter 1. The kind of siddhi depends on the particular sanayama employed which fixes total order on some specific object or body part.
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CORRECTIONS, ADDITIONS, COMMENTARY
(page/paragraph/line - continued paragraph numbered zero)
33/commentary on chapter: Siddhis and Two-fluid model: Reflections after this chapter emphasize the importance of the siddhis in inducing the near-vacuum state which produces and "two-fluid" model, which two concepts seem central in explaining psychic phenomena. (Here refer to addendum on pages 46 and 372.) The following additional commentary may be useful in amplifying these ideas.
The brilliant scientist, Werner Heisenberg, once said: "What we see is not nature, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Since we do not ask the right questions of nature, she does not tell us the right answers. The writer wonders if this concept is relevant in regard to those phenomena now considered miraculous and psychic. Do we in fact misinterpret the significance of what we see in this area, because we lack the insight to unravel the complex mechanisms and ideas which have produced such anomalous experience? Perhaps if we backed off the subject for a bit, and proposed some new theoretical considerations, we might further our cause.
Generally speaking, when a problem such as the psychic area proves sticky, it is because we are not in possession of powerful enough constructs. When one is looking for more powerful constructs, one usually finds that mathematics and physics furnish helpful paradigms. Intuition suggests that the two-fluid model in atomic physics may be just such a paradigm. Let us completely forget psychics for a few moments while we investigate the physical model carefully for possible isomorphic relevance.
To explain the two fluid model in non-scientific parlance, let us suppose that there is an assemblage of N people who wear nothing but sheets, as many as are at hand. Let us stipulate that while sheets cannot be divided, within the group they are always distributed as evenly as possible. Further let the number of sheets X, which starts out much larger than N gradually shrink, until at last it becomes less than N. Here a very spectacular event happens: suddenly the heretofore homogenous group is divided into two
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pacts - those who still have one sheet, and those who are naked; it is obvious that the behavior of these two subgroups will differ considerably.
To get a gut reaction on a profound problem, we have anthropomorphized the metaphor. Let us now change it by reducing the assemblage from persons to atoms, and the sheets to quanta packets of heat. This change in operators does not change the process, and it is at once obvious that we have the two fluid model (best exemplified by the superfluidity and superconductivity properties of Helium 3 under 2 degrees Kelvin).
In trying to visualize the two-fluid model, it may be helpful to realize that it is an inevitable consequence of the fact that energy comes in quantum packets, and consequently that when the entropy in a system has been so diluted "that there are not enough of the packets to go around" some of the stuff of the system must lack any packets at all. There are hence two kinds of stuff in the system: stuff without energy packets, and stuff with one energy packet each; these two form the two fluids.
Let us at once note, as important, the fact that the two fluids are very different in behavior. The one ordinary fluid carrying all the entropy of the system has no changed properties since the usual statistical laws govern. The other, an extraordinary fluid with no entropy, has no electrical resistance nor surface boundary. Quantum mechanical laws pertain here in macroscopic form. Conditions when quantum mechanical laws supersede the law of averages are conditions which favor "miracles." Since, however, this paper is not a scientific treatise, we will not further dwell on the other remarkable properties of the non-entropic liquid but proceed to use it as an isomorphic metaphor.
What has been described heretofore is a "spontaneous" example of the two-fluid model which occurs naturally because zero (with its unique properties) is the number below one. We shall now describe a more complex model which can occur only with intelligent intervention, since it consists of the division of a system into two sub-systems, one of which contains no entropy packets (and the other several entropy packets per unit of stuff) though some artificial separation process. Supposing that there is some way in which this can be done, the consequence will be that in a rather normal system (in fairly high entropy), a small sub-system can be so purified of entropy that it will be in total order, with consequent remarkable properties, while the larger sub-system takes on the excess entropy distributed over a larger extent, and hence relatively unnoticed. Naturally the lower the total entropy in the system, the easier it will be to achieve this goal, so that as a limiting case the goal is spontaneously achieved when the entropy packets per unit of stuff in the system have been reduced to unity, and not some multiple of it.
The spontaneous example of the two fluid model which must occur in physics because zero is the number below one, can hence be generalized to a contrived example of the two fluid model when some mechanism is employed to counteract the "spreading as-evenly-as- possible law," and produce units with no packets of entropy in the presence of others of more than one packet of entropy apiece. It is suggested that one such possible mechanism is siddhis meditation, which directs total order into a small subgroup at the expense of higher entropy in the larger subgroup.
Siddhis are produced by a sanayama, or 3-fold simultaneous use of concentration (samadhi), meditation (dhyana), and fixity (dharama). The first two produce an increase in order which flows through the whole system. But fixing the attention on a particular part produces an inflow of order from the whole system of the specific part. One could say that order in general is lessened to produce more order in one spot. (The analogue would be that of a hydraulic ram which uses the fall of a lot of water over a small height to produce the raising of a small amount to a considerable height.) The amount of order introduced into the small sub-system is so large that it produces a siddhi (miracle). The kind of siddhi depends on the particular sanayama employed which fixes total order on some specific object or body part.
Siddhis are important to psychic science because they involve almost every discrete phenomenon studied under that discipline, such as telepathy, precognition, levitation, psychokinesis, mind-reading, and many others, as catalogued in Gowan (1980). The most authoritative description of the siddhis is Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, Book III on paranormal powers, (Aranya, 1977). In the West, the Transcendental Meditation Move-
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ment, through its siddhis teaching, has experience and documentation on this subject, (Orme-Johnson and Farrow, 1977). Keeping these facts in mind, let us now turn to taking testimony from these sources. (Here reread page 38).
Domash views meditation as the conscious exploration of very low or ordered mental temperatures. The genesis of pure consciousness is seen as a phase transition of the nervous system to a state of long-range order among neurons. Similarities exist between this state of pure awareness and macroscopic quantum mechanisms, such as superconductivity and superfluidity. This "fifth yogic state" can be modeled in terms of the two-fluid model characteristic of superfluids, in which special laws of nature, not seen during ordinary high entropy, become evident. It may be that such siddhis as levitation, as well as telepathy, precognition, and other paranormal powers are effects of this change of laws from statistical to quantum.
A close reading of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, Book III on paranormal power, (siddhis), (Aranya 1977:278-348), reveals that this ancient sage predicted the existence of the siddhis and accounted for them in a completely compatible manner. This is not the place to argue the relative merits of Transcendental Meditation or other ministries in the facilitation of such states for the average human, since our aim is to bring out the compatibility of some psychic phenomena with very recent discoveries in physics.
The advantages of the two-fluid model are:
1) It offers a first scientific explanation of some paranormal phenomena;
2) It provides an explanation why saints in a very high state of order develop spontaneous and unsought siddhis;
3) It suggests further developments, explorations, and research experiments.
There are limits to the scope of this model in explaining psychic phenomena; it is not claimed that it can account for all such manifestations. Nevertheless, the siddhis approach to paranormal phenomena as enhanced powers of the right hemisphere of human beings in a high state of order, using the two-fluid paradigm is a very useful one, since it gives us a first view of the paranormal as compatible with the quantum mechanical principles of modern physics.
18/3/ microgeny: The following compatible quotation purporting to come via automatic writing from the dead Myers is found in Geraldine Cummins The Road to Immortality (1955:59): "Even when man is awake . . . his consciousness is broken by gaps of unconsciousness forty or fifty times a second." (A similar conclusion is reached by E. D. Fawcett on page 328 of The Individual and Reality.)
86/3 I.V. Patrovsky of Prague advises that dowsing is caused by muscular tension, which generates electromagnetic impulses of wave length 3-70 cm which penetrate down to dielectric water and are reflected back.
88/4 Work of Burr: further to this topic see Russell, E. Design for Destiny. Sudbury, England, Nevill Spearman, 1921 which gives (p. 178-9) extensive bibliography of Burr's writings including his Blueprint for Immortality, Sudbury: Spearman, 1950?
97/0/17 We guess that the reason the siddhis come spontaneously in the cases of some Christian mystics is that the "disorder packets" are not numerous enough to go around, and consequently there is a natural separation in accordance with the two fluid model, - (see previous comment on chapter 1 ). In the yogic siddhis, there may be artificial means used to separate the entropy in individuals in a higher state of disorder; this is apparantly the theoretical reason for proscriptions against its use. The heat entropy Helium 3 model is very helpful here, presuming that it is an exact isomorph.
98/3/6 We now suggest that the specific power possessed by the "control" is that this disincarnate spirit is able to effect a siddhi, in other words go into samadhi, whereas the departed communicators are not.
112/0/6 This concentration of thought resembles a siddhi, and one is justified in wondering if materialization, and other phenomena of similar type are caused by a siddhi on the part of the departed control. This would explain why it is necessary to have a control, (a departed person who has learned siddhi technique), and would also explain why there seem to be so many East and American Indians as controls (since they belong to a culture which through Vedic or Shamanistic techniques has more access to the siddhi technique).
162 Commentary on SHC. Reflection after writing this section suggest more emphasis on the very rapid, (almost instantaneous) aspect of this combustion which has received insufficient attention. (Note 164 under Gaddis No. 8; also 162, 1st Paragraph, No. 4; and again 165/3/3-4). An almost instantaneous flash of light would explain the lack of burning of more distant objects in the room (which would certainly occur if the time were sufficient for heat to build up). Is it possible that SHC is a kind
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of aborted translation, so that the flash of light does not fully destroy the body? SHC phenomena should be re-examined with this very rapid co- mbustion hypothesis in mind. If correct, this hypothesis would make SHC akin to an aborted translation process, and would suggest that SHC might well be placed under Mortem effects, (3.7) instead of under 3.3.
162/5 1. V. Patrovsky of Prague advises that SHC should never be associated with alcohol, as the two are not connected. He believes a possible explanation is that deuterium oxide from heavy water becomes concentrated in elder people and by some cosmic impulse a nuclear reaction may arise.
176/3/12 Further accounts of these pioneers in radionics may be found in Russell, E. W. Report on Radionics. Suffolk, England: Neville Spearman, 1973. Our tentative hypothesis in regard to the healing properties of radionics is that 1) there is a universal intelligence, 2) mankind has access to it through the right hemisphere, 3) but it cannot speak, and hence must communicate its information through various forms of apparatus known as radionic. In other words, radionic hardware is much like an Ouija board, or a dowser's wand, enabling the subliminal self to communicate without words, and facilitating this response.
178/3 1. V. Patrovsky of Prague advises luminescence may be identified as Russell's effect, such as action of butterfly wings, flowers, woods, metals on photographic plate. Crystals such as those of flint, feldspar, and fluorite may exhibit electro-luminescence by piezoelectric effect. Some metals fluoresce by heating or absorbing ultra-violet rays. Flowers may exhibit chemi-luminescence when oxidized by air.
223/2 1. V. Patrovsky of Prague advises that a local healer Zezulka was able to generate both A.C. and D.C. electromagnetic fields, and thus activate water. "Physical changes in water are paramagnetic nuclear resonance, Peschke effects, and the breaking of hydrogen bonding caused by the A.C. field. Low frequencies may form free radicals, charged ions, and trace of hydrogen peroxide, all with positive effects on living matter. All living matter in general may be influenced by magnetic, electrostatic, and biophysical effects (PEER and EMPT effects) which cause changes in large molecules of hemoglobin, DNA, etc."
223/2/4 1. V. Patrovsky of Prague disputes that these finger emanations are capable of being photographed by Kirlian photography. He states that "all we see on Kirlian photographs are coronal discharges modulated by changes in skin resistance which depends on emotional activity."
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225/0/5 1. V. Patrovsky of Prague advises that this "sick" magnetism is nothing but positive ionization, which may be neutralized by flame or water.
227/2/5 Correspondent Patrovsky and others have advised us that the "90% water" is too high, and that the figure is nearer 60-70%.
263/5 Genius and reincarnation: cf Russell, E. Design for Destiny Neville Spearman, Sudbury, England, 1971, p. 108 for similar views.
270/Myers on genius: For what it may be worth we quote the following from Geraldine Cummins The Road to Immortality 1955:63-4: (The extract purports to be a communication from the dead Myers.) "Now this speculation ... is interesting when applied to genius. The souls who have preceded us on earth naturally stamp us mentally and morally. If a certain type of psyche is continually being evolved in the one group, you will find that eventually that type if it be musical, will have a musical genius as its representative on earth. It will harvest all the tendencies of those vanished lives, and it will then have the amazing unconscious knowledge which is the property of genius."
313/0 Group Soul: Another writer who believed in this was Myers. We quote from G. Cummins The Road to Immortality 1955:51 (automatic writing purporting to come from the dead Myers): "The higher the ego climbs on the ladder of consciousness, the nearer it draws to other kindred souls. I have already told you that there may be a thousand, a hundred, or merely twenty souls all fed by one spirit. Their consciousness of comrade-souls increases on the higher levels of existence. In time they are able to enter into other souls' memories, perceive their experiences and be sensible of them as if they were theirs. Mind becomes communal in the last stages, for the spirit, the unifying principle, is tending all the time to produce greater harmony, and therefore greater unity. These various individuals are merging more and more, becoming one in experience and in mind, and thus attaining to undreamt-of levels of intellectual power."
313/0 Reincarnation and disincarnates: For similar views see Russell, E. Design for Destiny. Neville Spearman, Sudbury, England, 1971 p. 126 quoting Oliver Lodge, source Hibbert Journal, 1921, quoted in F. B. Bond The Company of Avalon, Oxford: Blackwell, 1924.
(page 390)
Adamic Ecstasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Altered States of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 320
Animal Senses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Apports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125
Auras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Automatic Disposal of Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Body Size and Weight Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .207, 209
Body of Buddha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .348
Calm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Chastity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
Clairaudience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Clairvoyance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Cold Wind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .165
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Continence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
Continuous Contact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
Cosmogenic P owers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76, 214
Developmental Aspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 72
Dowsing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .86
Electromagnetic Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .172
Elongation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 208
Empery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
Over Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Endothermic Reactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Epilog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
Etheric Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Exothermic Reactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .160
Exotic Abilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47
Exotic Factors of Intellect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 52
Externalization of Sensorium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .211
Extraordinary Strength . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .210
Firewalking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 149
Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
Friendliness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
Gemeinschaftgefuhl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .252
Gems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
Genius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262, 273
Healing
Laying-On-Of-Hands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .223
Orthocognitive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .237
Union-Compassion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253
Human Oddities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Incorruptibility of Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189
Independence from Physical Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
inedia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Infused Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .254
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1, 262
Invisibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Knowledge of Stars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .217
Levitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Among Mystics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .190
Among Paragnosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Among TM Adepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .202
Theories About . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Luminosity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Materialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Mediumship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 99
Miraculous Hearing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . 234
Miraculous Sight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Miraculous Touch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .222
Mortem Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Needed Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 360
Non-Somnia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 187
Odor of Sanctity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 211
Operations of Increasing Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
Orthocognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
Out-Of-Body Experience (OBE) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130
Paradigms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .10
Paranormal Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Physical Mediumship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .98
Poltergeist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Prana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Precocity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
Premonition of Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Pribran-Bohm Hologram Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Precognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Psychic Heat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Psychic Surgery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .228
Psychokinesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Psychometry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Recapitulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
Reincarnation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
Siddhis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Space and Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 130
Spontaneous Human Combustion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .162
Stars, Arrangement of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Stigmata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
Telepathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Teleportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Time Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Time Warp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Transfiguration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
Union-Compassion Healing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253
Unsolved Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .360
Vision of Cosmic Beings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .218
Through Opaque Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
TABLE 1
THE ERIKSON-PIAGET-GOWAN PERIODIC DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE CHART
DEVELOPMENTAL
LEVELS
(see below)
ATTENTIONAL
MODES (see across)
---------------------------------
DEVELOPMENTAL
LEVELS (see below)
LATENCY
3 it, they
THE WORLD
IDENTITY
1 I, me
THE EGO
CREATIVITY
2 thou
THE OTHER
INFANT
ERIKSON
(Affective)
PIAGET
(Cognitive)
TRUST vs. MISTRUST
1
SENSORIMOTOR vs.
CHAOS
AUTONOMY vs.
SHAME AND DOUBT
2
PREOPERATIONAL
vs. AUTISM
INITIATIVE vs
GUILT
3
INTUITIVE vs.
IMMOBILIZATION
YOUTH
ERIKSON
(Affective)
PIAGET-GOWAN
(Cognitive)
INDUSTRY vs.
INFERIORITY
4
CONCRETE OPER'NS
vs. NON-CONSERVATION
IDENTITY vs.
ROLE DIFFUSION
5
FORMAL OPERATIONS
vs. DEMENTIA PRAECOX
INTIMACY vs.
ISOLATION
6
CREATIVITY vs
AUTHORITARIANISM
ADULT
ERIKSON
(Affective)
GOWAN
(Cognitive)
GENERATIVITY vs.
STAGNATION
7
PSYCHEDELIA vs.
CONVENTIONALISM
EGO-INTEGRITY
vs. DESPAIR
8
ILLUMINATION vs.
SENILE DEPRESSION
.
TABLE 2-1
TAXONOMY OF EXOTIC POWERS AND ABILITIES
0 PHYLOGENIC - (other species)
1. PHYLOGENIC- Mankind (SOI Factors of Intellect)
2. ONTOGENIC
.1 extensions of sensory modalities
.11 smell
.12 taste
.13 sight
.14 touch
.15 hearing
.16 unclassified
.2 extensions of mental abilities
.21 temporal
.22 spatial
.23 figural (art)
.24 musical
.25 mathematical
.26 verbal
.27 semantic
.28 behavioral
.29 unclassified
3. COSMOGENIC: Physical (Body Powers)
.0 sensitivity to psychic impressions, telepathy, dowsing, (18, 19)*
.1 physical mediumship, communication with dead, poltergeist phenomena, apports, psychokinesis, materializations
.2 OBE bilocation, time warp, teleportation, clairvoyance, (38,47)
.3 endo - and exothermic reactions, firewalking, psychic heat, SHC
.4 stigmata
.5 luminosity, aura, electromagnetic effects, (40)
.6 independence from physical functions, inedia, non-somnia, (30)
.7 mortem excursus, knowing time of death, post mortem effects, incorruptibility, (22, 39)
.8 levitation, (42)
.9 invisibility, (21)
.X body size and weight changes, elongation, abnormal strength, (24,45)
.Y externalization of sense organs, odor of sanctity, (see 4.3-5), (48)
4. COSMOGENIC: Mental (Knowledge Abilities)
.0 knowledge of arrangement and motion of stars, (27, 28)
.1 vision of cosmic beings, (26, 32)
.2 calm (31)
.3 vision through opaque objects, miraculous sight, (25)
.4 miraculous touch, ability to heal through laying on of hands, understanding of body system, (29)
.5 miraculous hearing, (41)
.6 empery over self, others (healing), animals, weather, miracles, (17)
.7 adamic ecstasy, cleansing doors of perception, gemeinschaftgefuhl, (23, 16)
.8 Infused knowledge, omniscience (jhanas 1-4), (33, 34, 44, 45,49)
.9 Continuous contact and union, (jhanas 5-8) (35, 36)
The numbers in parentheses refer to Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (see Table III-1)
(page 64)
TABLE III-1
PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRA BOOK III ON SUPERNORMAL POWERS
PAGE
SUTRA
INDEX
SAMYAMA ON
GIVES KNOWLEDGE OF, OR POWER OVER
315
16
4.7
changes
past and future
317
17
4.6
word
cries of all creatures
324
18
3.0
latent impressions
past lives
326
19
3.0
notions
thoughts of others
327
21
3.9
body
invisibility
328
22
3.7
karma, portents
time of death
330
23
4.7
gemeinschaftgefuhl
same (compassion)
331
24
3.x
physical strength
same
332
25
4.3
effulgent light
hidden or distant objects
334
26
4.1
solar entrance
cosmic regions
340
27
4.0
lunar entrance
arrangement of stars
341
28
4.0
pole star
motion of stars
341
29
4.4
navel
body system
342
30
3.6
trachea
hunger and thirst
343
31
4.2
bronchial tube
restlessness
343
32
4.1
coronal light
cosmic beings (siddhas)
344
33
4.8
intuition
all knowledge
344
34
4.8
heart
mind stuff (chitta)
345
35
4.9
buddhi
Purusa (pure consciousness)
348
36
3.y
Purusa
cosmic senses
(The previous are knowledges en route; the following are external powers.)
TABLE III GADDIS (1967) DOCUMENTATION OF "MASTERY OVER FIRE"
PAGE
DATE
N
n
TYPE
REMARKS
L
t
CITE (GADDIS)
116
.
1
.
A
St Francis de Paula
.
.
Thurston 1952
117
16xx
1
.
B
Claris ASC
.
.
.
117
186x
1
.
C
Home, transfer ASC
(see quote below)(1)
.
.
SPR:VI:103
Adair 1924
Burton 1944
121
1917
1
.
C
medium, transfer ASC
.
.
SPR:35 1924
121
1927
1
.
C
12 yr old boy
.
.
.
122
1871
1
.
C
blacksmith
.
.
NYC Herald 9/7/1871
122
1883
10
.
D
Indian firedance ASC
.
.
B. of Ethnology 1883-4
125
1948
1
.
C
Honolulu fakir
.
.
Long 1948
126
.
gr
.
D
Greek religious rite ASC
.
30'
.
127
1952
gr
.
D
Voodoo dancers ASC
.
1'
Bach 1952
129
1936
gr
.
D
Guiana dancers ASC
.
.
Forbes 1936
130
1760
2
.
A
St Medard hysterics ASC
.
.
Dingwall 1947
193
1950
45
1
W
Fiji fire walk
25'
.
Wright 1950
135
1962
30
.
W
Buenos Aires s.soc'y ASC
.
.
.
138
1935
1
2
W
Kuda Bux in England
11'
5"
Price 1936
140
1938
1
.
W
Kuda Bux at Radio City
20'
.
.
141
.
gr
.
W
Fiji fire walk ASC
25'
15"
Hocken
142
1933
.
.
W
India and Burma
50'
.
Miles 1933
142
1901
1
.
W
Tahitian in Honolulu
.
.
O'Brien 1921
142
.
1
.
W
transfer to author ASC
90'
.
Stevenson
143
.
1
.
W
transfer to author ASC
(see quote below)(2)
.
.
Long 1945:31-7
144
1899
2
.
W
transfer to 2 children
.
.
J. Polynes. Socy 2:1899
145
1899
3
1
W
transfer to 4 Englishmen
(see quote below)(3)
.
.
(ibid:)
146
1936
35
1
W
transfer to American
gr
.
J. Borderline Res. 1949
146
194x
1
.
W
transfer to author
30
.
Menard 1954
147
1933
1
.
W
transfer to author
India
.
.
Long 1948:42-5
148
1922
200
.
W
transfer to many
(see quote below)
13'
.
Thurston 1952:18
150
1949
567
9
W
transfer to many
(Univ. of Hawaii)
(see quote below)
15'
.
Kenn 1949
(use "back" function to return to text)
General notes: page is the page in the Gaddis book; the date is the approximate date when the occurence took place; N is the number of successful persons; n is the number of burned persons; in each case they somehow disobeyed instructions; Type represents the kind of fire mastery where A - general mastery; B - enduring a blazing pyre; C - handling hot coals; D - a fire dance; W - fire-walking; ASC refers to the fact that the candidates were known to be in a trance or altered state of consciousness, transfer refers to the fact that the ability to pass through fire was transferred by the adept to some one else, not adept in the art, such as a bystander, an observer or the author of the account; I - the length of the firepit in feet; t - the time the participant was observed in the firepit or the time to transit it. Cite - the bibliographic source to be found in the bibliography (SPR
Society for Psychical Research).
Special notes:
1. (Gaddis 1967:118) The Earl of Crawford wrote: "I have frequently seen Home when in a trance go to the fire and take out large red-hot coals and carry them about in his hands. . . . Eight times I have myself held a red-hot coal in my hands without injury. . . ."
2. (Brigham, Long:31f) Dr William T. Brigham of Bishop Museum, Honolulu: "I watched him with my mouth open and he was nearly across,-a distance of 150 It when someone gave me a shove. . . . I do not know what madness seized me but I ran. The heat wag unbelievable. . . . I was never so relieved in my life as I was to find that I was safe, and there was not a blister on my feet."
3. (Journal of Polynesian Soc'y N.Z. March 1899) Col Gudgeon, British resident in Tahiti: "I knew quite well that I was walking on red-hot stones, and could sense the heat, yet I was not burned. I felt something resembling slight electric shocks. . . ."
4. (Thurston, 1952:187ff) Bishop of Mysore, Monsignor Despartes: (a witness): "There must have been 200 people who passed over the embers, and 100 who went right through the middle of the flames" A Caucasian police chief told the bishop: "We felt as though we were in a furnace, but the fire did not burn us."
5. (Kenn, 1949) "Walkers interviewed afterward reported that their minds "were a blank" or that "they were under a spell." Their feet felt "only warm but had a tingling sensation, like the foot going to sleep"
6. It is notable in this table that it is the hands and feet which seem to have the immunity, rather than the whole body. This fact raises the issue of whether the auras which proceed from hands (and putatively the feet, see section 4,15) have a countervailing influence.
Table IV: Properties of Various Trance States Compared
Property
Schizo-
phrena
(*)
Possession
Mediumship
Hypnotism
Shamanism
Glossolalia
Mystic
Experience
(*)
Ego
Absent
Absent
Absent
Absent
Partly
Present
Partly
Present
Present
Memorability
None
None
None
None
Some
Some
Much
Possessor
?
Demon
Spirit
Hypnotist
Familiar
Deity
Deity
Personal
Value
Minus
Minus
Neutral
Plus
Plus
Plus
Very Plus
Social
Value
Minus
Minus
Plus
Plus
Plus
Plus
Very Plus
Sought?
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Induced?
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Considered
Illness
Illness
Talent
Therapy
Vocation
Grace
Theophany
Speech
Understood
Some
Some
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Physical
Symptoms
Yes
Yes
Few
Few
Few
Few
None
Trance
Learned
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
DNA
(*) For Comparison Only (use "Back" function to return to text)
(page 177)
TABLE V PROPERTIES OF PARATAXIC PROCEDURES
PROCEDURE
STATE OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
DIRECTION
OF ACTION
MODALITY
GOODNESS/
BADNESS
NUMINOUS
ASPECT
Prototaxcic
Mode*
Trance
impressed**
(excursion)
very bad
dreadful
1. Archetype
REM state
impressed**
pictorial
bad
worrisome
2. Dream
REM state
impressed**
pictorial
B/G
paranormal
3. Myth
normal
(neutral)
oral
-
religious
4.Ritual
normal
expressed**
enactive
G/B
magical
5. Art
normal
expressed**
pictorial
good
creative
Syntaxic
Mode*
normal and
higher ASC
expressed**
symbolic
very good
psychedelic
*for comparison only, not a part of parataxic mode.
**on individual, or by individual
(page 247)
Table VIII: PROPERTIES OF SYNTAXIC PROCEDURES AND GRACES
(after Laski, 1962 and Goleman, 1972)
.
D
E
V
E
L
O
P
E
S
T
A
G
E
Y
O
G
I
C
S
T
A
G
E
S
A
M
A
D
H
I
S
T
A
B
I
L
I
T
Y
S
I
D
D
H
I
S
J
H
A
N
A
Procedure
or Grace
A
F
F
E
C
T
C
O
G
N
I
T
I
O
N
P
U
R
I
F
I
C
A
T
I
O
N
I
L
L
U
M
I
N
A
T
I
O
N
T
R
A
N
S
E
N
D
E
N
C
E
U
N
I
O
N
Details of Glory
Remarks
C
R
E
A
T
I
V
E
6
3
N
O
N
E
O
S
C
S
T
A
B
L
E
N
O
N
E
S
O
M
E
-6+
Tantric sex
O
.
.
.
.
.
Prototaxic
sexual union
-5+
Creativity
I
x
.
.
.
.
Creative
Illumination
-4+
Biofeedback
I
x
.
.
.
.
Alpha bliss
-3+
Orthocognition
I
x
.
.
.
.
Orthocognitive
inner security
-2+
Meditation*
I
x
.
.
.
.
Meditative
contact bliss
P
S
Y
C
H
E
D
E
L
I
C
7
4
S
A
G
I
K
A
L
P
A
A
S
C
T
R
A
N
S
I
E
N
T
Y
E
S
-1+
Response Exp.**
E
x
x
.
(sense
presence)
Nature - mystic
oceanic, peak exp.
0+
Adamic ecstasy
E
x
x
.
(hear)
Cleansing doors
of perception
1
Knowledge
ecstasy
E
x
x
x
(see)
Pratyhara
hindering thoughts cease
2
Knowledge
contact #1
E
x
x
x
(touch)
Primary object
transcended
3
Knowledge
contact #2
e
x
x
x
(penetrating)
Rapture ceases
4
Knowledge
contact #3
e
x
x
x
(merge)
All feelings cease
U
N
I
T
I
V
E
8
5
N
I
R
G
I
K
A
L
P
A
A
S
C
S
T
A
B
L
E
Y
E
S
5
Ineffable
contact
e
.
x
x
x
.
Consciousness of
infinite space
6
Transcendental
contact
e
.
.
x
x
.
Objectless infinite
consciousness
7
Ineffable
union
e
.
.
.
x
x
Awareness of
"no-thing-ness"
8
Transcendental
union
e
.
.
.
x
x
Neither perception
nor non-perception
(use "Back" function to return to text)
O = orgasm I = Inspiration E = ecstasy e = beyond ecstasy; *Goleman places meditation in yogic stage 4
**Laski denies that this experience is a true ecstasy, although the testimony of many poets and nature mystics would indicate that it is
+Easten lore does not mention negative jhanas; they are added for clarity.
The "zero" jhana is known as the "access" state.
TABLE VII-1 LEVELS IN THE SPECTRUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS - AFTER WILBER (1977)
Lilly
p.181
Spectrum Level Name
p. 143
Sheath
p. 176
Description or Remarks
173
Mahayana Names
p. 169
Brown
p. 109
Body
p. 168
3
(Cosmic Mind)
.
"The Void"
A
citta
Void
.
6
Transpersonal
Bands
ananda
"cosmic filter"
A
alaya-vijnana
.
karuna causal
12
Existential
vijnana
space-time created (p. 120-33)
"Primary Dualism"
B
manas
Form
.
24
Biosocial Bands
mano
"cultural filter (p. 135)
Castaneda's "tonal"
C
.
.
suksma subtle
48
-48
Ego
Prana
ordinary man (p. 136)
("syntaxic") (Gowan 1975)
D
manovijnana
indication
.
96
-24
Philosophic Band
.
"personal filter" (p. 158-9)
super-ego
(E)
.
.
.
196
-12
Persona/Shadow
anna
("parataxic") (p. 150-1)
compartmentalized or split person with "good me" and "bad me," neurotic, psychotic
F
.
truth
sthula gross
384
-6
(Five Senses)
.
("perceptual filter")
(G)
5 vijnanas
5 senses
.
.
768
-3
(Environment)
.
("prototaxic")
(H)
.
existence
.
Note: Material in parenthesis has been added and is not found in Wilber.
TABLE VIII-1 - TRIPLICITIES2
ESSENCE
POTENTIALITY
MANIFESTATION
(Buddha)
FATHER
HOLY GHOST
SON
(Christian)
CAUSAL
SUBTLE
GROSS
(Jones)
CAUSAL
ASTRAL
PHYSICAL
(Occult)
(nilplicate)
implicate
explicate
(Bohm)
void
thought-forms
things
.
double integral SS(f)
single integral S(f)
(f) = function
math
function
df/dx
d2f/dx2
math
S(f)(x)
(f)(x)
df/dx
math
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This site may contains some copyrighted material which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. This constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.