Possession
MOST OF US have seen a mind-reader perform his magic on stage. We know there is some explanation for what he is able to do, even as there's an explanation for such tricks as pulling a rabbit out of a hat or sawing a woman in half.
But is there reality behind the tricks of mental telepathy? Do some people possess unusual power to see the unseen, to penetrate the mind of others, to predict the future?
For many years, experimentation has been going on in the fields of mental telepathy and extra-sensory perception.
An experiment in thought-transference involving two sisters was reported as early as 1883 by W.F. Gurney et al. When investigated by a committee, the Creery sisters performed various feats, including identification of playing cards turned up at random by the research team.
The advantage of such experiments with playing cards is that the likelihood of successful guesses is known, in the absence of factors that would favor correct guesses (connivance between the principals, poor shuffling from previous order, etc.). In a random drawing, the chance is one in 52 of guessing the correct card.
Subsequent to the report on the Creery sisters'
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high scores in guessing, it was found that they sometimes used a system of signals. In spite of their protestations that they only resorted to this if they didn't want to disappoint visitors during a run of wrong guesses, and that experiments with the best results were not influenced by signals, this revelation took the edge off these early experiments.
When Professor J.B. Rhine began his experiments at Duke University in 1972, he chose to use a pack of 25 cards, five each of five different kinds: star, cross, circle, square, waves. Possibility of successful guessing was improved from one in 52 (deck of playing cards) to one in five. This did not affect the validity of results, however.
At the beginning of Rhine's experiments, he had one person to look at the card while another guessed, as in the Creery experiments. Mental telepathy (ability to transfer thoughts without the usual sensory channels of communication) seemingly explained unusual success. Later, when he tested successful guessers without prior examination of the card by an observer, Dr. Rhine found that correct guesses were still above normal.
This led to the extra-sensory perception (E.S.P.) theory: some people have the ability to know, by beyond-normal means, facts of the external world hidden to them, without the necessity of these facts being transmitted from someone's mind. Mental telepathy depends on another person's having the fact in his mind; E.S.P. does not.
A further step was taken in the Rhine experiments. Successful guessers, who has high scores on identifying cards before they were turned over
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and seen by anybody, were told to predict on paper the future order of a pack of E.S.P. cards before they were even shuffled. Then, after the pack was shuffled and cut in a random fashion, the actual order of the cards was compared to the predicted order. Some subjects had an above-normal degree of success in foretelling an order that did not yet exist, which is referred to as precognition.
Children seem to score better in such extra-sensory perception experiments than adults, the uneducated better than highly educated people. A.A. Foster reports that primitive Canadian Indian children were far ahead of highly intelligent London college students.
While research in the E.S.P. field seems to establish the possibility of perceiving facts not available to the senses, the level of such perception is hardly to be compared to highly sophisticated incidents reported by some researchers.
Joost A. M. Meerloo, associate professor of psychiatry at New York School of Psychiatry, gives the following case study:
A patient in psychotherapy brings to the therapeutic session a frightening dream in which he saw that his younger brother has a car accident. He never dreams about his brother nor about car accidents. The therapist writes the dream down and tries to find out why this patient had that tragic inner vision that night. Though we do not yet understand the dream, the subject of our investigation is the strange ambivalent relation between the patient and his brother. A few days later the news comes in,
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that the patient's brother who lives at 3,000 miles distance, was indeed the victim of a car accident at the very hour the dream was dreamt. Several virtual traits in the dream correspond remarkably with the reports of the accident.Now begins the epistemological problem of how to judge this spontaneous case. Is it merely a coincidence? Every theoretician of probability would laugh at such a supposition. Are we satisfied in saying in full awe: "This was again that mysterious psi-factor?" Or can we, out of the therapeutic situation, learn to understand better why the brother in mortal danger sends out a message to our patient? Both brothers had had a very intensive emotional relation after the early death of their father, thereby repressing completely their early sibling rivalry. The depression for which my patient had come under treatment had been partly provoked by his younger brother's departure for California.
Something becomes now clinically more clear. The brothers had lived so close together as if they had been mutually dependent twins; especially among twins we are familiar with the fact that they can read each other's thoughts. Scientifically speaking, nothing is proved yet, but we have got an initial hunch about a broken rapport and communication that tries to reconstitute itself at a moment of extreme emergency.
Our group gathered many such examples of well-controlled dream material, its content corresponding with occurrences taking place far away. Parapsychological literature relates also
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plenty of these cases. Examples of mothers who experience the death of their sons on the battlefield in a specific dream are legion. During my own escape from the Nazis I noted down various informing dreams I had myself. (Hidden Communion)
What is our response to these examples?
Most of us just don't know how to respond. To agree that such communication takes place outside ordinary sensory experience is to admit the existence of a world and forces we cannot see.
Perhaps, just perhaps, there are senders and receivers, people who have strong E.S.P. The rest of us, if we deny the possibility, could be in the position of a person who has never seen television, who is told that images and sounds surround him, needing only to be channeled through a receiver to be seen and heard.
He won't believe it, for he's never experienced the reality.
In the whole field of parapsychology, a mystery exists that never seems to be fully removed by occasional evidence of deception and fraud.
Strange rappings in the night, objects moved without human or other visible intervention, the sense of a presence unseen but real: phenomena of this sort are documented to the point of strong evidence for their existence.
This is a different matter from the question whether stars rule human affairs and earth's destiny. Even without our Judeo-Christian presuppositions, we could not believe the lifeless masses of matter — including the moon on which men have
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walked can be the source of information about the future.
A roach in a clock factory would hardly consider his destiny ruled by the mechanisms and machines above, around, beneath him — unless he was a very stupid or disturbed insect.
J.B. Phillips, British author and Bible translator, tells of an experience that cannot be explained by ordinary sensory data:
Many of us who believe in what is technically known as the Communion of Saints must have experienced the sense of nearness, for a fairly short time, of those whom we love soon after they died. This has certainly happened to me several times. But the late C.S. Lewis, whom I did not know very well and had only seen in the flesh once, but with whom I had corresponded a fair amount, gave me an unusual experience. A few days after his death, while I was watching television, he "appeared" sitting in a chair within a few feet of me, and spoke a few words which were particularly relevant to the difficult circumstances through which I was passing. He was ruddier in complexion than ever, grinning all over his face and, as the old-fashioned saying has it, positively glowing with health. The interesting thing to me was that I had not been thinking about him at all. I was neither alarmed nor surprised nor, to satisfy the Bishop of Woolwich, did I look up to see the hole in the ceiling that he might have made on arrival! He was just there — "large as life and twice as natural." A week later, this time when
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I was in bed, reading before going to sleep, he appeared again, even more rosily radiant than before, and repeated to me the same message, which was very important to me at the time. I was a little puzzled by this, and I mentioned it to a certain saintly bishop who was then living in retirement here in Dorset. His reply was, "My dear J______ , this sort of thing is happening all the time." (Ring of Truth)
