GATES OF THE MIND
By Joseph Sadony
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NO MAN can
contribute to the world more than his own personal experience, the harvest of
his own research and experiment, unless it be the
fruit of inspiration or prophetic insight.
The works of Joseph Sadony contain a rich store of both.
Gates of the
Mind is one of a number of manuscript volumes thus far withheld form
publication by the author. Though its
subtitle is Proven Psychic Discoveries, various digressions from the narrative
reveal that its purpose is not autobiographical. It is an introduction of the anatomy of
prophetic intuition. The small book here
privately printed is rather less than a “condensation”; it contains but a small
portion of the first volume of this unpublished work.
Underlying and
eclipsing the narrative is a rational of the physiological foundations and
scientific investigation of mental phenomena considered as tele-empathic and
telepathic phenomena of the human nervous system.
It is a
conclusion of the author and his associates in research that most mystic,
psychic, and occult terms used in describing mental phenomena are misleading,
that there exist no mysterious “faculties” of a mystic or occult nature, but
that the imagination, if used correctly, is capable of portraying past,
present, or future events within the limitations imposed by the fact that the
imagination is dependent entirely on memory of past sensory experience to
provide the elements of its portrayal.
For example,
the author claims that the term “thought transference “ is
a misnomer, that it is impossible for what is usually designated a “thought” to
be transferred from one mind to another mind, but that it is possible and of
common occurrence to induce in another mind a thought that is similar to one
experienced in your own mind, or vice versa. The exact degree of similarity
will depend upon the similarity of past experience. The induced thought,
however, is entirely the product of the selective simulation of memory elements
in an activity of the imagination. The thought is your own, and has not been “transferred”
from another mind, even though it be similar in every
respect. A phenomenon has taken place, but it is one of thought induction, not
thought transference.
We are living
through a crisis the full extent and meaning of which is realized by only a
few. We are and have been witnessing periods of confusion and revolution, not
only in world politics, in science, education, industry, and art, but also in
psychology, philosophy, and religion.
We are witnessing
and shall witness the collapse of theories and concepts in all fields of
thought. No science can continue to stand on its present foundations without
adjustments made necessary by the confusion and poverty of existing verbal
organization. Neither the philosophies nor the psychologies can withstand the
critical application of the operational view with any greater success than the
physical sciences. They will be forced to more strict correlation of Language,
Logic, and Life.
Thus we have
undergone and are still undergoing a revolution in the physical sciences. Even
now new foundations are being lad to complete the bridge extending from atomic
to organic, thence to astronomic dimensions. The biologist must know his
physics and chemistry as well as his psychology; and a psychologist without knowledge
of the former is not worthy of the name. The philosopher who does not know by
first-hand research and experimentation these fundaments of life and the
physical universe must resign himself to his own amusement, for his mental
structures can be only dialectic castles in the air.
The confusion of
the age was manifest in the first few sessions of the Conference on Science,
Philosophy and Religion at the opening of World War II. The scholars admitted
that they were confused, and that they did not know how to “think with a view
to action,” or how to teach each other to the end of reaching mutual
understanding and agreement. As a result they were forced to agree to disagree,
to predict a pluralistic instead of a monolithic civilization.
Gates of the Mind
is the beginning of an answer to the scholars on the part of a student of life
and human nature, a seeker for truth and an independent investigator on an
experimental basis of the operations of the human mind in relation to
physiological and psychological consequences. Here for the first time is the
beginning of a detailed account of a personal adventure in the deliberate and
purposive development of prophetic intuition, and its application to problems
of nature and human nature, science, philosophy, religion, education, industry,
war, and peace.
There has been need
for an effort on the part of someone capable of experiencing and demonstrating
as well as observing so-called psychic and mental phenomena to separate the
wheat from the chaff, to paint the picture of just what can and cannot be
expected of it in the present state of man’s development; to function of man’s
sympathetic sensitivities from all the technical and psychic “racketeering”; to
encourage the individual development of these sensitivities along healthy and
constructive lines, and to discourage the authoritarian capitalization of
psychological or spiritual truths and the subjugation of peoples by
psychological tricks. In this small book is the beginning of Mr. Sadony’s
answer to this need.
And in answer to
those who may ask “Who is Joseph Sadony?” we quote data contained in Who’s Who
in
SADONY, Joseph A. Founder and director, Educational Research
Laboratories, Montague, Michigan; columnist, Muskegon Chronicle (Mich.) since
1929 Home: “Valley of the Pines,”
Montague, Michigan; b. Montabaur, near Ems, Germany, Feb. 22, 1877; s.
Alexander Nichols and Apollonia Reipert) S.; m. Mary Lillian Kochem, in 1906;
ch. Joseph Jr. (1909). Came with parents to
From the view of
some, a greater importance should be attached to the application of prophetic
intuition to fundamental problems of science, philosophy, education, and religion,
rather than to elements of mere personal experience. But to the laymen there
can be nothing more important than how he can benefit by personal experience,
rather than by the acquisition of knowledge or theory concerning the more
abstruse problems of science or philosophy.
For his benefit,
then, who cares little for the deeper problems
that might be discussed at greater length, we may conclude this
introduction by assuring him that so far as mental phenomena are concerned, together
with the conclusions expressed in Mr. Sadony’s comments in Gates of the Mind,
we are only a few of many who will agree that they have been established with
as much certainty for those of us who have participated in the experimental
investigation of this subject as the results of our research in the fields of
radionics, electrostatics, electro-magnetism, and gravitation.
Educational Research Laboratories
It matters not who in the world of time the
mind may be; Truth imprints upon its tablet its
own law. If that mind is so constituted, it
can no more help reflecting the fact than a mirror can
help reflecting the rays of the sun if at just
that angle to catch the eye as well as to send the
reflection that will come to the human eye
that receives it. The receiver is just as important as the sender.
JOSEPH SADONY
INTRODUCTION
PERIODICALLY in the history of the world it becomes essential
for men mentally akin to find each other, to know each other, and in unison
deliver a message of truth to enlighten, to strengthen, to correct mistakes, in
an effort to avoid just what has happened to us all. But how is this to be
done, if not by education? Not to condemn the methods of others, but to
substitute a better way that will defend itself.
All religions
embody good and have bettered the world. There are still two factors: Faith and Science; two rules, and both are
evidently right. Is it expecting too much that Religion and Science together
create the third principle, resulting in the transformation of the world into
one human family of many children, each to his own? With Science to preserve
order by eliminating fraud and trickery, there would be no fear of judging the
innocent as guilty.
As man is inclined
toward superstition, he naturally falls an easy prey to those clever enough to
deceive his eye. In fact, some of the brightest minds of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries have been completely deceived in this way. The possibility
of our loved ones returning after having passed away, or at least of sending us
some message or thought, cannot be doubted. But it is the unreliability of the
method used to receive these messages, as well as the unreliability of the
person receiving them, that gives rise to a question. The truth is often
exaggerated, and the open-minded victim easily duped.
Within mankind
there is a power so great that it would be dangerous to know it until we are perfect
in humility and self-control. Until then it is hidden from us by our selfish,
animal nature, which causes the mind to become cloudy and discontented.
Even as trees sleep
in the winter and blossom again in the spring, so also does humanity alternately
sleep and blossom: periodically come the
fruits of genius, great minds and sensitive souls who give voice, as “human
radios,” to the great broadcasting of the ages, the Song of Truth. And with
their passing, humanity gradually falls asleep again until the next “wave” or
cycle.
In this spiritual
sleep, this ebb of the soul, is the heyday of false prophets: therein will be found the origin of
superstition, in “imitation” of what did hold some truth, but is now a word
without meaning, a body without a soul.
Why do supposedly
great but false prophets and teachers flourish for a day and then die in
obscurity, leaving no flourishing field to prove the fertility of their
teaching?
The shell of the
wheat was there; the worlds and phrases-all borrowed to feed people who do not
think for themselves; and even when planted, gave up no fruit because the
spirit of God was lacking, and because they who professed, denied the
simplicity which was the soul itself.
Man slowly
approaches the epoch of the human radio. His antenna of imagination opens that
inner ear that hears the silent broadcast of the ages. It still vibrates in the
atmosphere. Man’s mortal ear already hears the music and the words…
We may view this
psychologically rather than from a spiritual or religious point of view;
nevertheless, it is clear that an even greater revelation will accompany the
discovery of a ”radio” in the human mind than what took place industrially,
internationally, and domestically with the invention and introduction of radio
into our homes.
The entire
universe is within the human head in the same manner that music broadcast from
various cities all over the world is within the radio, or within the room in
which its is being received.
We forget that a
well-governed and trustworthy imagination contains the tools that make
education from the specifications of wisdom; that therein also are the antennae
of man with which he searches for God:
that aerial to receive the message; the chamber of transformation in which
the “word is made flesh’; where thoughts are dramatized in symbols that are
revelations if they be attuned to “facts.”
We still have more
to learn of the rooms of man’s mind, to find the doors leading to that
religious ecstasy, the mystery, the frenzy of the aborigines, the bliss of
divinity felt by martyrs and saints, the hypnotic power of our professional
men-all still in its infancy.
No one will deny
facts, unless he has a subtle purpose to use opportunities for selfish purposes.
Truth is self-evident, and needs no support. It supports itself. And if the
pillars of a structure are lies, it will collapse. Still, the spirit of true
support is ever present, so that a new permanent structure shall rise from the
ashes and dust of falsehood. There are ever present health germs to continue
life, even among death germs. That is the law of adjustment, compensation, and
growth, the manifestation of life.
All that matters
most to man is back of his own eyes, and there he flounders in the dark,
thinking he thinks a thought, but unaware of the origin of that thought, or of
its fruits; “imagining’ things without the slightest conception of the power
and mechanism that he is using.
Surely we may learn
much by watching the insect with its antennae moving in every direction,
sensing the danger we cannot see. It protects itself without the great gift to
man: imagination. It only acts upon its
inherent power of instinct. It uses its antennae to sense approaching danger,
which it avoids, but knows not its source, without reason. Why should not man
have a more highly developed sense by the protection of reason, or the cause
with its effect?
If the same amount
of energy and education had been utilized for psychological, mental, and spiritual
power as for the comforts of economic, mechanical, and electrical power, what
would have been accomplished to further the progress of humanity?
There is no excuse
for man to underestimate the power of the mind at the loss of his inheritance
from God or Nature, from ancestry, or self-acquired. If we refuse to use reason
and logic as a foundation to intuition, whom can we blame for the failure in
evolution? whom but our own negligence? Nature offers us her fruits. Why are
men ashamed to admit their belief for or against spirituality?
How can anyone judge or give an opinion of
the power of prayer, of Christianity, or of the prophets, unless he has given
it a lifetime of experience to see the answer, and then left us the records, by
which we may judge?
There is much that
might be said of certain facts and truths that would by compel us to search the
Book of Mistakes made by those who were sincere, but too enthusiastic to allow
Nature to grow in its own good time; where swords have been unsheathed without
provocation, only in fear of apparently losing opportunities. If there be any
loss, let us go back and see whether the purse had a hole in it: whether the compass was influenced by a nail;
whether the watch kept good time as it should, or whether we were controlled by
our stomach, our heart, or our mind…
We are ever
traveling toward the future, where all truth is born. Should we waste time in
disputing the possibility of truth we think we have not, or be open to the
possibilities that the world shall know tomorrow, as yesterday gave us for
today?
We have a duty we
owe to humanity-to those who have knocked upon doors of empty churches,
temples, and schools, but not prisons. We must help men and women who can do
work, not as missionaries; nor under the flags of politics, cults, or isms, but
just pure, cleanhearted leaders who are handicapped, discouraged, held
back--being used as steppingstones to respectability by the profane.
Why waste time,
paper, and ink analyzing flavors, the taste of fruit? Let us eat what Nature
has given for thousands of years; and turn it into good health, joy, long life,
and normal appreciative thoughts, so that the real knowledge of life may be
born normally for today and tomorrow, and not for thousands of years hence.
We cannot afford to
spend much time considering the opinions or methods of yesterday; nor stop to
harvest their fruits today, when we must plant for a new generation, knowing
that all those who do not now understand will gradually do so as time passes,
for “Time proveth all things.”
The individual
awakening and cultivation of intuition is the foremost concern of all leaders
and teachers who may be pioneering in the prevenience of a new era; until all
education is “Prevenient education” our problems as a nation shall not be
solved.
Written history
contains no records of a nation in the position in which the United States of
American now stands, with the possibilities in its hands for the manifestation
of a spirit of prevenience that would enable it to become the dominating
culture of a new epoch by demonstrating a new level of revolutionary “warfare”:
without muscle and bloodshed, as an example to set before the other nations of
the world.
Who shall plant the
seeds of the new viewpoint in the ground thus made ready; who but those
thinkers and leaders who prove by their stability, adaptability, reliability,
and endurance that they have been chosen by their own fertility to survive as
the foundations for new structures and the roots of a new generation?
As Americans should
we not fight for what America represents, as the melting pot of the world, with
many laws inherited, yet obeying but one law, that of our pioneering
forefathers for freedom of thought, speech, and religion founded on logic,
reason, and reality, as well as (and above all) one Supreme Being of power that
may be clothed in any raiment desired, but internally one and the same hub of
that Wheel of Truth, where the spokes are teachers and exemplifiers; the rim,
those whose personal responsibility is to protect those who teach; the steel
hoop, the beasts of burden; and the movements, of the combined machinery of the
world?
Things have only
been partly done. The mansion is still in process. We are all but workers at
the scaffolding (parties and divisions) of American as well as Christianity.
When a mansion is done, what happens to the scaffolding? It is torn down,
revealing the completed examples as models for a Universal Christianity and a
United Nations of the World.
The two are
inseparables, the north and south poles of each other, the spirit and the body,
the ideals and the nation, the way of life and the government to make it
possible.
Can we expect to
crystallize Utopia and usher in the long-heralded Millennium? That’s not the
question. It is the dream and the vision that point down the highway. Though we
fall by the wayside and never reach it, we must believe in it. Otherwise we
travel in a vicious circle. It is only the hope that leads us on.
The problems of the
ages still face us, but today we are better equipped than ever before to
understand them, if we will only discard the limiting thought habits of
ancestral education, and adopt the mental tools and implements offered us
today, with which to understand and shape tomorrow.
What excuse have we
to neglect a progress that we may further in our own way? Who should be to
blame in the misunderstanding of a bugle call-the wounded lips that fail to
shape the notes, the bugle, or the man who is supposed to know the signal and
fails to execute it?
Someone must hit
the gong so the blind may hear the hour. Another must turn the hands for the
deaf, so they may see. Why the slate and chalk, memory’s purpose and traces of
the blueprint? Surely there must be many laborers to one architect or overseer.
Why should we deny our destiny? If there be an effect, surely there has been a
cause. If we hear an echo there must have been a voice to send it. If you or I
have an ideal to express, whence came its cause? Others may try to play music
and fail. Why? Is it for the want of a piano, a melody, or trained fingers?
If you have dreams
and visions only, without framing them exposed to eyes that seek them, you
speak a language that you alone understand. It is useless to those called to
cooperate with you-workmen of the temple idle, waiting for your designs while
you sleep, and they vanish. Whom do you think shall spin, weave, work in the
quarries, or gather timber to materialize dreams given you, if you fail to sing
your melody?
Why cannot more men utilize the gifts they
really possess, but which they do not seem to realize are in their possession?
Why carry the newly felled trees to be made into lumber, when beasts of burden
would gladly carry them for a cast-off meal? Why all the spiritual confusion
throughout the world, when there is no discord where truth exists?
How many fine minds
are there hidden in obscurity at the front line of commercialism, shackled to
an organization because of wages and an inferiority complex; while if but
allowed to dream, away from the grinding note of gears, a new musician, poet,
or scientist may be born. Give men a change to spread their shallow or clay
roots. The top can always be pruned from faults. But let their roots alone, to
allow character to prove their value before we forget why we live, and how.
Why do not men of
learning come together to exchange views, as pugilists do blows; wrestlers,
holds; athletes, feats of endurance, so that monuments of knowledge may be like
large, fine trees as landmarks to the wayfaring man who is traveling through
unknown lands, the labyrinth of the world’s paths, to his home and loved one,
whether mortal or immortal, and do those things of the sake of truth instead of
wealth and glory? Truth itself if glorified, and so are they who dispense it.
The progress of the
world’s education, research, and understanding would be so much more enhanced
if we allowed thinking men to do their thinking without a handicap. Let them be
able to think and do their best while the man with muscle removes stumbling
blocks so the dreamer may dream visions governed by thinkers for the doers to
give it life.
If each man or
personality in the entire world represented an individual key to his greatest
treasure vault, we would not need to fear a burglar picking our lock, for no
two keys would be alike. Still, all are expected to eat from the same plate the
same amount, dress alike, be punished alike, be rewarded alike, and die alike.
Why not examine the tumblers of these human locks and see who should be trusted
most, and with what responsibility, so that we will find geniuses to teach us
short methods, instead of waiting for them every century or so?
The trouble with
most of us is that we shape things to suit ourselves, according to past
acquirements; whereas we should permit truth to come to us, crystallizing in
its own shape; we should then try to figure out what the shape its.
The seed of truth must
preserve itself for future generations in a vocabulary untainted by those words
that have attracted to themselves all the odium of a confusion of fraudulence,
fakery, trickery, and overgrown superstition.
The world is
waiting for someone to come to teach them; all looking in different directions
for another coming, save those who believe that He has already come. Does one
appear upon a crest of notoriety? Then it is not He. Does he found a cult or a
“system”? The Maser himself comes not in these ways-but as a breeze across a
prairie where labor all notions, all races, sects, and creeds…each fanned by
the breeze, and differently; each giving expression to his reception and
appreciation of the One Gentle Breeze through this world: each clothing a Christ in virtues thus
conceived. One is wet, and the breeze dries him. One is covered with dust, and
it blows away this dust, fanning the hair from his eyes. One draws a bow at his
enemy, and the breeze prevents, carrying it back to the sender. One aims with
the breeze a dart just to warn, and fall short of its mark, but the breeze
carries it on to the heart of him who deserved the death-blow that it was…
At best we are but
cogs in the Wheel of Time, and call it “history”-which is but the echo for
philosophers: the flames, and the smoke
rolling away; cause and effect, blinded by the blindness of man to know neither
the beginning nor the end, nor what is one; thinking mortal what is immortal;
feeling the heat; seeing the smoke; combining nothing as one cause-thinking
only in jets, as the beating and breathing of heart and lungs. Is it not true?
The only cause a
man has for not realizing his power as a man, is that he never has tried to
select the mental food his brain should digest to prove how in all simplicity
his ideals lie at his feet if he will but select the mental food to accomplish
all his desires that but cast their shadow before him. Let him but cast their
shadow before him. Let him but awaken his gift of logic and reason to realize
that to think a thing is to shape action, energy, and influence to that
creation thought. For we only want those things made manifest by what we have
allowed our brain to consume.
Thus we arrive at
the purpose of these prefatory and fragmentary paragraphs, which is to provide
a few samples of the food for thought that has sustained me in the continuation
of that quest of which the beginning is subjected to both chronicle and
commentary in Gates of the Mind.
JOSEPH SADONY
Valley of the Pines
January, 1948
WE are not so
alone today [1948] as we were
forty-five years ago. Turn on your radio and
see.
And what will you say within forty-five years
more? May you not then hear the whispering
thoughts of loved ones gone before you within
their past silence, as it was half a century
before
--only waiting for us to find the spiritual
dial,
as we found the material one, within the mind
and hand of man who did seek, and who found
it-but shadow of the real yet to come?
JOSEPH SADONY
CHAPTER 1
My mother was showing me a
picture. She said, “That is where I was
born, Joseph.” For a minute I looked at
it, and it didn’t seem right. I said,
“But, Mother, shouldn’t there be a river over here?” I pointed to the right.
“And shouldn’t there be a barn besides just a house?”
“What makes you say that, Joey? The
artist made this just like it was. No, We were away from the river. We had no
barn. What makes you say that?”
“Well, anyway,” I said, “I remember the
river, and a barn and a bridge.”
Mother said, “Joseph, you mustn’t talk
like that. You never went as far as the
river. You couldn’t possibly remember
it. Besides, that’s where your father was born. It was his father who had a—“
Suddenly my mother stopped and looked at me biting her lower lip. For a moment she seemed not to see me, though
looking right at me.
I said, “Mother! What’s the matter? ”She said, “Joseph, you
couldn’t possibly remember that, because you were never there, but that’s where
your father was born, by the river, near a bridge. And your grandfather had a
barn, because he had horses. That was on the
It was spring, and we were watching a
robin build a nest outside the window.
I said, “Do you think that’s the same
one that built there last year, the nest that fell down when the wind blew this
winter?”
Herman said, “I think it’s maybe one
of the young ones that was born in the old nest.“
I said, “But how would it know? If it
was born in the old nest, how would it know how to build a new one? Can a
mother robin teach it?”
“But how?” I insisted.
“Well, they call it instinct, Joey,
but what that is I can’t tell you. I guess it’s born in them because the mother
and father knew; back and back so far that nobody knows anything about it.”
“Herman, do you think we know things
because Mother and Father knew them, even if they don’t tell us?”
“Well, I think maybe we feel things
and do things like they did, Joey. I’ve
heard Father say you are sometimes just like Grandpa Jean Marie Felix
Reipert. He was a bookbinder, like
Uncle, and an artist too, always working with his hands, making things like you
do.”
I said, “Herman, sometimes I feel as
if I could almost remember things before I was born. But just when I think I do, I forget it
again. Do you ever feel that way?”
Herman said, “Well, I know what you
mean. It’s like a dream. When you wake
up you can’t remember it, but you know you were dreaming.
I said, “Yes, only it’s
not when I’m asleep, Herman. It’s when I’m awake, and when I’ve been thinking
and then stop thinking for a minute. When I start thinking again, it’s gone.”
Herman looked at me a minute and said, “You’ve always been funny that
way, Joey. When you say things without thinking you are usually right, and
everyone wonders how you know. But when you think about thins you act as if you
didn’t know anything at all. I suppose you know that sometimes worries Mother,
because she’s afraid Father won’t understand it. He doesn’t like that sort of
thing one little bit.”
“But what can I do about it, Herman?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say too much without thinking when Father is around.
It’s better when he thinks you’re dumb than when he worries, wondering what’s
got into you. Some day I’ll tell you why he worries about it.”
“Tell me, Herman! Please tell me!”
“Ssh! Joey, they’ll hear us. I’ll
tell you sometime when nobody’s home but you and me.”
It was pitch dark and I woke from a nightmare in a cold sweat. I must
have cried out in my sleep because Mother had her hand over my mouth,
whispering, “Be quiet, Joseph! Don’t wake your father. What were you dreaming?”
I said, “I dreamed that Herman was hanging on the wall with his arms
out, like on a cross. He was nailed there.”
My mother gasped and said, “Joey! Promise me you won’t tell anyone that!
Don’t tell your father, and don’t tell Herman or your sisters.”
I promised, and then asked, “Why?”
“Because,” she said, “your father doesn’t like such things, and we
mustn’t think of the or tell about them. But you frighten me.”
“I’m sorry, Mother.”
“I’m not blaming you, Joseph. You can’t help how strange it is. I
dreamed a dream like that about Herman the night you were born, and I didn’t
dare say anything about it. Because eight months before you were born I started
dreaming strange dreams, and they all came true. That never happened to me
before, and it has never happened since you were born. But during that time all
my dreams came true except that last one about Herman. You’re the first I’ve
told, because now you dream it too! Let us say a prayer, Joey, and not tell
anyone.”
So Mother left me, but I didn’t sleep. Something troubled me, but I did
not know what it was. It was something more than my dream about Herman;
something that made me feel all alone in the world, even with a large family.
I lay in the dark; then suddenly something happened to me that I did not
comprehend until years later, in memory. The vague distress of an internal
conflict I could not understand suddenly vanished. In that moment I gained a
new sense of identity. Yet I felt like a stranger in the bosom of my own
family. Suddenly I didn’t know who I was, and lay there in the dark asking
myself, “Who am I? Where am I? How did I get here?”
But there was no uneasiness in the sensation; rather a sense of impending
excitement, as if I had entered a new world and could hardly wait to explore
it. Somewhere in this new world a treasure was hidden, and I would find it. For
some reason my heart was glowing as if I had fallen in love with something I
couldn’t see. All my inner senses were affected by this, so that strong, tender
arms picked me up, but I could see no face because I was suddenly tired, and
suddenly safe. When I woke it was morning.
The world was the same, after all; but something inside of me was
different. I felt happy about something and didn’t know why, I saw more than I
usually did. I stopped to look at things that I usually passed by; and when I
looked at the same old things I had seen every day, I now saw something I
hadn’t before, and identified them in my mind. I heard sounds and knew what
they meant without turning my head to look. I felt the urge to go out
exploring, but suddenly felt the need of sharing all this new world with
someone who would understand it. I though of Herman, but he was crippled and
couldn’t go with me.
So I stayed home with Herman, I couldn’t tell him about my dream, so I
asked him, “Herman, can’t you tell me now why Father worries about what gets
into me? Mother is
Page 3
outside now. No one will hear us. The girls have gone too. What is
Father worried about? What does he think is going to happen to me?”
“Well, he thinks something gets into you, Joey. And he doesn’t know
whether it’s a devil or an angel. Sometimes he’s sure it’s a devil, and that
it’ll lead you to no good end. Remember
how one time you would run off with his gun and go shooting by the castle on
the
“Do I have to be the same all the time, Herman?”
“Not for my part, Joey. That’s what I like about you. One never knows
what you are going to say or do next.”
“Doesn’t Father like that?”
“Well, it isn’t just that. It’s when you say things about the future, or
when you seem so positive about something you couldn’t possibly know. And when
things happen to you that are mysterious.”
“But nothing mysterious happens to
me, Herman.”
“Do you remember the time you had Uncle take you coasting on Montabaur
hill? You didn’t have a sled, so you took a ladder instead. The hill was all
ice, and at the bottom was the crossroad. Uncle said a team of horses was
coming, but it was too late for him to stop you, and you could not stop
yourself. He said there was nothing on earth could keep you from being killed
or badly hurt.”
“But I wasn’t hurt a bit, Herman.”
“That’s just the thing, Joey. Ladder and all, you shot right through
between the legs of the horses, entirely unhurt. How did you do it? You didn’t
know. No one knew. That was a mystery. And then when they asked you if you
weren’t frightened when you saw the team ahead of you, you said no, you weren’t, because the minute
you saw them you thought about something
else and forgot all about them.”
“Well, I did, Herman, I closed my eyes, and saw the picture in the
church.”
“Yes, I know, Joey. But you said you knew you weren’t going to be hurt.”
“I did know it. I wasn’t hurt.”
“Well, all right. I believe you. But I’m showing you what worries
Father. When they asked you how you knew you weren’t going to be hurt bad or
killed, you said it was because you were going to marry a girl named Mary, with
black eyes and dark hair when you were twenty-seven years old, so that’s how
you knew you weren’t going to be killed before then.”
“That’s how I did know, Herman.”
“Well, that’s what Father doesn’t like. It’s either nonsense, or you
know. And if you know, how do you know? He doesn’t like it either way, Joey.”
So that night I lay there again in the dark feeling like a stranger, I
tried to remember how it all came about that I was there, and why I felt like I
sometimes did. It was the “feeling” that made me say things and think things
like Herman said Father didn’t like, and Mother seemed to understand but hushed
me up so he wouldn’t hear me.
I was six years old we were still in Montabaur, when there began to be
talk in the family about going to
We all had on light, flexible suits of armor, like fish scales made of
metal. There was a bright red cross on each breast, a sword in one hand and a
Bible in the other.
It was fifty years before I found out, inadvertently, that the village
of Montabaur and the hill I climbed that day were originally called Humbach;
and that centuries before met the Crusaders had climbed that hill and looked
down over the beautiful country, calling it “The Holy Land.” The hill reminded
them of that Mount that Christ had ascended to pray, with Peter, James and
John, where He was transfigured before them. So they christened it
I did not know this as I
trudged along that day, surrounded by the creation of my own imagination, a
company of Christian warriors with swords and Bibles.
When I reached the top I still could not
see
So far as I know now I
had no knowledge of the Crusaders, or in any case of
their relation to the hill at Montabaur. Of course it is possible there was a
foundation for the “image play” with my remembering it. The fact is here
unimportant as the purpose of these early recollections is more to provide the
background and to portray the general nature of early thought elements as based
on experience.
At present his is merely
illustrative of a later problem: What
distinguishes a “true” imagination from a “false” one as an element of
imaginative experience when it is regarded as an established fact that we can think only with what we have acquired to
think with? In other words, all imaginative experience is made up of
combinations and recombinations of elements of sensory experience with a
physiological foundation. Nevertheless it has been established by experiment
that the separate parts or memory elements may be put together correctly or
incorrectly to form a true or false internal representation of external events
or conditions. What distinguishes between the
true” and the “false” when immediate verification by observation or experiment
is impossible?
The answer, later to be
set forth more fully, is that the distinguishing characteristic of a “true”
imagination is a “feeling” that must be felt in order to understand its nature.
I did not at first
comprehend this, but now in looking back at many thousands of imaginative
experiences of childhood and youth, I see that when the exercise of the
imagination is either unaccompanied by any feeling whatsoever, or when the
imagination produces a feeling as a result of its exercise (e.g. imagining
Indians is followed by a feeling of excitement and anticipation), the
imagination is not to be trusted unless a train of thought is followed back to
determine its origin, and unless the logic and reason are sufficiently matured
and trained to adjust and retouch the picture in accordance with experience, or
reason based on observation and experiment.
On the other hand, if a
certain type of “feeling” (which is a dominant experience throughout this
record) precedes the exercise of the imagination, and in fact produces the
imagination by selective stimulation and blending of memory elements to
express, to clothe, to embody, or to interpret the “feeling,” we have then a type
of spiritual inspiration and mental phenomena that merits further
investigation, to which an introduction will be found in these pages.
My first experiences of
a distinction in feeling associated with imagination were largely unrealized at
the time, but preserved in memory. In climbing
I did not then realize
that these details characterized the Crusaders, who gave the hill historic
background and a name. All the elements were familiar to me, but not the
history. My memory contained swords, Bibles, Crosses, metal armor, and the idea
of men who would use these things. Emphatically, I did not see the “spirits” of
Crusaders walking up the hill with me. What I “saw” was entirely the product of
my own imagination in which was composited various elements of memory acquired
by previous sensory experience.
But these memory
elements were selectively stimulated, assembled, and imbued with life by a
“feeling” at a particular time, under a particular condition, at a particular
place, which invested them with a meaning I did not myself comprehend until
fifty years later. Whence and what the
“feeling”? Why the particular
mental imagery evoked by the feeling? Not in these few childhood cases alone,
but in thousands upon thousands of cases extending through a lifetime: my own
and the lives of many others whose experiences I have investigated.
That was the quest in which, symbolically at least, I set forth with a
sword in one hand and a Bible in the other, to find the answer. I sought the
truth, and as time went on I found that my imagination provided the truth in
one instance and deceived me in another. It deceived me when I used my own
reason and memory to speculate on things I didn’t know enough about. It
deceived me when I concentrated or “tried.” It never deceived me when I didn’t
try, and didn’t care, and had a “feeling” first that started my imagination
going to piece together in a flash what was aroused from my memory by the
feeling. What was the feeling?
I stress this because as time went on people who knew more about such
things than I would say, “ The boy is psychic, “ or “He is clairvoyant.” “It
must be telepathy or psychometry,” and so on.
And I knew they were all wrong. I possess no
special, mystic, or occult sense that other men do not possess. My mental
operations are limited entirely to what I have acquired and recorded by sensory
experience. My imagination has only my own memory to draw on. I visualize something spontaneously past,
present or future, near or far; it proves correct, with witnesses to verify
it. My records contain thousand of such
witnessed cases in which I was correct 98% of the time. What did I “see”? Nothing but a composite of my own memory
elements of past experience.
Truly and literally it was “nothing but my imagination.” Still it
corresponded with the truth. Why? Was
it a good guess? Was it “coincidence”? Was it “chance”? These were questions to
be answered by experimental research. At first I did not know. But time ruled
out chance beyond all dispute. And I did soon find out that man’s most
important thinking does not take place in the brain alone, but with the entire
body and nervous system.
Truth is not to be found in man’s memory of words or his reflective
visual or oral thinking. Words and memories of sights and sounds may be woven
together into endless combinations. What
gives them meaning? What
determines the exact word or memory elements that will be combined in any given
concept or idea or train of thought? What assurances have we that our ideas
have any correspondence with reality at all?
Our only assurance from a scientific point of view is one based on
experience, observation and experiment. How then is it possible to know things
in the future, at a distance in the present and in the past, without
opportunity for experience, observation, or experiment? I can only say that I
have established this fact for myself, that I am writing this commentary on my
early experience to introduce you to what I did and how I did it, so you too
may establish the facts for yourself, without taking anyone’s word for it; mine
or that of anyone else.
It requires not the use of some mysterious faculty you do not possess,
but rather the suspension of the use of your “intellect”(verbal memory, reason,
etc.) until after your feeling of intuition has clothed itself imaginatively.
Then harness it by “logic and reason,” by all means, if you can. But you must first
learn how to stop thinking at will. You must learn how to “deconcentrate”
instead of concentrating. You must make no strenuous “effort.” You can’t
“force” it. You can’t “play” with it. You can’t “practice” it. Spontaneity is
its most essential characteristic. It cannot manifest in the realm of habit or
“conditioned reflexes,” as in the case of instinct.
In the language of the New Testament, you must not try to move the
spirit; you must let the spirit move you. This means that you must let the truth
shape you, for the simple reason that you cannot shape the truth. Your relation
to truth is direct, and not by reflective or verbal representation. You will
find the truth neither in words nor in memories, but only in direct nervous
coordination of the whole of your immediate sensory experience, internal as
well as external.
Just as the law of crystallization and chemical combination in the
mineral kingdom and the inorganic world, so also the law of selective absorption
in the organic world and vegetable kingdom, preserving the species,
materializing the truth and meaning of the seed. And so also the selective
excitation and conditioning of reflexes in the formation and operation of
instinct in the animal kingdom. And there is evidence that a similar law is at
work in a more complicated system of self-conditioning reflexes as manifest in
the
Vastly superior nervous organization of man: a mechanism of
adaptation not only to so-called seen or visible environments, but also to
“unseen” environments such as those manifest in radiant energy and the
specifications of future growth as manifest in seeds.
All I knew as a child
was that I had some sort of relation with what I could neither see, hear,
smell, taste nor touch; and that relation was a “feeling.”
But I found that
“thinking” and “imagining” first created a false feeling that lied to me. It
was only when the feeling came first, without thinking, that the feeling was
right. And my thoughts and imaginations were right only if they were induced by
the feeling and not by association of thought resulting from what I saw or
heard. Sometimes there was nothing in my experience to fit the feelings that
came to me. Often I could not understand them at all in terms of word or ideas
familiar to me. Still I “knew”; but I couldn’t explain it.
I feel it necessary for
the sake of the intellect of those who have had no such experiences to explain
thus at length the view from which my own are regarded. None was regarded as
occult or mystic in nature; none involved mysterious unknown senses, nor were
they “extra-sensory” or “super-sensory.” Man’s relation with his environments,
the universe, the rest of mankind, Deity, or forms of energy or life beyond his
present understanding is regarded as a physiological, neurological, sensory
relation. No responsive or imaginative activity is regarded as possible without
a nervous organization with a physiological foundation. And I have established
to my own satisfaction by experiment that if I apparently “see” a vision or
dream, a dream that proves to be prophetic, there is no so-called faculty of
prevision, or second sight. The “third eye” employed in such experiences is
nothing more nor less than the “imagination” that every man, woman, and child
exercises to a greater or lesser degree. This “mind’s eye” of imagination has
never, does not, cannot, and never will “see” anything outside of one’s own
physiological organization. Its sensations are entirely “memory sensations.” It
is strictly limited to the momentary and fragmentary revival of past
experiences as recorded in memory. Its one and essential power, which
distinguishes the complicated nervous organization of man from the more simple
one of the animal, is the power of recombination by means of which the
imagination can make new creations out of the memory elements of old
experiences.
Thus we symbolize; we
indulge in fantasy; we speculate and theorize; we create works of art; we
invent; and thus we produce a culture and a civilization. But as we thus change
environments, we change our “destiny,” and we change the character of
adaptation that operates in the law of the survival of the fit. It becomes
necessary to adapt oneself to subtler and more complicated environments. It
becomes necessary to develop foresight, a knowledge of consequences; to plan,
to prepare, to prevent. We find that only those who do this survive.
So now we have a law of
the survival of the intuitively fit. But intuition
needs to be redefined, or we shall have to find a new word for it.
Possibly there was a
time when brute strength survived, but it soon became evident that a less
strong and more sensitive nervous organism better adapted itself to
environments in the survival of the instinctively fit.
With the appearance of
man there was anew element; intelligence. Neither brute strength nor instinct
could cope with it. The intellect that could make a trap, dig a pitfall for
mastodons, and invent a gun soon became king of the earth.
And then what, as men
fight each other as well as the elements of nature, to say nothing of man’s own
creations, which break his bones and blast him from the face of the earth? Do
the strong battle and kill themselves off so that the meek shall inherit the
earth?
Man now finds others
than himself to battle. He builds cities, and the earth trembles, opens great
jaws and swallows them up. Volcanoes belch forth and bury them. Winds blow and lay
them low. The rain falls and great floods sweep all before them. Lightning
strikes and burns his structures to the ground. He builds ships and they sink
at sea. He makes fast-moving engines and dashes to destruction. He digs in the
bowels of the earth for its riches and is buried alive. The sun dries up his
crops and he perishes in famine.
Pestilence breaks out and leaves a city of dead to be buried
unknown by the sands of ten
It is the last cycle;
the final “survival.” And is it the strong who survive? Is it the cunning? Is it the meek? Is it the tyrant? Is it the
selfish and arrogant? It is not. It is
they who feel the “feeling” and act on it. It is they who had a “hunch” not to
buy tickets on the ship that was going to sink. It is they who did not build a
city where Vesuvius would belch forth its lava and flames. It is they who do
not buy or build a house below the future flood-crest of a river. It is they
who packed their belongings and left the day before an earthquake shattered
their home. It is they who do these things without even thinking why.
What is the “feeling”? If we waited to use it until we knew
what it was, we would be like the farmer who still uses kerosene lamps because
he doesn’t intend to use electricity until he knows what it is. The wren does
not know why it flies south; but it flies,
and thus escapes cold and starvation. An animal obeys a “feeling” directly,
without translating it into words or thoughts of visual (imaginative)
representation. Man has so far lost his neural relation with reality (by having
substituted a world of words and symbolic representations) that he regards as
abnormal those who retain it or regain it. He invests it with an air of
mystery, and represents it by misleading words of special vocabularies, mystic,
occult, theosophical, theological, psychological, and psychic.
The mystery is no longer
in the physiological and nervous organization of man—not any more than in the
construction of the Geiger counter. The mystery is in the so-called cosmic rays
that act on the Geiger counter. What are they, and where are they from? The
mystery is in the source of energy or life that acts on the nervous
organization of man to produce the “feeling.” What is it, and where is it from?
There need be no other mystery. The organism upon which it acts is now fairly
well known. New ductless glands will be discovered. Many functions and
operations will be better understood. But in all its essentials the
physiological foundation and nervous organization is well enough understood, in
the light of developments in the field of electronics and radiant energy, to
know that man is capable of experiencing “feelings” (independent of seeing,
hearing, smelling, tasting, touching) that emanate from sources known or
unknown. Heat is but an obvious example, as well as electrical conditions of
the atmosphere.
Beyond this coordinated
sensitivity of the entire nervous system no further or special sense is
required. It is superfluous and absurd to postulate mysterious powers of
vision, clairaudience, “psychic abilities,” and so on, when the normal powers
and modus operandi of
imagination and memory not only suffice in explanation, but may be investigated
experimentally to establish the fact that one’s so-called psychic faculties are
entirely limited constituently to the contents of the individual memory, just
as the constituents of words are limited to the alphabet employed, and my
verbal representation is limited to my vocabulary (i.e., my verbal memory_,
unless I pause to look up or coin a word for an idea that has not yet been
incorporated in my verbal organization.
And yet I have had words
come to mind and pass over my tongue in experimental conditions, words entirely
unfamiliar to me, words in foreign languages, or technical terms that could be
found in a dictionary, and some that could not, containing information that I
did not myself knew, and that was verified as correct. I used familiar
syllable, however. I used the familiar alphabet. And even where I inscribed
hieroglyphics entirely unfamiliar to me, it was a composition of familiar
smaller elements of lines and curves, shapes and angles. The fact still
described in terms so vastly misleading and misunderstood as remains that my
vision of these things cannot correctly be “psychic,” telepathic, and so
on. It was nothing whatever but
imagination compositing familiar elements of previous sensory experience
recorded in memory.
I see and correctly
describe a scene ten thousand miles away. (I have done this under
experimental conditions as recorded in my files.) I see and
describe a future event, which occurs exactly as I described it, with only
minor variations. What is lacking or faulty in my description is lacking in my
memory. For what so I see? Nothing but my own imagination.
Actually I do not see ten thousand miles away with any form of
“vision” whatever. I do not
“see” the future. My reception or perception of these things is
entirely formless, entirely a “feeling,” entirely devoid of image, word,
thought or concept. What makes it intelligible to myself or someone else is the
activity of my imagination, which endeavors to symbolize, portray or interpret
the “feeling.”
And what is the
“feeling”? That is the one great mystery. That is the quest. That is the source
of all inspiration, the fountainhead of all spiritual gifts, the heart and life
of all religion. This is the foundation that science has provided for spiritual
understanding: a physiological foundation for a nervous organization that
responds to an unknown source or sources of energy in the form of “feelings.”
These feelings are neurological and physiological; not the activity of a
special or occult “sense,” but the coordinated activity of the entire nervous
organization. The reaction is one of selective stimulation of previously
experienced and conditioned reflex arcs of memory. The imagination interprets
the “feeling” in terms of memories associated with similar feelings. Thus a
complex feeling is broken down into its elements by symbolic representation in an
imaginative composite of memory elements. Thereby we “understand” it.
With this explanation we
may hope to contribute to a better understanding of mental phenomena stripped
of the deceiving terminology of generations of “psychic racketeering.” Man’s
“all-seeing eye” is his imagination, and his imagination sees not beyond his
own nerve ends. It sees only the “past” that has been recorded in memory.
Still, by this means he may portray what has not yet been recorded (i.e., the
future); he may “see” around the world; and he may explore the past before his
birth in the history of the human race. And why? Because his quivering nerves are open to the universe and
susceptible to innumerable feelings. The feelings stimulate and thus clothe
themselves in reawakened memory sensations.
Thus we do not see the
past, present or future beyond the range of our senses, but we “imagine” it.
And if our “feeling” is genuine, or imagination is “true.”
Can there be a “false feeling”?
Yes, when it is merely the echo of a past feeling aroused by suggestion,
association of thought, and memory of words: i.e., intellectual activity in
general. The “feeling from outside” can bring you information of a phenomenal
nature only when you are able to suspend all internal activity of thought. The
“feeling” must have an empty slate to write on. It must be allowed to select
your memories, to shape them in your imagination, to choose its own words. The
result will be instantaneous; and until you understand the language of feeling,
you may not be able to distinguish such formations from your own thoughts. Or,
on the other hand, the experience may be so pronounced that you will think you
see a “vision,” a “spirit” or a “ghost.”
You may feel indignant
if others call it a hallucination or “imagination,” but that is exactly what it
is, nothing more. Still, it may be a genuine experience and the “vision” may be
true in every detail within the capacity of your memory to provide the
necessary elements.
To help you understand how
this can be, and to help you to distinguish between false and true, the wrong
and right use of the imagination, the false echo from the genuine feeling, I
have taken these pains both to record and to comment on my own personal
adventures and research along these lines.
Not everything is easy
to explain, but we must avoid attaching the “mystery” to the wrong place.
Within all seeds is the “design” of what they will become by growth and
development. The creative power exists
in the unrecorded. What has been recorded is already “dead.” Thus the creative
and progressive power in man necessarily manifests as a prophetic power, active
in determining what he shall be, and not what he has been.
What has been inherited
or already determined as a conditioned reflex is of the past. But what selects
or chooses, as in the power of selective absorption of a seed, or the power of
selective stimulation in physiological man, is of the “future” in function of
“time,” which exists solely as a biological phenomenon of succession in growth.
Thus there are
innumerable sources of prophetic “feeling” in man that need not be the occasion
of any “mystery.” In our very careless and inadequate verbal organization we
speak of wishes, wants, desires,
appetites, hunger; of ambition, aspiration, ideals; hope,
Anticipation, expectations, faith, and so on. These
terms are neither clearly understood, defined nor differentiated; and means
have not been provided to distinguish between those sources of prophetic
feeling that are inherent to the structure of our physiological organization,
as in the case of animals whose cycle of progressive activity repeats itself
each generation, and those sources of prophetic feeling that are not inherent
to the individual physiological structure but which manifest in human progress,
which repeats itself in cycles extending through several generations.
To the latter we must
attach the “mystery.” Self-preservation is not a remarkable phenomenon, but
race-preservation is. The man who will fight to preserve himself or his family
is not a particularly interesting object of study, but the man who will live
his life and give his life for the sake of mankind and human progress is
manifesting the mystery that is the religion of mankind. What is the source of his “feelings”?
But to return to my own
experiences, I have found that whereas “memory is not inherited (i.e., it is
not possible to “remember” before we were born in terms of our ability to recall
our own sensory experience since birth), we do nevertheless inherit enough of
our parents, and through them of past ancestors, to manifest a “feeling” that
is capable of arousing parallel memories in our own experience. And thus our
imagination may approximate some condition or memory of a parent or ancestor
before our birth.
I make this statement on
the basis of considerable evidence. Often, however, there is a composite of
elements derived from both father and mother, so that the feeling is complex
and the resulting imagination a mixture.
Just what caused my
mother to dream prophetic dreams while bearing me, and not any of the other
children, is something that I do not even attempt to explain. What caused me to
dream at the age of seven, going on eight, on a night when I was “reborn” by a
distinct psychological change, a dream similar to one my mother dreamed the
night I was born one month too soon—that again is something I cannot explain at
this stage of the record. And why we both should have dreamed that Herman was
hanging on the wall, nailed there as if he had been crucified, might possibly
be considered a coincidence, in view of the fact that the symbolism is not
unusual in a Catholic family; and if we consider crucifixion to be a symbol of
suffering, it could certainly apply to poor Herman, a cripple from birth.
Nevertheless I can swear
that under the circumstances neither Mother nor I breathed a word to Herman
about that dream; nor did we tell anyone else, on account of Father’s attitude
toward such thins.
We could not regard the
dream as prophetic in a literal sense, since it would be absurd to think that
Herman would ever really be found hanging on the wall. At most we could regard
it as symbolic, and at worst as symbolic of death. But the dream of a series
that had not come true, and it had upset her so much at the time that I was
precipitated into the world in a premature birth.
Therefore our feelings
can be imagined when Herman called Mother one day, after a spell of suffering,
and said, “Mother, hang me on the wall
here!”
Shocked, and thinking he
was perhaps delirious, she asked, “And why should I do that?”
He answered, “Because I
want to die like Christ died.”
Mother said, “But you are
not going to die, Herman! Don’t talk that way.”
He answered, “Yes, I am,
Mother.”
She put her arm about
him, and they prayed together.
Then Herman cried
himself to sleep.
He never woke up
again.
Chapter II
So Herman died just when
I felt that I needed him most. Now I was the only boy; I had no brother; and I
was indeed alone in the world. For my father was working all day at the large
paper mill; my mother was kept busy; the girls had their own interests. I was
sent to a Catholic school, but outside of school had to shift for myself.
And now I made some
discoveries; first, that Herman was not “dead.”
How did I know? I could
not see him, nor could I hear his voice. But I very definitely “felt” his
presence. And then, of course, I could imagine him by remembering him and in my
imagination I could carry on a conversation with him.
Was this really Herman
or only my imagination? Well, in the first place, what is the difference between
the first sense impression, and the recalling of that sense impression as a
memory?
When the reflection of
light from Herman that affected my optic nerves affected instead the silver
emulsion of a photographic film, we look at the result and say, “That’s Herman.”
I recall the image of Herman in my memory and say to myself, “It’s
Herman.”
Certainly I know that it
is only my memory, and only in my imagination. But then I think, “Well, anyway,
Herman is still alive in my mind.”
It was that way when
Herman was still alive; when I was off somewhere and he was home. I could
remember him then too. But now this was different, because there was a
“feeling.” And somehow Herman, or the thought of Herman, seemed to be able to
put a life into my memory and make me imagine things I never imagined before,
all through that feeling.
The first time I felt it
was a few days after Herman was buried. The feeling came first, and then I
thought of Herman.
I imagined him saying,
“Well, Joey, I’m still here in your memory, anyway.”
I thought, “Now you
won’t have to stay home all the time, Herman. You can play with me”
And then in my
imagination, my memory of Herman said, “Then
don’t remember me this way, Joey! I’m not crippled any more.”
It was then that I
realized I was remembering Herman just as he had been when I saw him last. So I
changed everything except his face and his eyes and my memory of his voice.
Limb by limb I took my memory of Herman and made it over in my imagination,
until it could run around as I did.
And then I was so
thrilled by the difference that tears came to my eyes. The feeling became so
strong that it burst out of my mouth, and I said, “Thanks!”
Then something struck me
funny, and I said, “Herman, was that me thanking you, or you thanking me?”
Suddenly a joyous
feeling filled me, and I laughed with it.
I ran out to play and
imagined Herman running out with me. I began to show him all the things he
hadn’t been able to see or do when he was crippled.
It did not occur to me
to regard it as anything other than pure imagination on my part. I did not
think Herman’s “spirit” was running around with me. I had always carried on
conversations in my mind; and now for a while, instead of talking with myself,
I talked with a reconstructed memory of Herman in my imagination. The fact that
my imaginary and reconstructed brother occasionally said things in my
imagination that I did not knowingly put into his mouth was a fact that passed
unnoticed by me at the time. I took it for granted as something quite to be
expected.
For example, I would go
to the woods, and I would imagine Herman saying, “Well, Joey, we haven’t seen any Indians yet.”
And this would remind me that my chief anticipation on leaving
Montabaur for the
I thought, “But you were
asleep, Herman.”
And my imagination of
Herman answered, “Not when you were
scalped, Joey. That woke me up.”
Chap. II –Page 2
And then I laughed, because
I had forgotten that incident; but now I remembered that right while I was in
the thick of my imaginary Indians during the coach ride, someone in the coach
dropped something that hit me on the head. So vivid were my imaginings that for
a moment I thought I had been scalped, and woke Herman up with my war-whoop.
School made me nervous,
sitting so still. One day I began to beat a rhythm with my hands and feet. The
teacher told me to stop, and asked me what I was doing it for. I couldn’t
answer her.
She said, “Well, if you
can do a thing, you can explain why you were doing it. Now tell me!”
All I could say was, “I
don’t know.”
So she struck me over
the knuckles with a ruler, and said, “Well, don’t do it again, or this ruler
will know a better place to hit you.”
I sat there stunned and
humiliated, with tears blinding my eyes. It was not just the pain on the
knuckles. It was worse than that. I had not been long in the school, and I had
looked up with admiration at the teacher. I had wanted her to like me, and now
she had struck me.
Needing some comfort, I
imagined Herman saying, “Why didn’t
you tell her, Joey? Tell her why you were doing that. Go after school and tell
her.”
“But I don’t know why.”
“Yes you do.”
And then it came to me. On the way to
Then I imagined Herman
saying, “Do you remember how you tied
a tin can to a string and let it down over the side of the ship, Joey?”
Then I thought, “Yes, I
would draw it up full of water sometimes. But one day the water in the can was
warm. And then it was cold again. I
wonder why that was?”
The answer came, “Ask her. Ask the teacher when you explain
about beating your hands and feet.”
And so I did. She was
interested, and talked about it with someone else. Then she told me that when
the water I drew up was warm, we were crossing the
As time passed I took
more and more to wandering through the woods, studying all living things in my
own way, speaking to them and making believe that they answered me.
I thought, “Everything could speak if we could only
interpret it.”
By this even as a child,
I did not believe that animals and trees could speak the English or any other
language of spoken words, or that they had human qualities. (That would have
been anthropomorphic!) But I did believe that everything in nature had a
“meaning,” like a word in the language of Nature; and that this language that
we see through our eyes, hear through our ears, smell through our nose, touch
with our fingers, and taste with our tongues, was also the language that was in
my head when I closed my eyes and ears, and “imagined” things.
This was a language
“without words,” and this, I thought, was the one language of all the world,
the language of thought itself, in which all knowledge could be expressed. I
was forced to this language for my own understanding, moving from a country
where one language was spoken to a country where another language was spoken.
So I looked at a tree
and understood it. I heard a sound and knew what made it without looking to
see. I smelled odors in the woods, and knew what they came from. And then I
found that if I touched something with my fingers, I could tell whether anyone
else had touched it before me.
How did I know? It was a
“feeling.” And then I found that if I let that feeling make me “imagine” things
without thinking, I could describe who had touched, it, and other things
connected with it in the past. As time passed, someone told me,
“What, that’s psychometry. You
were able to psychometrize things.”
I answered, “But that’s
silly. It isn’t anything but what I feel with my fingers. And then I try to
imagine what the feeling means.”
And then they would say,
“But you described the whole scene exactly, where this object came from. You
must see it in order to do
that.”
But I didn’t see it. I
saw nothing but my own imagination; nothing but bits and fragments of my own
past memories. But what put them together correctly to express the meaning of a
“feeling”?
What puts the letters of
the alphabet together to form words? What puts words together to form sentences
of understanding?
No one could answer me.
Nor could I. All I knew was that if I stroked a thing with my fingers until I
felt that it was a part of me, like my foot, I could “feel” it, just like my
foot.
There is only one way my
foot can talk to me, and that is by a feeling. It may be pleasant or
unpleasant, hot or cold; comfortable, tired or painful. My own memory tells me
why, and what it means. I can’t see my foot; it’s in my shoe. I can’t see my
foot even if it’s bare. All I can see is the dead skin outside. That’s all I
can see of anything. All we ever see is the dead skin of things. We never see
what anything really is. We can only “feel” it.
If people were going to
insist on calling that “seeing,” very well then. I could “see” better with the
ends of my fingers and with my eyes closed. Also I could “hear” better that
way.
To prove it, and to
amuse my friends, I would hold my hand high, fingertips in the direction of a
distant railway engine five miles away that none of my friends could hear or
see. I would say, “It’s whistling, only you can’t hear it now.” Then, “It’s
coming closer, closer—now it’s going
to whistle: one, two, three—“ and whooo
came the shriek of the engine just after my third count.
“But how did you know?”
“I saw the engineer
reach up to pull the whistle.”
“But how did you see it?
We couldn’t even see the train yet.”
“With my fingers.”
“But you can’t see with
your fingers!”
“Of course not. But
that’s what you insist on calling it.”
“But you must see it in your mind,
then. It’s second sight. It’s clairvoyance.”
“Those are just words.
And what they mean to you isn’t true. I don’t see that train and that engineer
at all. I’m just imagining it. What I see in my mind is a train I remember
looking at one time from close up. The engineer in my mind is one who waved at me
one time. That may be him, but I don’t think so, and I don’t know. It’s the
engineer in my memory and not the engineer in the train that starts reaching
for the handle to pull the whistle. When he starts reaching, I start counting.
That’s all there is to it.”
“But what makes the
engineer in your imagination start reaching at the right time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t
understand it at all. You’re a strange one, and no fooling.”
I didn’t like this. I would
say, “You could do it too, but you don’t try.”
One time I said, “I’ll
show you. Let me put your coat over your head. Hold up your hand. A cloud is
going to pass over the sun. You tell me the minute it does. Then after a few
minutes tell me when the sun breaks through again.”
When this was done
successfully, I asked, “How did you know?”
“Because I could feel
the warmth of the sun on my skin. When it was cool I knew the cloud had covered
the sun. When it was warm again I knew the cloud had passed.”
“Well what’s strange
about that? It was a feeling in your hand and you knew what it meant.”
“But that’s different.”
“No, it isn’t different.
Not in the way you mean. Of course it’s different, but it’s the same thing.”
“What a way to talk!
It’s the same thing only different! That’s about as clear as mud,
Joey.”
So I stopped trying to
explain things for a while. I didn’t
know enough about them myself.
In school, things didn’t
go so well. Not that it was hard for me, or that I got poor marks. But they
didn’t teach the things I wanted to know about, and they didn’t talk the
language I understood best.
What I wanted I couldn’t
express or explain at that time. My soul cried out dumbly what others before me
and after me found words to say: “Give
me the things, not words about things. Give me the thoughts, not words about
thoughts.”
So I could not bring
myself to study then; and in a whole lifetime of research I have never been
able to study since; to study things and nature, yes; but not words and books.
Thirty years later I
dreamed a dream of being a schoolboy again, kneeling on a dusty corner asleep,
while the other pupils worked their heads off studying the essential oils. When
recess came, I went out and had a fine time, but the rest were too tired.
This was symbolic of my
whole life. I have seen more lives blasted and stunted by brain-cramming than
by utter ignorance. Hence I have always preached against tiring out the colt in
practice before the hour set for the race.
Man’s worst enemy is his
memory, he has misused it. It was never meant to be a trunk into which to pack
a lot of words and opinions. It was meant to record experience as a
sample-case, an alphabet of nature’s language, like stringing a harp or piano,
one string of each tone. Then any melody in the world of music can be played on
it. And even from a distance the vibration of another tone will produce a
vibration in my instrument, if I possess a string of like pitch to respond to
it. I do not need to see, hear, smell, taste or touch it. The string in my
piano is going to vibrate if someone strikes the same string on another piano
at a distance.
But the string of my
piano is not going to vibrate if I use the piano as a trunk and pack it full of
words. The words are going to bang around on the strings so I cannot hear
anything else.
As long as I didn’t
learn from books; as long as I kept my memory from recording anything but
direct experience, experiment and observation; and as long as I could seal off
a part of my brain for a vocabulary, but refrain from using it in my thinking,
then my thinking was not confined to my head. I could think with my whole body,
with every nerve and organ: then I would know the truth, for they would not lie
to me as men did, and as books did, using words.
I wanted the truth to
select its own words, and not for men to try to shape ideas of truth in my
brain with their words. This would not be true, and it was impossible ever for
it to be true; for that is not what truth is.
Every argument that I
ever heard was caused by someone trying to shape the truth by words, instead of
allowing the words to be shaped by truth.
Fervently and deeply I
wanted the truth, and I could see that none of the teachers knew the truth;
none of the books told the truth. It was nothing but words, and words about
words. Brick by brick, word by word, I saw the wall being built around us
children to seal us for life into one room of our brain, with only two windows,
our eyes, safely guarded with prison bars of words stronger than steel that
also kept out most of the light; with every other gate of the mind carefully
sealed by a word, so that no feeling could be arrived at, save through a word
first, like putting gloves on our hands, shoes on our feet, spectacles on our
eyes, muffs on our ears, and a woolen padding on every nerve end so we would be
cut off from the quivering, life-giving pulsations of direct contact with the
truth.
So I revolted; tore down
the wall of words; threw off my shoes, both physically and mentally, and walked
barefoot even where the stones were sharp and painful.
I went on alone in rain
and thunderstorms, praying to God to let me feel the truth that no one could
tell me in words. I promised that if He could make me “feel” the right things
to do, I would always obey those feelings, instead of what other people told me
to do when one person said one thing, and another said another.
When I got out alone like this, a strange
feeling would sometimes come over me. When it did, then as far as I could see,
everything, instead of being outside my head, seemed to be inside my head.
Looking out over a marsh
where the frogs were croaking, I would hear them as if they were inside my
head. They seemed to be a part of me, and I would amuse myself by pointing in a
certain direction, saying, “One, two,
three—now!”—and a big bullfrog would croak from where I pointed.
So far as the evidence
of personal experience is concerned, it does not answer the question whether
the seeming ability to “cause” a frog to croak at will was a real one, or
whether I predicted the croak.
This is merely
illustrative. The problem comes up repeatedly in my records, as this type of
phenomena is now an established fact with a sufficient number of reliable
witnesses, so that the solution to this problem is one of the most fundamental
considerations in the fields of science, philosophy, and religion. To what
extent does the mind “make” things happen, and to what extent does the mind
foresee what is going to happen? Does the mind create thought, or is it acted
upon by thought?
Has man deceived himself
by extending his conception of biological time beyond the sphere of its
function in nature? Does cause precede or follow effect? Have we perhaps gotten
the cart before the horse in thinking that the cause comes first because of our
manner of recording biological time in a reflective function of memory, where
things are naturally reversed as in a mirror or any other phenomenon of
reflection? How is it, for example, that in dreams the sound that caused a
dream wakes you up, and that the dream precedes the sound that has “caused” it?
Then again, here is an acorn.
Overhead I see the oak tree from which it fell. I know that if I plant it, it
will grow into another oak tree; and if I gather all the acorns from that, I
can prove that within my hand at this moment I hold the means to produce a
whole forest of oak trees.
The past is “outside,”
over my head; the acorn has left if forever. Yet in the same moment I imagine
the future forest of oak trees; and I know that at this very minute, though the
chemical constituents of that oak tree of the future are in the air I breathe,
and in the soil beneath my feet, I know that the true cause of that future
forest lies in the palm of my hand, inside the seed (in the future of that
growth), and not in the tree overhead, (its past), from which it has departed
forever.
The cause of a thing is
in action or a function, and not a position or sequence in space or in
biological time. The old oak tree produced the acorn in my hand, but now the
active cause of the future oak tree is in that acorn as its own future, which
becomes manifest by selective absorption in growth manifest by selective
absorption in growth. The old oak tree is cut off from any possible function as
a cause of growth in the new tree. The power of creation is the future biologically. The past
is the memory of the body, the future is the memory of the seed. My dream
precedes the sound that causes it, just as my backward is forward in the
mirror, for a dream is a reflex of memory.
And likewise when by
shock of emergency or will of intent and earnest desire we suspend our logic
and reason, and revolt from our walls of words, then only our raw nerves are
exposed to nature; we think with our spine, our hands, our feet, our skin. What
is outside of us is now part of us, inside. We are a waking dream; we are
conscious on the other side of the fence; our actions precede what causes them.
I say, “One, two, three—“and the train
whistles. I say, “One, two, three—“and
a frog croaks. And one time, before eleven witnesses who are all still living
as I write this (this was later in life), I said, in the midst of a storm.
“Look at that tree, if you want to see something. Suppose I told you that I
could make the lightning strike that tree; would you believe me? Of course not.
But watch it. One, two, three—“
And no one was more
astonished than I when a bolt of lightning split the tree before our eyes; for
I was in a “waking dream” at the time, having abandoned myself to the
the spirit and enjoyment of the storm.
The lightning bolt broke my state of contemplation, or whatever you may choose
to call it; hence I was astonished at the fulfillment of what I had been only
half conscious of saying.
This may sound incredible, but I assure you that it is a fact of
experience before witnesses, and only one of several thousand cases embodying
the same principle. None of my witnesses is of a type to grant me power to
cause a particular tree to be split by lightning at the third count of my
finger. There are, therefore, only a few other possible conclusions:
1.
That as in a dream, my speech preceded the sound or event that caused
it; in which
case, our conception of and relation to “time” needs deeper
investigation and perhaps
drastic revision.
2.
That neither my speech nor the event was the cause of the other, both being the effect
of a common cause; viz. the power that caused the event also called my
attention to it,
and through me the attention of others before it happened.
Either 1 or 2 with variations could be embodied in a theory of prophecy
or prevision. We could state another possibility:
3.
That the cause of my speech was not the power that caused the event, but
rather a
power in myself, or acting upon myself, which could foresee the event
without any
causal connection whatever.
Still further, 2 might be clarified by limiting the “power” to a purely
material nature. For example, we say that “instinct” causes muskrats to “hole
in” just before a storm; but reflex conditioned by a change or degree of
atmospheric pressure associated with a consequence would account for it.
Moreover, I have turned one of my laboratories into a large electrical
condenser, with an electronic ohmmeter connected between a metallic roof and
the ground. The radiation resistance of this portion of space started building
up one rainy day; and as the needle mounted higher and higher, till it could
record no more, at one hundred million ohms, I knew without any “mental
phenomena” that lightning was going to strike in the vicinity. It struck within
two minutes after the capacity of the meter had been reached. Who is to say
that the human nervous organization is not as sensitive as one built by man’s
hands?
Still, that would not account for picking the right tree. Nor did the
meter tell me what my nerves now did after the crash, when I asked, “Did anyone get the horses in before it
started to rain?”
My assistant said, “I don’t know. Why? Shall I go and find out?”
I said, “The bolt was so close it made me feel as if I were a horse. I
imagined a horse leaping into the air and falling down dead.”
My assistant went back to the barn and found that the horses were not in,
as the rain had come on so suddenly. One of the other men was standing in the
barn looking out at the downpour that followed the crash.
He said, “Yes, I know the horses should have been brought in, but I was
just starting back to the pasture for them when it started. I’m just waiting
for it to let up a little”
So both went back to look for the horses, and found two of them dead.
One of them had leaped a six-foot fence and was several feet away without any
tracks leading there.
In this case and others like it, I have had delicate instruments in my
laboratory, in a temperature-controlled room, which correlated in their
functions with outdoor temperature and weather changes, but slightly in advance
of the outdoor effects. It became evident that the instruments were being acted
upon at once by forces that a little later, sometimes five to twenty minutes,
brought about the outdoor changes; thus enabling us to predict them by a small
margin. Changes in atmospheric and electrical conditions, for example, preceded
local meteorological effects, as also atmospheric tidal effects on temperature
changes.
Thus it seems reasonable to believe that the human nervous system might
be able to detect conditions on the same basis. But this will not account for
all the phenomena observed. The imminence of a lightning bolt might be felt,
but what explains pointing
to the tree it will strike, and timing the flash to the second?
What explains the fact that when a real horse leaped into the air and dropped
dead, a memory of a horse in my imagination did likewise?
And if what causes a
frog to croak can act more quickly upon my nervous system when “attuned” to it,
giving me time to count three before the frog reacts, how does this work with
the engineer tooting his whistle, or a man doing what I say he is going to do
without his knowledge of the fact, so that the power of direct suggestion is
eliminated? Did I make him do it; did I foresee that he was going to do it; or
were we both acted upon by some unknown third factor that caused me to predict
the act, and the other man to fulfill it?
All that is established
experimentally (and this I have done thousands of times in the course of my
research) is a relation of sequence with respect to the biological time of me
and my witnesses. (1) I state what is going to happen. (2) It happens. Is 1 the
cause of 2? Is 2 the cause of 1? Are both 1 and 2 the effect of a common cause?
Is the relation entirely fortuitous, i.e., just a matter of “chance” or
“coincidence”? Or is there some other explanation?
For example, is it
possible that our conception of causality is in error, and that prevision does
not imply predestination; that prophecy and “free will” are perfectly
compatible if not identical, in the sense that free will requires dimension in
biological time?
If free will on the part
of Deity or man requires the setting in motion of processes that require or
constitute time, the determination and the fulfillment of free will will be
separated by a time interval that may vary from an instant in which you ask
your neighbor at the table to pass the butter, up to a lifetime that may be cut
short if it is your “free will” to end it, or to violate the laws of health in
slow suicide of neglect.
In any case the aim of
the bullet can be altered up to the moment the trigger is pulled; but once
pulled, the bullet is on its way to a target that was not predestined until the
release of nature’s forces beyond man’s control.
Since in every case free
will does involve a time interval, however short or long, between its
determination and its fulfillment, it is perfectly possible that prophecy is
based on immediate knowledge or foreknowledge of the execution of free will in
a determination that thus permits the manifestation of prophecy in perfect
harmony with free will. Yet this has been considered in philosophic and
theological difficulty of insurmountable nature, whereas it is in nature and
human experience no difficulty at all.
The only difference
between scientific and intuitive prediction is that in science the execution of
an act of free will is known by observation or intention, and that in the case
of intuition it is “sensed” or “felt” in a way no more “occult” or mysterious
than the function of an insect’s antennae, but in man by the coordinated
activity and sensitivity of his entire nervous organization. And whereas
science is based on reflective analysis and comparison of sensory perceptions
and memories of past sensory perceptions, intuition is based on the automatic
and synthetic coordination of man’s entire physiological organization, wherein
by selective stimulation of reflex arcs (called “memory”) a series of
“feelings” is transformed into an activity of imagination that constitutes
understanding and provides a basis for responsive activity of the motor or
sympathetic nervous system.
If thoughts may be
changed, environments may be changed. If environments may be changed, destiny
may be changed, for there is a constant adaptation to environments. So
“destiny” may be altered by one who knows the laws by which he can do so
intelligently. This knowledge constitutes “free will” and involves “moral
responsibility.” Not everyone acquires or exercises it, hence the present condition
of the world today.
Most of us do what we do
today because of the momentum of yesterday, or by reaction to stimuli, without
exercising the ability to resist or suppress that reaction. Thus we are
governed by past and present (i.e., memory and sensory reaction), which
perpetuates vicious circles, retards progress, and prolongs undesirable
conditions; whereas the exercise of “free will” consists of and entirely
depends upon a consideration of and preparation for “tomorrow.”
The present moment is too late to exercise this prerogative with any
expectation of altering the present moment. We can alter our future in
cooperation with nature’s laws, by considering between two possible courses of
action, and choosing not merely the course of action leading to the “most
desirable” result, but the criterion by which we shall evaluate that
“desirability.”
The mistake many make is in considering the “will” and “desire” as
simple things. They are not simple but complex. It is possible to change the
will by “willing to will,” and to change a desire by “desiring to desire”
(i.e., by changing one’s criterion).
Man has two sources of desire and will that are founded in two distinct
physiological systems of conditioned reflexes. One of these he shares in common
with all animals; the other is distinctly the endowment and distinguishing
characteristics of man. Neither of these two systems is “free” insofar as the
reflexes have already been formed and conditioned. The freedom that is denied
to animals and enjoyed by man is the power and the necessity by reflection to
create and modify the growth and development of further reflex arcs (i.e., to
make or modify tendencies, habits or hopes).
If we call this reflective and representative ability “intellect,” then
this is the seat and source and modus
operandi of individuality and
free will. For the intellect may lend its aid as a modifier to either one of
man’s two sources of will; or man’s two sources of will may engage in conflict
for the possession of the intellect. The one is the will of experience, habit,
instinct; the other of the selective development of latent possibilities in the
seed. One is the voice of the past; the other of the future. Free will is the
gift of prophecy; and the gift of prophecy is free will.
The moment you lose hope and faith, your destiny is established
regardless of your will, like a bullet shot from a rifle that cannot be turned
from its course. As long as your optimistic hand holds opportunity, you govern
“fate”; but if you drop it through doubt, carelessness or pessimism, you are in
the hand of fate’s “destiny,” not your own will.
Thus religion, as the guarantor of hope and the guardian of faith, is
our only organized insurance of freedom and free will. A wholly dogmatic and
authoritarian religion, however, is a religion in mane only, a speculative
system of beliefs, not an operative and phenomenal function of faith.
Free will is the power. What man believes to be his “will” is but a dam
for the capture and use of this power. All is right until he uses his will
power the wrong way.
This is the power of the individual, of governing the polarity of his
desires by commanding the animal propensities or the spiritual sentiments. Thus
he determines which shall predominate, according to whether he allows himself
to respond to instinct (past), or to be influenced by intuition or inspiration
(future).
Man’s only escape from this fundamental conflict of choice has been a
disastrous one for him (i.e., to reject both instinct and intuition), thus
confining himself to the independent operations
of the intellect (i.e., to a world of reflective and verbal
representations).
Within this sphere of purely intellectual activity, the truth is
entirely irrelevant with respect to the physiological and psychological
consequences of the reflective and representative activities of the brain and
nervous system. For the multifarious combinations of memory sensations create
states of mind and motivate action without regard to their “truth” or “falsity”
with respect to any criteria whatever.
Until we embody the physiological laws of thought in a logic capable of
correlating language with life, more philosophic speculation is barren and
without any probability of correspondence with truth.
Our only practical physiological means of insuring the correspondence of
our imaginative activity with external conditions is by the use of special
sensory organs in the acquisition of experience, the exercise of immediate
observation, and the invention of apparatus in experiments. This is science.
Our only practical means
of insuring the correspondence of our imaginative activity with external or
internal conditions beyond the capacity and ability of our sensory organs to
acquire experience, to exercise immediate observation, or to invent and apply
activity of the entire nervous system as ”antennae” in the acquisition of
knowledge by “feelings,” which are to be
understood only by the selective stimulation of memory elements in the activity
of imagination from which all independent operations of the intellect have been
rigidly excluded.
This is the domain of religion, not as a system of speculative belief,
but as an operative function of intuition and faith that involves and includes
the inspiration of all the so-called spiritual gifts, including prophecy and
all types of mental phenomena to which have been falsely attributed occult or
psychic connotations.
The exercise of the latter to the exclusion of the former produces but
half-men and half-truths: i.e., mystics and mysticism. The exercise only of the
former produces but half-men and half-truths: i.e., skeptics and
skepticism.
The materialism of science and the spiritualism of religion are each in
themselves incapable of embracing the whole man or the whole truth. It is only
the two together, functioning in one man, not in separate men, that produces the
capacity of mankind to a universal consciousness, coordination and
understanding.
CHAPTER III
It was shortly after the time in my boyhood when I revolted against the
schoolroom and turned to nature instead for my lessons. I would play truant and
go off alone in a storm, talking back at the thunder as if it were God
speaking.
I would say, “If I call upon you, and still fail to find the truth and
the true religion, it will not be my fault, because we have been told, ‘Ask and ye shall receive; seek and ye shall
find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.’”
I would say to myself, “If there is such a thing as a Holy Spirit, let me feel it. I don’t
want anyone to tell me about it any more. All I ask is let me feel it myself, and then I will know.”
I said this, not doubting, not asking for “proof,” but as a hungry child
demanding food, not words about food and pictures of good things to eat.
When I thought this way, a tingle would start in my spine that chilled
me from head to foot, and then a feeling would go out to the end of every nerve
in my body as if my heart were pumping warm wine instead of blood. I would feel
a glow all over.
I would say, “Thank you, God!” And then the tears would come to my eyes
because I was happy. I never told anyone about this. People wondered why I was
always happy, and always whistling and singing; and this was why.
That was in the spring, and when summer came I was sent to a farm to
work for a man who was kind to me.
I tended the cows every day,
taking them a long way out on a road where I staked them to graze. This was the
school for me. I learned more doing this than I had learned all year in school.
When it was time to go back to school again I became so nervous and
restless that I was allowed to leave school and work in a spring shop for a
dollar and twenty-five cents per week, to help my parents.
Thus I left school at the age of thirteen, and have never been inside of
one since, except later in life as moderator and director of local school
boards.
As for religion, I was absent from churches as well as schoolrooms, and
for the same reason: I had found outside in nature, and within myself, what
they did not or could not give me.
I have in the course of my life investigated every religion known to man
on earth, past or present. I have enjoyed close friendships with leaders and
laymen in all faiths; with priests, rabbis, and ministers of many
denominations; and I must say that when I dug beneath the words and the various
intellectual representations of doctrines and concepts, I found the same
fundamental, universal faith by which man sustains a relation to his Creator
and the spirit of truth in a function of neutral activity or consciousness
other than “intellect.”
And when as a scientist I convinced myself of the irrelevance of truth
with respect to the physiological and psychological consequences of the
operations of the intellect, a conclusion immediately follows that dispenses
with all argument. It does not make any difference whether or not the
doctrines, the concepts, and the verbal representations are true, so long as the physiological
and psychological consequences are favorable to man’s spiritual progress: i.e.,
if they lead the various types of intellect (to which the various doctrines are
helpful) to the establishment of a relation with truth in a function of faith
that is more fundamental than belief: i.e., an operative, not a speculative
relation with the creative reality of God, or truth.
I have therefore devoted my life to the experimental investigation and
study of the scientific foundations of
the spiritual verities that are of necessity and by virtue of the essential
unity of mankind in common with all religions as the essence of a universal
Christianity.
Because I have found
these spiritual verities to be operative and not speculative; and because in my
own experience I have found that they operate in mankind through a
physiological function of faith and not an intellectual function of speculative
belief, I urge the support of all religions with emphasis on the faith they
have in common, rather than the doctrinal beliefs by which they differ, and
which a study of the history of religion and the history of mankind will reveal
to have been the necessary expressions of intellectual variations to insure the
perpetuation of the more essential elements of man’s physiological relation
with truth through the nonintellectual operations of a living, universal
faith.
At the age of fourteen I went to Chicago with my father. My mother and
sister followed later. This was during the World’s Fair, and my father was
employed in connection with one of the exhibits. Later, my parent had a bakery
and a milk depot in the city. I got up early every morning when it was still
dark to deliver milk.
By this time my father was a citizen of the United States, and was
employed at the government appraisal store.
Not going to school, I always had some time for myself outside of work.
I used it experimenting; and my mechanical, electrical, and chemical
“inventions” were a source of great bother and worry to my mother, who was
afraid of fires and explosions.
From time to time I secured work in various trades, in search of
different kinds of experience. When I was fifteen I worked for a company that
made window screens. Here I invented and constructed a machine for stapling the
screening onto the frames.
I used to dream of having a wonderful shop, fitted out with every tool
imaginable, so I could make things. I wanted also a chemical and electrical
research laboratory and workshop. All of these daydreams materialized, though
some of them many years later.
During this time I began to have experiences with regard to which space
here permits the inclusion of only a few examples.
One time while working for the Hall Safe & Lock Company, I was sent
out to dismantle the lock of a safe that had been blown open by safecrackers. I
placed a drift in position and raised my hammer to strike it.
Now came the first experience in my life in which something happened in
my arm that I could not account for as an act of will or reflex to my own
thoughts. With hammer in mid-air, something held my hand sot that I could not
hit the drift. The feeling was not as if some outside force held my arm, but
something inside the muscles. They refused to make the motion I had instructed
them to do by the impulse of my brain and the reflex of habit. So I examined
the lock to see if perhaps I was hitting it in the wrong place to accomplish
what I had to do.
Satisfied that I was hitting it in the right place, I raised my hammer
again but could not bring myself to strike the drift. Then down my arm came the
“feeling” that there was something there I shouldn’t hit. So I pulled the drift
out again; and behind it I found a dynamite cartridge that had been placed
there by the safecrackers, and that had not yet been exploded.
This was the first of many similar experiences. Again and again
throughout my life, I would have lost fingers, hands, arms, legs, and life
itself were it not for an independent action of my muscles in making a movement
I did not direct, or in refusing to make a movement that I did direct.
What was it, within myself or in the universe, that had the power to
move my muscles without my own will, or to prevent them from carrying out what
I had every reason to believe to be my will? I did not know. All I could swear
to was that it happened not once or twice but again and again; and at the age
of seventy it still happens—but always as a last extremity. In later years, I
learned to look for a feeling and to obey it in time to direct my own course of
prevention. But failing this, “something else” took over; and as a result of
it, in a long life of activity, of travel, of driving various kinds of
vehicles, operating all kinds of machinery, I have never had a serious
accident, but innumerable narrow escapes, all owing to some kind of purposive
or automatic reflex of self-preservation.
Problem: What is it? I
have friends, bless them, who seem to think that such questions are answered by
muttering a name.
I demonstrate to them the fact that I can attract and repel a piece of
steel “at a distance” by means of another piece of steel concealed in my
hand.
I say, “There you behold an invisible force. You can’t see it , smell
it, taste it, hear it, or touch it. Yet I can cause that piece of steel to roll
away from me or roll toward me at will. What is it?”
Secure behind their wall of words, such people say, “Why, any school boy
knows what that is! It’s magnetism.”
“Do you know what magnetism is?”
“It’s what you’re using to make that piece of steel move.”
“But do you know what it is.”
“Well, no. Does anybody?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Very few admit they don’t know
until I drive them to it. They solve all
he problems of the universe by means of magic names.”
As long as things have names people are satisfied. As long as they can
mutter a sound or draw signs on a blackboard, or stir the sign and the sound up
out of their memory, that is all that is necessary. Look around the world and
hear the torrent of mutterings like a perpetual hailstorm. See the rivers of
ink flowing onto tons and tons of paper. Man has built ships for himself out of
paper, and sails out into the universe on a river of ink blown by the breath of
empty words. Then when the ship of his illusions collapses, eh finds himself in
total ignorance. For now, without words he knows nothing; but had he not
deceived himself, he might now, without words, have known all.
Some of my friends do not like this line of thought. “You can’t do
without words,“ they argue, “You yourself speak and write every day of your
life. You have written a newspaper column for years, using perhaps four or five
million words. You can’t convey your thoughts without naming words.”
To this I answer, “But I don’t think in words, and I don’t think with
the part of my brain that remembers words. I’m trying to break down the wall of
words that holds you prisoner, and unbar the gates of your mind that words have
sealed shut. I’m trying to show you that your fingers, your muscles, your
spine, and every organ and cell in your body knows more that you do; and that
here is nothing more ignorant in the human anatomy than an educated brain that
has barred every gate of the mind except that associated with verbal reflex.
“A man with such a brain is nothing more than a piece of machinery; his
voice but a phonograph record. It is beyond his comprehension (because he has
no comprehension; only fixed ideas, concepts anchored to words): he cannot
believe because he cannot personally experience what it means to stretch out a
quivering antenna of nerves that pick up feelings
and transform them from electric currents, which stir up visual and verbal
memories and reactions, into the echoes of a past, a living, or a future voice
or scene.”
It is not the knowledge of the brain that holds the hand from hitting a
dynamite cartridge that can’t be seen, or that causes one to hesitate and miss
the plane or train that is going to crash. What is it? Are we going to “fix” it
with a name?”
A name is nothing without a meaning; a meaning is impossible without
understanding; and an understanding is impossible merely on the basis of a
chain-reaction on our verbal memory. An understanding is possible only on the
basis of neural activity in direct response to the object or subject of that
understanding; not merely a twitch in a
brain cell that awakens the memory of a few words, but the coordination of the
entire physiological and neurological organization.
How glibly the vocabularies of philosophies and ideologies, of sciences
and theologies flow from the tongue! And how many know anything? How many
really understand anything? Very few can define the words they use; and when
they do, the words are dead.
We speak of hunches, intuition,
presentiments, precognition, extrasensory perception, inspiration, psychometry,
spiritualism, clairvoyance, telepathy, divination, superstition, faith, the
Holy Spirit, God. All these words are used to talk “about” something.
None of the words, as defined and understood by anyone I have ever talked with,
adequately represent what they are talking about, because the words have not
been coined by men who know or understand adequately what they are trying to
name.
Public conception of the terms has been deformed by the operation of
“psychic racketeers” who have capitalized on the crudity and the hunger of
people for truth, by deceiving them with tricks. I have investigated these
things and I know all these tricks. One of the purposes of this commentary is
to attempt to rescue the truth, and to restore understanding and faith in man’s
God-given spiritual gifts, so that “each may prophesy, that each may be
comforted” for himself without being deceived by charlatans and false prophets;
and without being dependent upon the self-assumed authority of others for what
he may seek and find and feel and know himself.
One day when I was walking down the street I felt very blue and
discouraged without knowing why. This was unusual for me, because I was
ordinarily contented and cheerful, if not happy, in those days. This was a new
feeling and I could see no reason for it. I did not know of anything that would
make me blue. I felt that way all day, and I could not identify or interpret
the feeling. My imagination was no help to me now.
That night my father asked me what ailed me. I said I did not know. He
insisted that if I was unhappy there must be a reason for it, and he wanted to
know what it was.
The moment he asked the question the answer was there. It was something
about my father that made me feel unhappy. Now my imagination had something to
work on, but I didn’t want to tell him about it, because now in his presence I
felt and imagined that he was going to die, and that was what made me feel so
upset and unhappy.
However, he forced me to tell him that I was afraid he was going to die
suddenly, within two weeks. And then he punished me for dabbling with such
nonsense, and said he thought I had gotten over that sort of thing long ago.
For the moment my father convinced me that I was wrong, because I hoped
I was wrong. So for the next few days I tried to put it out of my mind. At
least I never spoke of it. But early in the second week my father came down
suddenly with a fever that developed into typhoid pneumonia. At the end of two
weeks he was gone.
Overnight my boyhood was over. I was now the only man of the family. I
went to work to help support my mother and sister.
Shortly after my father’s death my mother met friends who attended
“spiritualist” meetings. She accompanied them one time, and told us at home of
what she had heard and seen. I could not believe her, and was curious to find
out how much of it was true.
So I went to see this medium of whom my mother and her friends were
speaking so enthusiastically. I was sorely disappointed. Before the séance was
over I had detected and knew how all of the tricks were done by which the
public was being deceived.
Here I do not wish to be misunderstood. The fact that I found one medium
fraudulent was not grounds enough o form a judgment that all mediums were
fraudulent. But the fact that the first medium I ever met was fraudulent is
sufficient to explain why I avoided all séances on general principles until I
made up my mind to investigate and expose the tricks for the sake of the truth
that did exist, and that I felt needed no “stage trimmings.”
Later on I met a number of very
sincere mediums whom I judged to be honest but to some extent self-deceived.
Also I met a few who confessed their tricks, and justified them by saying, “We
use a trick to make people believe a truth, because the people cannot
understand and will not believe the truth without the trick.”
I cannot here include details of my later investigations along these
lines, but I must say that while my own personal experience convinced me
absolutely of the truth of immortality, the reality of survival, the fact that
death does not end all, in the reality of a type of communication based on
“feeling” such as might take place also between two living persons who are
attuned by bonds of love and affection, I have yet to be convinced of any form
of “materialism,” trumpet blowing, slate-writing, spirit-photography, and so
on. And at the time I am speaking of it, in the city of Chicago, this is just
about all that spiritism consisted of; and in every instance where I was a
witness I privately exposed the trick and revealed how it was done. And I can
assure you it was not done by a “spirit”
Yet at the same time I frequently “felt” the presence of my father; the
feeling revived a memory, and I could imagine him walking along beside me. I
could “talk” with him by saying something and “imagining” what he might say in
return.
If I had been willing to deceive myself as some mediums were, I could
have said, “I see my father, and he tells me so and so.” But I did not see my
father. What I “saw” was a memory of my father. He did not speak to me at all.
The words were out of my own verbal memory, and I put them into the mouth of
the memory of my father in my imagination. Then how could I explain it when the
memory of my father in my imagination told me things I did not myself know, and
that only my mother knew/?
It all comes back to the “feeling” again. So far as I could see, the
only link between the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen, was a “feeling,”
just as the only link between two telegraph operators is the current in the
wires. The click that the receiver hears is not the click that the sender
hears. It is a different” click.” You do not hear the voice of your friend over
the telephone; what you hear is a vibration in your receiver that sounds like
your friend’s voice.
Perhaps there do exist people who think that the voices they hear in
their radio are the voices of the broadcasters a thousand miles away; but of
course that is not true. What we hear is the vibration of a diaphragm in the
Magnavox and not the vibration of the larynx of the person who is
speaking.
And perhaps people who watch the images on a television screen are
really under the illusion that they are seeing the faces, forms, and movements
of the players in the broadcasting studio; if so they are deceiving themselves
like the mediums who think they “see” spirits and “hear” voices.
You see nothing on a television screen but the variations of intensity
of a spot of light, which is moving with such great rapidity that it creates
the illusion of sustained vision; and the distribution of light intensity
throughout the field, being determined by the reflection of light from the
players and scene in the studio, deceives your optic nerves into believing you
“see” the players. But how is this done from a distance, “without any wires”
and through the air”?
Answer that and you will have an adequate explanation of all so-called
mental phenomena; with the sympathetic nervous system as antennae, the
imagination as amplifier and television screen; and what you see in your mind’s
eye of imagination is nothing but the flickering composite of one’s own memory
element.
Whether or not this “means” anything more than your memory depends
entirely on whether you can turn the switch in your nervous system that
reverses the current, so that the nervous system is acting on the memory and
not the memory on the nervous system.
If the nervous system is acting on the memory, then your “feeling”
manifests in imagination by selective stimulation of memory elements to form an
“image” or a succession of remembered sounds. Then just as a seed manifests
what it contains by selective absorption of chemical elements for the soil and
air, so does a thought or “truth” or a “spirit,” or whatever you prefer to call
it, manifest in a “feeling” that translates itself by selective stimulation of
memory elements or motor elements, into imagination or action.
At least this was my early understanding of the matter. At no time have
I ever had evidence that a “thought” or “spirit” could move anything other than
a human organism and nervous system. At no time have I ever had evidence that
either a thought or a spirit could be “seen” or photographed. At no time have I
ever “heard” a thought or a spirit. All I can state from personal experience is
that whenever a feeling originates in my nervous system without internal cause,
whenever I succeed at the same time in eliminating all other influence,
suspending all other sensory reactions; i.e., when I stop thinking independently and allow my thought to be “shaped”
by the feeling, then what takes place in my imagination (though it remain only
imagination, composited of my own memories) nevertheless corresponds with some
external reality or event, past, present or future, without any limitation in
space or time save the decided and very troublesome and insurmountable
limitation of what my memory contains to contribute to the visualized
representation that is the foundation of my understanding.
If this view disappoints any follower of fraudulent spiritism, let him
then take comfort in the conclusion that though a “spirit message” may not be a
direct contact of a loved one, neither is the voice over the radio. But you
recognize the voice and understand its intimacy. Why not the thought of a
comforting mother in the “beyond”?
Of course it’s nothing
but your “imagination.” But your imagination will tell you the truth if you
seek with a prayer (tuning in), and if you will stop thinking with your brain
and offer up every nerve from the top of your head to the tips of your fingers
and toes, for inspiration. What is inspiration? First it’s a “feeling,” and
then the feeling paints a picture, sings a song, writes a book, or solves a
problem that changes the course of history.
One medium said to me, “I realize all that, but if I tell my people that
I only imagine what their deceased loved ones are saying, will they believe me?
No, I have to work a trick, and pretend that the spirit writes it on a slate
directly. I can’t admit that my finger does the writing.”
But to this view I could not agree. The search for truth is far more
thrilling, more comforting and more profitable here and forever than any
imagined thrill or advantage to be gained by deception or self-deception.
Nor could I feel that this was something to “dabble” with, like a
plaything. My friends would talk about books on the subject, and tell me that I
ought to read this one or that one. But every time I was tempted to do so, a
“feeling” would stop me. Just as I was stopped from hitting the drift with my
hammer when there was a dynamite cartridge behind it and I didn’t know it.
The only book I was able to open without this feeling was the Bible, and
there I found the whole subject covered in the 12th chapter of the first
epistle of the Corinthians, “Concerning spiritual gifts”’ and the fourth
chapter of John: “Beloved, believe not
every spirit but try them whether they are of God, for many false prophets have
gone forth into the world.”
So when my mother and her friends became interested in “table-tipping”
and kindred phenomena, I didn’t want any part of it. Later, I investigated
various forms of “automatic writing” and the phenomena of hypnosis and
self-hypnosis to an extent that does not permit inclusion in this record; and
for reasons given in the connection I did not feel it advisable to experiment
along those lines.
All hypnosis is fundamentally self-hypnosis.
No man has the power to hypnotize another against his will, if one exerts that
will. All that a “hypnotist” is able to do is to contrive by psychological
tricks to secure the willingness and cooperation of the subject. The “power” is
in the subject, not in the operator; and the success of the operator depends
largely upon securing the confidence complete trust, or fear of the subject.
Ninety per cent of the
people in the world today have spent the largest portion of their lives in
various stages of self-hypnosis. The production of these states of mind in the
people has been the objective of organized efforts on an incredible scale
throughout the world. I have witnessed two World Wars that were directly due to
states of self-hypnosis induced in masses of people by the organized efforts
and propaganda of small groups of men. We have lived to witness the greatest
psychological crime of all history. War would be impossible if we could break
the spell of self-hypnosis that holds the people of the world in subjection to
false ideas, ideologies, personalities and words, in a state of hypnosis
produced by psychological tricks. We must expose these psychological tricks.
But that is another story.
So many experiences I had when a young man made me realize that the
ready response in my make-up was due to my harp of experience, such as it was;
and that whatever confusion and error came into the picture was due to what I
lacked in this respect. So I made deliberate efforts to enlarge and perfect
this instrument of understanding. Each tool or instrument mastered added so
many more strings, enabling me to give an opinion based upon absolute
knowledge. And as I continued to add to this supply of strings, I found a
readier response within myself when seeking knowledge by intuition, or
endeavoring to interpret knowledge acquired only through the transference of
“feelings” from others, or from sources unknown.
I would meet a stranger, for example, and as an experiment attempt to
describe his father, who would be totally unknown to me; or some other person
he might be thinking of. The correct description, of course, is recorded in his
mind; and if I have registered one thousand faces in my own memory, there will
be one among these that will now be recalled from my memory by the “ feeling” I
get from the stranger. This provides me with an imaginative description as
nearly as possible like the one in his mind, but which I can sense only in terms
of facial characteristics recorded in my own memory in connection with faces I
have seen.
These things were thus all clear to me early in life, and I could
demonstrate them. But there was one thing that long remained a question mark in
my mind, and that was the anatomy of prophetic intuition. For in my own
experience the difference between past and future was that I appeared to get
the information of the past as an inductive activity of my mind, while the case
of prophetic intuition it seemed as if I were in the future coming back
(deductive), and with it a sort of reverential awe, a kind of ecstasy as if
just returning from a grand concert, or a beautiful garden filled with music,
color, and perfume, and peculiar feeling akin to what I would imagine is caused
by opium or morphine, as nearly as I could understand it. Once felt, it is
always craved. But whereas drugs destroy in reaction, this seemed to
strengthen, giving greater endurance, greater power, greater precision and
command to all activity, both of body and mind. This is the “Feeling” (with a
capital F).
There is a less pronounced sensation involved in so-called thought
transference. I say “so-called” since in reality no thought, as we ordinarily
consider thought, is transferred at all. Any thought that I experience
originates in my own anatomy and not that of anyone else. I can, however, be
caused to think a thought similar to the one that someone else has thought, is
thinking, or will think; and in the same manner whole masses of people can be
caused to think similar or parallel thoughts.
There is only one way I know of to
describe it to another who has not felt it; the feeling that distinguishes a
thought thus induced (i.e., thought induction rather than thought
transference), and that is to take him in a car along a street he has never
seen before. I cause him to lose his sense of direction, and then ask him to
check up on his sense of orientation. I ask him to make himself believe that he
is going north, say, toward his home. Then I ask him to change the direction
mentally, and imagine himself going south. He feels himself denying a supposed
fact, and acquires the new viewpoint only after he has wiped his mental slate
clean by an effort to eliminate his previous thought or belief In so doing he
experiences a mental “sensation” that is akin to that experienced when a
thought is induced by the transfer of a feeling, (not of a “thought”).
The acceptance and recognition of mental activity thus not
self-originated requires the voluntary or involuntary elimination of previous
or present self-originated mental activity. In other terms, you must stop
thinking in order to allow thought to be “induced” from external influences.
But whether your mental activity is the result of current direct from your own
batteries, or current induced by the activity of your sympathetic nervous
system in response to external influences, it is nevertheless still your own
memory elements that are stimulated to constitute your “thought.” Therefore the
term thought transference is a
misleading one, involving a conception that is not in accordance with human
experience and experiment.
Chapter IV
As a young man I began
to visit all the various denominations of churches in the city, and to
investigate all forms of religious belief and worship.
There were many questions that I wished to ask, but hesitated to state
because I did not want to appear unduly inquisitive. I soon discovered,
however, that if I asked these questions “mentally” (i.e., in my own mind
without putting them in words), I would receive the answer in one way or
another, during a conversation or discourse of the ministers or speakers.
I experimented with this for a while, without anyone knowing what I was
doing. I received such strange and direct answers to my mental questions that I
was led to experiment in having others ask silent questions of me.
The procedure was to start a conversation with the understanding that my
questioner was only to think his questions; to talk about anything he pleased,
but never to state the question he wished answered. Afterward we would compare
notes; and I discovered that it was often easier to answer these unspoken
questions than it was to answer questions put directly into words. Moreover, my
answers to nine out of every ten questions were correct. What was functioning
here?
In the first place, not knowing the question, my part of the
conversation was spontaneous and without constraint or concentration of effort,
as was the case when faced with a direct question that I was expected to answer
in the same direct manner.
In the second place, at no time did I make an effort to discover what
the question was, either by questions on my part or an effort to “sense” it or
“read the mind” of my questioner. I refrained from this for the simple reason
that when I tried it I was obliged to “think about it,” and my best chance of
success was not to think about it at all.
Consequently I never knew when or if I had answered the question until
it came time to compare notes on the result. I would say or talk about whatever
popped up in my mind during the conversation. More often than not it was
something entirely foreign to the conversation; and consequently more often
than not I really didn’t know what I was talking about at all.
This was the origin of a deliberate effort on my part to apply the
principle of “effortless thought without thinking” on an experimental basis.
The result of these early experiments, however, gradually got me deeper
and deeper into a situation from which I was later able to extricate myself
only by the drastic means of leaving the city and seeking seclusion. Word got
around all too quickly that all a person had to do to get the answers to all
his problems and troubles was to have a little talk with me.
At first I was glad enough to have people come to me, without my having
to go to them, to carry on my experiment. It gave me a chance to learn a lot
about human nature, human thinking, and the troubles and problems of the people
at large. Moreover, it gave me a chance to practice and further develop the
rather unusual art of “talking without thinking.” Now, instead of being obliged
to depend entirely on “images,” I began to gain a greater facility in drawing
on “words” in response to my “feelings.”
But the less fortunate side of this experience, so far as I was
concerned, was that as many as one hundred people per day, often more than
that, would come to the place where I lived. This began to consume all my
strength and time, so that it was difficult to earn a livelihood; and I would
not “commercialize” what I felt should be held “without money and without
price.” Further, many of the people who came to me were poor and in need, with
real trouble and problems of life beyond their capacity to solve them for
themselves.
Also, the main requirement for my success in helping them was a
sensitive, sympathetic attitude on my part, to which I submitted to such extent
and their troubles were my troubles. I became bound to them. I could not refuse
them what comfort I could give. And I shall never attempt to describe what I
suffered as a consequence of this;
sweating with them, shedding tears with
and for them; keeping my nerves almost raw so that I would not fail them;
praying for help, if help could be had from any “higher power,” so I could meet
these demands.
From a casual experiment I was plunged over my head into he midst of
human woes, with people by the hundreds looking to met to relieve them from
those woes in a world where war had taken toll again and where charlatans had
risen by the score, of all types, to deceive them.
And still further, advantage was taken of me at every turn. Many came to
me out of curiosity alone. I had not then developed resistance to this, and did
not like to offend. So when businessmen came to me with their trouble, I was
often drawn into considerations with regard to which I was not prepared by
experience to understand the real issues involved.
For example, as the time drew near for another presidential election in
1900, William McKinley was nominated for re-election on the Republican ticket,
with Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, as vice president. William
Jennings Bryan was nominated for president on the Democratic ticket, and there
were a number of other minor parties, each with a candidate for president.
For a reason I did not at first understand, the outcome of this election
was considered to be “crucial” by many businessmen, officials of various
corporations, and one in particular (within the circle of my “friends and their
friends”), J.W.A., who was a member of the board of Trade In Chicago.
The subject came up continually in conversations as the elections drew
near and for the first time in my experience I found myself being drawn outside
of purely personal considerations into the whirlpool of national politics and
affairs.
For the first time, too, I found myself wondering about these things.
For this would be my first experience in voting as a citizen of the United
States. At the time of McKinley’s first elation in 1896 I had been only
nineteen years old, and it was only in 1898 that I attained my majority of
derivative citizenship due to the naturalization of my father before his death,
when I was a minor.
So now I took the matter of voting seriously, and wanted to know whom to
vote for, and why. But the issues of the election were confusing. From all I
knew previous to that time, they should have depended largely on questions of
principle and policy in dealing with the colonial possessions that were taken
from Spain in the Spanish-American War. There were questions of believing in
war or not believing in war, of the liberties and treatment of peoples, of the
principles of democracy, the spirit of the Constitution of the United States
and American ideals in general.
But now there was talk of a monetary question again. That had been an
issue in the 1896 election. The Democratic party had sought to introduce a
silver standard and the Republican party, taking a stand for the gold standard,
had won out. The result of this election in subsequent legislation should have
settled the matter, and everyone thought it was settled. Even the Democratic
party was willing to regard it as settled and concede their cause as “lost.”
But Mr. Bryan, as the Democratic nominee, insisted on raising the issue again.
As a result of this there was an unexpected confusion in the minds of those who
took their responsibilities of citizenship seriously.
Many who favored Mr. Bryan’s views against militarism and existing
colonial policies, and who were also in favor of his concept of a Christian
Americanism, could not, for practical and economic reasons affecting their
private interests, favor his proposal for a silver monetary standard.
Many who felt it necessary to support the Republican view in regard to
the gold standard did not approve of what they called “the greedy
commercialism” that dictated the Philippine policy of the Republican
administration.
The result was that there were many in both parties who could not wholly
approve of either candidate. As a consequence of this there was great
apprehension in the commercial and industrial world with regard to the probable
outcome of the election. And into this confusion of issues and uneasiness of
spirit I was drawn through the instrumentality of friends and those who sought
to take advantage of my mental experiments.
What immunity I might have had through my own concern as to how I should
vote in this, my first election; though I had nothing personally at stake, no
matter what the outcome might be. In the first place, I was aware that this
time, because of the confusion of issues, many would not vote at all. I
considered doing the same myself; but then I reflected that it would not be a
good way to start my career as a citizen. I asked myself the question, “Is the majority always right? Do the people
make the best choice?”
Suddenly I
discovered that I wanted to know who was going to be elected. I had never asked
myself such a question before, as a mental experiment. But now I did, I
“blanked” my mind and turned my imagination loose to catch the answer from my
“feeling.” The result was a mental flash of a newspaper headline bearing the
name of McKinley and containing a figure somewhat in excess of half a million
majority. So I felt that while I was in no position to judge the issues on the little knowledge I
then possessed, I would assume that the majority were right, and vote for
McKinley.
If that had been all, this book would probably never have been written,
and the whole future course of my life and thoughts would have been changed.
But it was not all. In the course of my conversation with a number of
businessmen, including the above-mentioned J.W.A., when they asked me questions
concerning the coming election, I forthwith answered now what I had never been
able to “feel” in their presence, that I thought McKinley would be elected by
about half a million majority.
I do not recall any special reaction to these conversations except in
the case of J.W.A. Upon that occasion, however, I experienced a phenomenon that
was new in my life. After predicting to him the outcome of the forthcoming
election, I became suddenly confused, and felt a sense of panic and shock
followed by such a feeling of depletion, shame, and dejection that I thought I
was going to be ill. I could not comprehend it. It was as if a light in my
heart and mind had suddenly been extinguished, leaving me in darkness. The
feeling” I had come to regard as an ever-present function, as much “mine” as my
sense of sight or hearing, left me. From that moment I was unable to “feel” or
sense anything. I could only reason things out. My intuition had died a sudden
death. Why?
I cannot hope to describe the feeling of desolation that came over me.
People came to me with their troubles, and I could only sympathize with them by
common sense and reason. I walked the streets so people would not find me home.
I went out alone at night under the stars to shed tears where none could see
me, and to pray and sweat it out alone to find the answer. Why? Why?
The election
came and went. McKinley won by a little over 800,000 majority. I bought a copy
of the paper with the headlines I had “seen” in answer to my mental query that
had somehow betrayed me. Then I found that Mr. J.W.A., as a member of the Board
of Trade, had cashed in on my prediction to an extent that netted him a profit
of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars or more.
What was the answer? As days went into weeks, weeks into months, I was
to ask myself that question a thousand time, until I had written the answer so
deeply that it was never to be forgotten.
There was only one answer, and I couldn’t’ squirm out of it, no matter
how I tried to reason it out. My eyes and ears were mine to use or misuse at
will. But the “feeling” was a gift that
I was not free to misuse without suffering the penalty of losing it. Perhaps
there was some natural law I did not understand, and which I had unknowingly
violated. Perhaps it was an operation of a “spirit of truth” or intelligence,
such as the Bible described.
In any case, whatever I had believed as a child, whatever I might now
assume from a rational standpoint, coincident with “coming of age” as an adult
citizen of these United States, I was painfully faced with the fact that my nervous
system had sustained a relationship with some unknown “source” of inspirational
energy that operated only on conditions; that I was still largely ignorant of
those conditions; that as a child I had not been expected to know those
conditions; but that now as an adult I was responsible for the violation of
those conditions, even through the instrumentality of others. Ignorance of the
law appeared to be no excuse.
The whole affair appeared to originate in my conversation with J.W.A.
Whatever the fault, I was to blame, not he. I did not receive one penny from
him as a result of his profits from my prediction, yet I was paying the price
for it. And he never knew nor could he have understood the price I paid.
Other men had profited in one way or another from the by-products of my
mental experiments, but not to this extent. Then why, in principle, make an
issue of this case? Was it because I had given away without discrimination what
had been given me in private as an answer to my own question, asked for a very
different reason?
In any case, here I was with only logic and reason left to me, forced to
conclusions against which my logic and reason revolted. What I had regarded as
a physiological operation of my nervous system, which involved “feelings” as
tangible as those of heat and cold and electrical currents, had proved to
depend only in a secondary sense on the physiological and nervous mechanism I
possessed. Primarily it depended upon the operation or co-operation of
something “other than myself,” and I was undergoing a reluctant proof of this
fact by having the primary “current” shut off. My prayers and tears and torture
were of no avail. I had to think my own thoughts; the thrill of having them
induced by inspiration was mine no more.
It was then that I knew what made charlatans
and fraudulent spiritists, even granting that they had possessed some kind of
gift. For if and when they lost it for any reason at all, they were obliged to
go on by “pretending.” Because they commercialized it, their livelihood
depended on it; and when it failed them they substituted tricks.
It became evident to me that there was some kind of spiritual ethics
that was not very well understood. So I made up my mind that I would prepare
myself with a better foundation for making use of intuition, if I should ever
succeed in regaining what I had lost. And this included insuring my own future
freedom and independence, with a means of livelihood that would not be
incompatible with a continuation of my research, though not dependent on it
from a psychological angle.
To this end I went to work at any job I could find; spent all the money
I could spare on instruments and apparatus, and all my spare time familiarizing
my self by experiment rather than textbooks with the principles of electricity,
chemistry, and microscopy. I bought the finest microscope that I could obtain
at that time; and because it was a better one than any of my doctor friends
possessed, I worked with them evenings in return for specimen. Thus I started
my studies of biology and physiology, having made up my mind that if the gates
of my mind were going to stay closed, I would take up medicine and become a
doctor.
But I did not fix my mind too strongly on this thought, because I still had
the vision of workshops and a research laboratory, where, if my intuition did
not fail me altogether, I would delve into the mysteries of nature that
constituted the still unsolved problems of science and support his dream of
pure research by an occasional invention of a practical kind.
Thus ended the first twenty-three years of my life, with the loss of the
“feeling” that had led me through all, from childhood.
Exactly one year to the day from the time my “feeling” left me, it returned
again; just as if an electrical switch, long disconnected, was again turned
on.
What this exactitude of period might mean I did not then know. It was as
if I had been sentenced to one year in “jail,” a jail with only two windows, my
eyes; and all the other gates of my mind barred shut. For though I could hear,
what I heard meant little. And though I could still smell the odor of flowers
in spring, the experience stirred no response. The flavor of food gave me no
pleasure; my appetite was gone. Things that I touched were cold or warm, rough
or smooth, but I could not feel them a part of me, to interpret their hidden
meanings as I had done since childhood. My imagination and emotions, which had
previously been ever active, sensitive to respond, were during this year
entirely dormant.
For the first time I felt the deficiency of my education; for now what
had been the source of my understanding was no longer active. I felt that I
knew nothing whatever about anything at all. So I set out to learn what I could
while working for a living along with thousands of others who were serving
“sentences” longer and harder than mine, in the endless treadmill of the
civilization of a large city.
The story of that year would be superfluous to this record. Suffice to
say that in that time I was reduced to the humility of realizing that “in
myself I am nothing,” and that other men in themselves were nothing; that
without inspiration all men were nothing but electrochemical, biophysical
mechanisms.
Then what was inspiration: What was the “current,” and from whence, that
brought life to dormant nerves, vision and understanding to the mind? I could
see that men did not realize. The blind followed the blind, and none of them knew.
What made men great musicians, great artists, poets, surgeons,
scientists, leaders, prophets? Was it the men themselves? What and whence the
energy, the enthusiasm, the ambition, the hope, and faith the vision that took
the clay of the earth, the body of an animal, and raised up out of the mob a
great and lonely man?
And why did men flourish for a season, rise up inspired and speak their
piece to thrill a nation, only to sink back to the level of a beast again, with
a glaze over their eyes, a palsied hand, a pathetic ghost of a once-great man?
Only now did I know the answer, in the only way that one can ever know
the answer to anything, by a personal experience. My little light hadn’t lit up
a very large area; it was the light of a boy, not a leader. I was not a great
musician, artist, or anything else. Compar- aratively few people even knew I
existed. But my light had gone out. And I could see in the lives of other men
that they too had flashed a greater light than mine but it had gone out.
We were the wires and the bulb, the machine and the motor; but without
the “current” we were nothing but that. It required a man plus “something
else.” Without the man, the “something else” could not manifest. Without the
man the “something else would be without hands, without voice, without strings
to play a melody. But conversely, without that “something else” men are but the
clay of the earth, and go the way of all flesh as a herd of educated human
animals. And I could see that if man did not sustain a proper relation with
that “something else,” it left him as
quickly as the snapping off of a switch or the burning out of a light.
Further I could see that it was this “something else” that had been
responsible for all scientific progress; and still the scientists could only
dissect the mechanism, trace the circuits of the nerves, and experiment with
the functions and disorders of the organs; but science had not yet detected the
function in its own progress of that “something else” that caused even the
hearts of scientists to burn with the thrill of great discoveries, which they
ignorantly presumed themselves to be making because they rightly assumed that
their thoughts and conclusions consisted of happy correlations of their own
observations, experiments, and sensory experience; but they wrongly ignored the
function of the very energy that animated them in the fusion of their memories
as an activity of understanding, failing
to realize that without this inspiration
they could not have been led to make the discovery: that it was not
“accidental,” as they thought; and that were it not for the “something else,”
they would have gone the way of all the uninspired on the endless treadmill of
the world’s repetition of routine.
And still further I
could see that religion had developed a vocabulary with which to do a lot of
talking and preaching about this “something else,” which had shown what it
could do with men now dead for centuries, but seemed careful not to imply too
strongly or to encourage the expectations that even granting the omnipotence of
that “something else” it can do the same things today.
If the sun had gone out, whence the heat and life of earth and man at
this moment? But with my own light out, I could understand the past tense of
religions from which the light had fled: living on memories, doctrines and
speculative beliefs. What else was left? What indeed could we do but cling as
best we might to a lost faith that, having ceased to be operative physiologically,
had become a legend, where people worshiped at an empty grave that was but a
reflection of their own lives, from which the living, vibrant “something else”
had fled, leaving but an echo and a “word”?
So I who had stayed outside of the churches that could not feed me with
a living God, to fill every nerve with life and understanding; I who had said,
“Fill me with the spirit if there is such a thing; don’t talk to me about
it”—now I could understand. My heart ached for us all. I, too, now lived on a
memory that began to fade like an echo without a voice to sustain it.
I say all this in the hope of conveying some understanding of what it
meant to be released again from the prison of my own skull; the gates of my
mind flung open once more, dormant nerves alive again, so that the whole
universe from which I had seemed to be a separate thing now seemed to be
inside, instead of outside my head. The moon, the sun, and the stars, the trees
and the people, I saw in that moment seemed to be as much a part of me as my
own hands and feet.
I shook hands with a friend, and suddenly felt a pain in the lower right
side of my abdomen. Not having seen him for some time I asked him how he was,
and he told me he had ruptured himself lifting a heavy packing case.
I was introduced to a man and a woman, total strangers to me. When I
looked at the head of the man I imagined for an instant that it resembled a
long, high bridge. When I looked at the woman, for a moment her face seemed to
me to be that of an old man holding a violin under his chin. When I laughingly
told them about it, the man said, “That is strange I am working on the
specifications for a new ridge over the Mississippi River. I am an engineer.”
The woman said, “Why, whatever made you say that? I never heard of such
a thing! I have been thinking of just such a man. I met him at a musical in
Paris, and he promised to give me lessons when I returned. I am planning to go
there now.”
A man was brought to see me by a friend who said, “Joseph, this man has
heard of your mental experiments and would like to talk with you about them.”
When I shook hands with him, a feeling of cold crept up my arm like a
cold draft that went all through me and chilled me from head to foot. I was
hard put to it to complete the handshake courteously, without betraying my
revulsion to the feeling.
During the meaningless formalities of opening a conversation, I kept
asking myself, “Now what does that mean? What does that feeling mean?” But my
mind went blank, and produced no answer. That was the answer, and I didn’t know
it at first.
The man said, “I thought perhaps you could tell me something of what I
ought to do. I have become confused in my mind, and the doctors can’t help me
with it. They don’t find anything wrong with me physically.”
I said, “Well, I can tell you what you are going to have to do, if you
don’t let up a little, and take better care of yourself. Your are going to have
to take a long rest.”
“Do you think I should quit working for a while?”
“Try it for a week,” I said, “And then let’s talk about it again. Take a
week off at once, and just rest. Then come to see me.”
But I never saw him again. My friend told me that he dropped dead at his
work, having arranged to finish the week out before taking a vacation.
Thus began a long period
of adjustment between myself as a physiological mechanism, of which I now had a
better knowledge, and the rest of the universe in connection with which there
was “something else” that appeared to be establishing a relation with my
imagination and memory through the involuntary nervous system.
It was not all clear sailing, and I proceeded with a caution I had not
exerted before, as I was determined both to test out its limitations, or
perhaps I had better say my limitations, and still avoid losing it again.
There appeared to be a “code” or language of “feeling” combined with
mental imagery by which I could learn to extend the range of my interpretation
of conditions. For example, the cold draft up the arm, and the inability to
imagine anything when death was near, and there was nothing that could be said
or done.
Then, too, there were lessons to be learned regarding the conditions necessary
to sustain a cooperative relation between the voluntary and the involuntary
nervous systems. Perhaps it was well not to spend time theorizing about it, but
rather merely to state a few of the facts.
Some of my friends thought I had suddenly developed a “conscience,” but
I had given that considerable thought, and I knew it was not what they meant by
the word. Conscience to most of
them was merely a matter of childhood training as to what was right or wrong;
and later in life, a social conscience based on public opinion and fear of
criticism, “what people would think,” and so on.
On the other hand, there is a private conscience of moral arbitration
that governs conduct even in solitude on the basis of self-respect, ideals, and
aspirations. With this type of conscience I was acquainted from childhood. No,
what I was now experiencing was a period of systematic training (call it
self-training, if you wish), in which my voluntary nervous system was obliged
to place itself in submission to the involuntary nervous system for
self-preservative reasons.
The bargain that intuition seems
to drive is that it will serve you if you serve it. You must obey your
intuition to cultivate it, to develop it, and to retain the use of it. This is
a voluntary act. In colloquial language, you have a hunch, and the hunch is an involuntary experience. Whether or
not you obey it is up to you. If it is a real hunch, or intuition, you will
inevitably regret it if you do not. These experiences will increase in frequency
if you obey them; and if you don’t they will cease altogether. This is evident
from case histories.
But to complete the transaction one must go further than that. One must
recondition the entire system of reflexes that constitute habit, so that neither
habit nor sensory stimuli nor the influence or suggestions of environments,
thoughts, desires, or purposes of other
people can interfere with the function or execution of your intuition of your
relation between your inner self and that universal “something else.” That must
come before all else—“or else,” in the final transaction.
If this had not been the case to some extent with myself previously, I
would have hit the drift with my hammer at the time when it would have exploded
the dynamite cartridge I didn’t know was there. In that and many other cases
where I was not alert to exercise any caution of intuition, I would not be here
to write this record if my involuntary nervous system had not been responsive
to “something else” besides my own will, knowledge, experience, or senses. My
arm refused to obey. On other occasions it had done just the reverse, by making
a sudden movement, to my own astonishment, to prevent an accident that I had
failed to prevent by a voluntary intuitive alertness.
So now this proclivity appeared to be undergoing a period of
calisthenics in a series of minor issues. I would start to smoke, and
experience a feeling not to do so. If I heeded it, well and good. If not, my
hand would drop or throw the match away before I could light up. I have never
felt required to stop smoking, but I was definitely stopped from inhaling the
smoke, limited in amount, and prevented upon occasion.
I have never been a drinker, and all my life have believed and practiced
moderation in all things. Therefore an occasional drink was always in order.
But now I had the occasional experience (apparently as a sort of involuntary
“exercise”) of having a glass in my hand but being unable to drink it.
One day I was asked to join a group on an excursion into the country,
and the prospect pleased me. A day in the country away from the city was
something that I would enjoy. I said, “Yes, I would be glad to go” already
framed and on the way to my vocal cords, but it came out, “No, I’m sorry. I
can’t go.”
“Why not?”
That stumped me. There was no logical reason. I wanted to go. I couldn’t
answer and did not feel like making false excuses to the one who was urging me,
so I merely smiled and shook my head. This met with an argument. Why did I
“spoil the party,” and so on. They thought me stubborn. I said I would be glad
to go, that I really wanted to go, but not just then. If they would wait until
the day after tomorrow, I would go; but not the next day.
So the whole trip was postponed in order to have me go with them. Next
day the train we would have taken was derailed in a gulley; three were killed
and many injured.
This was my wages, and countless other occasions like it, for “playing
the game” that developed and conditioned involuntary reflex actions to the
promptings of an intuitive feeling. If I had not allowed myself to respond to
the reactions that threw a match away before I could light a smoke, and stopped
my hand before it could raise a drink to my mouth, I would have been without
that hand and perhaps my eyes from an explosion, and I would have said what I
tried to say, “Yes, I would be glad to
go,” and we would all have been on the train that was wrecked.
And still, it is interesting to note that in “playing the game” above
mentioned, I have in the long run never been disproved of anything, but have
been merely reduced to moderation in all things. First, however, I had to
demonstrate a willingness to give up anything and everything, to do things I
did not want to do, and to refrain from things I did want to do—all to the end
of clearing the road for the greater
freedom.
Friends have thought that I was obeying an “impulse.” No, it is not that
. It is an intuitive determination to follow an inspired thought. The thought
is my own, an activity of my own mind and nervous system, but an activity that
would not take place unless it was induced by a feeling that constitutes
inspiration, and that emanates from “something else,” not my own.
I have utterly failed from the viewpoint of science and psychology to be
able to account for the results of experiments in field or laboratory without
that “something else.” I find by investigation that men who can do so on a
purely mechanistic basis are themselves merely talking machines confined to the
electrical recordings of their verbal memory. My radio is mechanistic also, but
it has to have a “broadcasting station”; and that is the “something else.”
I confess there are no “call letters” to the human radio “station.” I do
not know what or who or where the “vibrations” or radiant energy comes from
that is transformed into an activity of the imagination by means of selective
stimulation of memory elements, but I do know that, so far as I am concerned,
together with my associates through many years of research, on the basis of
experience, observation, and experiment, on an operational, not a theoretical
scientific, basis, we have established the fact for ourselves that man’s
survival and progress on a level superior to that of an intelligent animal
depends entirely upon his rising above the level of a talking machine and
establishing a relation as a “receiver” to “something else.”
Name it what you please,
it will still be the source of all inspiration, all great art, music,
literature, culture, and scientific discoveries. And it will still be what has
produced the world’s scriptures and spiritual concepts. All the evidence we can
educe today tends to establish the fact that one Jesus of Nazareth and His
apostles knew what they were talking about; and that the mental activity of
those who think otherwise is confined to the reflective operations of the
sensory and verbal memory. This is indeed a self-sufficient “mechanism,” and
that only, but without any dependable relation with truth or the rest of the
universe, unless it is responsive to the “something else” that has the power to
shape out of the sensory and verbal memory an activity of the imagination that
corresponds with or portrays not only past and present, near and distant, but
also future facts.
This is something that each individual may test out for himself. It is
possible for any and every human being to “prophesy,” if he will fulfill the
conditions. The survival of our Christian civilization depends on it. It cannot
survive on the basis of doctrinal beliefs or a legendary, speculative faith. It
must be an operative faith, rooted in a physiological inspiration of prophetic
intuition that will restore to mankind his heritage of spiritual gifts.
This is the inner nature of the present historic crisis, and I foresaw
this crisis and described it more than fifty years ago. The survival of our
Christian-American civilization and democratic way of life depends on it.
Christianity will survive, but not the speculative churches, and not our
democratic way of life unless history is supplemented by prophecy; and unless a
doctrinal God is supplanted by prophecy; and unless a doctrinal God is
supplanted by a living God and a phenomenal “something else” that can enter our
lives through our nervous system on a basis at least equal to that of the radio
broadcasting that now perpetually enters our ears.
I have for half a century since the early period that serves the purpose
of this commentary lived my life to discover, to prove, and to exemplify this
truth, and the conditions that make such a relation possible. But that is still
another story. And it includes the finding of Mary Lillian, the building of my
home and laboratories in the Valley of the Pines, the birth of my sons, and the
records of my search and research for the truths we understand and live by.
Chapter V
I felt that the time had
come to sink roots and grow the tree that might provide shade and shelter and
fruit for those who sought what I had found.
My unspoken prayer was “Show me the way, and I will follow it.”
Then, as in a dream, I saw a road stretch out before me. It entered a
city but did not end there. It led to the shore of a large body of water. Over
the water I saw a tiny finger of light, like the beacon of a lighthouse coming
from the opposite shore.
In my imagination it seemed that all I need do was to look and think in
order to acquire the power of locomotion in the direction of my gaze. So I
imagined myself flying, as a sea gull, out over the water, drawn onward by that
beacon of light.
As I neared the other shore, in this evening flight of imagination, I
saw a little stream that the light illuminated. From a small inland lake this
stream ran parallel with the shore through a pond into a shallow valley between
a hillside of timber on the left, and more gently sloping hills of pastureland
on the right.
I made a diagram of this visionary valley in my notebook, and wrote
beneath it, “This is my valley. I am now going home.”
Then I set out in search of it. I did not doubt for a moment that it
existed. But I did not immediately find it. I went to California to meet
friends who were to return east with me. We climbed to the top of one of the
Hollywood hills, where we put up a large wooden cross as a landmark.
I looked down and said to my companions, “Someday I am coming back here
again, and even now I can see how it will look then. All that we see from here
will be filled with streets and building, homes, streetcars. And at night it
will be ablaze with lights like the reflection of stars in a mirror. We could
stay here and become a part of all that progress. We could own land here and
become wealthy. But at what price? Are we to be as other men? Or shall we do
what other men have never thought of doing, and discover things they little
dream exist?”
I knew then that this was not the hillside of my vision. I knew that the
valley of my dream must remain undesecrated by the world for another half a
century.
It was Valentine’s Day, and I had promised to spend the evening with Mother
at the home of my sister Bertha and her family. They had built an apartment
building and lived in one of the apartments, on the second floor. A few friends
were expected to join us.
As I stood outside before going in, I saw someone in the lower
apartment. I caught just a glimpse of a pair of large, dark, calm eyes beneath
a clear, white brow. It was the face of a girl prematurely poised, like the
portrait of a virgin newly emerged from the chrysalis of a childhood that
lingered still like haunting, half-forgotten memories.
I thought: Where have I seen her before? But no answer was forthcoming,
save that I had never seen her before. No such person had been in the
neighborhood before I had gone west.
I shrugged to myself and dismissed the thought. But it was not to be
dismissed so easily. Those dark eyes haunted me. Moreover, they seemed to
challenge me, and I could not define why.
I thought: How deceiving their calmness, like the surface of two deep
pools in the starlight. What fire, what pride, what depths of hurt or loyalty
were hidden there?
A little later, when I was upstairs, I asked my mother, “Who lives below
here?”
She said, “A young friend of mine and her mother. She visits with me
often, and we sew together. I have been telling her about you, Joseph. I want
you to meet her and talk with her. She is such a fine, sweet girl, much too
young to be working all day every day helping to support her mother, and
working at home besides. She does not have the social life that she has been
accustomed to, and that she should be having right now. Perhaps you can help
her and advise what she ought to do. She would not ask it. She is too proud for
that. But you will do this for me?”
“How old is she, Mother?”
“She is sixteen or seventeen, but you would think she was older by her
actions. She has the poise of twenty, and a quiet determination that exceeds
mine. I often wonder at the nimbleness of her fingers and the things she is
able to do so quickly and quietly that you hardly know she has done them.”
“You have not yet told me her name, Mother.”
“Haven’t I, Joseph? Well, it is Lillian. I shall ask Bertha to invite her
up here this very evening, if she will come, and you will see for yourself what
I mean.”
So for Mother’s sake—and for absolutely no other reason—I found myself
facing a slim, dark-haired little lady whose proud but graceful carriage and
long, black eyelashes might have stepped out of the family portrait of a
southern cavalier planter and his children before the Civil War.
From her black eyes, so clam, so poised, so indifferent at first, there
now sparkled a flash of mingled amusement and defiance.
I exclaimed, “But your name should have been Mary!”
“Well,” she admitted, “my full name is
Mary Lillian.”
“Then what are you doing this far north?” I asked her. “You are a
southern girl, or I’ll never make another guess about anything.”
“Yes, that is true. I was born and reared in Kentucky, but now I live in
Chicago. I don’t see what my name has to do with that. There are lots of Marys
in the North.”
I laughed. “Of course that’s true. But I felt you were a southern girl
at the same time I knew from your eyes that your name should be Mary. If one
was right, I knew the other was right—and something else besides. You didn’t
want to talk with me, did you?”
At this she smiled, and said, “Well, I didn’t believe all they told me.”
I said, “I hope you didn’t!”
She added, smiling quizzically, “Because if it were all true—well, it
just couldn’t be true, that’s all. No one could know things like they say you
do. And if they did, I would not want to know them. Imagine how I would feel
right now if I thought you could know all my past, and what I am thinking, and
what is going to become of me!”
I said, “If I tell you the truth about all that, will you keep it a
secret?”
Surprised and suddenly serious, she said, “Certainly. I will not mention
anything you tell me, but I do not ask you to tell me anything.”
“Well, the truth is that I don’t know any of the things people think I
do, If I told you all about your past, I would not know what I was talking
about. I might sense your thoughts, but I don’t try and I don’t pry. If it is
given to me to see a vision for your future, it is not I, for I have no such
vision of myself. I am only a little messenger boy delivering a wireless
telegram. I don’t even open it to read it, and try to remember it and
understand it myself. Can you understand that?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll try.”
“Then maybe I can help by showing you what I mean. I don’t know anything
of your past, but it is given me to realize by intuition that from the day of
your birth up to now there has not been one single thing you have ever done or
thought that you need be ashamed of. I see tears, because you have lost things
in life that were dear to you. Through no fault of your own you have been
deprived of much that should have been yours, in home environment and
advantages. Your loyalty has robbed you of girlhood days and personal
advancement. As I told you, I don’t know what I am talking about, but you do.
Don’t you?”
She looked at me with wide eyes, her breath suspended. She whispered,
“Yes.”
“And to show you that details are possible, though we won’t go into
them, what happened to one of your three rings, the one you did not bring with
you?”
“Why didn’t you have it repaired?”
“Because it was hardly worth it. The ring wasn’t very valuable.”
“Oh, but it was. You knew those were real emerald, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” She said. “Yes, I knew it, but I don’t see how you did, since I
said it wasn’t valuable.”
“Well, there you are,” I smiled at her now. “I didn’t know it. I didn’t have the slightest idea that you even
owned a ring, or that the stones were emeralds, until it popped out of my
mouth, and I heard myself telling you about it. Do you begin to understand how
it is?”
She took a deep breath, and said, “It sounds so simple when you say it,
but it will take me longer than this to begin to understand how it is.”
“Well, all that matters right now, Mary Lillian, is that you realize
that I do not claim to know these things myself, but when they come to me, if
they do, they are true. That is the only reason for mentioning things that you
already know. Now I will tell you something I see that you don’t know. I am
only doing this so you will stop worrying like you sometimes, do, without
anyone knowing about it. You don’t need to worry about anything in your future.
About a year from now you will have a home of your own, and everything will be
changed.”
“You mean I will be married?”
“Yes, you will be married before that time.”
“Won’t I be in Chicago?”
“No, you will not be living in any city.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “But I won’t live on a farm! I’ve always said that
I would never marry a farmer! If I had to live on a farm, I would never marry
at all!”
“Well, I agree that you will never be a farmer’s wife, but you will live
in the country. It will not be a farm, exactly, but a beauty spot, with woods
and a stream, near a lake. You will have flower gardens all about, and if there
is any farming it will be only a kitchen garden for your own use, with pasture
for cows and horses, so that you will have fresh milk and riding horses. Of
course, you will visit the city from time to time, and later in life will
travel. The older you get, the more beautiful you will become; and the best
part of your life will come last.”
After that Mary Lillian was often present of an evening in a group with
her mother, my mother and sister, or a few friends. We grew to know each other,
but it was a growth as intangible as that of the roots of a tree. In silence,
and without even the touch of our hands, the unseen waves of understanding
played between us. When the conversation of others took a turn that amused us,
or bored us, or exasperated us, a brief glance at each other, a single flash of
eyes, fully conveyed our view to each other. We had expressed ourselves; we had
been understood; we were strengthened; we felt relieved.
With the summer ahead, I announced my intentions of going camping in
Michigan. I was going to follow the little beacon light of my vision and hunt
for my future home. The idea of escaping the city and camping in the woods by
the waters of Michigan so appealed to our little circle of friends that when we
took the boat from Chicago, on June 6, armed with tents, cots, blankets, and
other equipment, we had a crew of six men, three of whom brought along their
wives, and there was a woman besides who had agreed to undertake the cooking.
On the south side of White Lake we set up a small permanent camp for the
season. Other friends were to come from time to time, and for varying periods,
for their vacations.
Mary Lillian and her mother came over to spend the last two weeks in
June with us, and there, with the wind rustling in the pines, with the water
softly lapping the shore at sunset, with the fragment smoke of wood burning in
our campfire, the alchemy of nature completed her binding. Yet nothing was said
to reveal it. But when they left I knew the time had come. I was so lonesome
that everybody noticed it, and concluded the reason. A pall settled over the
whole camp. Finally, the others all talked it over behind my aback, and decided
that the best thing to do was to send someone across the lake to bring Mary
Lillian back again. But the moment I knew what they were planning, I put an
immediate stop to it. I saw a quaint and wistful vision of a little lady
stepping out of the pages of history to whisper, “Why don’t you speak for
yourself, John?”
So I went back to the city, myself.
When Mary Lillian saw me she did not ask why I had come. I held out my
hand and she placed hers within it. I said, “Come,” and she followed me out
into the summer evening.
Then she looked up into my eyes, and asked, “When?”
I said, “Now and forever.”
We were married on July 3. Then I brought her back to camp again.
I had placed a diagram and description of the kind of place I was
looking for in the hands of real-estate agents. It was not long before one of
them, Frank Pryor of Montague, told me, “You know, there is such a place as you
describe just north of White Lake on the Old Channel. Your description sounds
just like the old Redman estate. The creek runs through it, and there’s a stand
of pine timber on one hillside, pastureland on the other, with a house, barn,
pigsty, and woodshed. The house is nothing to brag about, but—“
“How much land is there?”
“Eighty acres.”
I said, “It’s mine. How much is it worth?”
“Hold on a minute,” said Mr. Pryor. “I’m just telling you that there is
such a place. But it’s not for sale.”
“Take me out to see it. I want to talk with the owner.”
“But no one lives there. The owner lives in St. Paul.”
“Then wire him an offer of thirty-five
hundred dollars cash for it. That is all I can raise just now.”
The offer was accepted. The place was ours. But it was the next March
17, St. Patrick’s Day, before we arrived bag and baggage, horse and wagon, to
take possession.
From the crest of the hill overlooking the valley we faced another
hillside covered with a stand of nearly virgin pine timber. At the foot of the
hill a little creek wound south, to the left, through marshland and groves of
cedar trees into a pond or bayou, beyond which could be seen and heard the
waves of Lake Michigan pounding onto shore and leaping high with outstretched
arms of white spray.
There was no mistaking it. This was it. The Valley of the Pines—and the
valley of my vision.
Then one day as spring slipped into summer, Mary Lillian whispered to
me, “It won’t be long now. He kicks like a boy. I think we’re going to have a
mechanic!”
The night watch began while an electrical storm was gathering its
forces. Thunder and lightning had always terrified Mary Lillian, but now there
was a different look in her eyes. As the hours crept by, I could almost see the
white mantel of motherhood descending upon her.
The whole house shook with reverberations of thunder, which somehow
seemed determined to emphasize this night as a special event in our lives.
At ten thirty the storm reached a climax in one terrific bolt of
lightning. It struck so near the house that the sound of the concussion that
nearly deafened us was simultaneous with the wake of the bright flash that lit
up Mary Lillian’s pale face. She caught her breath, and I thought for a moment
that she was going to scream, but she did not.
I rose to go to her, but the doctor pushed me aside, because he was
busy.
Joseph Junior had entered the world.
When the doctor had gone and she was resting more easily, with the baby
in her arms, we looked at each other without saying a word. I reached out my
hands and she understood instantly. She laid our son in my arms.
It was only a symbol, but I could not find the words to explain it. So
without saying anything. I raised the child toward the ceiling as if offering
it to the Most High. I heard only a murmur from Mary Lillian, but I knew that she
understood me, for she whispered, “Amen!”
Somehow, as time went on, the world beat a path to our door, until we
had to build a large gate across the road leading into the valley, and keep it
closed except to those who came by invitation.
Chapter
V—Page 5
We never allowed much publicity, but a friend would bring or tell a
friend who told a friend . . . and finally I began to receive letters from all
over the country, and other countries, questioning me along the line of mental
phenomena and intuition. And I, in turn, began questioning others about their
views and experience, until a large correspondence became part of my research,
in which I would ask others in all parts of the country to check whether there
was any foundation to things that I sensed.
I used to keep track of this correspondence by sticking pins in a globe
and on maps, in some seven hundred cities in forty countries. Often in the
evenings or late at night, I would look at those pins and let my eye be drawn
to one of them in connection with a feeling that someone was thinking of me, or
that someone was ill, or dying, or in trouble. If I could sense or figure out
who it was, I would write and ask them
to confirm it, if that was the case.
Sometimes, too, my eye would be drawn to some other part of the map,
where there were no pins, where there was no one I knew, or had ever contacted;
yet I would imagine a fire or a storm or a ship sinking, and then express this
to witnesses who would watch the news to see whether I was right.
Again and again through the months, the plight of people on sinking
ships, of miners trapped and doomed to death in mines, of planes out of
control, of individual tragedies forced themselves unsought upon the screen of
my mind. It ceased to be a problem of establishing the facts, but rather of
gaining and providing a better understanding of them, so that, perhaps, some
day—who knows?—there might be developed a sort of clearing house for amateur
“human radios,” as there now began to appear for wireless and amateur radio
“hams.”
Would it ever prove practicable for human sensitivity to be harnessed
and directed to do some good in the world, to prevent things that are sensed,
or to go to the rescue of men who would die unheard and otherwise without
help? Some system of sifting out false
thoughts would have to be developed, so that a thousand groundless fancies need
not interfere with the evaluation and function of one truly intuitive thought.
If we could “pool” our intuitions, one might supplement the other, and in the strength that comes from union a great
deal of good might be accomplished. But working alone, the only purpose that
has been served by a great many of my own intuitions was the satisfaction of my
own research and the enlightenment of a few friends.
For example, during the latter part of March 1912, Charley Abel was
helping me put a star clock on a little tower we had built on the hill
overlooking the Valley of the Pines. For several evenings we adjusted the
clock, checking the hours in connection with the advance of the date.
One evening I began to feel excited, and wondered why. It occurred to me
that if we watched closely and did not fall asleep between times, we might see
a meteor. I spoke of this to Charley, and we watched for three or four hours,
but nothing happened. Charley would doze off, and I would wake him, saying,
“Keep awake, Charley. This is something you will never see again.”
To myself I wondered why the feeling of excitement persisted over seeing
a meteor. I had seen hundreds of them flash across the sky.
But never before, and never since, have we seen anything like what we
saw toward midnight that very evening. From northeast to southwest, a large
ball of flame (which I assumed was a meteor) shot diagonally downward toward
Lake Michigan. I don’t know how close it was; therefore I don’t know how large
it was. We heard no sound of its striking anywhere, but in passing us a
crescendo of sound like high-pressure steam so thoroughly startled us that we
just could not take it standing up. Both of us sank down on the platform,
perhaps instinctively seeking protection behind the flimsy rails that were but
toothpicks, had we stopped to think.
Later, while still looking at the stars and talking about it, Charley
wanted to know how I knew we were going to see a thing like that.
I answered, “I didn’t.”
He said, “But you told me to watch for it.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know it would be like that. I only felt that
something was going to happen.”
‘What made you feel that way?”
What we were doing, I guess, working on this clock and watching the
stars. We were looking north. Now when I look south, it is different.”
“Yes. It’s warmer, isn’t it? It’s pretty cold up here still. Looking
south makes me feel warmer, even thinking about it.”
I said, “You stop too soon. When I look south feeling cold like this, it
makes me think of men freezing to death in the Antarctic. But there you are. If
we weren’t standing here, I wouldn’t be thinking of it. So what makes one think
of anything? Just because we are talking about it now, I can feel the thoughts
of a man in a little tent in the Antarctic. He is dying, and he has no fuel or
food. He’s trying to write, but can hardly hold the pencil in his hand. He has
been badly disappointed, and now he feels entirely hopeless. He has been to the
pole, but someone got there ahead of him. There were dog tracks and a tent with
letters in it.”
Charley asked, “Is he all alone?”
I said, “I think there were five in all, but now only three are left.
They are all wrapped up in some kind of sleeping bags. They don’t much care
what happens to them. They feel that they have suffered and sacrificed for
nothing.”
Suddenly, I felt horribly depressed, and said, “Oh, it’s too bad! Only
one of them is left alive right now. The other two are dead, and he knows it.
He could save himself, but he really doesn’t care. He knows it is the end, and
does not fear it, but he is heartsick. He keeps on writing, and I feel a pain
in my kidneys and bladder when I think of him. He knows that only a few miles
away is warmth and safety. He wonders if anyone can know his thoughts, and the
reason he wonders is because he senses that someone does.”
All of this made me feel so bad that I could not bear to think of it any
longer. I did not then have any idea who the man was, but my heart went out to
the man whose last thoughts were of those he loved, and of things he was too
much of a gentleman to write about, of disagreement among his men that was
aggravated by their disappointment, of a useless struggle. It was all so
depressing that a man would not have the resistance that would save him.
This was the beginning of my interest in polar research. We did not yet
have a radio, and I was not familiar with the news of world’s explorations. I
did not know for several months that all this was really true, and that the
name of the man was Captain Scott, or that Amundsen had reached the Pole ahead
of him.
But that very night I did tell the rest of my Valley, who bear witness
to it, of this experience. I told them that there had been too much needless
sacrifice in polar exploration.
I said, “But it will not be allowed to go on. Scientific developments
will enable men to fly over the poles in safety, and they will be able to
rescue men who call for help by wireless telephones. There will be no need for
more lives to be lost in polar research.”
For a while, my secretary Clarence Christian worked for George Mason,
Sr., as office manager of the Montague Iron works. Mr. Mason became a very good
friend, and I began to feel anxious about his health.
One day I told him that if he did not take a rest within three weeks, he
would be forced to go to bed, and perhaps never get out of it again. But he could not see his way clear to abandon
his work for a vacation, so he ended up at the hospital in Muskegon.
During this time Clarence carried on his work for Mr. Mason, and stayed
at his home. One day, Clarence became so nervous he asked me to stay with him.
As I entered the parlor in Mr. Mason’s home, I said, “Clarence, listen to this
peculiar music that comes to my mind.”
I sat at the piano and
played what I heard in my mind. It was so solemn and sad that it affected both
of us. Then suddenly I realized that I was playing a funeral march. I imagined
seeing a coffin and the remains of George Mason. My eyes filled with tears, and
when Clarence asked me what was the matter, I told him.
A few mornings later I was notified that if I did not come to see Mr.
Mason before noon, I would not be able to see him alive. It was impossible for
me to get there in the morning, because it was already past train time. I told
Clarence, “George Mason shall live till I see him. He cannot die. He shall not
die.”
I did not “pray” that he might live. I “willed” him to live until I
might see him once more. Perhaps my assurance was based on a feeling that he
would. Perhaps he would have lived until afternoon, in any case. But in all
probability George Mason himself had something to do with it. For when Clarence
and Charley and I arrived at the hospital, at three forty-five that afternoon,
he clasped my hand, and said, “I can go, now that you have come.”
My vision and the music that I had played on the piano in Mr. Mason’s
living room were materialized at the funeral.
For some time previous to the illness of George Mason, the large iron
safe in his office had not been locked fully. The tumblers had not been thrown
over. But one night after his death, Mr. Mason’s son accidentally closed and
locked the safe. It was then realized that no one but George Mason, Sr., had
known the combination. His personal papers pertaining to the estate were in the
safe, and it was now necessary that it be opened. As office manager and acting
secretary, Clarence made every effort to open the safe, but without success. As
a last resort, before breaking the lock, Clarence asked me to try to open
it.
This was the kind of spontaneous necessity that I was always watching
for as a basis for experiment. If George Mason had asked me, while living, to
see if I could open his safe “just for fun,” in order to see whether or not I
could do it, I would not have tried it, and would not have expected to succeed
if I had, unless I should sandpaper my fingers and try it as an exercise in
safecracking, But with Mr. Mason dead, with no one else knowing the
combination, and with the pressing need that it be opened, ideal conditions
were set up for a real experiment.
I took off my hat and coat and sat at Mr. Mason’s desk, just as he had
always done, bending over an open ledger. I asked Clarence to blindfold me so
that I would not be distracted by sight or by muscular effort to hold my eyes
closed. I asked him to wait long enough for me to fully think myself into
George Mason’s personality, then, while I was pretending to be Mr. Mason,
suddenly to ask me to open the safe.
This Clarence did; and scarcely knowing what I was doing, I turned to
the safe and, to his astonishment and mine, opened it in about ten seconds. But
I still did not know the combination, and immediately afterward could not have
done it again with my eyes open.
Chapter VI
One day in the presence of fifteen people I began to fear that one or
more of them would be in danger of drowning if they were not careful. I wanted to
warn them, and in so doing found myself saying more that I had expected to say.
I said that there would be five deaths from drowning in White Lake that
season—first two, then three. I asked them all please to be careful, so that
none of them would be included. But Dr. Montgomery and a woman were drowned.
That was two. Then the rest of the season passed without mishap, and I assumed
with the rest that I had been wrong about the five.
One evening I took Mary Lillian and the children to Montague to attend a
birthday party at the home of Joe Apoll. Joe was the one whom I had warned to
be careful not to be under anything heavy supported by a chain hoist, for I had
had a “daydream” of him in just such a position, and had “seen” a mental
close-up of a link of the chain that would break. He did remember my warning
when he actually found himself in just such a position, and stepped back, but
the link broke and Joe’s hand was crushed. He phoned me from the doctor’s
office and said, “Well, I’ve got it.” And I still have the broken link and an
X-ray picture that I took of Joe’s hand.
When we arrived for the birthday party, I was told that Joseph Hazeltine
had promised to come there to meet me for the first time, but he had been
called out on duty as deputy sheriff at the last moment. I was told later that
he had been nervous, and had said that he would “much rather have met Mr.
Sadony.”
At midnight or shortly after, I began to feel very nervous and
depressed. I went to the graphophone and played “Nearer, My God, to Thee,”
which to some of those present seemed a strange thing for me to select at that
stage of a birthday party. But as I looked around at the party, it began to
take on the aspect in my mind of a funeral. I began to feel bad, but said nothing.
I did not know how to interpret my feeling.
About two in the morning we left for home. As we passed along the shore
of White Lake, I looked at the rough water and listened to the wind that we
ourselves were bucking.
I said to Mary Lillian, “Wouldn’t it be terrible to be out there on a
night like this?” The feeling persisted, and I added, “What if two or three men
were out there hanging on to a boat? God help them, if they are!”
Mary Lillian shuddered, and said, “But surely—who else would ever go out
on a night like this?”
No one, of course—unless he had to. But Joseph Hazeltine “had to”—he and
two other men who had accompanied him on his duties. He was there instead of at
the birthday party meeting me. Was he thinking of me? Was it a coincidence that
we were talking about it, and shuddering as we passed the lake in the
dark?
But there were the “three,” found the next morning. Five deaths in the
lake for the season. Was this another “coincidence”?
However, as I had never met Mr. Hazeltine, the incident did not linger
long in memory at the time. So when a week later I was putting up a stovepipe,
I could see no connection when a thought came to me so strongly that I stopped
putting up the pipe and could not finish until I had written it down: “Fanny, I
was not murdered. It was an accident. Be happy. Someone will take my place in
four years.”
I looked at the paper and thought, “But what has that to do with me? Why
should I write a thing like that?”
Then something within me seemed to urge, “Sign your name to it.” So I
signed it “Joe.” Still, it meant nothing to me, and I put it away.
Two months later, Mrs. Apoll visited us with a friend. She introduced her
as Mrs. Fanny Hazeltine. Instantly everything connected in my mind. It was her
husband, Joe Hazeltine, who had wanted to meet me, and who had been drowned
instead. Now I realized that she always felt he might have been murdered. I got
out what I had written her two months before, without knowing who “Fanny” was.
Mrs. Hazeltine wept when she read it, and swore that she would never
marry again.
I said, ‘Oh, but you will. And his name will be Joe too!”
Everybody connected with this affair seemed to be named Joe. Another
“coincidence,” of course. Because four years later she married again and was
very happy. Her husband’s name was Joe.
But was it a coincidence that I felt impelled to write, and to say what
I did? Is life and everything in it a “coincidence”?
One day while I was writing a letter I heard (or thought I heard) a
distinct knock at my door. After a moment of reflection and no further sound, I
concluded that a blue jay or a woodpecker had been pecking at the window, and
continued with my letter.
A few moments later the sound was repeated; this time there were three
distinct knocks at my door. For confirmation I glanced at my dog. He did not
stir, as he surely would have done, had there really been a knock.
Yet I had “heard” a knock. So I concluded that my ear must have
reflected the memory of a knock in response to some “thought.” I determined to
test this idea. Who might want to communicate with me by “mental radio”? For
the first time in a long while I thought of my father, so I turned over the
reign of my imagination to his memory, and proceeded to act out my part in all
seriousness.
I went to the door, opened it, let in an afternoon sunbeam, and
pretended that it was my father. I said, “Well, Dad, I’m glad you have come.
Sit down with me for a while. Is there something I can do for you?”
Then I took my pad and pencil and wrote down what I imagined my father
was saying: “Joseph, it is three o’clock in the afternoon of August first. I
wish you would build Mother a little nest of three rooms overlooking your
valley, so that she may be happy there the last sixteen years of her life. Then
I will come and take her with me.”
I said, “Okay, Dad, I’ll start today.”
“Thank you, Joseph. I’ll come again.”
Then I snapped myself out of what seemed like a bit of idle imagining,
and went back to finish my letter.
When I came to clear my desk and throw my notes and a bit of doodling
into the basket, I could not leave the room. I rescued the notes of my
imaginary conversation from the waste basket and phoned down for Charley to
hitch up the team and be ready to help me, because I was going to haul enough
gravel and sand out of Lake Michigan (abut two blocks away) to make concrete
blocks for a three-room house as a Christmas present for Mother, who was still
living at East Lansing with Cristina and Bert King.
Charley and the rest thought that we couldn’t do it by Christmas, but I
was determined to try, and Mary Lillian was determined to help me. She even
climbed up on the roof with me, two days before Christmas, and we finished
shingling it in a snowstorm.
Mother knew nothing about all this, but next day she came from East
Lansing unexpectedly to visit us. We gave our two small sons a gilded key and
told them to show grandma her Christmas present.
The inside was ready for her, all lit up, a goose in the oven—there were
even books on a shelf for her to read. When she saw it she fainted. And when I
had revived her, I asked her why she felt that way about it.
She said, “Oh, Joseph, you should not have done it!”
“But why, Mother? What makes you say that?”
“Because you can hardly afford it yet, Joseph. And I am responsible for
it. One afternoon I went to church and prayed. It was like a complaint. I
prayed, thinking that if only your father were here, he would build me a little
nest of three rooms that I could call my own. That was all I wanted. And now
you have done it.”
“When was that, Mother? When did you do that?”
She thought a moment, then said, “It was on August first, your Joseph’s
birthday.”
“Was it in the afternoon?”
“Yes. About three o’clock.”
I said, “Well, Mother, maybe Dad is around here, after all.
The intuitive life is not without suffering, but the suffering is that
of sensitive nerves exacerbated by discord or tragedy, among other causes. For
in order to carry this experiment as far as I did, you must be able to sensitize
your nerves and mental clearing house so that the least sound, even that of a
pin dropping on a sheet of paper, shocks you as much as an explosion, and
nothing less will shock a positive man of intellect who becomes calloused and
deaf to all but his objective senses.
I found that at no time was intuition more alive and active than when
body and mind were either wholly absorbed and coordinated in creative labor or
exhausted with fatigue. In the first case, the intellect of reason and memory
were too busy to interfere with intuition, and in the second case, too tired to
do so. Therefore I kept pads of paper and pencils everywhere—in boats, in cars,
in ships, by every chair where I was likely to rest, and by the side of my bed.
I made it a rule that intuition came first, before any and all other
considerations, and that I would always write it down if it was not something
that I could immediately execute. If my hammer was raised in the air to strike
a blow, or a forkful of food on the way to my mouth at table when a thought was
induced by an intuitive feeling, the nail was not to be hit by the hammer, or
the food was not to reach my mouth, before I had procured pad and pencil to
record it. I stood guard at he “wireless” receiver of my brain night and day,
save when unconscious from sleep or sheer exhaustion—and even then could not
escape the position I had assumed.
I would wake up out of a deep sleep to find myself reaching for pad and
pencil, and on many occasions in the morning found things written there that I
had absolutely no recollection of writing. More than five million words
accumulated in this way. I did not “think out” one word of it, and was often
hard put to it to comprehend what my hand had written. But it was definitely
not “automatic writing,” so called. It was intuitive writing. The difference
between the two is that between night and day.
I could fill several volumes with experiences stemming from thoughts
that came to mind while working, or from the wandering of imagination when
relaxed and tired after a day of hard work.
Our home would have burned down if I had not obeyed intuition one day. I
sent for three large fire extinguishers at a time when running water was
available, and the weather being warm, we had no fires. It was thought to be an
unnecessary move just at that time, but I carefully filled them and placed them
in accessible positions.
That was at eight o’clock in the evening, after supper. Exactly six
hours later, at two o’clock in the morning while I was working in my shop, I
looked out the window and saw flames through the window of our bedroom. A lamp
had been burning there, as electricity was not at the time available. It was
the first time anything like that had happened to us, and it was the first time
I had ever made such deliberate and apparently unseasonal preparations for it.
I had to let everything else go until I had prepared those fire extinguishers.
I canceled plans to go out in the evening and stayed home quietly working in
the shop, in sight of the window through which the flames were visible. But
until I saw the flames, it never occurred to me to expect them. I did not “foresee” what would happen, but I
had unconsciously prepared for it. And as time went on, I discovered
that this was one of the most important aspects of the intuitive life.
I could see more clearly than ever before what the trouble was with so
many people who might just as easily have avoided tragedy, as I did, not only
on this occasion, but on many others. My fire extinguishers made quick shift of
the blaze. We all possess a “radio” in our minds but seldom use it. Few ever
learn how to use it, and many give up and cease trying when they fail.
You cannot force it. You must coax it to perform, and then accept what
comes to you, even if it is nothing. It is not an “organ” that you can use at
will, like our eyes. It is like radio antennae with which you may attempt to
tune in, to “seek, knock and ask.” Then—who knows?—you may receive a beautiful
program that will illuminate and bless the rest of your life. But beware of
this: if you tune in to the world of human thoughts, you shall be a slave to
other men who dominate by forceful, positive thinking.
If, however, you use your “human radio” to tune in to the Great
Broadcaster of Life, you will serve the purpose of life by responding, not to
the skeptical intellectual demands of men, but to those who also tuned in to
the Central Broadcasting station of Mankind.
This is the foundation of human brotherhood—the brotherhood that is
impossible save between intuitive men, men who know each other before they
meet, and who cannot be separated even by death.
Our bodies are but the chemicals of minerals and vegetable constructed by
nature to hold, to receive, and to be animated by the soul, which is that part
of radiant energy we call God, a law of nature that may be symbolized by a
child, chalk in hand, writing its name on a blackboard. The chalk is nature,
and what it means is the child. Nature is the chalk, but God moves within; that
is the Everlasting Name nature has written in its mystery.
The spirit of man is but
an echo of the soul—that repeats but knows not its meaning. The spirit is the
graphophone record repeating answers to problems about which it knows nothing,
like my psychologist friends with their textbook knowledge—a parrot, a book, or
even a prayer of mere words in a language you do not understand, though you
repeat it daily for a lifetime. But let the soul express one thought, and poets
will write of it for centuries.
For the soul expresses itself in whatever medium it finds available—in
music, in color, in form, in the flesh of a man, in tears, in emotion, in love,
in prayer—playing upon the strings of whatever instrument you are able to
furnish. This is inspiration, intuition, prophetic vision. And this is what the
psychologists had eliminated from their consideration, because in observing the
behavior of the human graphophone, machine, the human radio and television are
automatically shut off.
The soul has not got a chance to “put words into your mouth” if you put
them there yourself by playing the graphophone records memory, by planning and
thinking what you shall do or say.
No, It was definitely impossible to live the intuitive life on the basis
of intellectual planning. So I would apply my intuition to a continued search
for truth, without hope or expectation of any particular objectives or of
financial gain. I would concern myself with economics and industrial problems
only to the extent that it was necessary to make the research possible; and
thus far things have worked out all right from intuitive beginnings, without
worrying about it. I began to see a practical aspect to the faith of the old
that “the Lord would provide,” if one obeyed the intuitions by which the Lord
might find it necessary to enlist your help in so doing.
The object of my study was the mind of man. This obviously included the
whole universe. Not one aspect of science, philosophy, or religion could be
excluded from consideration. To establish the truth of the mind of man, I would
have to build a new bridge between science and religion, for I saw that all
previous attempts to do this had rested on quicksands of purely intellectual
speculations. Research in the physical sciences and in the mental sciences must
proceed hand in hand on a basis of experience and experiment. One glimpse into
the future staggered me. The task was more than I could do. I could only begin
it. I dared not look again. I kept my eyes glued to the ground only one short
step ahead. Enough that I lived today intuitively in preparation for tomorrow.
Enough if I contributed one small but essential block to the structure of a new
generation that would tax the skill and specialties of the world’s greatest
minds.
As time passed it became evident that many chains of events were
unfolding here and there throughout the world, and interweaving little threads
of thought that seemed to pull on my mind.
One evening, for example, I felt inclined to sit at the organ in the
little chapel we had built, and improvise some music. I had spent the day in
the world of intellect making a delicate magnetic instrument that I had
designed for geophysical research, and before attempting to answer some of the
seven or eight thousand letters that had accumulated, I felt the need to woo my
way back into the world of intuition again.
I drifted into a strange melody that I had never played before. There
was an oriental sadness in it, and suddenly I felt the presence or thoughts of
Srikrishna Chatterjee, as if he were dead or in a coma. I had not heard from
him or thought of him in a long while.
I wrote him about this and received answer that he had been at the door
of death, but was now better. He informed me, however, that it had been
predicted in India that he had not long to live.
In explaining my experience, I wrote him: “About the middle of February,
while in my chapel, I seemed to feel your presence, just as if you were in that
sphere which hovers between death and life, a living dreamland, the sphere
which brings me so many thoughts—as if you were in the next world, but still
anchored by a silk thread to this one. I began to fear, for I felt that you had
something still to complete.”
As for the prediction that he had but a short time to live, I told him
that I disagreed with it. In answer to it, I predicted that he would recover,
make a long journey, and visit many people before his time would come.
Three years later he wrote me: ”The journey was undertaken by me in
October. I was seized with a desire to see my second boy and his two children
and wife at Nasirabad, which must be about fifteen hundred miles from this
place. I went to Calcutta, and thence proceeded. I visited Arraha, Pushkar,
Chitor, Udaipur, Ujjain, and eight other places in the course of my journey.”
The consequence of this journey had repercussions for me that I did not
then dream about. Wherever Mr. Chatterjee went, my letter went with him. He
presented himself as living testimony that the prediction of his early death
(which had been made in India) was erroneous, and that my prediction for his
recovery and journey, made three years before, was being fulfilled. Moreover, I
had predicted that Indian would attain her freedom in 1948, and that by 1940
seven of her provinces would already have gained emancipation. This prediction
was privately made, but it spread more widely than I had anticipated.
One day I was looking at a photograph of Tagore that hangs among others
of my friends, in my study. I recalled Frederick Fisher’s description of Tagore
as a stolid mountain compared to Gandhi, who was a rushing torrent. And I was
thinking of Frederick’s account of a conversation that had taken place in his
presence.
Tagore expressed his desire to remove all idols, saying, “If we can do
without them, even the lowest can do likewise.”
Gandhi replied, “No, you cannot do this. Idols are the poor man’s
crutches. They cannot walk without them until you supply them strong limbs of
understanding.”
Now I looked at Tagore’s picture, thinking. “Can you do that,
Rabindranath? Can you supply the poor of India with limbs of understanding
strong enough to dispense with their crutches of idols?”
I imagined a sad expression coming over Tagore’s face, even in the
photograph, as if he was saying, “Joseph, I am only a poet. But I try also to
teach with my melodies. I am not too strong, myself.”
Then I saw a little black ribbon pinned to his picture. It was
imaginary, of course. When I looked again it was gone. But every time this
happened to me, I put a real black ribbon, a tiny one, where I thought I had
seen one. For in every case the person in question had not lived more than six
months. Five months and two weeks later, Rabindranath Tagore was gone.
What is the source of
this “vision,” this “signal”? What tells me that a friend is soon to pass on?
More than a score of little black ribbons on photographs of friends bear silent
witness without explaining a thing. Among them were Ella Wheeler Wilcox and
Marie Corelli, Theodore Roosevelt, and, years later, his wife, Edith, with whom
I corresponded until she died; Abdul Baha and Anton Lang, the Conan Doyles and
Sir Oliver Lodge, Rudyard Kipling and the explorer Amundsen, General John
Pershing, and Lieutenant Governor
When 1940 saw the liberation of seven provinces,
and 1948 the freedom of all
Then one day I stood looking out
the window in the Valley, for a few moments indecisive, tired, uncertain what
to do next, uncertain whether it was worth while to do anything. I thought:
This is not me. This is not the way I feel. Some other ‘program’ has blotted
out my own on my ‘radio.’”
I wondered what it could
be. I stood there, groping with my mind, just like insects I have watched
groping in all directions with their antennae, searching for some recognizable
environment. It seemed dim and far away, so in order to reach it I became more
and more sensitive. And in that moment Mary Lillian came quietly into the room,
but here was a slight click of the door latch as she opened the door. To me it
was like a gunshot, and for a moment I thought I had been shot. I clutched my
side and staggered. Mary Lillian ran to me, pale and frightened.
What’s the matter, honey? What is it?”
I said, “It’s nothing. I was thousands of miles away, that’s all. I
really thought I was shot.”
She said, “I’m sorry. I frightened you.”
I said, “No, It was not you. That was just a coincidence. Or was it? I
don’t know what it is yet. Just forget it.”
Later, Mary Lillian told me, “I think I know what it was now. Were you
thinking of Gandhi? I’ve just heard about it over the radio. You went through
the same thing in your mind.”
Well, I cannot say that with certainty. I was not consciously thinking
of Gandhi at the moment. I was still trying to identify the thoughts that
distressed me. The experience brought me to earth with such a bang that I
dropped the whole thing from my mind like a bad dream, and went to work in my
laboratory.
But it lingered. Nothing exactly like that had happened to me before.
Was it just another “coincidence”?
I wondered.
When my family and I were working with Frank R. Adams in our local
dramatic club, helping to put on plays, the venture culminated in building The
Playhouse in Whitehall. This was made to pay for itself in between times by
renting it for other purposes; and eventually Frank installed moving-picture
equipment. It became a movie theater, and for a long time my boys managed it
for Frank. Usually we all went down in the car early enough to open up the
theater and stayed through both shows, as one of the boys had to be on hand
till the end.
No one but my family and Meredith, who assisted me in the experiment,
knew why I spent night after night in the orchestra pit at the drums, adding
the pianist (who was sometimes my son Arthur; in providing sound effects during
the days of silent films. And no one knew why I doggedly stayed there through
two shows each time.
My procedure and the reasons were simple. I watched the picture through
the first performance, studying it carefully to provide the right drumming
effects, and carefully noted the repertoire of emotions each play induced in
the audience. I was there to see the audience, not the picture; and from my
vantage point in the orchestra pit I could see without being seen, though I was
making a lot of noise in order to be heard all evening.
My little research project took place during the second run of the
picture. Throughout the second performance my eyes were closed. I looked
neither at the picture nor at the audience. Meredith sat where he could see
both the picture and the audience, and near enough to me so that we could
converse in whispers when necessary. I made it a practice to try to see the
picture through the eyes of the audience instead of my own, during that second
performance. Having provided myself first with a memory of the picture, I then
allowed the emotions of the audience, amplified by the number of people
present, to recall the various scenes at the proper time.
Thus for hours, week after week, I practiced sensing the emotions of a
small “mass” of people (varying from one hundred to five hundred
people)—emotions that were somewhat unified and coordinated by a common object
of interest and concentration. So when the Empress of Ireland sank, for example, I was perhaps better able
than another to recognize the combined emotion of a hundred people facing the
certainty of death.
But when it is a prevision, what then? I felt the shadow of the Lusitania disaster casting itself
long beforehand. I did not sense the name Lusitania, but described it in terms of the shock it would bring
to the rest of the world. I predicted it for the first week in May 1915. I felt
the emotional reaction of the public several months beforehand.
But how could such a thing possibly be known? People asked me, “How did
you know?”
And how many times was I forced to repeat, “I did not know.” Knowledge
is of the intellect. Prophecy is not knowledge.
I don’t know why such things came to me, when it did no good to anyone,
and did not serve to prevent disaster.
Of far greater service was the night I had an impulse to get out the car
and drive to town and back with Mary Lillian and the boys. When I told them to
get on their things, they said, “Swell! We’ll take a midnight ride to town and
back! But why? Everything is closed in town. Any special reason?”
No. Reason is knowledge. The intellect again. I had not the least
knowledge why. But I had to obey “or else” begin to lose the intuition that
grows stronger only by exercising itself in the muscles as well as the brain
and imagination. One has to carry them out if anywhere within reason—these
strange inner urges that I had determined to follow to the end.
So we went. And ahead of
us on the road was a pile of leaves such as drift up like snow impelled by the late
fall winds. I have driven through dozens of windrows of leaves like that. But
this time I stopped the car with the headlights on the pile of leaves and asked
my boys to kick through it. Beneath the leaves was a log big enough to have
wrecked our car, had we not stopped. The boys carried it to the side of the
road, and as we stood there trying to decide whether to go on to town or not,
since my urge had vanished with the removal of the log, a car speeded through,
going sixty mile an hour at least. It plowed through the leaves where the log
had been, and the group of teen-agers in it, on their way home from a show,
yelled a greeting to us as they passed.
A useful if thankless
job on our part. The life of half a dozen youngsters could hang on a “hunch” to
drive to town and back, in the middle of the night. But to foresee the sinking
of an unknown ship, and to sense the shock of public reaction, was of no help
whatever to anyone.
But all such experiences
are not fruitless. Often a connection came to light later that was wholly
unknown to me at the time. A striking example of this occurred later in
connection with one of our worst storms on Lake Michigan.
While listening to the
wind, I “imagined” and described to several witnesses the plight of a sailing
vessel, a schooner, with masks broken, and sails torn to shreds. The crew
abandoned hope and were expecting to go down with the hull when it sank.
In order to see if we
could sight anything, six of us went over to the lakeshore. The wind and sand
cut our faces, and we could hardly stay on our feet. We saw nothing.
One of our party, Jack,
who knew ships, said he did not think there was any such schooner as I had
described left in the Great Lakes trade. But even if it were true, what could
we do about it? Why my apprehension, which persisted for hours, that took me
out into the storm when I might have stayed where it was warm and dry?
Other ships were in
danger; one of our own boats went over in White Lake, and my sons had been getting
it in before joining us at Lake Michigan. A ship to the south of us sank. A
hundred ships could go down in this storm, and I would not know it or feel any
more than a general concern. It was this one imagined schooner, like a bird
with broken wings that fretted me as if I ought to be able to do something
about. It. But what? There
was not a boat within miles that could have survived an attempted
rescue, even if I could have proved that the whole matter existed outside my
imagination.
But not until Meredith
asked me if I thought there was any hope for them did my mind leave the general
direction of where I felt the schooner to be, and “scan” the rest of the lake.
Finally, I said, “There
is a big freighter ‘way to the north. It looks like a long black cigar. It is
the only ship that could save them, but it is heading out of the storm in
another direction. There is only one slim chance for that schooner. If the
captain of the ship follows the hunch he ought to be feeling right now, he will
change his course. Then he might sight them.”
It seemed pretty
hopeless, even granting it were all true. But we all threw our thoughts at the
captain of an imaginary freighter like a long black cigar, hoping to strengthen
the “hunch” that he ought to feel, if there were really a sailing vessel out
there with only hours left to stay afloat.
But how many follow
their hunches? What captain in his right mind would turn back into a storm at
the command of a feeble little twitch somewhere in his brain or spine or solar
plexus? With a wind so loud that his second officer would have to shout to be
heard, could he be expected to hear the unspoken prayer of men facing death, or
the thoughts of strangers standing on the shore more than a hundred miles away?
But there was a connection, and I did not know it. The captain of the
freighter, that long black cigar, was not only a “reality”; he was my old
friend Captain Charles Mohr, to whom I had predicted that he would sail a ship
before he ever laid hands on one, whom I taught to follow his hunches,
predicting that if he did so he would be honored above all other Great Lakes
captains, and go down in history and the annals of navigation on the Great
Lakes. He had years before agreed with me to follow his hunches as an
experiment, and let me know the results.
One of the results was not only one but five lake rescues, saving
twenty-seven lives. But this was the climax of his career. For this he was to
be honored as the first Great Lakes captain ever to receive the Congressional
Medal. Here was the one man afloat on the lake in that storm who not only could
experience a “hunch,” but who, by agreement with me, made a practice of obeying
it when he did.
Captain Mohr has passed on, but he still lives in the memory of all who
knew him as a man who stood alone in the hour of his decision, upon which the
lives of seven men depended. He stood alone, not only against the judgment of
his men, but against the better judgment of his own intellect. He did respond
to the thoughts and needs of other men, not only on one but on many occasions.
I remember the time when a young man told me how he stood, when a boy, on
the Michigan Avenue Bridge in Buffalo, watching the then magnificent ship Merida come in, and wishing that
someday he could be a captain of a fine ship like that. I told him that he
could; that if he sincerely wished it, he was prophesying for himself, and that
if he followed his intuition and always obeyed his “hunches” he not only could
be the captain of a ship like that, but make a name for himself to be honored
with the finest recognition ever to have been received by a Great Lakes
navigator.
He became a captain, and his first ship was the Merida. I received a letter from him later:
That afternoon that we had the talk together you said that after I
got home there would be a letter for me from Chicago from a heavy thick man by
the name of J.—John, you thought, and through him I would get a good job
sometime in March. But before that I would have two other offers which I would
take but wouldn’t keep. Well, it all came to pass within a day or so from the
time you had predicted, except that the man’s name is Jeremiah, instead of
John. You said I was to sail a big boat successfully, which I did, and that I
was to have a little girl born. I’ve got that too.
Offer No. 2, as per your prediction. You said I would have an offer from
the East in February, also that it would be from Buffalo. If you remember I
said more likely from Cleveland. You said possibly so, but every time you
mentioned it you said Buffalo, just as you said it would, and I have accepted
it.
When Captain Mohr received the Congressional Medal and his five lake
rescues were cited, he sent me a clipping, and wrote, “My reasons for sending
this to you is because it is just what you told me would happen over fifteen
years ago, and I have not forgotten.”
This is but one instance among many in the experience of one man besides
myself. He is but one of several thousand witnesses in the files of my own
mental experiments. And there are thousands of others in the world today who
have had similar experiences, and who, even at the moment that I write this,
and again as you read it, know the truth of such things beyond any possible
doubt.
In the face of all the evidence that is available in the world today,
the opinion of men who doubt because they have had no such experience deserves
the same consideration as the skepticism of the Kentucky mountaineer, who
refused to believe that radio was true because he did not possess one.
The experience of others will not convince you like an experience of
your own. It is not something you can learn from books. I have hoped to show
you the way to find out for yourself, but a better understanding of your own
experience is in comparing them with mine.
The intuitive life itself has no problems save those that vanish in
solving themselves. For it is not really necessary to understand everything, so
long as intuition succeeds in translating itself into successful action.
Obedience to the promptings of intuition removes by prevention all problems
that disobedience would create.
But he who sets out to live the life of intuition in collaboration with
the intellect (a modern necessity) finds himself obliged to correlate and
harmonize science, philosophy, and religion. He must harness intuition by
“logic, reason, and common sense.” And in so doing he encounters the critical
demands of the intellect to provide adequate explanation and verbal
representation. And he must squarely face and answer for himself by experience
the questions: “Is man a mere electrical recording machine?” “Is he also a
‘radio’?” And if the second, “What is the source of the broadcasting he
receives?” Is it possible to ‘talk without thinking’? (i.e. to by-pass the
intellect), and if so, “What ‘puts the words into one’s mouth’?”
From childhood I had found it necessary to “stop thinking” in order to
“imagine” correctly; but as I grew older I found that, if I stopped thinking
while talking, word were actually “put into my mouth” and I would say things
that were verified as correct without having the least idea what I was talking
about, and without requiring any exercise of imagination or understanding on my
part.
A similar phenomenon occurred in writing. I could take a blank piece of
paper and write on it something I never knew or thought of before. But it was
definitely not so-called automatic writing. I simply said or wrote what popped
into my mind at the instant; and it popped out of my verbal memory instead of
my memory of scenes and pictures (as in the case of “imagining’ things), but I
would not know what I was going to say or write next. And I was always
astonished on reading it over afterward, or hearing the reaction of my
listener, to discover that it not only “made sense” but was something that
could be verified.
The trouble with most people is that they shape things to suit
themselves, according to past acquirements, whereas we should permit truth to
come to us, crystallizing in its own shape. We should then try to figure out
what the shape is.
Some “feel” things without seeing any mental “pictures.” Some have vague
“hunches” that act only at forks in the road, to aid them in determining which
direction to take at the moment, but without providing them with any clear
vision concerning their goal or the means of attaining it.
Some visualize their ideals in all, then carry them out one by one,
prophesying for themselves without realizing it. And some sense things only
through symbols, which constitute a universal language of understanding based
on memory element of sensory experience in nature. The intuitive dreams and
“imaginings” of this type of person will seldom be literally true. The truth is
embodied in symbols that must be interpreted.
The history of human experience is filled with cases of all kinds, but
in my investigation of these things I have personally experienced all types of
mental phenomena without finding it necessary to take the word of anyone else
for anything. I have seen thousands of “false pictures” in my “mind’s eye” of
things that have actually happened, of things happening at the moment, and of
future events. But often I see a symbol that I must interpret, and in talking
with my friends of the symbols that come to me, it has often been the case that
they knew exactly what I was talking about when it was still a mystery to me.
One day, for example, I was talking with a man in connection with whose
initials I imagined that I saw the symbol of a silver frog. Two common conceptions
of my memory, “silver” and “frog,” were thus compounded by my intuition in an
apparent but vain effort to communicate something to my intellect. I could not
make sense out of it, nor could the man in question at the time of our
conversation.
But later he informed me, “You know that silver frog you spoke of? Well,
the two middle names that I never use, save for the initials, originally meant
a silversmith and a tadpole.”
Another case was my
first conversation with a Mr. H. of Grand Rapids. I told him that when I shook hands with him I
saw mentally many houses in construction, but it puzzled me a great deal
because there did not seem to be any evidence of their being occupied at any
time.
This didn’t make sense to me, but Mr. H. and his friend Mr. W. were very
much amused, as one of the projects that Mr. H. was then interested in
launching was a new kind of toy, a peculiar kind of building blocks with which
children could easily construct substantial houses of several miniature sizes,
depending on the number of blocks used.
Another source of confusion in many experiences of mental phenomena is
the difficulty of discerning between “thoughts” of people and events that
actually take place. The effect of the “mass mind” must always be guarded
against by an intuitive person in his relation with public affairs.
In my own experience I found it necessary to attempt to shut out
“thoughts” altogether on such occasions, in order to get at the “facts.”
Is “impersonal vision” possible?
When I was asked if I could “imagine” or describe something that was going on
in the world elsewhere, and specifically when I was asked if I could describe
the greatest crime being committed in the city of Chicago at the moment (and it
turned out that I was correct), to what extent was telepathy involved? Did some
human mind or minds have to be seeing or remembering? Was my imagination of the
crime an “impersonal vision,” or was it induced by the activity of the
criminal’s mind?
Does human memory survive death, and of so, is it possible for
disembodied minds to witness earthly events and to induce a representation of
them in the imagination of a living person? Can the imagination of a living
person envision distant senses or inanimate objects without the aid of
witnessing mind, living or dead?
Are conclusive answers to these questions possible on the basis of the
experimental evidence available? I do not think so. One may believe what one
will. Only this fact remains: the “vision” is there. Your “human radio” and
“mental vision” are working. But you do not know with certainty who or what is
broadcasting what you receive; and you do not know where it is coming from.
Consider the following experience to which well-known witnesses are
still living and available, though two are dead. We were on “location” during
the filming of one of a number of moving pictures in which I was interested. A
number of us, including the director, the late James Cruze, were sitting on a
bench in a park near Hollywood, while preparations were being made for the nest
scene.
There was an old man, an extra hired for the day, tapping the ground
idly with the point of his cane. He was out of hearing, and also deaf. On the
spur of the moment, I said to the others on the same bench with us and in
adjacent chairs, “Do you want to see me make that old man draw a triangle in
the sand with his cane, and then make a figure in the center of it?”
Everyone on the bench and within hearing held his breath almost, under
the impression that I was concentrating as an experiment in trying to influence
the old man telepathically to do what I had said. I was thinking about it, of
course, and watching the old man intently. But the thoughts in my mind, far
from being an effort to “will” the old man to do as I said, were somewhat as
follows: “Now what made me say that? I have put myself on a spot, and without
any good reason for doing so.”
For a moment or two the old man continued his tapping. Then suddenly
taking a new grip on his cane, he began making aimless and disconnected dashes,
lines instead of dots. In another moment he dragged the cane back and forth in
zigzag line. H ended up by making a clearly defined triangle, and then
proceeded to interest himself in drawing something inside it.
Everyone present thought it was a clearly defined case of telepathic
influence or “thought transference,” without the conscious cooperation or
knowledge of the subject. Of more interest to me were the reactions of the
individuals who had witnessed the little performance. They ranged from
excitement to amazed incredulity. But the entire episode ended in a burst of
laughter, because of the tone of voice in which Jimmy Cruze uttered one of his
characteristic and good-humored but unprintable curses, when he saw what the
old man had done.
He capped a vivid description of what he would be by the exclamation,
“By God! You did it!”
I said, “Hold on now, Jimmy. Don’t jump to any conclusions. I may have
done it, but I’m not convinced of it.”
This seemed to astonish him more than the little experiment. He said,
“What are you talking about? I don’t get it. Didn’t I see it?”
“Think it over. Did I really make the old man carry out my whim of the
moment, or did I merely predict what he was going to do?”
But the next scene was ready. Jimmy got up and lumbered away, mumbling
“Merely!”
He was not in the least impressed by the distinction, but it was a real
one. In thousands of similar cases the material evidence provides no direct
proof whether the prediction or statement involves mental processes that cause
the event, or whether the event, casting its shadow before it, causes the
statement.
Chapter VIII
We can no longer hold,
even from the scientific view, to the conceptual belief that the physical
universe within the range of our five special senses comprises the whole of
reality. We know that by far the greater portions of it are “unseen,” and that
our personal environing realities contain both cosmic and atomic elements with
which our five recognized senses are unable to deal. Still, we do deal with
them by means of speech and conceptual thought. And conspicuous among the words
and concepts that serve us for this purpose are “God” and the “atom,” the one
manifesting in religious behavior and the other in scientific behavior.
No one has seen God, and no one has seen a single atom. So far as these or any other concepts manifest in human behavior (serving as guides to action or research), it makes not the slightest difference whether they are “true” or not. But the knowledge of G