Mesmerism [hypnotism] is too gross a humbug to admit of any further serious notice. We regard its abettors as quacks and impostors. They ought to be hooted out of Professional Society.2
Need it be added that Semmelweis was driven out of Vienna, and out of his mind, by scientists who scorned his theory of bacteria—even after his ideas had saved hundreds of lives? The value of his work was really not recognized until twenty-five years after his death. And when Galileo’s telescope revealed Jupiter’s moons, his fellow astronomers refused to look through it; they knew that such bodies were not possible. The telescope, therefore, must be deceptive. So why look through it?
And do you suppose that the Wright brothers’ first flights caused a sensation? Far from it! Most newspaper editors considered the reports of witnesses to be “impossible” and dismissed the matter without even printing the news. Several years passed before many realized that a young man named Orville and his brother Wilbur had begun to reshape our world on that December morning in 1903. The brothers were many years, in fact, trying to find a market for their new flying machine. In a letter to the inventors in 1907, the First Lord of the Admiralty wrote as follows:
The Board of Admiralty were of the opinion that they [airplanes] would not be of any practical use to the Naval Service.
There is good reason to believe that here again, in the cases of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, we are witnesses at the birth of another scientific revolution, perhaps the most important of all. Indeed, this mere embryo could develop to mammoth proportions.
Already there are scattered examples at hand. A Dutchman named Peter Hurkos, for instance, has been successfully employed by several European police agencies, including Scotland Yard, to solve unfathomable crimes which had brought conventional methods of detection to an impasse. Hurkos is not a Dick Tracy. He is a clairvoyant who discovered his psychic gift after an injury when, as a painter, he fell from a scaffold. He has been responsible for the apprehension of thieves, pyromaniacs, and murderers; he has diagnosed disease and located missing people. After one demonstration, a leading police official admitted that ordinary criminologists were mere children compared with Hurkos.
Dr. B. J. F. Laubscher, a psychiatrist-anthropologist, describes in one of his books his experience with a native clairvoyant known as Solomon Daba, whom he had investigated over a long period of time. Having explained to Solomon Daba that none of the many claims made for his supernormal powers would be acceptable unless they could be verified, the doctor reports that the native agreed to any test which might be suggested. He was subjected, therefore, to a number of tests and, according to the doctor, acquitted himself remarkably well, displaying supernormal mental ability.
One occasion presented itself after Mr. Victor, a charge nurse at the doctor’s hospital, had lost two cows. During one of Solomon Daba’s visits to the hospital, the doctor, seizing upon the opportunity to test the native’s psychic powers, told him only that Mr. Victor had lost some cows and asked him to describe the cows and to state their present location. He agreed to try; then he shut his eyes and sat still for a while. What followed is here quoted from Dr. Laubscher’s book:3
… On opening his eyes he said, “I see the cows and I know where they are and how they have been stolen,” and then proceeded as follows:
“There were two cows, both black and white, and the younger of the two was going to calve; in fact, she has calved, because there are three cattle now. The younger of the two cows has a peculiar mark on its left side, the hair has grown in the opposite direction in the form of a crown or whorl. There was a little white boy about six years old who was very fond of this cow. He always fed her with bits of grass and corn stalks. Late one evening the cows were drove away from the field by a native man who works in this hospital. He kept them in the house in the location that night and the following morning early he hired a native boy to drive these cows to a friend’s place near Lady Frere (30 miles away). The boy left with the cows while it was still dark and drove them to the kraal near Lady Frere. He crossed the railway line this side of Essex and took a little-known track across the veld.”
I, of course, could not verify his descriptions of the cows, having never seen them, but I doubted his statement about the little white boy since I was well aware Victor had no such child. As instructed, none of the members of the staff present said a word.
After Solomon Daba left, Mr. Victor corroborated his description of the cows to the minutest detail; even the doings of the little boy turned out to be correct. This was a neighbor’s child. As the matter was already in the hands of the police, nothing more was done. The suspected man went off sick a few days ago and while at his home sent a native boy with a note to the ward. Mr. Victor, having in mind what Solomon Daba had told him, asked his native boy whether he drove some cows for “X” to Lady Frere some time ago. The boy, in my presence and that of other members of the staff and the police, admitted driving the cows and gave a description tallying in every detail with what Solomon Daba had said.
Consider for a moment the fantastic possibilities once clairvoyance, even if it is exhibited reliably by only one person, comes under the full scrutiny and control of science. Instead of “seeing” concealed cards at a distance, as in the Duke experiments, this power could then be focused upon more practical targets. Plans for warfare, secret weapons, criminal schemes, impending epidemics of disease, any nefarious design directed against mankind—all these could be exposed in the making. Each of us is tempted to exercise further his imagination to visualize all the problems that might be solved, all the mysteries that would be unveiled. Where would we stop?
When we ponder the application of psychokinesis (mind over matter), we find ourselves in more familiar territory. In the field of psychosomatic medicine, science some time ago conceded the influence of the mind upon the physical body. To be sure, we can hardly pick up a magazine without encountering some reference to the curative powers of the mind. “Heal yourself!” proclaim the articles. And a surprising number of stricken people apparently proceed to do exactly that. Almost every doctor is prepared to cite case histories of patients who have achieved near miracles through the application of will power. Hypnosis, too, continues to deliver dramatic evidence of the degree to which the mind dominates the body.
How much farther can the mind reach in this particular direction? Already we have observed that the mind doesn’t seem to recognize the line at which it is supposed to stop healing and sometimes spills over into areas which have been professionally judged beyond its domain. If even now we are given cause to wonder, then where are the limits once the full weight of science has converged upon these phenomena?
Is it conceivable, then, that this mental force might eventually give us insight into those elusive diseases which have so far yielded hardly an inch to intensive physical investigations? Is it possible, in short, that the magic of mind will start the unraveling of such enigmas as cancer and coronary disease? Perhaps—just possibly—the mind, consciousness, extends even to the very cells of which the body is composed.
We have so little to lose and so much to gain by continuing to trace the reach of the mind. If it seems laughable to link the mind with the growth of malignant ceils, or with the hardening of arterial walls, let your thoughts flash back to the lad who shed his fish-scale skin after a few words were whispered into his ear. Besides, this is no laughing matter. We must not be too proud to pursue any hopeful possibility. Millions of dollars and years of indefatigable research have availed relatively little; the puzzle remains as baffling as ever.
It is time to start thinking of “the mind” as something bigger than the area of the brain—something even more comprehensive, maybe, than the individual himself.
There are, furthermore, aspects other than health to which the mental horsepower might be harnessed. Floods of books, articles, lectures, and sermons attest to the general belief that our minds, following rather simple rules, can help us realize any rational desi
re. The idea common to almost all these plans, which usually point up the power of belief and imagination, is to utilize the force of the subconscious so that it will be automatically directing us, almost without conscious effort on our part, toward our chosen goals.
Heralding this general design, a Frenchman named Emile Coué once had the whole nation murmuring over and over again, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” Recognizing that the “twilight zone,” through which we pass each night just before falling asleep and each morning as we awaken, finds us in a state very similar to hypnosis, Coué maintained that these periods were ideal for making suggestions to ourselves (autosuggestion). He insisted, and so do his many followers, that as a result of this hypnotic-like repetition the subconscious would start grinding away at the job of improving the individual, not only health-wise, but in other respects as well.
Since the time of Coué’s simple system there have been numerous refinements, modifications, and extensions. But basic to all is the recognition of the power of the subconscious and the belief that the mind can influence health, external objects, and the minds of others.
One especially prominent man, whose accomplishments in several fields result in his being known as a genius, told me that he attributes his success to the persistent use of one of these subconscious systems. “The Chinese were right,” he assured me, when they pointed out that one picture is worth more than ten thousand words.
“So I use pictures,” he continued. “Mental pictures. Before I fall asleep at night, and as I awaken in the morning, and at any other time when I have a few moments, I concentrate on a mental image. What is most important, I believe, is that I center attention on my final goals, not all the problems and headaches in between. When I persist in visualizing the ultimate outcome—’seeing’ the results as I want them to come out—all the thorny details somehow seem to fall apart or to take care of themselves.
“Don’t ask me how or why it works. It just does, that’s all.”
The formula of this tycoon is very much akin to the advice given by the magnetic Dr. Erviri Seale:
“What your attention dwells on grows. The idea here is to center your attention on the state you want. Don’t play around with the things you don’t want. If you consistently take your attention from your problem, it will die. For instance, if you would manifest health, you must go within and become conscious of health. You must exult and rejoice in the finished state even though all the outer facts contradict you….
“… Don’t outline the solution to your problem. The spirit has its own mechanics. The mood knows the way. Leave the details to it.”
This technique is not new. About twenty-five hundred years ago Confucius gave the same advice: “In giving heed to the beginning think of the end; the end will then be without distress.”4
Of all the findings that have emerged from parapsychology research, perhaps the most significant is the fact that man is not, after all, merely a physical machine. For three centuries the scientists of human nature have regarded man as nothing more than a physical contraption. The new evidence to the contrary is a wonderful step toward learning what man really is, and the ultimate upshot is bound to result in better relations among men.
There is no telling how far the parapsychology research will lead us. The proof that there is something extraphysical, or spiritual, in human personality has momentous implications. Eventually the laboratory will answer even that all-time prize winner among questions: Does any part of a human being survive the death of the physical body? Already research in extrasensory perception has indicated, in its freedom from the effects of time and space, the plausibility of some sort of survival. And remember that this relatively new science has barely begun.
1 From Hypnotism and the Power Within, by Dr. S. J. Van Pelt
1 Medical Hypnosis (Vol. I)
2 Experimental Hypnosis, edited by Leslie Le Cron
3 Science, 1949, 110, 2866, 583
4 Trud. Last. Psikhonev. Kiev, 2:236, 1930
5 The Search for the Beloved, by N. Fodor
6 Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and Their Treatment, by W. Stekel
7 The very fact that so many doctors and hypnotists report cases in which
1 L. R. Wolberg, Medical Hypnosis, Volume I
1 Number 27, August, 1952
1 August, 1952
1 “What’s the World Coming to?”
2 British Lancet
3 Sex, Custom, and Psychopathology, by B. J. F. Laubscher
4 Shu Ching 5,17
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 55–10504
Copyright ©, 1956, by Morey Bernstein
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-307-49060-5
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