Literary Adventures

This page will take you into pieces of literature that are carefully selected for their great content at the literary, scientific, or philosophical level. A short selection will be presented in full. A long one will be divided into sections that will be refreshed regularly. Emphasis and highlights are mostly ours, not made by the original author.

Here is our current selection:

Supernature By Lyall Watson

Part Two - Matter

4 - Mind Over Matter

Ecology is largely concerned with the intricate system of interactions between life and its environment. The vast herds of zebra and wildebeest in Serengeti respond to environmental signals that initiate their annual migration, and in trekking in their millions from the plains of Olduvai up into the woodland of the Mara, they cut a swath through the country that leaves a mark for years to come. Beavers respond to the signs of approaching winter by building a dam to protect their lodge, and in doing so they floor an area of land and change its character completely. Man responds to environmental challenges in a direct and often brutal way -- clearing areas for agriculture, losing land to the sea by neglect and erosion, and reclaiming it with his monstrous machines.

These are direct physical connections between living and non-living matter, but there are other links, which are far less obvious. Each year the transpiration of plants puts five thousand cubic miles of water into the air, from which it falls on the earth as rain. The respiration of man, and other kinds of combustion he finds necessary to sustain himself, are using up more oxygen than the environment can provide and creating a carbon dioxide build-up that could initiate a new ice age, with all its dramatic effects on matter. At even the most simple individual level, there is evidence of indirect action of this kind. A musk ox that returns each evening to sleep in the same spot melts the snow with its body heat and exposes a patch of earth that lingers on into the summer as a livid scar in the carpet of green that everywhere else enjoyed the full protection of a winter snow blanket.

Beyond these oblique effects of life on matter, there are other connections that are even more tenuous. They depend not on direct muscular action, nor even on indirect breathing and heating, but on the effects of the fields of force that surround all living things. I believe that these apparently supernatural forces are capable of physical deception and understanding, but the whole thing is so new and yet so bedeviled by old superstitions, that we have to tread softly and come up on the subject unawares. A living organism depends on outside information. This arrives in three forms -- electromagnetic waves, such as light; mechanical pressures, such as sound; and chemical stimuli, such as those giving rise to taste and smell. If the organism is an animal, all three kinds of signal are converted by sense receptors on the outside of the body into impulses of electrical energy that carry messages in to the central nervous system. The fact that all news traveling along the nerves is conveyed by the same kind of vehicle can be shown by diverting the traffic. If a nerve fiber from the tongue is connected to one leading from the ear to the brain, a drop of vinegar in the mouth is 'tasted' as a loud and startling explosion. This is how hallucinations occur, by drug or stress-induced short circuits in the sensory system that allow music, for instance, to reach the brain as patterns of light. So what we usually refer to as the quality of a sensation depends entirely on which part of the brain is being stimulated at that time.

A nerve fiber is a very long, thin cell that not only generates an electrical charge when stimulated but passes it along to the next cell by a series of chemical changes that flow down its length like a smoke ring traveling along at two hundred miles an hour. Every time this happens it is exactly the same. Both the amount of current and the speed of travel are always the same, and no further action can take place until the whole event is over. A strong signal from the environment cannot generate a larger electrical charge in the nerve; it simply does so more often. So the intensity of the sensation as appreciated by the brain depends only on the frequency of the impulses coming in.

As an impulse passes along a nerve fiber, it uses a small amount of oxygen and gets rid of a small quantity of carbon dioxide. There is a slight local rise in temperature and a pulsation in the fiber that can be seen with a strong microscope, but the most noticeable effect is a change in the electric field. With suitable apparatus and electrodes on the skin, one can follow an impulse started by a prick on the finger all the way up the arm and record its arrival in the cortex on the opposite side of the brain. This communication shows up as a change in electrical potential, and the apparatus, by recording the passage of a single charge, can even be used to find out if a particular nerve is working properly or not. If one such impulse creates a measurable electric field that can be detected outside the body of a complex organism, it is clear that millions of similar events taking place all the time must produce a considerable surrounding field.

Paval Gulyaiev of Leningrad University has developed a very sensitive high-resistance electrode that is even more effective in measuring field intensity than Harold Burr's equipment. (294) There is still some secrecy surrounding his instrument, but it seems to be similar to magnetic-field detectors in use in space research. Gulyaiev's equipment can detect an electric field as much as a foot from the exposed sciatic nerve in the leg of a frog, and has also been successful in charting a human field some distance from the body. (129)

This field lasts only a fraction of a second, as each impulse passes along the fiber, but if the stimulus is prolonged, then a constant stream of impulses create a standing field that persists for a while. If the stimulus is strong enough, it can affect a muscle directly and produce a reflex action. For instance if you tread on a thorn it takes only one twentieth of a second for the nerve impulses to get to the spinal cord and back to the muscles that pull the foot away. Most stimuli, however, need to be sorted by the brain, and this takes four times as long. In the giraffe it takes as much as one third of a second for impulses to travel seventeen feet from a foot all the way up to the brain. Then the brain has to consider the stimulus, register it as painful, and send out the message to take appropriate avoiding action. Until such action is taken, and while it is under way, the brain continues to broadcast to the muscles involved and set up an electrical field far stronger than that provoked by the initial stimulus. Gulyaiev and others have shown that this brain-induced field has the highest intensity and can be detected at the greatest distances from the body.

Psychokinesis

In 1967 a Kiev film company produced a costly professional film about a middle-aged Leningrad housewife. (271) She is shown sitting at a table in a physiology laboratory after being medically examined and X-rayed to ensure that nothing is hidden on or in her body. She puts out her hands, with the fingers spread, about six inches above a compass in the center of the table and tenses her muscles. She stares intently at the compass, lines etched deeply in her face showing the strain of a body under acute tension. Minutes pass and sweat breaks out on her brow as she continues the struggle, and then, slowly, the compass needle quivers and moves to point in a new direction. She starts to move her hands in a circular motion and the needle turns with them, until it is rotating like the second hand of a watch. The field produced by the body can, under certain conditions, it seems, be stronger even than the field of earth itself.

There are many instances on record of matter apparently being directly controlled in this way. Most deal with grandfather clocks that 'stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died', or with pictures that fell from the wall at the precise moment of some distant calamity. By their nature, events of this order are unrepeatable and yield nothing to further analysis. They are lumped together under the name of telekinesis -- the ability to move things from afar -- and effectively ignored by all except hard-core parapsychologists, but once in a while someone is discovered who seems to be able to move things from afar on demand.

The most impressive of all early laboratory tests on this phenomenon was arranged in London by Harry Price, who made a name for himself in the thirties as a highly skeptical investigator of ghosts. (309) His subject in the test was a young girl, and the task he set her was to depress a telegraph key that closed a circuit and lit a small red light bulb, without touching any of the apparatus. He made the test difficult by blowing a mixture of soap and glycerine into a large bubble and placing this carefully over the whole apparatus. The bubble was then imprisoned under a glass cover, which was enclosed in a wire-net cage that stood in the center of a latticework fence of wood.

Despite all these barriers, witnesses report that the girl was able to make the light bulb flash on and off several times and that, at the conclusion of the test, the soap bubble was found to be intact. This is a neat demonstration and seems to have been honestly reported, but like most older experiments on the occult, it has loopholes which modern scientists pounce on and hold up to ridicule. The report fails to say whether the key was seen to move, which could be important, because we now know that it is possible to induce current from a distance.

The whole pattern of investigation changed in 1934 when a lecturer in the psychology department of Duke University, in North Carolina, was approached by a young gambler who claimed that he could control the fall of dice by will power. The lecturer was J.B. Rhine, already involved in a long-term statistical study of telepathy, but what the gambler showed him right there on the office floor was enough to start him off on an entirely new track.

Rhine and his friends bought some ordinary plastic dice and began throwing them. They actively tried to will two dice to fall so that the total of their sides added up to more than seven. There are thirty-six possible combinations of two dice, and fifteen of these are greater than seven, so they expected to hit their target 2,810 times out of 6,744 throws. They actually scored 3,110, which was so far from chance coincidence that it could occur only once in well over a billion times. Rhine concluded that it was possible that the mind could influence the fall of the dice, and so he set out to investigate what he called 'psychokinesis' -- physical motion produced by the mind.

Tests of this kind had been made before, but what Rhine brought to investigation of the occult was a scientific method based on statistical analysis of large numbers of tests. The value of his system is shown clearly in this first test. Here the average rate of scoring should have been fifteen out of thirtysix, but it turned out to be 16.5. Such a small deviation can easily be ignored in one test, but when it occurs over hundreds of tests it takes on an entirely different meaning, whose significance can be assessed only by sophisticated statistical analysis. This is not just mathematical juggling, but a method of defining what can reasonably be ascribed to coincidence and what must be taking place for some other reason. In most scientific research, a result is said to be significant if it would have occurred by chance alone no more than five out of a hundred times, which is odds of nineteen to one, but Rhine deliberately took extra precautions by ignoring anything that could have occurred by chance more than one out of a hundred times.

After twenty-five years of testing, Rhine concludes that 'the mind does have a force that can affect physical matter directly'. (275) He feels that the weight of evidence in favor of psychokinesis (PK) is so great that 'merely to repeat PK tests with the single objective of finding more evidence of the PK effect itself should be an unthinkable waste of time'.

These are some of the findings.

Rhine's tests, when assessed by his own statistical methods, show an over-all significance at a high level of chance. These methods have been criticised, perhaps rightly, but analyses by independent statisticians have revealed other trends hidden in the figures that are even more important. (254) The success of every person being tested shows fluctuations during the course of an experiment; nearly all subjects scored well at the beginning and again near the end of every series.

This suggests that decline in the middle of the test is due not merely to fatigue but to a loss of interest. 'Position effects' of this kind were most marked in tests where the subject was doing his own recording and could follow the trend of the score. (256) It was almost as though the person throwing the dice was influencing the pattern of their fall -- which is exactly what the tests were designed to find out. A bias that consistently produces better results in one part of the test than another is far more likely to be due to personal influence than some defect in the experiment. The extent of this bias was nicely demonstrated by an English mathematician who was able to produce exactly the same deviation from chance values by getting subjects to throw, at random, dice loaded with lead at one corner. (180)

Other tests produced further evidence of mental influence. In one series it was shown that subjects succeeded better with targets, such as double six, that appealed to them. (268) And in another series, higher scores were always obtained when the subject was allowed to throw dice of the size he liked best. (151) Strong interest in the outcome of the test was obviously important. If the subject was consciously trying for a particular combination, but knew that the experimenter was interested in another number, then this one also came up more often than expected. (274) The importance of psychological factors in the testing was clearly demonstrated in a very long series, of two hundred thousand throws, made by a man-and-woman team. After analysing their results, which showed a marked and changing pattern determined by their relationship to each other, a statistician decided that the scores could not be ascribed to chance or to 'biased dice, wishful thinking, recording errors or any other reasonable counter hypothesis'. (255) He concluded, 'PK is left as the only adequate cause of these effects.'

Through all tests it is obvious that the mood of the subject played an all-important part. The best results of all dice tests were produced by an experiment in the form of a competition between four successful gamblers convinced of their good luck and four divinity students equally convinced of the power of prayer. (114) It seems to be vital for the operator to be excited by the experiment and keen to see if he can succeed in making the dice do as he wants them to do. In no tests yet made have investigators repeating someone else's work ever managed to do quite as well as the original subjects. Rhine remarks that 'those struggling to make their own trails and to develop their own methods in uncharted territory have again and again shown themselves more likely to get evidence of PK'. (275)

This trend for researchers to get the results they badly want has naturally led to criticisms of the work on the grounds of experimenter bias and a lack of objectivity. Scientific investigation should ideally be neutral, but it seldom is, and in the life sciences the hazards are particularly great. For example, among the mass of information on the way in which white rats negotiate mazes, there is one very revealing item. It deals with an experiment on a number of rats that were specially chosen, on the basis of past performances in mazes, for their similar abilities. Their cages were marked at random with labels reading 'CLEVER' and 'STUPID,' and each rat was tested by several research workers in a new series of maze experiments. The 'clever' rats produced the best scores, but only when wearing their badges of merit. If the labels were changed around, their performances suffered accordingly. (282)

In order to avoid criticisms of this kind of bias, Rhine eliminated all contact with the dice by designing an electric machine to do the throwing for him while he stood nearby and exercised his will. (273) The results were even better. A physicist from Pittsburgh was still worried about bias during the recording stage, and so, to eliminate 'record error, the loss or selection of data, selection of the experiment, retroactive choice of the target and optional stopping', he built a machine to do everything.

The device shook and threw the dice and then photographed and filed the result without ever letting the subject see how well or badly he was doing. (223) All the experimenter had to do was press a button to start each throw going while he wished for a particular outcome. After 170 thousand throws he found he had results with odds of more than a hundred to one against chance. But if he completed the machine and added an automatic starter, so that there was no human involvement at all, the results were strictly according to chance.

Taken together, these experiments suggest that, for dice at least, there is evidence of a force of mental origin that can influence the movement of physical objects.

If the PK effect depends on the action of a subtle force, it would seem that these tests provide a very insensitive instrument for measuring it. Following the publication of Rhine's first results, several different techniques were developed elsewhere. In Germany, a seventeen-year-old schoolboy produced incredibly high scores with coins. He tossed a coin ten thousand times and was able to predict its fall correctly with results that had odds of a billion to one against chance. And in a test with a roulette wheel he scored seventy-five direct hits in five hundred spins, which has odds of millions to one against it. (25)

In other laboratories work went ahead on the assumption that not everyone can produce exceptional scores of this sort but that all people have some PK ability, which can probably be detected only by very sensitive tests. John Beloff, a psychologist at Queen's University, in Belfast, reasoned that microscopic particles should be more easily influenced than macroscopic ones and hit on the idea of using what he calls 'nature's own dice'. (21) In the nucleus of every atom there are two basic types of fundamental particles -- neutrons and protons. There are 275 different combinations of these particles that form stable alliances and make up most of earth's matter, but there are about fifty other naturally occurring chemical elements, with an unstable nucleus that sends particles shooting off as radioactivity. Beloff suggested that as these particles come off at random they would provide a perfect test of PK ability, which could be directed at either stopping them or increasing their rate of emission.

Two French scientists took up Beloff's suggestion and chose uranium nitrate as their radioactive source and a Geiger counter as the means of measuring the rate at which particles were given off. (70) Their subjects were two schoolboys, who were naturally fascinated by the experiment, and their task was either to accelerate or slow down the blips on the counter. They succeeded with scores of a billion to one against chance.

Helmut Schmidt, at Duke University in North Carolina, used the same principle in designing a sort of electronic coin flipper. His radiation source powered a binary generator, which produced one of just two kinds of reaction at random once a second. He arranged nine light bulbs in a circle on a display board and connected them so that only one could be lighted at a time. A 'heads' reaction made the light jump in a clockwise direction around the ring, while a 'tails' reaction made it go the other way. His subjects concentrated on making it move consistently in either direction instead of flashing backward and forward at random. In thirty-two thousand trials they managed to do this with odds often million to one against chance. (295)

The outcome of these two studies suggests that Beloff was right -- that PK action works most effectively at a subatomic level. This is a vital discovery, because we now know that the socalled particles in the atoms are not solid at all, but apparently consist of wavelike areas of electromagnetic action. There is only one kind of force that can influence an electric field -- and that is another field. The psychokinetic force begins to look like an electric-field phenomenon.

A mechanical engineer in South Carolina has produced evidence in support of this theory. He built a clock driven by an electric current that had to pass through a bath of salt solution. (80) In the presence of electricity, salt breaks down into charged ions of sodium and chlorine, which move toward opposite electrodes and carry a current through the solution. The speed with which the ions form determines the flow of the current and therefore the rate of movement of the hands of the clock. He thought that PK could act on the ions and either speed up or slow down the clock -- and it worked, with odds of a thousand to one against chance. Which seems to show that PK can bring a purely electrical force to bear on particles of atomic as well as subatomic sizes. The only drawback to the whole electrical theory is that there are examples of what seem to be PK forces acting on electrically inert substances, such as plastic and wood.

Haakon Forwald, a Swedish engineer, set out to describe PK in terms of the energy it exerts. He built a ramp sloping down onto a table and at the top installed a device for releasing a number of cubes simultaneously. The cubes rolled down the incline and out onto a table, where they could land on one or the other side of a center line. Forwald tried to make them go in one direction, and by measuring their displacement from the center line was able to calculate how much force was involved. With beechwood cubes weighing two grams each he found that the average force involved in moving the cube from a control position was about three hundred dynes. (104) A dyne is 'that force which, when acting on a mass of one gram, will accelerate it by one centimeter in each second'. This is a very precise physical measurement, and there is great satisfaction in being able to give a hard numerical value to the energy involved in at least one PK action. It helps to make the whole phenomenon seem more normal and legitimate, but it does not explain how it works.

Forwald also worked with zinc, bakelite, copper, cadmium, silver, lead, and aluminium cubes. He found that different materials reacted in different ways but that the distance they were deflected was not related to their weight. He suggested that, as his mind seemed to be trying equally hard to move all the cubes, any differences must be in the cubes and that they might themselves be liberating energy. (105) He explains that perhaps 'the mind action is of a relaying kind that is able to start an energetic process within the atom but does not convey energy to it'. Forwald tested the cubes for traces of any secondary radiation that would be produced by this sort of reaction, but found none.

The idea of a mental force acting only as a trigger makes sense when applied to all these PK experiments in which normal people try to influence objects that are already moving. Most of the results are not at all dramatic and gain significance only when viewed statistically. So it is possible that a small number of the falling dice or spinning coins drop into a state of equilibrium, where they could quite easily go either way, and it is on these that a very tiny force, perhaps no more than the pressure of a light beam, acts to produce the desired result. But this theory cannot even begin to account for some of the extraordinary things that are being done by people with special PK talents.

Will Power

Of all these special people, none is more talented or consistent than Nelya Mikhailova. She was born just ten years after the Russian Revolution, and at the age of fourteen was fighting in the front lines of the Red Army. She was injured by artillery fire near the end of the war and spent a long time recovering in the hospital. It was during this period that she began to develop her strange abilities. 'I was very angry and upset one day,' she recalls. 'I was walking toward a cupboard when suddenly a pitcher moved to the edge of the shelf, fell, and smashed to bits.' (233) After that, all kinds of changes began to take place around her. Objects moved of their own volition, doors opened and closed, lights went on and off. But, unlike most people plagued by poltergeist activities, Nelya realised that she was somehow responsible and that she could control the energy. She could summon and focus it at will.

One of the first to study her talents was Edward Naumov, a biologist from Moscow State University. In a test in his laboratory, he scattered a box of matches on a table and she circled her hand over them, shaking with the strain, until the whole group of matches moved like a log run across to the edge of the table and fell off one by one to the floor. To rule out drafts from the air, threads, or wire, Naumov put another batch of matches under a plexiglass cover, but Nelya still made them shuttle from side to side. (233) Five cigarettes were then placed under a jar, and Nelya showed that she could be selective, picking out only one of them and making it move. Afterward the cigarettes were shredded to make sure that nothing was hidden inside.

Two famous Soviet writers have examined her, admittedly in uncontrolled conditions, but their accounts give some idea of the scope of her talents. Lev Kolodny visited her apartment for an interview and was startled to see the top of his pen being pursued across the table by a glass tumbler. 'Both objects moved to the edge of the table as if they were in harness. The tablecloth wasn't moving -- the other glasses besides mine were still sitting there. Could she be somehow blowing on them to make them move? There was no draft of air and Mikhailova wasn't breathing heavily. Why didn't a jar in their path also move? I ran my hands through the space between Mikhailova and the table. No threads or wires. If she was using magnets, they wouldn't work on glass.' (181)

Vadim Marin, who was dining out with Nelya, reports, 'Apiece of bread lay on the table some distance from her. Mikhailova, concentrating, looked at it attentively. A minute passed, then another ... and the piece of bread began to move. It moved by jerks. Toward the edge of the table, it moved more smoothly and rapidly. Mikhailova bent her head down, opened her mouth, and, just as in the fairytale, the bread itself (excuse me but I have no other words for it) jumped into her mouth!' (233)

In both these accounts the possibilities of fraud and hypnotism exist, but at least one series of experiments have been conducted under controlled conditions, where there was no chance of dissembling. Genady Sergeyev, neurophysiologist at the Utomskii Institute, in Leningrad, set up the tests in a physiology laboratory. Mikhailova was strapped into an electroencephalograph and cardiograph harness and initial measurements were made of her resting physiology. Sergeyev discovered that she had a magnetic field surrounding her body that was only ten times less powerful than that of the earth itself. (271) At a later date this was confirmed by tests made at the Leningrad Institute of Meteorology. Sergeyev also found that she had an unusual brain-wave pattern, with fifty times more voltage being generated at the back of her head than the front.

The testing began with one of the most difficult and impressive PK demonstrations ever made. (233) A raw egg was broken into saline solution in an aquarium six feet from her, and, with cameras recording every second, Nelya struggled until she was able to separate the white of the egg from the yolk and move the two apart -- an act that nobody could ever attribute to hidden strings or magnets.

While the demonstration was taking place, her EEG showed intense emotional excitement. There was great activity in the deeper levels of the reticular formation, which co-ordinates and filters information in the brain. The cardiogram showed an irregular action of the heart, with that confusion between the chambers that is characteristic of great alarm. The pulse soared to 240 beats a minute, four times its normal level, and high percentages of blood sugar were recorded together with other endocrinal disturbances all characteristic of a stress reaction. The test lasted thirty minutes, and during this time Nelya lost over two pounds in weight. At the end of the day she was very weak and temporarily blind. Her ability to taste was impaired, she had pains in her arms and legs, she felt dizzy, and she was unable to sleep for several days.

All this is startling enough, but at the same demonstration Sergeyev also introduced a new and vitally important instrument. At the moment, it is known only as the Sergeyev Detector, and in principle seems to be similar to one that has recently been used at the University of Saskatchewan. (320) Its basic components are capacitors and a preamplifier connected to a cardiograph, and it is tuned to respond to change in the life field. Sergeyev had the instrument near Nelya during the laboratory test, and at the exact moments that she seemed to be moving objects with her PK force, he recorded big changes in the electrostatic and magnetic measurements of her field. (233) As she strained to bring her influence to bear, the electrostatic field began to pulse until it was undergoing a regular fluctuation at a rate of four cycles a second.

This turbulence was precisely linked at that moment to the pulse rate of four beats a second and to a heavy theta brain-wave action at the same frequency. The body rhythms seemed to be producing a beat that was picked up and amplified by the field around her and concentrated on the spot where her eyes were fixed. Sergeyev claims that these vibrations in the field act like magnetic waves. 'The moment these magnetic vibrations or waves occur, they cause the object Mrs Mikhailova focuses on, even if it is something non-magnetic, to act as if magnetised. It causes the object to be attracted to her or repelled from her.'

Part of this attraction could be due to an unusually wide electrostatic field that is being aided by a pulsing magnetic field. It has been recently discovered that the fundamental particles in most atoms can develop a spin that produces spin waves and a fluctuating magnetic field of the very kind necessary to reduce friction between an object and the table on which it rests. This is pure conjecture at the moment; nobody has yet observed this sort of magnetic interaction on or near objects being moved by PK activity, but there is growing and astonishing evidence of the necessary force being generated by most living bodies.

Leonard Ravitz has found that mental changes can produce measurable effects on instruments used for charting the life field. (265) With them he claims to be able to determine a person's state of mind and even the depth of hypnosis. Neurophysiologists in Canada are using a field detector to determine at a distance whether a patient's level of anxiety is high, medium, or low. It is no longer possible to doubt that a field of some kind surrounds the human body like a cocoon.

The Aura

Reports that the field pulsates are going to bring great gladness to the hearts of spirit mediums everywhere, who have always insisted that their sensitivity was due to 'vibrations'. Many, including the famous New York clairvoyant Eileen Garrett, have reported seeing spirals of energy leaving a newly dead body. (113) And now Sergeyev claims that his detectors sprang into action near the body of a man whose heart and brain waves had stopped, and was therefore chemically dead, but who still seemed to be releasing electrical energy. The idea of an energy cloud, or 'aura', surrounding the body goes back many centuries.

Old pictures of holy men show them standing in a luminous surround long before Christians invented the halo. This haze with the mythical properties was first investigated by Walter Kilner of St Thomas' Hospital in London, who found in 1911 that, by looking through colored-glass screens, he could see a radiant fringe about six inches wide around most bodies. (174) He claimed that this aura changed shape and color according to the well-being of the person wearing it, and he used it as an aid to medical diagnosis.

Our eyes are sensitive to light that lies between the wavelengths of 380 and 760 millimicrons. With very-high-intensity artificial sources we can extend this at either end of the spectrum into the areas of infrared and ultraviolet light. The fact that man's body sends out electromagnetic waves just too long for most people to see has been vividly demonstrated by the new 'thermographic' technique, which translates heat radiation into wonderful color pictures. (308) Atoms generate infrared rays by their constant motion, and the warmer they are the more active they become. In thermographic portraits, cold hair and fingernails show up black or blue, cool ear lobes are green, the nose is a lukewarm yellow, and neck and cheeks glow with orange and red.

The system is now being used to detect tumors, arthritis, and cancer, which show up as isolated hot areas. So the body does radiate on a wavelength just outside our normal vision, and this radiation changes according to the health of the transmitter.

Perhaps Kilner was right. The range of human sensitivity is quite wide; some people hear sounds that to others are supersonic, and some people see wavelengths that to others are invisible. Those who claim to be able to see an aura surrounding living things could be supersensitive at the infrared end of the spectrum. Waves of this length are beyond the capability of the cone-shaped cells in our retina, which appreciate visible colors, but they may be within the range of the rod-shaped cells that are more sensitive to low light intensities. Occult books that give instruction on 'how to see the aura' usually recommend that it be looked for in dim light, with the eyes partly closed and the head turned so that light strikes the corner of the eye. These are precisely the conditions most suitable for bypassing the cones, in the center of the retina, and stimulating the much more sensitive rods, around the edges.

Animals with good night vision have no cones and no ability to see color, but they can operate in almost pitch dark, and it seems that many have some sensitivity to infrared radiation put out by their prey. It has been shown that owls can detect a silent, stationary mouse at a distance but are unable to locate a piece of dead meat of the same size and shape. If all nocturnal animals are able to see some infrared and therefore detect the 'aura', we now know why the animals most often chosen by witches for their 'familiars' were owls and cats.

All those who claim to have seen the aura describe it as surrounding the body in a smooth egg shape, wider at the head than the feet. It is interesting that this same shape crops up in reports dealing with aura-like phenomena described by other cultures. In the second beautiful book on his conversations with a Yaqui man of knowledge, Castaneda records a discussion about ordinary looking and really 'seeing'. (68) Don Juan says, 'I like to sit in parks and bus depots and watch. Real people look like luminous eggs when you see them.' He goes on to explain that sometimes in a crowd of egglike creatures he spots one who looks just like a person, and then he knows that there is something wrong and that, without the luminous glow, this is not a real person at all.

Following up Kilner's work, the Cambridge biologist Oscar Bagnall has tried to describe the aura in physical terms. He claims that it can most easily be seen after 'sensitising' the eyes by looking for some time through a solution of the coal-tar dye dicyanine or pinacyanol. To make this easier, he has designed goggles with hollow lenses that can be filled with the dye dissolved in triethanolamine. (12) Bagnall reports that the aura cannot be dispersed by a current of air but that it is attracted to a magnet held close to the skin and that, like the electrical field around a charged conductor, it extends farthest from a projection such as a finger or the tip of the nose. He describes the aura as being composed of a hazy outer layer and a brighter inner layer, in which there seem to be striations running out at right angles from the skin. Bagnall and other aura watchers say that every once in a while a much brighter ray 'reaches out from the aura like a searchlight' and extends several feet from the body before vanishing again.

Compare that with this description: 'Whole luminous labyrinths, flashing, twinkling, flaring. Some of the sparks were motionless, some wandered against a dark background. Over these fantastic galaxies of ghostly light there were bright multicolored flares and dim clouds.' This is no extract from an account of an LSD trip, but the report of a top Soviet academician to the Presidium on an investigation now taking place in Krasnodar, near the Black Sea. (233)

In 1939 the electrician Semyon Kirlian was called to a university laboratory to repair an instrument used in electrotherapy. He noticed that when a patient received treatment with the machine, there was a tiny flash of light between the electrodes. He tried to take photographs with this light and discovered that it was possible to do this without a camera by inserting a plate directly between the high-frequency spark and his hand. On being developed, the photographic plate produced a glowing image of his outstretched fingers.

Other living objects also made pictures studded with dots and flares, but with inert objects there was no image at all. Kirlian built his own machine to generate high-frequency electrical fields with an oscillation of two hundred thousand sparks per second between two electrodes. He also designed an optical viewer (now the subject of fourteen Soviet patents) to make it possible to watch the process directly without films or emulsion. (192) It was a view of his own finger under his instrument that provoked that pyrotechnic description from the academician.

Every living thing placed in the high-frequency discharge produces these patterns. A whole hand can look like the Milky Way, sparkling and twinkling against a glowing background of gold and blue. A freshly picked leaf shines with an internal light that streams out through its pores in beams that gradually flick out one by one as it dies. Leaves taken from plants of the same species show similar jeweled patterns, but if one of the plants is diseased, the pattern in its leaf is entirely different.

Similarly the patterns produced by the same fingertip change with the mood and health of the man to whom it belongs. Kirlian says, 'In living things, we see the signals of the inner state of the organism reflected in the brightness, dimness and color of the flares. The inner life activities of the human being are written in these "light" hieroglyphs. We've created an apparatus to write the hieroglyphs, but to read them we're going to need help.' (233)

For twenty-five years Kirlian and his wife battled to perfect their apparatus. A constant stream of visitors--physicists, physicians, biochemists, pathologists, electronics experts, and government ministers--came to see the results. And went away impressed, and the bibliography on the Kirlian process grew to massive proportions, but nothing happened until 1964, when suddenly the doors opened to them. They were set up in their own laboratory with all the latest equipment, and research projects began on Kirlian-designed machines in a dozen other centers. The results are now just starting to come in, and they promise to revolutionise many aspects of biology and parapsychology. The electric aura has arrived.

Basic to many branches of the occult is a belief in 'astral', or 'etheric', bodies, which are supposed to exist as spiritual doubles of our own physical bodies. People who have had a leg amputated say that they can still sense it and even complain of itches in absent toes. This can be explained by the persistence of old sensory patterns in the brain, but some psychics claim to be able to 'see' phantom limbs still attached to the body. Now the Kirlian effect shows that they may be right. In Moscow a Kirlian machine has been used to take pictures of an intact leaf, then a third of the leaf is cut away and further pictures are taken. For a short while after part of the leaf has been removed, an image of that part persists as a 'ghost', making up a complete sparkling outline of the whole original leaf.

This suggests that there is some sort of energy matrix in all living things and that it has a shape like that of the organism, but relatively independent of it. This is an incredible idea, but in Russia they are taking it seriously. At the Kirov State University, in Alma-Ata, a group of biophysicists and biochemists are trying to study this energy body with the aid of an electron microscope. (233) They claim that it is 'some sort of elementary plasma-like constellation made of ionised particles. It is not a chaotic system, but a whole unified organism in itself.' They call it the 'Biological Plasma Body'.

Plasma sounds like something out of a Victorian spiritualist meeting, but has a physical reality now. A plasma is a gas that has been so completely ionised that all the electrons have been stripped off the nuclei of its atoms. This occurs in a thermonuclear reaction when the temperature is raised to three hundred million degrees C and the gas particles accelerate to speeds great enough to produce fusion, but there is no evidence that anything like this can happen at body temperature. Which does not mean that it is impossible; it just means that this whole branch of physics is so new that nobody knows exactly what a plasma is or what it can really do. One interesting fact that is known about plasma is that the only thing that will contain its energy effectively is a magnetic field--and we know that the body has one of these.

One of those to make the pilgrimage to see the Kirlians in Krasnodar was Mikhail Galkin, a surgeon from Leningrad. After looking at the cavalcade of lights in his own hands, he began to wonder about their origin. The strongest flares shone right out of the skin like searchlights, but their positions corresponded with no major nerve endings in the body, and the pattern of their distribution showed no correspondence with arteries or veins. Then he remembered his experiences on the Zabaikal front in 1945 and the lessons he had learned from a Chinese doctor in the art of acupuncture. Acting on his hunch, he sent the Kirlians a standard acupuncture chart of seven hundred important points on the skin--and they tallied exactly with charts that the Kirlians had begun to prepare of the fires visible under their high-frequency machine.

Acupuncture literally means 'pricking with a needle'. It is a very old and much-respected Chinese system of medicine, which puts the emphasis on prevention of disease rather than a treatment of the symptoms. In the old days, a patient paid a doctor to keep him from becoming ill; if he did fall sick, the doctor paid him. (189) The essence of acupuncture is the belief that all matter contains two activities, Yin and Yang, and that well-being depends upon a proper balance between them. These activities are manifest as subtle flows of energy circulating in the body, which at some points come near enough to the surface to be manipulated. The key control points have, in thousands of years of practice, been literally pinpointed, and at each point an excess of the appropriate energy can be released either by fingertip massage or by inserting a metal needle.

Perhaps the most critical test of acupuncture is its efficacy as an anesthetic. Western journalists were recently invited to see a series of major operations in Peking conducted entirely without any other kind of anesthetic. Neville Maxwell reported on the removal of a tubercular lung from a patient who had just one thin steel needle inserted into his right forearm, which apparently numbed the whole chest area and allowed the operation to proceed while the patient chatted with the operating theater staff and sipped tea. 'The onlooker could exchange words with the patient and, short of nudging the surgeons, could stand as near as he liked. After the operation was completed, the wound was closed, the needle removed, and Mr Han was given a helping hand to sit up. Then the patient's arm was massaged and he was helped into his pajama coat, again with no sign of even a wince.' And then Mr Han gave a press conference. (209)

Chinese practitioners spend years learning to locate the acupuncture points precisely, but impatient Western students have always found this difficult. Now Gaikin and the Kirlians have built an electronic device to mark the points to within one tenth of a millimeter. The Russians proudly demonstrated this machine, now called the 'tobiscope', at Expo 67, in Montreal, alongside the Vostok spaceship. With this instrument, medical laboratories all over the world are now using needles, electricity, and sound waves to stimulate the key points and produce dramatic cures. This development provides hard, practical proof of the effectiveness of acupuncture and the reality of the 'plasma' with which it seems to be connected. (331)

If a biological plasma body exists, I would expect it to be produced by the organism. Once it exists, it is possible that it could exercise some sort of organisational function over the body that made it. There is one study that showed that a muscle that was surgically removed from a mouse and cut up into small pieces would regenerate completely if this mince was packed back into the wound. (289) But perhaps the best example is provided by the sponge.

There are some colonies of unicellular animals that get together in large social groups, but sponges are more complex than this and are classified as single organisms. The cells in their bodies are loosely organised but occur in several forms, which fulfill different functions. There are collar cells, which live in cavities and wave whips to create the currents of water that flow through the animal's pores to bring it food and oxygen; there are sex cells, which produce eggs and sperm; and there are cells that build supporting skeletons of such superb geodesic construction that they serve as inspiration for aircraft designers. Some sponges grow to several feet in diameter, and yet, if you cut them up and squeeze the pieces through silk cloth to separate every cell from its neighbor, this gruel soon gets together and organises itself - and the complete sponge reappears like a phoenix to go back into business again. A persistent plasma body would provide a perfect template for regeneration of this kind.

Whatever it may be called, 'bioplasma' or 'aura' or 'life field', it is becoming difficult to avoid the conclusion that our sphere of influence does not end with the skin. Beyond the traditional confines of our bodies are forces we seem to produce and may be able to control. If you can accept this, then psychokinesis no longer seems strange. Nobody questions the fact that the mind controls and guides the muscles in our bodies, but to do this it has already demonstrated psychokinesis. An intangible thing like the mind, which has never been seen, jumps the gap between the unreal and the real, creating nervous energy, which directs muscular energy, which moves physical objects. From this situation to PK is only a short step; all we have to do is fill the gap at the other end. The Russians may well have done just that.

The relationship between mind and brain is still a complete mystery. Sir John Eccles, a great Australian neurophysiologist, described the brain as a system of 'ten thousand million neurones ... momentarily poised close to a just-threshold level of excitability. It is the kind of machine that a ghost could operate, if by "ghost" we mean in the first place an "agent" whose action has escaped detection even by the most delicate instruments.' (92) This ghost in the machine of psychokinesis seems to have been layed by the sensitive instruments of Sergeyev and Kirlian. It could even be the same sort of ghost that the Germans call 'poltergeist', the noisy spirit.

Poltergeists

There is no shortage of good evidence for poltergeist activity, much of it provided by skeptical scientists, professional police officers, and hard-nosed reporters. The phenomenon is the same all over the world. Things fall off tables, light bulbs drop from their fixtures, liquids are upset, meaningless knocking occurs, stones fly through windows, and taps are left running. These apparently childish tricks often seem to be associated with an adolescent, usually a girl at the stage of puberty or a teenager in a stage of emotional adjustment. (142) In one well-known case, a twenty-year-old girl with delicate feelings was just getting involved in married life. The association of poltergeist activities with a person, rather than a place, is crucial.

It suggests that unusual geophysical phenomena, such as a local aberration in gravity, play a less important part than forces of psychological origin. (292) There is an area at the head of the Songe Fjord in Norway and another in the volcanic crater of Kintamani on Bali, where pebbles are not as firmly anchored to the ground as they should be. But investigation, such as George Owen's meticulous study of the Sauchie poltergeist, show that when the central figure in one of these cases moves, the phenomena follow close behind. (237)

The psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor has described the poltergeist as a 'bundle of projected repressions'. (103) If this is true, the projection is completely unconscious. It could be psychokinetic energy just lashing out blindly, like the reflex movement that makes one knock a glass off the table when startled by a loud noise. But sometimes poltergeist activities show a measure of intelligence or purpose, as when writing appears on a wall or objects are aimed at a particular person. In these cases, the PK activity could be controlled by some deeper unconscious level, but even here the ghost is not a spirit so much as a manifestation of mind.

One of the features common to nearly all poltergeists is that people rarely see objects actually in motion, and, even in the few cases in which they do, I have not been able to find a single report made by anyone who saw an object start to move. This could be important. In laboratory tests with PK in ordinary people, effects often fail to appear when the subject is concentrating hard on them, and then suddenly appear when their attention is diverted.

Poltergeist activities frequently stop as soon as an investigator arrives to examine them. Rhine describes some of his studies as 'trying to develop film in daylight'. (275) Just as darkness is an essential prerequisite for photographic development, so spontaneity seems to be important for PK by laboratory subject or poltergeist. The few special people who have learned to produce PK effects at will are obviously in a separate category. Rhine concludes that PK is 'one ability which only operates under a narrow range of psychological conditions and is easily inhibited if these conditions are unfavorable'. ... In most persons it is inhibited all the time.

Perhaps the most useful clue to emerge so far from these investigations is Sergeyev's discovery that, during PK, the electrostatic field and the heart and the brain are all operating at four cycles a second. It has been known for a long time that the brains of very young children have slow wave patterns.

Electrodes attached to the stomach of a woman in late pregnancy show that the unborn child is producing waves of fewer than three cycles a second - the same (delta) waves that adults develop when 'sleeping like a baby'. In the first three years of life delta rhythms are predominant, and only later do the pulses speed up to the alpha rhythms of meditation and the even faster rhythms of complex thought and calculation. At first it was believed that rhythms of four to seven cycles were just transitional between delta, which stop at three, and alpha, which begin at eight cycles a second. And it was assumed that these intermediate patterns were characteristic only of growing children, but later they were also found under certain conditions in adults and were given the name of theta waves.

Theta rhythms start in the thalamus, the area of the brain that seems to govern emotional display. They can be produced very easily in a young child by snatching a sweet or a toy away and holding it just out of reach. They can be produced almost as easily in adults by offending or frustrating them. In laboratory situations theta rhythms are often demonstrated by offering the subject a pleasant stimulus, such as having his forehead stroked by a beautiful girl, and then suddenly sending her away. As soon as the pleasant sensation stops, theta rhythms appear, flicker to a crescendo for a short while, and then disappear.

Most adults are used to frequent disappointments, and it seems that they adjust to them by suppressing the theta quite quickly. In children the rhythms persist much longer and often lead to temper tantrums or purposeless destruction. It has been discovered that those adults who are subject to uncontrolled fits of violent aggression often have dominant theta rhythms in their brain waves. This is such a characteristic symptom that it has been used as a means of detecting this type of psychopath.

So it seems that, as young children, we all have a natural tendency to react emotionally to frustration by acts of aggression linked with theta waves in the brain. It seems, too, that animals react in the same way. Hebb tells of a chimpanzee that sat quietly for hours just watching a female in another cage, and then, as soon as she retired to her sleeping den, showed a sudden and violent display of rage accompanied by the chimp equivalent of our theta waves. (144) As children we flare up in the same way, but as we mature we learn to suppress the violent rhythms.

The fact that this is a conscious and deliberate process has been demonstrated by Walter in laboratory tests where anger was artificially induced by exposing subjects to a light flickering at the theta rhythm, between four and seven cycles a second. (335) There is a wide variation in individual ability to exercise control, and it looks as though bad-tempered people are often just those who are not so good at holding theta down.

Textbook descriptions of behavior under theta rhythms use the words 'intolerance', 'selfishness', 'impatience', 'suspicion', and 'childishness'. Which is a very good description of most poltergeists. It is tempting to draw parallels between the two and point out that poltergeist activities are most often associated with people who are going through difficult periods in their lives, when they would probably benefit a great deal by being allowed to produce a temper tantrum but have now grown too old for this to be socially acceptable. Perhaps the frustration builds up to a point where it can find release only through the unconscious, in pointless psychokinesis such as breaking windows and throwing things around.

This is just guesswork; I have no proof to offer in favor of such a theory, but there are the records of Nelya Mikhailova's physiology to fall back on. While PK effects were being observed, she was operating almost exclusively on a strong, self-induced theta rhythm. Her blood-sugar and endocrine measurements show that she was in a state of controlled rage. These may be precisely the conditions necessary for PK to appear.

In communities of animals, high levels of aggression often appear and lead to fighting that is highly stylised so that emotions can be expressed without either protagonist being too badly injured. These are rules, but under certain conditions the rules break down and an animal finds aggression thwarted. This happens when two antelopes are so evenly matched that neither will give way, or when two gulls meet on the edge of their respective territories, where neither has right of way. The rival tendencies to fight and to flee are brought into direct conflict with each other and a stalemate exists, but the level of emotion is so high that it has to find an outlet somewhere, and so a 'displacement activity' occurs.

The antelope may start scratching his hind leg as though he had suddenly become unbearably itchy, and the gull may start tugging at bits of grass as though he had an overwhelming need to build a nest immediately. In this way, pent-up aggression is expressed in action of an altogether different kind. Perhaps this is what happens in psychokinesis. Maybe the level of theta-induced anger is so high and so frustrated that it is displaced into another channel, and instead of the man kicking a chair over, which would be considered childish and reprehensible, his unconscious mind gets the force field to do it for him.

There are still a lot of maybes and perhapses in all this. We do not yet know the answers, but a pattern seems to be emerging. It is hard to find a logical place in biological evolution for psychokinesis below the human level. In all other species, aggression is easily expressed. Only in man is there conflict between aggression and social pressure. Only in man has the brain developed far enough to produce a mind that sets its own standards of behavior and consciously suppresses instinctive patterns that fail to meet this standard. Children have to be taught to do this, but at a time of life when the pressures on them are greatest, it is possible that they find an unconscious outlet.

The few people who can produce psychokinetic effects at will have presumably learned to do this by bringing this displacement activity under conscious control. Perhaps, as we learn more about ourselves, more of us will be able to do this equally well. At the moment it seems a little pointless to squander energy and lose two pounds in body weight every time we need to separate an egg. We can do things like this far more effectively with our hands, but these PK party tricks may be just kindergarten toys to a mind that can exert real control over matter.

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