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 Three - Mind

8 - The Cosmic Mind

Part of life's strength lies in the fact that it is precarious. The protoplasm in every cell hangs in an unstable balance that can be tipped in either direction by even the most subtle stimulus. Every part of every organism is like a packet of explosive, primed for action and connected to a hair-trigger mechanism--even a solitary amoeba is poised in this way, ready to flow in any direction. There was a time when amoeboid movement was thought to be completely random, so species were given splendidly anarchic names such as Chaos chaos, but our notions about the physical basis of life have changed.

Amoebae still delight student naturalists; anyone who can draw a squiggly pencil line that at some point in its meanderings meets up with itself again can call this an accurate representation of an amoeba. But we now know that the amoeba's pseudopodia are thrust out with intent, sometimes so precise that they can entirely surround even rapidly moving prey in an embrace that engulfs them without touching at any point. This is possible because the amoeba responds to slight changes in its environment by rapid reciprocal changes in its structure.

The social amoebae respond to each other in the same way, coming together for reproduction in response to a chemical signal between them. When acting in concert they probably broadcast chemical messages, and we must assume that congregations of other independent protozoa, such as those which get together to form a sponge, communicate in the same way. It is difficult, however, to understand how as many as half a million units can coordinate their activities without even the most rudimentary nervous system.

In later and more complex multicells, a miracle of organisation takes place. Some of the components change their shape and stretch until their length is as much as one hundred thousand times their breadth--proportions unique in life--and these elongated cable cells become sensory links between the different areas of the animal. The nerves provide a mechanical basis for electrochemical communication and promote the joint activities that give most animals direction and purpose, but sponges have none of these advantages and yet manage to operate in a controlled and clearly nonrandom fashion that seems to be almost extrasensory. Even if torn to shreds and put through a sieve, their cells reassemble again, like an organism rising from the dead.

Plants also lack a nervous system and show no transmission of impulse from cell to cell--and yet they, too, demonstrate concerted action. A touch on the end of one of the compound leaves of Mimosa pudica makes it fold up, and if the stimulus is strong enough, the response soon spreads to neighboring leaves until the whole plant seems to cringe in submission. The action of the Venus flytrap is even more impressive, because the cells achieve a kind of battery fire, responding together in an explosive action that is fast enough to catch an intruding fly. The biochemistry of the contractions is clearly understood, but coordination of the separate cells is still a mystery. The answer to it may lie outside the bounds of normal sensory perception.

On a February morning in 1966 Cleve Backster made a discovery that changed his life and could have far-reaching effects on ours. Backster was at that time an interrogation specialist who left the CIA to operate a New York school for training policemen in the techniques of using the polygraph, or 'lie detector'. This instrument normally measures the electrical resistance of the human skin, but on that morning he extended its possibilities.

Immediately after watering an office plant, he wondered if it would be possible to measure the rate at which water rose in the plant from the root to the leaf by recording the increase in leaf-moisture content on a polygraph tape. Backster placed the two psychogalvanic-reflex (PGR) electrodes on either side of the leaf of Dracaena massangeana, a potted rubber plant, and balanced the leaf into the circuitry before watering the plant again. There was no marked reaction to this stimulus, so Backster decided to try what he calls 'the threat-to-well-being principle, a well-established method of triggering emotionality in humans'.

In other words he decided to torture the plant. First of all he dipped one of its leaves into a cup of hot coffee, but there was no reaction, so he decided to get a match and burn the leaf properly. 'At the instant of this decision, at 13 minutes and 55 seconds of chart time, there was a dramatic change in the PGR tracing pattern in the form of an abrupt and prolonged upward sweep of the recording pen. I had not moved, or touched the plant, so the timing of the PGR pen activity suggested to me that the tracing might have been triggered by the mere thought of the harm I intended to inflict on the plant.'

Backster went on to explore the possibility of such perception in the plant by bringing some live brine shrimp into his office and dropping them one by one into boiling water. Every time he killed a shrimp, the polygraph recording needle attached to the plant jumped violently. To eliminate the possibility of his own emotions producing this reaction, he completely automated the whole experiment so that an electronic randomiser chose odd moments to dump the shrimp into hot water when no human was in the laboratory at all. The plant continued to respond in sympathy to the death of every shrimp and failed to register any change when the machine dropped already dead shrimp into the water.

Impressed by the plant's apparent sensitivity to stress, Backster collected specimens of other species and discovered that a philodendron seemed to be particularly attached to him. He no longer handles this plant with anything but the greatest care, and whenever it is necessary to stimulate it in order to produce a reaction, his assistant, Bob Henson, 'plays the heavy'. Now the plant produces an agitated polygraph response every time Henson comes into the room, and seems to 'relax' when Backster comes near or even speaks in an adjoining room. (10) Enclosing the plant in a Faraday screen or a lead container has no effect, and it seems that the signals to which it responds do not fall within the normal electromagnetic spectrum. In more recent experiments Backster has found that fresh fruit and vegetables, mold cultures, amoebae, paramecia, yeast, blood, and even scrapings from the roof of a man's mouth all show similar sensitivity to other life in distress.

This phenomenon, which Backster calls 'primary perception', has been substantiated by repetition of his work in other laboratories. (86) It raises awesome biological and moral questions; since thinking about it, I for one have had to give up mowing lawns altogether, but if it were to be taken to its logical limits we would end up, like the community in Samuel Butler's Erewhon, eating nothing but cabbages that have been certified to have died a natural death. The answer to the moral problem lies in treating all life with respect, and killing, with real reluctance, only that which is necessary for survival--but the biological problems are not as easily resolved.

If dying cells send out a signal to which other life responds, why do they do so? And why should such signals be more important to a potted plant than they are to us? Alarm signals are common to all social vertebrates at least. Sea gulls have specific calls that warn their breeding colonies of the approach of predators; ground squirrels and prairie marmots have an early-warning system that alerts their colonies to the danger of air raids by birds of prey. The function of the signals is so clear that those of crows and gulls have been recorded and broadcast across airfields to frighten these birds off the runways just before a plane is due to land. Very often the alarm is interspecific--terns, starlings, and pigeons feeding with gulls all take to flight at the sound of the gull alarm call; and seals dive into the water when nearby colonies of cormorants give notice of approaching danger. (69)

Alarm calls obviously have high survival value and work well across the species line, but not all species function on the same frequencies or even with the same sense organs, so there would be a strong natural pressure toward the evolution of a common signal--a sort of all-species SOS. Pressures of this kind seldom go unnoticed, and it would seem that Backster's discovery could be nature's answer to exactly this need. Presumably it would begin by a compromise signal being developed among groups of closely related species in response to a common predator. Then it would be to the predator's advantage to be able to detect the signal and anticipate its effect on his prey, and finally both predators and prey would find the signal useful in giving warning of an avalanche or flood or some natural catastrophe that could affect them all.

The search of a signal accessible to all life would naturally narrow down to the lowest common denominator. All organisms consist of cells, and the existence of a system of communication among cells would provide the final answer. We have yet to prove conclusively that such a system exists, but the odds in favor of it get better all the time.

Man's exclusion from this warning may be only apparent. I am beginning to suspect that unconsciously we are every bit as aware of the alarm as every pigeon or potted plant. It is a well-established fact that even in sleep we respond to certain significant sounds: a mother will sleep through the roar of a passing train but wake as soon as her child cries softly in another room.

Many mothers claim to know when something is wrong even before the baby sounds his audible alarm. They may be right and tuning in to the universal alarm, but many senses are known to be particularly acute immediately after childbirth, so they could be responding to ordinary stimuli that are very subtle indeed.

The male ostrich Struthio camelus has several hens, and each of them, in strict hierarchical order starting with the dominant female, lay five or six eggs in a hollow he scrapes out on the ground. The last of a large clutch, of twenty eggs, may therefore be laid three weeks after the first one, but all hatch within a few hours of each other about six weeks later. (330) This wonderful synchronisation is vital if the cock is to look after his brood effectively, and he ensures that it occurs by listening in to the eggs as they develop. By the sounds they make, he can assess their stage of development, and if one is too far advanced, he rolls it out of the nest and buries it for a while until the others catch up. Other eggs have parents less astute, and they synchronise themselves by listening to each other.

Days before hatching, the chicks of most ground-living birds, which need to hatch and run off together almost immediately, break through the small shell membrane to gain access to the air space at the blunt end. They breathe this air, and the sound of their breathing can be heard by chicks in other eggs, who know by its rate how near to hatching their brood mates are. (91) In the Japanese quail Coturnix coturnix the rate builds up to three sounds a second, and it has been shown that an artificial click at this frequency accelerates the rate of hatching of all the eggs in a nest. The embryos in most eggs make little 'pleasure' calls in response to a change in position when the egg is held in the hand. These can be heard with a sensitive stethoscope, but it seems certain that breeding parent birds hear these sounds quite clearly and make the appropriate response to them.

In the 1880s two French scientists discovered a boy who appeared to be able to guess correctly the page numbers of books chosen at random by another person. The condition under which the boy operated best was with the experimenter standing with the light behind him and the book open between himself and the child. It turned out that the boy was able to read the numbers from the minute back-to-front reflections on the cornea of the experimenter's eye. (221) These reflections were only one tenth of a millimeter high, but the child's sense of sight was so acute that this was enough to give him the information he needed. This kind of sensitivity is very rare; it is unusual for anyone to be able to see so well, but supernormal does not mean supernatural. The boy's sight was extraordinarily good, but a powerful sense of sight is a very natural phenomenon, and a vulture could probably do as well if it could be persuaded to try.

We have not yet been able to draw any hard and fast limits to the acuity of our senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Every new probe into their potential seems to push the limits of receptivity further and further out, and new spheres of perception are continually being discovered. Many apparently supernatural abilities sooner or later turn out to be due to hyperacuity of an existing sense system and in no way extrasensory, but there is one phenomenon that keeps cropping up and has yet to be explained satisfactorily in terms of the established senses. This is 'thought transference', or telepathy.

Telepathy

A recent definition of telepathy describes it in these terms: 'If one individual has access to information not available to another, then under certain circumstances and with known sensory channels rigidly controlled, the second individual can demonstrate knowledge of this information at a higher level than that compatible with the alternative explanation of chance guessing.' (222)

There are thousands of records of what seems to be communication of this kind between two people who already have strong emotional bonds. The evidence is largely anecdotal and deals usually with knowledge of crises affecting one member of a pair--husband/wife, parent/child, brother/sister--that is communicated at the time of the occurrence to the other member, somewhere else<. Rapport is said to be most effective between identical twins, who suffer the same diseases at the same times and seem to lead very similar lives even when separated at birth. These accounts are interesting but almost impossible to assess in retrospect and offer no real clues as to the nature and origin of telepathy.

The most painstaking attempt to deliberately keep knowledge of a given fact from an individual to see if he could guess the target correctly is the work done by Rhine and his associates at Duke University. They took the public feeling that there was an area of human experience in which people seem to know, by 'hunch' or 'intuition', about things that are out of direct reach of eye or ear, and examined it under laboratory conditions, in which the odds against knowing by pure coincidence could be computed. This work began in the early 1930s, when Rhine first used the term extrasensory perception, or ESP, to describe the process and began a lengthy series of tests on card guessing.

Rhine used the Zener pack, which consists of twenty-five cards carrying five symbols; square, circle, cross, star, and wavy lines. In any test the chance score is five out of twenty-five, but in a variety of test situations with a number of subjects, Rhine found that many times scores were so high that they had odds of more than a million to one against chance. On one occasion a nine-year-old girl from an unhappy home scored twenty-three when tested at her school, and when brought into the Duke laboratory by an experimenter to whom she had become emotionally attached, succeeded in guessing all twenty-five cards correctly. A Duke student, Hubert Pearce, became very involved with the research and, when specifically challenged by Rhine to do well in an important test, identified every single card in the pack.

These were exceptional results clearly influenced by the personalities involved, and in longer series of the basically monotonous tests both subjects continued to do better than chance, but at the level of only seven or eight out of twenty-five. So most of his research, which has now been going on for almost forty years, is providing telepathic evidence that shows up only in statistics. But even if the margin of success is small, it is so persistent, over tens of millions of tests, that it shows that something is taking place to produce this bias.

The statistical methods used at Duke have been criticised, but the president of the American Institute of Mathematical Statistics says, 'If the Rhine investigation is to be fairly attacked it must be on other than mathematical grounds.' (133) Spencer Brown of Cambridge suggests that the deviation from chance may be real, but that it is caused not so much by telepathy as by an as yet unrecognised factor that affects randomness itself.

To many other researchers the surprising thing about the statistics is that there should have been any success at all in experiments of this kind. Gaither Pratt describes the card tests as 'a grossly inefficient instrument', which is 'choking off the very function which it was designed to measure'. (257) And the Soviet worker Lutsia Pavlova regards the Rhine tests which involve transmitting a great many bits of information in a short time as the most difficult way imaginable of trying to generate telepathy. She says, 'We find it best not to send signals too quickly. If different bits come too rapidly, the changes in the brain associated with telepathy begin to blur and finally disappear.' (233)

A series of card tests with less equivocal results was performed in London between 1936 and 1943 by Samuel Soal and his subject Basil Shackleton. Soal grew weary of the standard designs and made his own cards, portraying five brightly colored animals. In one series with these images, on which the unconscious could get some sort of grip, Shackleton scored 1,101 out of 3,789, which provides odds against chance so high that they become almost meaningless. One could not get a result like this by chance even if the entire population of the world had tried the experiment every day since the beginning of the Tertiary period, sixty million years ago. (307)

One of the most interesting things about this test situation is the motivation of the subject. Soal described how the tests began one day when his office door suddenly opened and a tall, well-groomed man in his thirties appeared. 'I have come,' he announced, 'not to be tested, but to demonstrate telepathy.' This was Shackleton, and a firm belief in his own ability undoubtedly played a major part in producing the exceptional results.

Official support may also help, because in Russia great strides in telepathy research have been made in state-supported projects during the past five years. The new era opened on 19 April 1966, when Karl Nikolaiev--an actor in Novosibirsk--managed to open telepathetic contact with his friend Yuri Kamensky--a biophysicist in Moscow, 1,860 miles away. Both men were supervised by scientific teams, and at a prearranged time Kamensky was handed a sealed package selected at random from a number of similar boxes, and, on opening it, began to finger the object, examining it carefully and trying hard to see it through his friend's eyes.

It was a metal spring consisting of seven tight spirals and, in Novosibirsk, Nikolaiev wrote his impressions as 'round, metallic, gleaming, indented, looks like a coil'. Ten minutes later, when Kamensky concentrated on a screwdriver with a black plastic handle, Nikolaiev recorded 'long and thin, metal, plastic, black plastic'. (345) The mathematical probability of being able to guess a single target out of all the possible objects in the world is too large to even consider as a possible explanation for Nikolaiev's success, so the authorities were suitably impressed and grants were readily provided for further research.

Soon the 'Popov group' came into being. This is a panel of scientists known collectively and officially as 'The Bio Information Section of the A.S. Popov All-Union Scientific and Technical Society of Radio Technology and Electrical Communications'. Their first task was to try to detect the action of telepathy in the brain, so in March 1967 the group installed Kamensky in Moscow again and took Nikolaiev to a laboratory in Leningrad, where he was installed in an isolated, sound-proof room and wired up to a series of physiological monitors.

He spent a while getting himself into a receptive state, which he describes as 'completely relaxed, but attentive', and when he indicated that he was ready, his brain was producing a steady alpha rhythm. Nikolaiev had no idea when the telepathetic message from Kamensky would be transmitted, but just three seconds after the experimenters in Moscow gave the signal to begin sending, Nikolaiev's brain waves changed drastically as the alpha was suddenly blocked. For the first time in history, visible proof of the transmission of an impulse from one mind to another, across four hundred miles, had been obtained.

In later tests, EEG records showed similar dramatic changes in the brain patterns of the sender as well as the receiver, and the Popov group reported, 'We detected this unusual activation of the brain within one to five seconds after the beginning of telepathic transmission. We always detected a few seconds before Nikolaiev was consciously aware of receiving a telepathic message. At first there is a general, nonspecific activation of the front and mid sections of the brain. If Nikolaiev is going to get the telepathic message consciously, the brain activation quickly becomes specific and switches to the rear, afferent regions of the brain.' (233) When receiving an image of something such as a cigarette box, the activity in Nikolaiev's brain was localised in the occipital region, associated with sight, and when the message consisted of a series of noises being heard by the sender, activity took place in the receiver's temporal area, which is normally involved with sound.

The connection between telepathy and the alpha rhythm is crucial. It seems certain that both telepathy and psychokinesis occur only under certain psychological conditions and that these are the ones marked by the production of brain waves of a particular frequency. In PK it seems to be the theta rhythm, but in telepathy it is the alpha pattern, between eight and twelve cycles per second. Subjects who score well in laboratory tests all say that they adopt a certain state of mind, which one described as 'concentrating my attention on a single point of nothingness. I think about nothing at all, just looking at a fixed point and emptying the mind entirely if this is possible.' (224) Another calls the telepathic state 'concentrated passivity', and a third sees it as 'relaxed attentiveness'.

The psychologist William James resolved this paradoxical state by recognising two types of attention. One is the active type, which requires effort such as that shown 'by one whom we might suppose at a dinner party resolutely listening to a neighbour giving him insipid and unwelcome advice in a low voice, whilst all around the guests were loudly laughing and talking about exciting and interesting things.' (163) This kind of attention involves conflict and is quite distinct from the passive type, in which one responds almost instinctively to an exciting sense impression. An example of this could be the state of someone who wakes suddenly in the night thinking that something must have disturbed him and sits up watching, listening, and waiting for whatever it was to happen again.

The production of telepathic or of psychokinetic phenomena is still so rare as to be considered abnormal, and it seems that in many subjects the fear of being able to do this type of thing produces a state of conflict that actively prevents them from doing it again. Many successful performers, whose livelihood or prestige depends on producing the phenomena, resolve the conflict by dissociation. They enter a trance state in which their conscious minds can disclaim all responsibility for the events, or perhaps they even become 'possessed by a spirit' of someone else, who can be blamed for the goings on.

The success of these psychological gambits for avoiding conflict is indicated by the fact that many subjects seem to remember nothing at all of what happened during the performance. For some the dissociation is simple, but others appear to go through tremendous battles in the process. Hereward Carrington, one of the old 'trouble shooters' of psychical research, described the condition of a psychokinetic subject at the end of her session as 'weak, drawn, nauseated, hysterical, deeply lined about the face, physically and mentally ill--a broken shrivelled old woman'. (65) He also noted that her expenditure of nervous energy was greatest when there were strangers present and her fear of failure, and therefore her degree of conflict, were also high.

The effortless attention that seems to accompany successful performances is very characteristic of the psychological state that goes with alpha rhythms. To produce the rhythm that turns on the light in a commercial 'alphaphone', one has to achieve just this state of mind. It used to be thought that alpha was continuous as long as the eyes were closed and that it would automatically stop when they opened, but with practice one can keep the rhythm going with wide-open eyes by avoiding any kind of analytical or calculating thought. This means avoiding sensory activity and becoming as abstracted as possible, and probably explains why many psychic subjects prefer to work in the dark or at least in dim lighting, and all of them insist on quiet.

An EEG analysis of Einstein showed that he maintained a fairly continuous alpha rhythm even while carrying out rather intricate mathematical calculations, but for him these were part of everyday life and required no great expenditure of effort. (243) So it seems that alpha need not be blocked by mental activities as long as these require no active attention and involve no conflict.

The meditation techniques of the East are specifically designed to promote relaxed attention. Zen texts carry the instruction to 'think of not thinking of anything at all', (78) and master yoga teachers say, 'When the mind becomes devoid of all the activities and remains changeless, then the yogi attains to the desired state.' (23) The emphasis is on the lack of conflict, and although an act of will is initially required to reach this state, 'once the habit is developed, effort is replaced by spontaneity and, instead of having the attention hold the object, the object holds the attention.' (19)

A study of riya-yoga adepts in Calcutta showed that their normal rate of alpha activity was in the usual range of nine to eleven cycles per second, but in deepest meditation they produced prolonged alpha rhythm that was accelerated by as much as three cycles. (83) Grey Walter tells of a study in which he watched a Hindu doctor go into meditation: '... the alpha rhythm became more and more regular and monotonous, until toward the end of the exercise, which lasted about twenty minutes, the alpha rhythm was absolutely continuous, so that it looked like an artificial oscillation.' (336) These measurements show that meditation states are quite unlike drowsiness, light sleep, dreaming, coma, or hibernation, but have much more in common with the patterns observed during successful telepathy. It is quite possible that the two states originate in the same way and are aspects of a single biological condition.

The Popov group have built an automatic tuning device, which is nothing more than an 'alphaphone', to tell Karl Nikolaiev when he is in the correct mood for receiving telepathic messages. The presence of similar rhythms in both sender and receiver seems to be one prerequisite for successful communication between them, and the Russian research has shown that this is not just a passive and accidental resemblance in brain patterns. In one of their experiments Kamensky was exposed to a strobe light flashing at a set frequency inside the alpha range, and naturally this stimulus set up a corresponding rhythm in his brain. Nikolaiev, in another building, prepared himself and settled down to receive communication by producing his own alpha rhythm, and when the two thought they were in contact, it was found that their patterns were perfectly synchronised. (286)

Not only that, but every time the frequency of the light flashing at Kamensky was changed, Nikolaiev's rhythm changed instantly to match it. Similar results have been obtained at the Jefferson Medical College, in Philadelphia, where two ophthalmologists showed that a change in brain rhythm, such as the production of alpha waves, in one twin could cause a matching shift in the brain of the other, identical twin some distance away. (153) This kind of contact is apparently even more effective if a strong physical or emotional state is involved at the same time. (233) The Popov group attached Kamensky to a binocular apparatus that provided light flashes at a different frequency for each eye. The double stimulus set up conflicting patterns on either side of his brain, and the result was instant nausea.

The same patterns appeared simultaneously in Nikolaiev's brain, each on the appropriate side, and produced in him an attack of 'seasickness' so severe that the experiment broke up in confusion. This is the most convincing demonstration of telepathy to date, including, as it does, patterns in the brain that could not be produced in any natural way.

Again, the evidence shows that the most effective telepathic messages involve trauma and crisis and that no news travels so well or so quickly as bad news. Biologically this makes sense. There is no urgency attached to pleasure and well-being; these are states that can be communicated in the usual leisurely way by normal channels, such as greeting cards, but if alarm signals are going to serve any useful function, they must travel by the fastest possible telegraphic or telepathic route.

In 1960 a French magazine splashed the news that the United States Navy was using telepathy to solve the old problem of communication between a submarine under water and its base on the shore. They reported that the atomic submarine Nautilus was in telepathic contact with trained receivers on the shore and that ESP had become a new secret weapon. The American authorities were quick to deny the reports, but the Russians were equally quick to point out that they had been using the system for years. The Soviet method involved rabbits instead of radio. They took newly born rabbits down in a submarine and kept the mother ashore in a laboratory with electrodes implanted deep in her brain.

At intervals, the underwater rabbits were killed one by one, and at the precise time that each of her offspring died there were sharp electrical responses in the brain waves of the mother. There is no known physical way in which a submerged submarine can communicate with anyone on land, and yet even rabbits seem to be able to make contact of a kind in a moment of crisis.

The possibility of actually using telepathy as a means of communication to submarines and spaceships has been entertained by both the United States and the USSR, and in both countries scientists have used the ideas as an instrument to pry more money for research out of their governments. As far as we know, nothing really practical has emerged. The difficulty is that in deep-sea or outer-space exploration, reliability is essential, and nobody has yet managed to produce telepathic contact that works every time and on demand. Perhaps the closest so far is the Kamensky/Nikolaiev combination, in which EEG records show when contact is taking place and how long it lasts. Using a Morse signal in which a contact of forty-five seconds is read as a dash and a contact of less than ten seconds as a dot, they have succeeded in getting seven consecutive signals across space to spell out the Russian word MIG, which means 'instant'. (110)

The test took twenty minutes, which is not exactly instantaneous, but even this would represent a saving in time when talking to a cosmonaut in the vicinity of Jupiter, where radio communications will lag by over an hour. The message, of course, would have to be very simple, and it is difficult to imagine any space project placing reliance on a system as unpredictable as this one still is, but it might be useful in an emergency.

Apart from influencing brain waves, telepathic contacts also seem to have an influence on blood pressure. Douglas Dean, an electrochemist at the Newark College of Engineering, has discovered that even those who are consciously unaware of receiving telepathy might be doing so. (85) When someone concentrates on the name of a person with whom he has an emotional tie, the distant subject registers a measurable change in blood pressure and volume. Dean used a plethysmograph to show that about one in every four people have this kind of sensitivity.

Using such loaded names and a system in which a response stands for a dot and a long period without stimulus represents a dash, he has managed to send simple messages from room to room, building to building, and, in one case, over twelve hundred miles, from New York to Florida. (178) This discovery ties in with Russian findings that individuals in apparently telepathic contact have a quicker heartbeat, greater cardiac noises, and in some cases perfect synchronisation in pulse between sender and receiver. (227)

It has been suggested that this physical rapport could be enhanced by electromagnetic fields. A Washington electronics engineer reports that 'working with high frequency machines, my colleagues and I have suddenly found that we are on occasion telepathic.' (233) It is possible that the whole body is involved. One study shows that an increase in electrical activity and therefore a decrease in skin resistance takes place at the moment of contact, (236) but most indications point to the fact that physical relaxation and therefore a decrease in muscle tone and skin reaction is essential. Electromyographs attached to the arms of yogis in meditation show no response at all, even when the session lasts over two hours. (83)

Relaxation produces a decrease in the rate of respiration and a corresponding increase in the pressure of carbon dioxide in the lungs. This in turn produces a rise in the carbon-dioxide tension of arterial blood, and when this comparatively poorly oxygenated blood reaches the brain, it starts a chain reaction in which the blood vessels dilate to increase the rate of flow and the brain rhythm accelerates as it battles to get the oxygen it needs. Usually this reaction produces fast alpha rhythms of exactly the frequency that seems to be conducive to telepathy. Accidental loss of blood produces the same deficiency with the same results, and it is interesting that people who lose blood often speak of being relaxed and detached, just watching the world go by and seeing other things and other people very clearly.

Another, and more common, cause of oxygen deprivation is high altitude. Could it be purely coincidental that so many of the transcendental techniques have been perfected by people living at great heights in the Himalayas? A member of the first successful Everest expedition described his reactions above twenty-four thousand feet when he felt 'the presence of one half of me soaring above, sublimely purposeful, aware of the beauty around. It chides, encourages, fortifies the other half, grinding dismally below.' (232)

The correspondence between the conditions that seem to be best suited to telepathy and those which occur in meditation is so close that it is tempting to pursue the parallels even further. (224) All the groups that practice meditation also have very strict rules governing their diet. They are almost entirely vegetarian for ostensibly moral reasons, but there could also be a physiological basis for their food preferences.

Meat has the direct effect of increasing the acidity of blood, and our bodies respond to this by lowering the amount of acidic carbon dioxide in compensation. A vegetable diet has the opposite effect: it reduces acidity, and compensation for this produces a rise in carbon-dioxide pressure in the lungs and a reduction in the amount of oxygen getting to the brain. So a vegetarian meal has roughly the same effect as an increase in altitude--and the yogis dining on rice and fruit down at sea level in India are making physiological excursions up into the mountains every day.

Many of the physical conditions that seem to be part of a state that encourages telepathy also occur in sleep. The muscle tone is reduced, respiration and carbon-dioxide pressure are decreased, and the brain is generally not concerned with analysis and calculation. At Maimonides Hospital, in New York, a 'dream laboratory' has been established, primarily for research into sleep and dreaming but also to investigate the possibility of telepathy between a sender and a sleeping receiver. One of the team working there says, 'Many persons who are incapable of effective communication in normal ways can communicate at a telepathic level and surprise the therapist with a dream of rich awareness even of the physician's problems.' (309)

The information included in these dreams could have been gained in a normal way during a psychoanalytic session, so they set up a series of experiments in which senders tried to communicate when EEG patterns showed that the receiver was dreaming. One of the targets was Dali's painting The Sacrament of the Last Supper, and on waking, the subject reported a dream of a group of people, a fishing boat, a glass of wine, and the feeding of the multitudes. On another occasion the senders were two thousand people at a pop concert in a nearby theater, and the target was a man meditating in the lotus position that they could see on the screen above the performers. The concert situation was chosen because 'music appeals to a person's non-verbal nature, to levels of consciousness below the intellect.' (79) It seemed to work because the subject had a dream of a holy man capturing the energy from the sun.

Several workers suggest that telepathy is masked by consciousness and that it takes place only when one's guard is down and it can slip by the active censor in our minds. There seem to be specific conditions in which telepathy can take place, and trying to examine it in a laboratory under controlled conditions is a little like trying to study the behavior of a dead animal.

Sitting at a table hour by hour trying to guess the sequence of five meaningless symbols in someone else's pack of cards seems hardly likely to lay bare the unconscious areas where telepathic abilities may be latent. Our unconscious responds much more readily to emotional situations. This can be demonstrated very easily by an experiment such as that in which subjects were shown ten nonsense syllables, five of which were accompanied by an electric shock, until they became conditioned and produced electrical responses in their palms whenever they saw the 'shocking' syllables. (160)

The syllables were then flashed on the screen so fast that none of the subjects could consciously tell them apart, but their unconscious minds saw the patterns quite clearly and produced the reflex each time they were shown a brief glimpse of the syllables that had once been connected with the shocks. The unconscious is active all the time, but techniques like this are necessary to prompt or bully it into giving up its information.

The best instrument we possess for exploring the unconscious is hypnosis. The psychiatrist Stephen Black has said, 'Hypnosis is not only the most simple and practical way of proving the existence of the unconscious--which is still in doubt in some circles--but is in fact the only way in which unconscious mechanisms can be manipulated under repeatable experimental conditions for purposes of investigation.' (26)

The induction of hypnosis depends on the establishment of a rapport between hypnotist and subject that is at first sight very much like one of the prerequisites for telepathy. There are, however, no EEG patterns unique to hypnosis, and there is no evidence at all to suggest that hypnotist and subject enter into physiological linkage like that of Kamensky and Nikolaiev, but there are reports of shared experience.

The physicist Sir William Barrett carried out a series of tests with a young girl: 'Standing behind the girl, whose eyes I had securely bandaged, I took up some salt and put it in my mouth; instantly she sputtered and exclaimed, "What for are you putting salt in my mouth?" Then I tried sugar; she said "That's better"; asked what it was like, she said "Sweet." Then mustard, pepper, ginger etc. were tried; each was named and apparently tasted by the girl when I put them in my own mouth, but when placed in her mouth she seemed to disregard them.' (94)

This kind of communication has not been proved, but if it exists, it would lend strong support to Jung's notion of a collective unconscious, in which all experience is shared. Even Freud, though he himself had difficulty inducing hypnosis, believed that telepathy took place most easily in psychoanalytic situations, in which the unconscious was being exposed to scrutiny. His essay on Psychoanalysis and Telepathy was not published until after his death, but toward the end he wrote, 'If I had my life to live over again, I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis.' (309)

It looks as if telepathy is regularly received by the unconscious and only occasionally breaks through to conscious levels. There seems to be a barrier that prevents it from surfacing in our conscious minds, and to overcome this blockage we, or those such as the psychoanalyst or the hypnotist who are assisting us, must find some way around or some subterfuge that circumvents it. The old mediumistic phenomena of 'automatic talking' and 'automatic writing' while in a state of trance may be ways in which the conscious mind 'passes the buck' and surrenders its responsibilities. Dreams and hallucinations could be other ways around the repression. It is entirely possible that many of our everyday thoughts are telepathic, or at least partly telepathic, in origin and that we pass these off as our own simply because they have become mixed with much that is genuinely ours in crossing the threshold between the unconscious and full consciousness.

It seems to me that telepathy, defined as 'access to information held by another without use of the normal sensory channels', is proved beyond reasonable doubt. It is too much a part both of common experience and of controlled investigation to be dismissed any longer. We now have a great many records of communication taking place outside the normal channels, but still very little idea of how it might operate.

We know a fair amount about how it does not work.

Leonid Vasiliev, physiologist at the University of Leningrad, had done a long and painstaking series of experiments in an attempt to track down the telepathic wavelength. He started with two hypnotic subjects that could be put into a trance from a distance by what can only be telepathic means. This provided him with a repeatable phenomenon that could be switched on and off at will and probed and pulled apart to reveal what he hoped would be the physical basis of transmission. He eliminated most of the normal electromagnetic possibilities by putting the subjects into a Faraday cage, but still they fell asleep on telepathic cue. He built a lead capsule with a lid that sealed itself in a groove filled with mercury, but still the message got through. Finally, when he found that it worked regardless of the distances involved, Vasiliev admitted defeat. (328)

The discovery that telepathy seems to be independent of distance has disturbed investigators, because most known physical forces diminish in proportion to the distance they travel--in accordance with a well-known law. In recent years, however, the law has been broken. Many metals, when cooled to the temperature of liquid helium, can be made to carry an electric current without any loss due to resistance or the distance involved. (121) In this condition they are known as superconductors, and what they do amounts almost to perpetual motion as long as the low temperatures are maintained. Now there are signs that new alloys can be made that will allow superconduction at much higher temperatures, perhaps even at room temperature, and the exciting thing about these new, layered materials is that the metal is sandwiched between bands of an organic compound.

These new materials are also more directional than the old ones, allowing currents to flow only in certain channels. In this they are reminiscent of discoveries that under certain conditions radiations such as radio waves can be ducted so that they not only arrive at their destination undiminished in power but sometimes even gain in strength. Work on the sounds produced by whales shows that these mammals will deliberately seek out inversion layers deep in the ocean, where a band of warm water sometimes gets trapped between two layers of cooler water, and that they use these bands as submarine cables to communicate perhaps over thousands of miles across an entire ocean.

This raises the question of why, if such channels exist, have we not been able to detect them or deflect them in the space between two people in apparent telepathic contact? The answer to this could be that they depend on particles that are mathematically imaginary. Modern physics often uses virtual particles with imaginary energies and masses to describe functions in the physical world. An example is the 'neutrino', which has no positive physical characteristics and is observable only by inference but plays a vital role in the interaction of other fundamental particles.

The neutrino, and its counterpart the anti-neutrino, have never been directly discovered, but every competent physicist today is convinced that they exist, simply because he can see no way in which certain reactions could take place without them. The situation with telepathy is much the same. Certain phenomena have been observed regularly under a wide variety of conditions, and there is no reason to assume that a physical agent does not exist simply because we cannot yet see it.

Assuming that telepathy exists and acknowledging our failure to discover its mode of action, we are still left with the problem of what it means. Why did it evolve in the first place? And if it is not confined to man, what is its biological function?

Sir Alister Hardy, once Professor of Zoology at Oxford, has been disturbing his more orthodox colleagues since 1949 with the notion that telepathy may be the clue to a fundamental biological principle that has played a major part in evolution. He argues that the development of language, important as it was for man, is unlikely to have produced extrasensory kinds of perception as well, and suggests that it might have had the opposite effect. Language undoubtedly assisted the growth of reason, the exchange of ideas, the initiation and spread of new inventions, and the enlargement of our cerebral cortex, but it might also have repressed a more primitive form of knowing in favor of the more precise communication possible in a spoken system. Babies up to the age of about eighteen months seem to be very much like chimpanzees of the same age; they have similar interests and intellects and can communicate very effectively in the old, visual manner.

Even adults, deprived of the advantages of language and linguistic clues, see, hear, feel, move, and explore in much the same way as animals do. A man who cannot make notes or draw a map is no better at negotiating a maze than a trained white rat. In explicit knowledge, formulated in words and formulas and diagrams, we are unbeatable, but in tacit knowledge, which is concerned with what we are actually in the act of doing before it becomes expressed in words or symbols, we are not as good as many other species.

Hardy said, 'Perhaps our idea on evolution may be altered if something akin to telepathy ... was found to be a factor in moulding the patterns of behaviour among members of a species. If there was such a non-conscious group behaviour plan, distributed between, and linking, the individuals of the race, ... it might operate through organic selection to modify the course of evolution.' (134)

By 'organic selection' he meant that the gene combinations best suited to the habits of an animal would tend to survive in preference to those which did not give full scope to an animal's patterns of behavior. For instance, if a bird that used to feed on insects from the surface of the bark of trees found that as man encroached and the insects became more scarce it could get more food by probing into the bark, then it might change its feeding habits in this direction. If all the members of the species adopted the new habit of probing, then those whose genes gave them the advantage of a slightly longer bill would have a better chance of survival. In time all the population would have longer beaks, and an evolutionary change in appearance would have taken place because of a simple change in behavior.

The blue tit, Paws caeruleus, in western Europe has recently learned to open the foil caps of milk bottles left on doorsteps and drink the cream off the top. This behavior pattern is spreading rapidly across the continent, apparently by imitation, and if the dairies continue to deliver their product in the same containers, it is possible that sooner or later these little birds will develop a bill better designed to exploit a valuable new source of food.

In both these cases the change in behavior was brought about by an environmental change. Most evolutionary developments are ones of this kind, occurring in response to external pressures of climate or the actions of predators or competitors. Plants evolve entirely in this way, developing in directions imposed on them by the selective forces of sun and rain, soil and shelter, competition with neighboring plants, and destruction by browsing herbivores. The fantastic carnival of flowers is one produced entirely for the benefit of those animals the plant needs to come and distribute its pollen. (133) The Australian orchid Cryptosylia leptochila has developed a flower that is a perfect replica, complete with spots in the proper places, of the abdomen of a female ichneumon fly, Lissopimpla semipunctata.

The male is attracted to the flower, tries to mate with it, and in doing so, picks up pollen and carries this on to his next frustrating rendezvous. This is a clear example of the behavior of an animal acting as an evolutionary force on the shape of a plant. Animals are not entirely dependent on the external forces of selection in this way but can, by their exploratory nature, bring about changes in their own appearance by changing their behavior.

The importance of this distinction is that adaptations produced by external selection are generally limiting the negative in nature, shaping an organism to fit more easily into the environmental niche in which it occurs. Adaptations produced by the animal's own patterns of behavior are much less predetermined and can lead it out of the niche into the exploration and colonisation of entirely new ways of life. Otters would never have developed their webbed feet, nor dolphins their flippers, if one of their entirely terrestrial ancestors had not deviated from its usual routine and gone paddling instead. And this is where telepathy comes in.

Some of these changes in behavior and body form took place in a comparatively short space of time, and it is difficult to see how this could have been achieved in every case just by the trial-and-error experiments of occasional adventurous individuals. New habits and ideas can spread by imitation, as they seem to be doing in the milk-drinking tits and in a population of monkeys on one of the Japanese islands who have learned to take sweet potatoes down to the sea and wash them. Even here there are problems: Mi, and it seems that a second group of monkeys, on a neighboring island, have recently and unaccountably also begun rinsing their food.

The existence of an unconscious telepathic link among members of the same species could be a great help in developing and stabilising new behavior patterns. Whately Carington, who once experimented with the telepathic transmission of drawings between people, put forth the idea that other patterns, such as the intricate webs of some spiders, might be communicated in the same way. 'I suggest that the instinctive behaviour of this high order or elaborate type may be due to the individual creature concerned being linked up into a larger system (or common unconscious if you prefer it) in which all the web-spinning experience of the species is stored up.' (64)

It is nonsense to suggest that instinctive behavior is governed by a collective unconscious; we know beyond doubt that it is controlled by genetic inheritance, but it is possible that telepathy could be useful before a habit becomes genetically fixed. A habit must become widespread before it can be incorporated into the repertoire of a species, and it could be spread and stabilised very effectively by some kind of telepathic system. Without telepathy it is difficult to see how an elaborate instinctive pattern can develop at all in invertebrate animals that are highly unlikely to acquire new habits by imitation or by tradition.

For a system of this kind to work, news of a new discovery would have to be generally broadcast in the same way as an alarm call and not confined to a cosy, two-ended telepathic contact. Most human experiments have been of the single-line type, but this does not mean that party lines are impossible. At one point in the long series of experiments between Kamensky and Nikolaiev, a third person was introduced. While Kamensky was in Leningrad transmitting to Nikolaiev in Moscow, unknown to either of them an interceptor, Victor Milodan, was installed in another building in Moscow. Five items were transmitted that evening, and Milodan managed to 'eavesdrop' sufficiently well to identify two of them accurately. So even a very modern and sophisticated spy, specially trained in telepathic techniques, can still have trouble with 'bugs'.

Telepathy could also be useful for cohesion in complex societies such as those of bees and ants. We know that part of this function is played by chemicals, by pheromones that circulate in a hive and let everyone know that the queen still lives. Each worker bee and ant also has a complex of glands that release smells designed for special situations such as laying a trail to a food source or 'scenting' an alarm. In ants the alarm smell is kept in the mandibular glands, and if discharged into still air, it forms a sphere that reaches a maximum diameter of about three inches in fifteen seconds; then it contracts again and fades out altogether after thirty-five seconds. (343)

The alarm sphere therefore extends for only a short distance around the disturbance, say that caused by the intrusion of a foreign insect, and does not affect the rest of the nest. This is important, because there are so many minor disturbances each day that the colony would come to a complete standstill if each alarm were broadcast generally, but there are situations where more concerted action is necessary and where the local and short-lived effects of the smell alarm are inadequate. In those cases telepathy would be very useful and may in fact be employed.

Ivan Sanderson has studied harvester ants of the genus Atta in tropical America and reports remarkable communal activity. (291) These ants build a network of complex, well-cleared roads radiating out from their underground city for as much as half a mile to all the useful food sites in the vicinity. If one of these roads becomes blocked by a falling branch or other obstacle, traffic is disrupted until the special police ants arrive to direct the construction of a detour. Sanderson was impressed by the speed with which reinforcements arrived at a site, and arranged a number of roadblocks of his own where he and his associates were installed along the road at intervals with stop watches.

They found that 'a great phalanx of police came charging up the road from the nest, shoulder to shoulder, about fifty ants wide and rank after rank', almost instantaneously. There was not nearly enough time for word of the disaster to be carried by antenna-to-antenna touch all the way back, the wind was blowing away from the nest and would soon have dispersed any alarm scents, it was dark, and no sound seemed to be involved. It is certain that Atta have a telecommunication system, and it seems to be independent of known chemical and mechanical senses. They, and other species like them, could make good use of, and perhaps already use, some form of telepathy.

A colony of social insects is, in a very real sense, a single organism. The queen is the sex organ and master endocrine gland; the workers are reproductive tract, digestive canal, and regenerative organs; the police are regulatory activities; and the soldiers are the organs of defense. All are united by a set of instincts into a single self-supporting structure in which the interests of the parts are subordinate to the interests of the whole. It should not be surprising to find that such an organism has a rudimentary mind. After all, the functions of the human mind cannot be anchored to any one cell or even a group of cells.

The brain is made up of far more parts than there are in an ant colony, and yet it manages to function as a whole, with more or less complete communication between its separate cells. Impressions are gathered from different areas and merged in the mind in exactly the same way I am suggesting that information from different sources may be merged in a telepathic union between apparently disparate individual animals in a community. This communion may even go a step further and involve all individuals belonging to the same species. There may be a sort of psychic blueprint for each species which involves an unconscious sharing of behavior patterns and perhaps even of form.

One of the major unexplained problems in biology is that of organisation. In the fruit fly Drosophila there is a particular gene that governs formation of the eyes. If this is altered by mutation, a fly is produced without eyes and, bred with others like it, will produce a strain of sightless flies. But after a while the gene complex rearranges itself and some other gene steps in to deputise for the damaged one--and suddenly the flies have eyes again. If part of the eye of a frog is grafted in below the skin anywhere on its body, the epidermal cells in that area will form a perfect lens. So the structure of the eye in fly and frog is not dependent only on a special gene or on special cells. There seems to be some sort of organiser somewhere else, a master plan that knows what the animal should look like and that will make the necessary arrangements in times of need.

Most of this organisation is in the hands of DNA--the unique molecule that carries the heritage of every species--but this does not seem to be sufficient. The remarkable thing about life is not that it exists in such a variety of forms but that so many forms manage to maintain their basic shape and integrity for so long in the face of the multitude of environmental forces that never stop trying to disrupt it. Certainly the DNA code carries instructions that determine the general physical form, but perhaps there is another organiser, a sort of stream of shared experience that allows only the best copies of the species plan to survive. Telepathy could do this.

Intuition

Charles McCreery of the Institute of Psychophysical Research in Oxford is skeptical of the physiological changes some workers present as evidence for the occurrence of telepathy. He prefers to draw a fundamental distinction between 'physiological apparatus as a means of determining the conscious ESP state and physiological apparatus as a detector of ESP'. (224) This means that he is not sure about telepathy itself but believes it is possible to recognise the conditions in which it will occur. McCreery lists these as continuous alpha activity, which is often slightly accelerated; decreased muscle tone; and increased carbon-dioxide pressure.

If there is a clearly defined physiological state in which telepathy is most likely to occur, then it must be possible for someone to train himself to recognise this state in the same way that one can learn to produce alpha rhythms or decreased blood pressure at will. Perhaps this is what intuition is--simply an ability to recognise the telepathic state and use this knowledge to say, 'I don't know why, but I just feel certain that ...' This would mean that intuition is a vague conscious knowledge of the unconscious reception of telepathic information. In many of the telepathy tests, subjects do have a peculiar feeling about certain guesses or impressions and say that some 'feel better' than the rest or that they 'have a hunch' that things are going well.

Often these hunches prove to be correct, but there is not nearly enough information available to prove that this correlation exists. Theoretically it should be possible to run tests designed so that the subject would withhold guesses until he felt this intuitive feeling of 'rightness'. But, so far, no tests of this kind have been done, and the connection between telepathy and intuition remains obscure.

It is possible that there is no correlation between them at all. One of the games played by the psychiatrist Eric Berne is to guess age, occupation, address, and family situation of people he meets. In this he often seems to be remarkably successful, and it has been suggested that he uses telepathy to get the information, but he feels that his intuition is based on normal sensory clues. He suggests that 'things are being automatically arranged just below the level of consciousness; subconsciously perceived factors are being sorted out, fall automatically into place, and are integrated into the final impression, which is at length verbalised with some uncertainty.' (24)

Berne claims that he can tell when his intuition is working well and that the conditions necessary for successful guessing involve 'a narrowed and concentrated contact with external reality'. Which sounds similar to the 'relaxed alert' state of good telepathy, but it is possible that both telepathic information and subliminal impressions are received when the mind is in this mood. We know that under hypnosis the unconscious can recall incredible things, such as the number of stairs climbed in visiting someone else's office last week or the number of lampposts in the street outside, but we have no idea why this sort of thing is collected and when.

It seems that far more environmental information gets into the unconscious than we suspected and that the barrier between unconscious and conscious processes is one of those vital filters that protect us from being swamped by sensations. If this is so, it is not surprising that we have trouble breaking through the barrier: our lives depend on its being maintained intact.

A certain amount of seepage occurs in the form of dreams and hallucinations, and intuition may be another breach, perhaps one that takes place in emergencies when the information might be vital to our survival. Most often, intuitions are the product of past experience--memories, wishes, hopes, and fears that have been stored in the unconscious, but sometimes they may contain completely new information, perhaps obtained by telepathy.

The scant use we make of intuition may be a product of the complexity of our conscious lives. We see it as an alternative to the logical approach of the intellect and tend to divide people into those who operate more emotionally--on the basis of intuition--and those who adopt an intellectual attitude to all decisions. Folklore credits women with greater powers of intuition, but there is little evidence to justify this, although it is possible that women are forced to be more intuitive simply because they have been denied the chance of intellectual development. In species with lesser reasoning ability and a less active consciousness, the barriers seem to be much reduced and in most to be completely nonexistent, but this does not mean that they lose sight of the distinction between 'self' and 'non-self'.

Swallows sitting on a wire space themselves out with almost exactly six inches between each two neighboring birds; for sea gulls the distance is twelve inches, and individual distance in flamingos is about two feet. Man draws the same kind of invisible circles around his body, and the diameter of these areas can be a good indication of his emotional state. The psychiatrist August Kinzel has discovered that the personal space surrounding a normal, well-balanced person is cylindrical and extends roughly eighteen inches in all directions. (176)

Each of us apparently defends this area, and Kinzel has found that the space is very much larger for those of violent disposition. When he tried to approach prison inmates who had records of violence, he found that they stopped him at a distance of as much as three feet and showed markedly increasing tension and hostility as the distance shrank when he deliberately trespassed on their space. Their personal area also bulged out behind them to about four feet, and they regarded any approach from this direction as particularly menacing.

These zones are partly under conscious control. When tightly packed into an elevator or bus, we very carefully suppress hostility and arrange ourselves so that we are angled away from our nearest neighbors in a gesture that provides some reassurance for them. It is possible that we also avoid aggression in these circumstances by an intuitive grasp of the intentions of other individuals. This need not involve telepathy or any extrasensory receptivity but simply an unconscious awareness of others.

The work of life fields suggests that a group of, people together generate a composite field that has a distinctive character and that the addition of a new individual to a group does not just quantitatively add to the field but often changes its pattern altogether. Conversely, we all know the feeling of emptiness and loss that can arise when one person, who may not have been taking any active part in a discussion, leaves a group. The character of the group, its topic of conversation, and its activity can all change, and the party may even break up altogether.

This field of social awareness seems to be the one in which intuition plays its most active role. Whether or not it has anything to do with telepathy, it certainly provides a useful means of access to unconscious sources of information derived from our environment and other organisms in it.

There are a few situations in which it seems also to be possible to obtain information completely unknown to anyone else.

Clairvoyance

In the long series of card-guessing tests at Duke University most of the subjects were trying to guess the card being looked at by another person; these were genuine telepathy tests. But in a few, the subjects were aiming at a target nobody knew, such as the sequence in a shuffled deck. When these tests returned results better than chance, Rhine was forced to recognise a new phenomenon--clairvoyance. (272)

One of the most exhaustively tested subjects in the history of Parapsychological research is a young Czechoslovakian student, Pavel Stepanek. He has produced phenomenal scores in all the classic card tests, but he has also introduced a variation of his own that has come to be known as the 'focusing effect'. (288) He scores particularly well with certain favorite cards and can find them when they are enclosed in envelopes and shuffled so that even the experimenter does not know which is which. After a while his focus comes to include the envelope too, and this has then to be placed in another wrapping. In his latest tests he is being offered a card in an envelope enclosed in a cover that is placed in another jacket, but still he gets them right. (258)

Most of these clairvoyance experiments provide evidence that becomes apparent only on statistical analysis, but two Dutch psychics offer much more dramatic demonstrations. (309) In 1964 Gerard Croiset of Utrecht was consulted by the police in the murder case of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi, and reports indicate that he was able to give accurate information and descriptions of the area in which the bodies were eventually found and to correctly implicate certain local policemen in the killings. In 1943 Peter Hurkos fell from a ladder, fractured his skull, and found that he had lost the power of concentration, but had gained a new faculty instead. When asked recently to assist the police of The Hague, he had only to hold the coat of a dead man to be able to describe the man's murderer in detail that included glasses, mustache, and wooden leg. When the police admitted that they already had such a man under arrest, Hurkos told them where to find the murder weapon. (157)

Strictly speaking, none of these examples can be recognised as true clairvoyance, because there was always someone involved somewhere who knew the vital information. Telepathy could have been taking place. Even in the cases of the card tests, there could have been flaws in the experimental design that allowed the experimenter to have an inkling, albeit unconscious, of where the hidden card was located. True clairvoyance must be concerned with the discovery of an object whose location is unknown to anyone, but then why not call it dowsing? The existence of clairvoyant abilities is so doubtful, and the possibility of such talents having any biological significance so remote, that it seems pointless to pursue them any further.

Witchcraft

Milan Ryzl, a Chzechoslovakian physician now working in the United States, tells of a series of telepathic experiments in which the sender tried to transmit bursts of emotion. When the sender concentrated on the anxiety of suffocation and conjured up racking attacks of asthma, the receiver several miles away suffered an intense choking fit. (287) When the sender concentrated on gloomy emotions and was given a depressant drug, the receiver showed the appropriate EEG response and began to experience strong head pains and a feeling of nausea that lasted for hours. This sheds an entirely new light on the old notion of black magic. There is no doubt that someone who believes that he has been bewitched can think himself into illness and even death, but this new work makes it look as though you don't necessarily have to think your own destructive thoughts. Someone else can think them up and point them at you.

William Seabrook lived for years among the Malinke people in old French West Africa and tells of a Belgian hunter who abused and murdered his local bearers until, as a matter of private justice, they arranged for a sorcerer to lay on a death-sending for him. In a clearing in the jungle the witch doctors set up the corpse of a man requisitioned from a nearby village, dressed it in one of the Belgian's shirts, combed some of his hair in among its own, fastened some of his nail parings to its fingers, and rebaptised the body with the hunter's name. Around this object of sympathetic magic, they chanted and drummed, focusing their malignant hatred on the white man miles away.

A number of his employees, pretending sympathy for him, made certain that the Belgian knew that all this was going on and would continue until he died. He soon fell ill and did die, apparently from autosuggestion. (302) The accepted explanation for events of this kind is that an unconscious belief in the power of the spell, even if one has not in fact been cast, can kill. But the discovery of what seems to be illness transmitted by telepathy suggests that the ceremony itself may be important. The frenzy of hate around the corpse in the jungle would certainly have a hypnotic effect on the participants and would produce exactly the conditions now known to be necessary for creating a telepathic state, the token doll in this case perhaps serving only as a focus for emotions that were in themselves doing damage at a distance.

A case can be made for considering all the trappings of magic in this light, as objects, like the altar in a church, on which attention can be focused and around which emotion can be generated. Spells producing sexual inhibition, possession, paralysis, and all forms of wasting disease undoubtedly rely on suggestion a great deal. Many work because the witches believe that they have these powers and because their subjects believe that they can use them, but the possibility of direct action on an unknowing person cannot be ignored.

There is not much doubt that the procedure of ritual magic of every kind can cause hallucinations. Richard Cavendish describes the magician preparing himself for action by 'abstinence and lack of sleep, or by drink, drugs and sex. He breathes in fumes which may affect his brain and senses. He performs mysterious rites which tug at the deepest, most emotional and unreasoning levels of his mind, and he is further intoxicated by the killing of an animal, the wounding of a human being and in some cases the approach to and achievement of orgasm.' Which includes just about every emotion known to man. It is hardly surprising if after all this he, and those involved with him, see visions and conjure up terrifying personal demons.

A common adjunct of the sorcerer's and the witch's craft is a potion painstakingly prepared for a special effect. Witches were notorious poisoners--both the biblical and the Italian names for them refer specifically to this talent--and the poisons prepared were undoubtedly effective, but it is generally assumed that the elaborate rituals involved in collecting and mixing the ingredients were unnecessary and superstitious elaborations. This may not be true. There is an old idea that a remedy for cancer can be prepared from mistletoe, but that its effectiveness depends entirely on the time that the plant is picked. A cancer research institute in Switzerland tested this recently by doing seventy thousand experiments on parts of the plant picked at hourly intervals day and night. (112)

They measured the degree of acidity, analysed the constituents, and tested the effect of all the preparations on white mice. They have not yet found a cure for cancer, but they did discover that the properties of the plant were drastically affected not only by local time and weather conditions but by extraterrestrial factors such as the phase of the moon and the occurrence of an eclipse. (339) Nothing is the same from one moment to the next. The orientalist Du Lubicz described a medicine that worked almost miraculously if prepared according to the traditional Egyptian ritual, but which, prepared in any other way, was actually poisonous. The time and the place and the way in which something is done do matter a great deal.

It was not many years ago that orthodox medicine completely dismissed psychosomatic causes. That has now changed, but I have the impression that in our new-found enthusiasm for things psychosomatic, we can go too far and attribute to them everything for which we can find no other reasonable explanation. Our future lies in the mind and in our understanding of it, but the intricate rituals and ceremonies that once surrounded occult practices associated with the powers of the mind may surprise us and turn out to have direct effects of their own.

Matter, mind, and magic are all one in the cosmos.

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