SUPERNATURE By Lyall Watson
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PART ONE: COSMOS
CHAPTER ONE: COSMIC LAW AND ORDER
The earth The moon The sun Other factors
CHAPTER TWO: MAN AND THE COSMOS
Man and moon Man and sun The planets Astrology
CHAPTER THREE: THE PHYSICS OF LIFE
Life fields Brain waves Resonance Biophysics
PART TWO: MATTER
CHAPTER FOUR: MIND OVER MATTER
Psychokinesis Willpower The aura Poltergeists
CHAPTER FIVE: MATTER AND MAGIC
Thoughtography Eyeless sight Psychometry Alchemy
PART THREE: MIND
CHAPTER SIX: SIGNS OF MIND
Palmistry Graphology Physiognomy Phrenology
CHAPTER SEVEN: TRANSCENDENCE
Hypnosis Autosuggestion Dreams Hallucination
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE COSMIC MIND
Telepathy Intuition Clairvoyance Witchcraft
PART FOUR: TIME
CHAPTER NINE: NEW DIMENSIONS
Time Precognition Ghosts Exobiology
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
APPENDIX
INDEX
About the Author
The author was born is South Africa and educated there and in Britain,
taking his Ph. D. at London University in 1963. He had a vast and
varied career; he was involved in anthropology in Jordan, Nigeria,
Indonesia and Brazil; archaeological excavations in Israel, Turkey and
Peru; palaeontology in South and East Africa; marine biology in the
Indian Ocean; botany in the deserts of Sonora; medical research in the
Philippines; and represented the Seychelles on the International
Whaling Commission. He spent years pursuing the paranormal and
published many important works in the area. He died in June 2008.
SUPERNATURE
Lyall Watson
A Natural History of the Supernatural
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 1973 by
Hodder & Stoughton Limited
This edition published in 2013 by Sceptre
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright (c) Lyall Watson 1973
The right of Lyall Watson to be identified as the Author of the Work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior
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without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978 1 444 77857 1
Paperback ISBN 978 0 340 40419 5
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'Dip into Lyall Watson's astonishing book SUPERNATURE ... It is a pot
pourri to amaze and startle us. Dr Watson guides us through the maze
and makes us realise how little we know about our world ... The result
is fascinating, even scary - what we understand as supernatural'
The Times
'To read this fascinating and well-documented book is to be shaken by
the sheer piling-up of evidence that things are not what they seem, not
by a long way'
Daily Mail
'Very stimulating ... instructive'
Sunday Telegraph
'SUPERNATURE is not simply an omnibus of psychic or natural phenomena
but a scholarly examination of a science which could revolutionise the
medical and psychological attitudes of mankind'
Evening News
'What the book does accomplish is a redefinition of the frontier.
Instead of the old borders, there is a kind of demilitarized zone into
which scientists and occultists may go without clubbing each other into
insensibility'
Los Angeles Times
'A stimulating and unusual book'
Daily Telegraph
'The book explores virtually the whole field of the occult and succeeds in illuminating many of its darker areas'
Psychic News
'A store house of off-beat happenings'
Observer
'Carefully selective and well documented'
Lancet
'Remarkable ... Even the sceptics will agree that Dr Watson has at
least given new meaning to those famous lines from Hamlet - "There are
more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy"'
Coventry Evening Telegraph
'Watson, a biologist, explores the fringes with a courage that commands respect'
Kansas City Times
INTRODUCTION
Science no longer holds any absolute truths. Even the discipline of
physics, whose laws once went unchallenged, has had to submit to the
indignity of an Uncertainty Principle. In this climate of disbelief, we
have begun to doubt even fundamental propositions, and the old
distinction between natural and supernatural has become meaningless.
I find this tremendously exciting. The picture of science as a jigsaw
puzzle, with a finite number of pieces that would one day all be
slotted neatly into place, has never been appealing. Experience
indicates that things are not like that at all. Every new development
in the microscope reveals further minute detail in structures once
thought to be indivisible. Each enlargement in the power of the
telescope adds thousands of galaxies to a list already so long that it
is meaningless to all but mathematicians. Even research into what once
seemed to be simple behavior patterns has a way of going on forever.
Fifty years ago naturalists were content with the observation that bats
catch moths. Then came the discovery that bats produce sounds inaudible
to the human ear and use echoes to locate their prey. Now it appears
that not only do moths have soundproofing, but that they have ears
specifically designed to listen in to an approaching enemy transmitter.
To counter this advance, bats developed an irregular flight path, which
confused the moths until they in turn came up with an ultrasonic
jamming device. But bats still catch moths, and it can only be a matter
of time before research discovers the next development in this
escalating drama of nature.
All the best science has soft edges, limits that are still obscure and
extend without interruption into areas that are wholly inexplicable. On
the fringe, between those things that we understand as normal
occurrences and those that are completely paranormal and defy
explanation, are a cluster of semi-normal phenomena. Between nature and
the supernatural are a host of happenings that I choose to describe as
Supernature. It is with these go-betweens that this book is concerned.
In the course of a fairly catholic education in most of the life
sciences, there have been many moments when the syllabus brushed up
against something strange, shied away, and tried to pretend that it
hadn't happened. These loose ends have always worried me and have now
accumulated to a point where I am forced to go back and attempt to pick
some of them up and try to relate them to the rest of my experience.
Viewed together, they begin to make some kind of sense, but I must
emphasise that this is very much a beginning and in no way a definitive
study. I am resigned to the fact that my synthesis goes so far beyond
the bounds of established practice that many scientists will find it
outrageous, while at the same time it does not go nearly far enough to
satisfy believers in everything occult. This is what bridges are about.
I hope that there can be some kind of meeting in the middle.
The supernatural is usually defined as that which is not explicable by
the known forces of nature. Supernature knows no bounds. Too often we
see only what we expect to see: our view of the world is restricted by
the blinkers of our limited experience; but it need not be this way.
Supernature is nature with all its flavors intact, waiting to be
tasted. I offer it as a logical extension of the present state of
science, as a solution to some of the problems with which traditional
science cannot cope, and as an analgesic to modern man.
I hope that it will prove to be more than that. Few aspects of human
behavior are so persistent as our need to believe in things unseen -
and as a biologist, I find it hard to accept that this is purely
fortuitous. The belief, or the strange things to which this belief is
so stubbornly attached, must have real survival value, and I think that
we are rapidly approaching a situation in which this value will become
apparent. As man uses up the resources of the world, he is going to
have to rely more and more on his own. Many of these are at the moment
concealed in the occult - a word that simply means 'secret knowledge'
and is a very good description of something that we have known all
along but have been hiding from ourselves.
This natural history of the supernatural is designed to extend the
traditional five senses into areas where others have been operating
undercover. It is an attempt to fit all nature, the known and the
unknown, into the body of Supernature and to show that, of all the
faculties we possess, none is more important at this time than a
wide-eyed sense of wonder.
Lyall Watson, Ph. D.
Ios, Greece, 1971
RATIONALE
The subject matter of most of this book is so controversial that I have
felt it necessary to give detailed references to all my sources of
information. These appear as numbers in the text, which refer to the
bibliography. Most are papers published in reputable journals, and
where I have myself not been able to check the findings, I have had to
rely on the fact that most editors send material to expert referees
before accepting it for final publication. Wherever possible, I have
consulted the original source material and found that this paid huge
dividends. A report in Scientific American of March 1965, for instance,
under the title 'Eyeless Vision Unmasked', claimed that Rosa Kuleshova
was a fraud and that 'peeking is easy, according to those who
understand mentalist acts'. Several books since that time have used
this report as justification for dismissing the entire phenomenon, but
reference to the original research shows that, despite the fact that
she was once caught cheating very clumsily at a public performance,
Kuleshova also possesses a talent that cannot reasonably be shrugged
off in this cavalier fashion. I make no apology for heavy reliance at
many points on publications such as the Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research and the Journal of Parapsychology - they set
standards of erudition and objectivity as high as any other academic
publications.
Where no reference appears, the flights of fancy are my own.
'The most beautiful experience we can have, is the mysterious.'
ALBERT EINSTEIN in Living Philosophies, 1931.
PART ONE
COSMOS
'I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.'
ALBERT EINSTEIN, in the London Observer, 5 April 1964.
There is life on earth - one life, which embraces every animal and
plant on the planet. Time has divided it up into several million parts,
but each is an integral part of the whole. A rose is a rose, but it is
also a robin and a rabbit. We are all of one flesh, drawn from the same
crucible.
There are ninety-two chemical elements that occur in nature, but the
same small selection of sixteen, forms the basis of all living matter.
One of the sixteen, carbon, plays a central role because of its ability
to form complex chains and rings that can be built into an immense
number of compounds. And yet, from the thousands of possible
combinations, just twenty amino acids are singled out as the units of
construction for all proteins. Most significant of all, these proteins
are produced in the right place at the right time by an ordered
sequence of events governed by a code carried in just four molecules,
called nucleotide bases. This is true whether the protein is destined
to become a bacterium or a Bactrian camel. The instructions for all
life are written in the same simple language.
The activities of life are governed by the second law of
thermodynamics. This says that the natural state of matter is chaos and
that all things tend to run down and become random and disordered.
Living systems consist of highly organised matter; they create order
out of disorder, but it is a constant battle against the process of
disruption. Order is maintained by bringing in energy from outside to
keep the system going. So biochemical systems exchange matter with
their surroundings all the time, they are open, thermodynamic
processes, as opposed to the closed, thermostatic structure of ordinary
chemical reactions.
This is the secret of life. It means that there is a continuous
communication not only between living things and their environment, but
among all things living in that environment. An intricate web of
interaction connects all life into one vast, self-maintaining system.
Each part is related to every other part and we are all part of the
whole, part of Supernature.
In this first section I want to look at some of the ways in which our life system is influenced by its environment.
ONE
COSMIC LAW AND ORDER
Chaos is coming. It is written in the laws of thermodynamics. Left to
itself, everything tends to become more and more disorderly until the
final and natural state of things is a completely random distribution
of matter. Any kind of order, even that as simple as the arrangement of
atoms in a molecule, is unnatural and happens only by chance encounters
that reverse the general trend. These events are statistically
unlikely, and the further combination of molecules into anything as
highly organised as a living organism is wildly improbable. Life is a
rare and unreasonable thing.
The continuance of life depends on the maintenance of an unstable
situation: It is like a vehicle that can be kept on the road only by
continual running repairs and by access to an endless supply of spare
parts. Life draws its components from the environment. From the vast
mass of chaotic probability flowing by, it extracts only the
distinctive improbabilities, the little bits of order among the general
confusion. Some of these it uses as a source of energy, which it
obtains by the destructive process of digestion; from others, it gets
the information it needs to ensure continued survival. This is the
hardest part, extracting order from disorder, distinguishing those
aspects of the environment that carry useful information from those
which simply contribute to the over-all process of decay. Life manages
to do this by a splendid sense of the incongruous.
The cosmos is a bedlam of noisy confusion. Everything in it is
subjected to a constant bombardment by millions of conflicting
electromagnetic and sound waves. Life protects itself from this turmoil
by using sense organs, which are like narrow slits, letting in only a
very limited range of frequencies. But sometimes even these are too
much, so there is the additional barrier of a nervous system, which
filters the input and sorts it out into 'useful information' and
'irrelevant noise'. For instance, if a cat is exposed to a continuous
electronic click, it hears and responds to the stimulus at first but is
soon habituated to it and in the end effectively ignores the sound
altogether. (87) An electrode implanted in the auditory nerve, leading
from the inner ear to the brain, shows that, after a while, the nerve
no longer even sends information about the clicks on to the brain; the
regular stimulus has been classified as irrelevant background noise and
discarded as a source of information. But as soon as it stops, the cat
pricks up its ears and takes notice of this novel and therefore
incongruous phenomenon. Sailors respond in the same way by waking
suddenly from even the deepest sleep when the sound of their ship's
engine changes pitch or ceases altogether.
We all have this ability to focus on certain stimuli and to ignore
others. A good example is 'cocktail party concentration', which enables
us to tune in to the sound of just one person's voice among so many all
saying similar things. (235) Even in our sleep, recordings of our brain
waves show that we produce stronger reactions to the sound of our own
names being spoken than we do to any other names. These are responses
that we learn, but all life automatically sorts out environmental chaos
in the same way and concentrates only on the improbable orderly events
hidden in the prevailing disorder.
Living organisms select information from their surroundings, process it
according to a program (in this case one that will ensure the best
possible chance of survival), and supply an output of order (which is
in turn a source of raw materials and information for other life). This
is an accurate description of how a computer operates, so it is not
surprising that a greater understanding of life should have come hand
in hand with the recent development of computer systems. Computers
operate on the basis of programmed information, which is supplied in
accordance with a theory that describes information as a function of
improbability, saying 'the more improbable an event, the more
information it conveys.' (41) Returning to the metaphor of life as a
vehicle, this means that we are bound to hear the improbable rattle in
a new motorcar but hardly notice the much more probable rattle in an
old one. The sound may be identical, but heard from the driver's seat
of the old car, it is part of the environment that carries very little
useful information. In a system in which everything tends toward decay,
another symptom of disorder is not at all improbable and in no way
distinctive.
A single bright light on a moonless night in the desert is very
conspicuous and obviously worth investigating, but even when surrounded
by other lights, one will stand out if it flashes on and off or changes
color. Hurtling through space on our planet, we are continually exposed
to the forces of the cosmos. Most of these are fairly constant and make
little conscious impression on us; we are no more aware of them than we
are of the force of gravity that keeps us attached to our vehicle. It
is only when the cosmic forces change or fluctuate like flashing lamps
that they become conspicuous and acquire information and signal value.
Many of these changes are cyclic, occurring again and again at more or
less regular intervals, which gives life time to develop a specific
sensitivity to the changes and a response to the information they
convey.
I have said that life occurs by chance and that the probability of its
occurring, and continuing, is infinitesimal. It is even more unlikely
that this life could, in the comparatively short time it has existing
on this planet, develop into more than a million distinct living forms
- and these are only the tip of an enormous pyramid of past successes
and failures. To believe that this took place only by chance, places a
great strain on the credulity of even the most mechanistic biologists.
The geneticist Waddington compares it to 'throwing bricks together in
heaps' in the hope that they would 'arrange themselves into an
inhabitable house'. (334) I believe that chance did in fact play a
large part in the process, but that its action was mediated by a
pattern of information that lies half hidden in the cosmic chaos.
The cosmos itself is patternless, being a jumble of random and
disordered events. Grey Walter, the discoverer of several basic
rhythmic patterns in the brain, puts it perfectly: He says that the
most significant thing about a pattern is that 'you can remember it and
compare it with another pattern. This is what distinguishes it from
random events or chaos. For the notion of randomness ... implies that
disorder is beyond comparison; you cannot remember chaos or compare one
chaos with another; there is no plural of the word.' (335) Life makes
patterns out of patternless disorder, but I suggest that life was
itself made by a pattern and that this design is inherent in cosmic
forces to which life was, and still is, exposed. These environmental
influences are behind most of Supernature.
The Earth
Cosmic forces recur in cyclical patterns, to which life learns to
respond. The strongest responses are naturally linked to the shortest
cycles, those which produce the greatest number of changes in a given
period of time. The most fundamental and familiar of all the changes to
which life is subject are those produced by the movement of our earth
about its axis.
We live on a distorted sphere that is not only slightly flattened at
the poles but also a little pear-shaped, with a bulge in the Southern
Hemisphere. The sphere spins from west to east at about a thousand
miles an hour and travels around the sun at more than sixty times this
speed, but both movements are influenced by its irregular shape. The
time taken for the earth to complete one full revolution about its own
axis is not only variable but also depends on which object in space is
used as a reference point to decide when the turn is complete. If we
choose the sun as our fixed point, one revolution, or one solar day,
lasts 24.0 hours. The lunar day is 24.8 hours, and, measuring our
rotation relative to one of the distant fixed stars, we get a sidereal
day 23.9 hours long. For convenience, we base our calendars on the mean
solar day - the average length of all solar days throughout the year,
but this is an arbitrary selection and it seems that life itself is
sensitive to all three cycles.
We say that there are only twenty-four hours in 'the day', and yet we
also divide the same period up into 'the day' and 'the night'. The
confusion of words leads to real confusion about the roles of day and
night in biology, but the fact is that all life on earth is ultimately
dependent on the sun, and so the problem boils down to the presence or
absence of sunlight. One of the most traumatic changes that life can
experience is the sudden and unexpected disappearance of the sun. On
the rare occasions of total eclipse, living things are thrown into
complete confusion. I have seen an eagle drop straight out of the sky
to take refuge in the crown of a tree, and a foraging troop of baboons
rush into the defensive formation they usually assume in response to a
predator, neither species knowing quite which way to turn to meet this
new and unexpected threat. Only man knows when to expect the next
eclipse of the sun by our moon, but all life is tuned to the daily
obliteration of sunlight by the movement of our own planet.
Light and dark alternate in a regular pattern that provides life with
basic information. This pattern has been called the diurnal rhythm, but
the length of the cycle, the relative amounts of light and dark, and an
organism's response to light or the absence of light, all vary. So a
new and less confusing name was coined in 1960 by Franz Halberg, a
medical physiologist at the University of Minnesota. He combined two
Latin roots to produce the word 'Circadian', meaning that which lasts
about one day. (132) Circadian rhythms produced by the earth's movement
can be seen in action in life at every level of complexity.
At the lowest level are a group of organisms to which both botanists
and zoologists lay claim. These are tiny pieces of undivided protoplasm
that have chlorophyll and use it like plants to make food from the sun,
but also have a long, whip-shaped flagellum, which undulates underwater
and moves them like animals in pursuit of the sun. If kept in the dark,
they abandon botanical methods of food production and pick up particles
of ready-made food, in the best zoological tradition. Typical of the
group is a little green teardrop called Euglena gracilis, which lives
in shallow freshwater pools. At one end of its thin elastic body, near
the whip-shaped propeller, is a minute 'eyespot' of dark pigment that
is not itself responsive to light, but masks the real photosensitive
granule lying at the base of the whip. When the eyespot covers the
'eye', nothing happens, but when light falls on the granule, it starts
the whip waving at about twelve beats each second and sends the
organism spiraling out into the light.
Euglena comes to rest in the sunlight by positioning itself so that the
granule is covered by the rakish eye patch. As the sun moves, so does
Euglena, but gradually it begins to lose its sensitivity, and toward
the end of the day it is a lot less active. If it remained mobile all
day, chasing after every stray sunbeam, the organism would use energy
as fast as it could produce it and have none left over for other
processes or for sustaining itself during the night. So Euglena has not
only developed a vital response to change in the environment but has
also acted on the information provided by the regularity of these
environmental changes. It has produced a mechanism for regulating its
movement so that it operates at an optimal level, working quickly when
movement is most necessary and phasing out as it becomes less
important. The fact that this regulation is 'built in' has been shown
by its persistence in a population of Euglena that were kept in
continuous darkness. Despite the total lack of light, all individuals
became active and sensitive to light at the same time each day, a time
when the sun they could not see was coming up, and they became
insensitive when the light outside the laboratory began to fade. (250)
Unable to make food from the sun, they took to feeding on particles in
their environment, but they did this only during normal daylight hours,
despite the fact that this food was available all the time. Even
Euglena, with its solitary cell, follows an accurate circadian rhythm.
Our knowledge of the development of multicellular organisms from the
first single cells is very limited, because they seldom left a fossil
record, but it seems likely that all plant and animal life was derived
from something rather like Euglena. In the course of evolution, cells
destined to serve more specialised functions in complex organisms were
modified a great deal, but most retained something of their early
independence. Even man has single cells that can still leave his body
altogether and live and move entirely on their own - on their way to
fertilise an egg. If one cell is taken from the root of a plant such as
the carrot, it can be kept alive in a nutrient solution and give rise
to a whole new carrot plant. (310) We see living organisms as entities
and tend to forget that they are intricate societies of single cells
and that each of the components has a great deal in common with all the
other cells, not only in that individual but in every other organism
that ever lived. Alexander Pope recognised that 'all are but parts of
one stupendous whole, whose body nature is ...' (251)
Circadian rhythms exist in simple unicellular organisms without
hormones or specialised nervous systems. In more complex, multicellular
forms that do have these advantages, they occur in more intricate
patterns and respond to more subtle environmental stimuli.
Of all the species drafted into service in our laboratories, few have
contributed as much to our knowledge of life as a fruit fly called
Drosophila. There are over a thousand species belonging to the genus,
but the most popular conscript has been Drosophila melanogaster. This
little fly with its wings spread is just the size of a letter 'v' in
this print, but in 1909 Morgan discovered that it had enormous
chromosomes in the cells of its salivary glands, and the fly was soon
surrounded by murmurous haunts of geneticists. Today almost every
university in the world supports a culture of fruit flies, so it is not
surprising that when biologists turned their attention to the study of
natural rhythms, Drosophila was again called in to assist the
scientists with their inquiries. The results were fascinating.
Small animals have a very large surface area in proportion to their
mass. If, like the fruit fly, they live on land, they are faced with
the problem of losing water from all parts of their surface, and have
to find some way of conserving body fluids. Most insects solve the
problem by growing a tough, waxy cuticle that resists desiccation.
Adult Drosophila are protected in this way, but when the flies first
emerge from their puparia, the bodies are still soft and their wings
are folded into a delicate tangle of lace that can expand and stiffen
only if moisture is available. So the flies all emerge at dawn, when
the air is cool and humidity is high. Under natural conditions the pupa
is probably aware of light and temperature and can time its emergence
properly, but it does not need all these clues.
Colin Pittendrigh of Princeton University devised a set of elegant
experiments that show how well Drosophila responds to even the smallest
scraps of information. (248) He kept fruit-fly eggs in complete
darkness under conditions of constant temperature and humidity. The
eggs hatched, and the larvae grew, and pupated. Development took place
as if normal inside the puparium, and the adult flies eventually
emerged, but they broke out at random, following no circadian pattern
at all. Pittendrigh then repeated the whole experiment with a second
batch of eggs, but this time he allowed the larvae to see light for
just one thousandth of a second, by firing an electronic flash at them
once. At no other time in their lives were they ever exposed to light,
and yet all the flies emerged from their puparia simultaneously.
The internal rhythms of the developing insects were synchronised by an
incredibly subtle signal and continued to keep time for several days
following the stimulus. Pittendrigh went on to show that the rhythm was
circadian by giving the larvae a slightly longer exposure to light.
Flies from these emerged together at a time that would have been
sunrise if the time when the light went out was considered as sunset on
some earlier evening. In other words, the flies started counting when
darkness fell. It seems from these experiments that the rhythm is
inherent in Drosophila and that the fly has only to be prodded very
gently to get the cycle going and to keep it going. I am particularly
impressed by the fact that emerging from a puparium is something that a
fly does but once in its life; it has no chance to learn and practice
this activity, and yet it operates on a 24-hour schedule. This natural
rhythm must be instinctive, built into the memory of the insect's cells
and waiting only to be tuned by the environment in order to produce a
series of perfectly timed behavior patterns.
The cells themselves may house this clock, but Janet Harker at
Cambridge University has shown that co-ordination between cells is
achieved by chemical messengers that carry time signals. (135)
Cockroaches generally suffer from a bad press, but they are excellent
experimental animals. The common species Periplaneta americana becomes
active soon after dark each day and scavenges continually for five or
six hours, but if one has its head cut off, it no longer shows this
circadian rhythm of activity. Not surprising, perhaps; but in fact if
the head is removed surgically and precautions are taken to keep the
insect from bleeding to death, it survives for several weeks. A
headless cockroach eventually starves to death, but while it lives, it
continues to move in a random and desultory fashion.
Janet Harker found that she could give a cockroach back its sense of
direction by a process of transfusion. All insects have very
rudimentary circulatory systems, in which blood just washes around in
the body cavity bathing the internal organs. One individual can be made
to share its blood with another by simply cutting a hole in the body
wall of each and connecting them together with a short glass tube.
Harker solved the problem of differences of opinion by an ingenious if
somewhat gruesome compromise. She strapped the blood donor upside down
on the back of the headless cockroach and cut off the upper one's legs
to prevent it kicking and upsetting the weird combination. Paired like
this in parabiosis (which means living side by side) the double-bodied
cockroach with one head and one set of legs functioned almost normally.
It once again showed the typical circadian rhythm with activity
confined to the period immediately after dark. (137) Something in the
blood of the donor passed through the glass tube and communicated
rhythm to the legs of the disorganised, headless cockroach. The
substance responsible seems to be a hormone produced in the insect's
head. Harker made a series of surgical transplants, each involving one
of the organs in the head, and found that the subesophageal ganglion (a
tangle of nerves just below the mouth) was the source of the message.
She discovered that if this ganglion was transferred to a headless
cockroach, the insect developed a rhythm identical to that of the donor.
So, in the cockroach, the center that responds to natural cycles of
light and dark has been located and can even be translocated. This is
vital information, but Harker went on to turn up something even more
interesting. (136) She kept one group of cockroaches on a normal
schedule and put a second group on a reverse timetable, with lights
burning all night and darkness during the day. The second lot soon
adapted to this situation and became active during the artificial
night, so their rhythms were always out of phase with the control
group. A subesophageal ganglion could easily be transplanted from a
member of one group to a headless individual in the other, and it would
impose its own rhythm on the recipient; but if the second cockroach
kept its own pacemaker as well, there was immediate trouble. The extra
ganglion turned out to be a lethal weapon. Having two time-keepers
sending out two completely different signals, the poor insect was
thrown into turmoil. Its behavior became completely disorganised, and
it soon developed acute stress symptoms, such as malignant tumors in
the gut, and died.
This is a perfect demonstration of the importance of natural cycles of
life; confusion of the cockroach rhythm kills the insect. Life keeps
time, and it seems that the beat is an old one, determined mainly by
the rotation of our own planet, which turns the sun on and off like
some giant cosmic strobe light.
Life arose in the primordial broth by the action of sunlight on simple
molecules. It is just possible, by stretching our knowledge of
biochemistry, to envisage a situation in which life could arise in the
absence of light, but it is difficult to see how it could continue to
survive once it had consumed all the available food. Light waves carry
both energy and information. It is no accident that the amount of
energy contained in visible light is perfectly matched to the energy
needed to carry out most chemical reactions. Electromagnetic radiation
covers a vast range of possible frequencies, but both sunlight and life
are confined to the same minute section of this spectrum, and it is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that one is directly dependent on the
other.
As various forms of life evolved on earth, the advantage went to those
that were able to sense their environment and act on the information
received. Because light covers considerable distances, it is probably
the best source of information available, and of all cosmic forces, the
best suited to sensing. The daily alternation between light and dark
provides information on the earth's movement about its axis. And the
fluctuation in the relative amounts of light and dark in each day tells
of the earth's progress in its movement about the sun.
The axis of the spinning earth is tilted from the vertical, so as the
planet travels on its orbital circuit, it presents each day a slightly
different face to the sun. Twice in every year, the sun's rays fall
vertically on the equator and days and nights everywhere are exactly
twelve hours long. At all other times either the North or the South
Pole is angled toward our star and there is an imbalance between the
amounts of light and dark that fall on places at various latitudes. The
regular shift in this relationship provides organisms with information
that helps them adjust to a yearly cycle of changes in the circadian
rhythm. This sensitivity is called the circannual rhythm - that which
lasts about one year.
It was discovered almost by accident by Kenneth Fisher in his work at
the University of Toronto, on the golden-mantled ground squirrel
Citellus lateralis. (244) Fisher kept these tiny high-altitude rodents
in a windowless room at a constant temperature of 0º C and twelve hours
of light each day. He found that they were active and healthy, with a
body temperature of 37º C, until October; then their temperatures fell
to 1º C and the squirrels went into their usual winter hibernation. And
then, despite the lack of any changes in light or heat, they all woke
up in April, were active all the summer, and went back into stupor the
following autumn. In a second experiment, Fisher changed the
temperature to a constant 35º C and found that this was warm enough to
prevent the squirrels from becoming dormant, but they still gained
weight in autumn and lost it slowly through the winter, just as though
they were actually hibernating.
Sensitivity to an annual cycle has obvious advantages: It helps an
organism to predict seasonal changes in its environment and to make the
necessary allowances for them. A bird that spends its winters in the
constant conditions of the tropics could use this sense to tell it when
the time had come to return north for nesting. A mammal that stays
behind through the northern winter profits from a sensitivity to annual
changes by knowing when to lay in a store of food. Both animals are
co-ordinated by photoperiodism - a sensitivity to the relative amounts
of light and dark in every day.
The tiny pale-green plant lice, or aphids, that spend their summers
busily plunging their mouth parts into plants and sucking out the
juices, reproduce during the long days by a process of virgin birth in
which no males are involved. (191) But when there are less than
fourteen hours of daylight, as autumn approaches, they start
reproducing sexually and lay eggs that last through the winter. Many
other animals change their appearance, rather than their habits, and
adopt a winter plumage. Dull-brown summer weasels turn into resplendent
white winter ones that can find concealment in the snow. If a weasel is
kept under extra artificial light in the autumn to extend its days, it
never produces its camouflage coat, so, like the aphid, it depends
entirely on the day length to tell it when winter approaches.
Visible light from the sun also acts on non-living matter, by agitating
its molecules and producing heat. Temperature is nothing more than a
measurement of the amount of energy a molecule develops by moving. At
high temperatures, molecules have more energy, move faster, and bump
into each other more often. This is why an increase in temperature
speeds up the rate of most chemical reactions - hence the Bunsen burner
applied to an experiment to get it going. Biochemical reactions are
affected in the same way, and as long as the heat is not high enough to
do any damage, the higher the temperature the greater the rate of
metabolism. So, by their very structure, living organisms have a
built-in sensitivity to temperature change, and as the changes are
produced by sunlight, they follow the same 24-hour cycle as
photoperiodism. Hans Kalmus at London University found that grasshopper
eggs hatched at dawn every day if kept at 22° C, but that they hatched
only at sunrise on every third day if kept at 11º C. (170)
Most cold-blooded animals are completely at the mercy of temperature
fluctuations, which set the pace of their lives, but in mammals and
birds it is often the activity that determines body temperature. Mice
reach a temperature peak when their activity is greatest, around
midnight, and are coolest in the heat of midday because that is the
middle of their rest period. (18) So their temperatures follow a
24-hour cycle even though this is not imposed by the temperature of
their surroundings. Some parasites take advantage of this phenomenon
and set their clocks by the cycles of their hosts.
Malarial parasites invade red blood corpuscles, where they multiply
until the cell can no longer withstand the pressure and bursts,
releasing the offspring to seek out other corpuscles, where the same
thing takes place again. If the parasites did this one at a time, they
would have little effect on their host, but what happens is that all
the malaria cells present in the body multiply at exactly the same
time, and this simultaneous onslaught produces the classic symptoms of
fever. Soon after noon the host begins to feel cold and starts
shivering despite the fact that his skin feels hot to the touch;
headache, backache, and vomiting follow and intensify throughout the
afternoon until, at sunset, the body temperature shoots up as high as
42° C and he sweats profusely. It is biologically inefficient for a
parasite to kill its host, but the Plasmodium that produces malaria
fever takes this risk, because it is vital for its own survival that it
should also come into contact with another kind of host. Man is home
for the non-sexual stage of the parasite, but the sexual stages require
the unique environment of the stomach of a female of a certain species
of mosquito. To get there, they have to be sucked up by the insect as
it bites the man, which is a complex situation requiring perfect
timing, but it all works out splendidly via the fever. The parasites
become active and reach sexual maturity in man's blood stream,
producing a fever, which raises the host's temperature, produces
sweating, and attracts the mosquito just after dark, when these
nocturnal insects are most active.
Little or no light penetrates to the blood vessels, where the parasites
live. Their environment has no marked photoperiod, but they are able to
bring their cycle to a peak at dusk by following the pattern of their
host's temperature rhythm. Man is active during the daylight hours; his
temperature follows the pattern of activity, and the parasites follow
the temperature. Night workers reverse their activity patterns and
therefore have their fevers in the morning, confusing the parasites
hopelessly and putting them completely out of step with their
alternative hosts, the mosquitoes. (141)
In the same way that parasites set their clocks by the body temperature
of their host, so all life can measure time by responding to
temperature changes of the body of our host, this planet.
Extensions of the photoperiodic research on fruit flies and cockroaches
show quite clearly that both these species also respond to what could
be called thermoperiodism. In constant darkness flies emerge from their
puparia shortly after the temperature cycle reaches its lowest point,
which in nature would be just before the dawn. Temperature can act as a
time signal. In fact it may do even more than that: It may be
absolutely essential for survival. An American botanist has found that
the leaves of tomato plants are damaged and die if kept under
conditions of constant light and heat, but remain perfectly healthy if
given a 24-hour cycle of temperature change. (150) In practice it does
not matter whether the temperature goes up or down; any regular
fluctuation between the limits of 10 and 30º C was found to be equally
effective.
Piece by piece we are beginning to build up a picture of the way in
which physiological rhythms respond to environmental cues. Life is
adapted to the earth's movement by a circadian rhythm and to the
earth's position in space by a circannual rhythm. Sometimes these daily
and yearly cycles intertwine to produce patterns of exquisite
sensitivity that make an organism responsive to every nuance in its
environment. This is as it should be. As parasites on the skin of our
planet, we can be truly successful only when we become aware of its
pulse and learn to pace our lives to the rhythm of its deep, untroubled
breathing.
Our host, however, is not alone. Earth in its turn is ruffled by the
galactic winds of change and subject to forces brought to bear on it by
an even wider environment. Inevitably these forces filter through to
us, and life on earth learns to dance to the rhythm of other bodies.
The most insistent beat comes, naturally, from our nearest neighbors.
The Moon
When Isaac Newton was twenty-three years old and a student at
Cambridge, he was forced to leave his college by the wave of bubonic
plague that brought black death to most of England in 1665. While on
this enforced holiday in the country, he saw an orblike apple fall to
the earth and, in his own words, 'began to think of gravitation as
extending to the orb of the moon'. These thoughts led to his universal
theory of gravity, which says that every particle in the universe
attracts every other particle with a force that depends on their masses
and the distance between them. The earth attracts the moon strongly
enough to hold it in orbit, and the moon is large enough and close
enough to tug insistently at earth's mantle. The water on earth's
surface behaves like a loose garment that can be pulled out from the
body to fall back as earth turns away again. The moon circles the earth
once every 27.3 days, rotating brazenly as she does so, to keep the
same face turned always to us, but earth shows all its sides to the
satellite once every 24.8 hours. This means that the waters of earth
flow out toward the moon, and therefore bring high tide to any land
that lies in that direction, forty-eight minutes later each day.
Every drop of water in the ocean responds to this force, and every
living marine animal and plant is made aware of the rhythm. The lives
of those that inhabit the margins of the sea depend entirely on this
awareness. One very small flatworm, for instance, has entered into
partnership with a green alga, and whenever the tide goes out, it must
come up from the sand to expose its greenery to the sun. Rachel Carson
took some of these animals into the laboratory and there described
their conditioning to the tidal rhythm in her usual effortless and
poetic way: 'Twice each day Convoluta rises out of the sand in the
bottom of the aquarium, into the light of the sun. And twice each day
it sinks again into the soil. Without a brain, or what we would call a
memory, or even any very clear perception, Convoluta continues to live
out its life in this alien place, remembering, in every fibre of its
small green body, the tidal rhythm of the distant sea.' (66)
This is true of any tidal animal taken to a laboratory near the sea.
For convenience' sake, most marine research units are established on
the coast, but fortunately for science one indefatigable researcher
into natural rhythms lives and works a thousand miles from the sea, in
Evanston, Illinois. Frank Brown started worked with oysters in 1954. He
found that they had a marked tidal rhythm, opening their shells to feed
at high tide and closing them to prevent damage and drying out during
the ebb. In laboratory tanks they kept this strict rhythm going, so
Brown decided to take some specimens home with him to Illinois to
examine more closely. Evanston is a suburb of Chicago on the shore of
Lake Michigan, but even here the oysters continued to remember the
tidal rhythm of their home, on Long Island Sound, in Connecticut.
Everything went well for two weeks, but on the fifteenth day Brown
noticed that a slippage in the rhythm had occurred. The oysters were
not longer opening and closing in harmony with the tide that washed
their distant home and it seemed as though the experiment had gone
wrong, but the fascinating thing was that the behavior of all the
mollusks had altered in the same way and they were still keeping time
with each other. Brown calculated the difference between the old rhythm
and the new one and discovered that the oysters now opened up at the
time the tide would have flooded Evanston - had the town been on the
shore and not perched on the bank of a Great Lake 580 feet above sea
level. (42)
Somehow the oysters realised that they had been moved one thousand
miles to the west and were able to calculate, and apply a correction
to, their tidal timetable. Brown at first suspected that the later
times of sunrise and sunset might have given them the clues they
needed, but he found that keeping oysters in dark containers from the
moment they were collected in the sea made no difference at all. It is
true that there is no ocean tide near Chicago, but something we tend to
forget is that the same gravitational force of the moon that acts on
the ocean can also act on very much smaller bodies of water. The Hughes
Aircraft Laboratory in California has developed a 'tilt meter' so
sensitive that it has been able to record lunar tides in a cup of tea.
(165) The moon also draws away the envelope of air that surrounds the
earth and produces regular daily atmospheric tides. Brown compared his
oysters' new rhythm with the movements of the moon and found that most
of them were opening when the moon was directly overhead in Evanston.
This was the first piece of scientific evidence to show that even an
organism living away from the ocean tides could be influenced by the
passage of the moon.
These lunar rhythms are close enough to the solar day length to be
included in the circadian classification of 'about one day', but the
moon also produces another rhythm, with a period of about one month. We
see the moon because it reflects light from the sun, and the amount of
moon we see depends on its position relative to the sun and ourselves.
The traditional phases of the moon follow a cycle slightly longer than
the lunar orbit - it is 29.5 days from one full moon to the next. Twice
during this cycle, the sun and the moon are directly in line with the
earth and the pull of their bodies is added together to produce higher
tides than usual. These spring tides occur when the moon is full and
again when we see the first thin sliver of the new moon setting. And
twice each month, at the quarters of the moon, when the pull of the two
heavenly bodies is opposed, we have much more moderate movements of
water called the neap tides.
Marine organisms are greatly affected by this cycle. A small silver
fish, the grunion Leuresthes tenuis, has made such a precise adjustment
to the moon that its very survival depends on the precision of this
response. I cannot improve on Rachel Carson's description: 'Shortly
after the full moon of the months from March to August, the grunion
appear in the surf on the beaches of California. The tide reaches flood
stage, slackens, hesitates, and begins to ebb. Now on these waves of
the ebbing tide the fish begin to come in. Their bodies shimmer in the
light of the moon as they are borne up the beach on the crest of a
wave, they lie glittering on the wet sand for a perceptible moment of
time, then fling themselves into the wash of the next wave and are
carried back to sea.' (66)
During that brief moment in the air, the grunion leave their eggs
buried on the wet sand, where they will be undisturbed for two weeks
because the waves will not come that high again until the next spring
tide. When the sea does return, the development of the larvae is
complete, and they wait only for the cool touch of the water to break
out of the eggs and swim away through the surf.
Another marine form that responds to the lunar rhythm is the palolo
Eunice viridis, a flat, hairy version of the earthworm that spends most
of its time hunting for food among the crevices of coral reefs in the
South Pacific. (74) It feeds itself but it mates by proxy,
concentrating eggs or sperm into the hind part of its body, which it
equips with an eyespot, breaks off, and sends up to the surface of the
sea to conjugate with the similar portions of other anonymous parents.
Although the worms never actually meet, the rendezvous of their private
parts is perfectly arranged by the moon. At dawn on the day the moon
reaches its last quarter in November each year, all the worms cast off
their hindquarters, and the sea around the reefs of Samoa and Fiji run
red with the masses of eggs. The local people respond to the same time
signal and gather over the coral in fleets of canoes to celebrate the
'great rising' and feast on its bounty.
The most dramatic examples of lunar periodicity come from animals that
live in the sea, where the passage of the moon is accentuated by huge
movements of water, but there is some evidence to show that it is not
the tide so much as moonlight itself that acts as a signal. The light
of the moon is three hundred thousand times less bright than that of
the sun, and yet life is able to respond to this minute cosmic stimulus
even through several fathoms of sea water. At the University of
Freiburg they were working on the polychaete worm Platynereis
dumerilii, which swarms to the surface of the sea around the last
quarter of the moon. (140) This worm loses its rhythm, swarming at all
phases of the moon, if kept under constant light in the laboratory. But
if the usual bright light is supplemented on just two nights of the
month with another light, brighter than the moon but still six thousand
times less bright than the sun, the worms are aware of this addition,
interpret it as the time of the full moon, and swarm exactly one week
later. Or, if they are not physiologically prepared for breeding at
that time, they wait for thirty-five days to bring them to the same
phase of the moon in the following month. This means that, in nature,
the moon could be concealed by cloud for all but two nights and the
worms would still be able to set their clocks by it. And even if the
moon were to be covered completely during every single night in the
month of swarming, they could still remember what happened the previous
month and use this as the signal for timing their reproductive
rendezvous on the surface.
Land animals are also influenced by the moon. Adult May flies live for
only a few hours, during which time they have to find another fly,
mate, and lay their eggs in winter. In temperate climates these insects
respond to clues of changing light and temperature, and all emerge
together in enormous numbers that hang in gossamer ballets over quiet
country pools on a few warm evenings in May. But in the tropics the
climate is so constant that these cues are missing and the May flies
have to find another timekeeper and even another month. Lake Victoria
straddles the equator in Africa, and yet it has a very successful
species of May fly, Povilla adusta, which solves its timing problem by
emerging only at the full moon. (138)
The Luo people, who live along the lake, say that it is going to rain
when they see the May flies swarming, and they could be right, because
we are just beginning to discover that superstitions like these often
conceal truths or half-truths based on old and sometimes sound
observations.
We know, for instance, that the moon pulls on the earth's atmosphere as
it passes, drawing it away and allowing it to flow back again like an
oceanic tide. Receding tides of air never leave a continent gasping in
the same way that a beach is exposed altogether on the ebb, but the
depth of air above us changes constantly, alternately decreasing and
increasing our barometric pressure. As with tides of water, not all
parts of the planet are equally affected; there are locations, which
have now been pinpointed, where unusually high and low air pressures
prevail. These are factories that churn out cyclones and anti-cyclones,
loaded with good or bad weather. Since the invention of the weather
satellite, we have been able to produce accurate maps of these
disturbances, and by studying the movement of warm and cold fronts,
predict changes several days in advance. But even armed with this
information, it was not until recently that our attention was drawn to
the role played by the moon in producing these weather patterns.
The news broke in Science magazine in the form of two short papers
published on facing pages of the same issue in 1962. The authors of the
papers had been working completely independently, in the United States
and Australia, both coming to the same conclusions but reluctant to
publish their findings for fear of ridicule. Only when each discovered
the existence of the other and learned that their findings had been
confirmed, did they go to press - together, for mutual support, in the
same magazine.
The American team collected data from 1,544 weather stations in North
America that had been in continuous operation over the fifty years from
1900 through 1949. From this they extracted all rainfall figures and
plotted the times of widespread rain against the lunar cycle. They got
a strange pattern, which led them to this conclusion: 'There is a
marked tendency for extreme precipitation in North America to be
recorded near the middle of the first and third weeks of the synodical
month.' Which means that heavy rain occurs more often on days after the
full and the new moon. (36)
In Australia the meteorologists collected rainfall data from fifty
weather stations for the period from 1901 to 1925 and found that the
same patterns were true of the Southern Hemisphere. (1) Both sets of
statistics seem sound and point to the conclusion that the moon does
affect weather. We know that rain falls when enough dust, salt, or ice
particles are present in a cloud for water vapor to condense around
them and fall to the ground. This principle is used when 'seeding'
likely clouds with chemicals from rockets or airplane to produce rain
exactly where it is needed. A natural source of suitable particles is
meteor dust, which falls at the rate of about a thousand tons each day
on earth. (34) This could be the link between the moon and the weather,
because two other independent teams have just come up with the
discovery that the rate of meteor arrival at the edge of earth's
atmosphere is greater at the times of full and new moon. (40)
Frank Brown, of oyster fame, has been working for twenty-five years on
ways in which life can be influenced by remote environmental factors.
Instead of testing these one at a time, he has tried to eliminate them
altogether, and most of the time he has failed, but his failures
succeed in giving us an astonishing picture of the sensitivity of life
to the most subtle stimuli. One of his early experiments involved
seaweed, carrots, potatoes, earthworms, and salamanders. He was
interested in their cycles of activity and used as his measurement the
amount of oxygen each consumed throughout the day. All his subjects
produced splendid rhythms even when kept, like the oysters, in the dark
at a constant temperature. Brown then tried to eliminate the influence
of changing barometric pressure by designing an apparatus that
equalised changes in barometric air pressure. His instruments told him
that the pressure in the test chamber was constant, but his plants and
animals continued to produce rhythms that told him they were still
aware of changes going on outside. (43)
Brown now has a vast mass of data to show this phenomenon beyond
reasonable doubt. His study on potatoes alone has gone on continuously
for nine years and provides full metabolic data for more than a million
hours of potato time. (47) The tubers 'know' whether the moon has just
appeared over the horizon, whether it is at its zenith, or whether it
is setting. Brown says that 'the similarity of changes such as these in
metabolic rate with the time of lunar day can be plausibly explained
only by saying that all are responding to a common physical fluctuation
having a lunar period'. This heretical notion, that the 'constant
conditions' (Brown always puts the words in quotes) referred to in
thousands of pains taking laboratory studies might not be so uniform
after all, has drawn a storm of criticism from biologists fighting a
rearguard action for the old idea that nothing could touch animals kept
under constant light, temperature, humidity, and pressure. But Brown
continues to gather evidence to show that there are other, even more
subtle factors that need to be taken into account.
One possible candidate is magnetism. We know that the earth's magnetic
field changes slightly according to the positions of both the moon and
the sun. Readings taken at Greenwich from 1916 to 1957 show that the
geometric field alters hourly in direct accordance with the solar day,
the lunar day, and the lunar month. (190) So, if living things were
sensitive to magnetism, they could follow the movements of both the
moon and the sun even while confined in the 'constant conditions' of
laboratory dungeons. It seems that life does have this sensitivity.
If you look carefully into the surface layers of a freshwater pool, you
are almost certain to see, rolling smoothly along through the water, a
determined little green ball as big as this 'o'. This is Volvox,
probably the most simple of all living organisms composed of a number
of cells that show a common purpose, and almost certainly a direct and
little-changed descendant of the first experimental union of the early
single cells. For these reasons J. D. Palmer, an associate of Frank
Brown at Evanston, chose Volvox aureus as his subject for an experiment
with magnetic fields. (239) Volvox, whose name comes from the Latin for
'rolling', is a photosynthetic plant, but one that moves rapidly and
well by the co-ordinated beating of whip cells that stick out from the
surface of the ball. Palmer confined his colony in a small glass corral
with a long thin neck that pointed toward magnetic south; then, as the
green balls came tumbling out, he noted the directions in which they
travelled. He recorded the emergence of 6,916 Volvox, one third under
natural conditions, one third with a bar magnet placed at the entrance
so that it augmented the earth's field, and the final third with the
magnet pointing east-west, at right angles to the field. The magnet
provided a field thirty times stronger than the natural one - and the
results were quite unequivocal.
With the magnet in line with the earth field, 43 per cent more Volvox
than normal turned to the west. With the magnet lying across the field,
there was an additional bias of 75 per cent. This shows that these
organisms not only can detect a magnetic field but are aware of the
direction of lines of force in that field. And the fact that Volvox is
an archaic form shows that life's awareness of magnetism goes back a
long way and is probably very deep-seated.
Brown pursued this study further with Nassarius obsoleta, a mud snail
that slithers in rapidly moving herds over the mud flats on New England
shores. He also confined them to a corral whose south-facing exit was
wide enough to allow only one to emerge at a time - and recorded the
movement of thirty-four thousand snails in this way. Some turned left,
some right, and some continued straight ahead, depending on the time of
day. In the morning, the tendency was to turn left, toward the east,
and in the afternoon toward the west. Brown introduced a magnet with a
strength only nine times that of the earth's field and found that, when
this was in the same direction as the natural field, it made no
difference - the snails continued to follow the sun. But when the
magnet was at right angles to the natural field, they began to follow a
lunar pattern. (46)
As the earth's cycle and its field are influenced both by sun and moon,
it is not surprising to find that both also affect an animal's response
to magnetism. Nassarius is adapted more to the solar rhythm, but in a
later experiment with a more nocturnal species, Brown found that he
could get clear-cut responses to the phases of the moon. He chose the
planarian Dugesia dorotocephala, a very popular little freshwater
flatworm about an inch long with an arrow-shaped head and an endearing
squint. In the same test apparatus, the worm turned left, that is to
the east, at new moon, and to the right when the moon was full. (45)
Since this work was done, there have been similar experiments with rats
and mice that show some evidence of response to magnetic fields, and an
old suggestion, that migrating birds may navigate along lines of the
earth's field, has been revived and is being re-examined. The work on
snails and worms shows that life has a clock-regulated capacity to
orient itself in a weak magnetic field. This possession of both a
living clock and a living compass fulfill the two essential
prerequisites of any system of navigation.
The Sun
Beyond earth's atmosphere, beyond even the orbit of the moon, lies
space. By definition this is supposed to be empty, an interval
separating things from each other, but instruments sent out to probe
this space reveal that it is far from empty. The vacuum is filled with
a variety of forces, many of which reach the earth and some of which
affect life here. The most powerful of these forces come from the star
we call our sun.
The sun is a dense mass of glowing matter a million times the volume of
the earth and in a permanent state of effervescence. Every second, four
million tons of hydrogen are destroyed in incredible explosions that
start somewhere near the core, where the temperature is 13 million
degrees C, and send fountains of flame shooting thousands of miles out
into space. In this continuous and unimaginable holocaust, atoms are
split into streams of fast-moving electrons and protons that rush out
into space as a solar wind that buffets all the planets in our system.
Earth falls well inside the sun's 'atmosphere' and is constantly
exposed to the changes in its weather. Scattered over the face of the
sun like acne are spots of even more violent activity that flare up
from time to time. These are usually about the size of earth, and
sometimes the rash spreads quickly and the sun erupts in a bout of bad
weather that produces magnetic storms in our atmosphere as well.
We first notice these storms when they disrupt radio and television
reception and produce the fantastic draperies of the aurora borealis,
but we continue to feel their effects in changes they produce in our
own weather. At times of sunspot activity there is a tendency for
cyclones to form over the ocean and for anti-cyclones to develop over
the land masses, producing bad weather at sea and fine conditions
ashore. One of the ways in which the moon may influence weather is by
deflecting the solar wind so that it hits the earth at a different
angle or misses it altogether. The IMP-1 satellite of 1964 recorded
fluctuations in magnetic field produced in this way. (225)
It would be possible to use sunspot activity as an aid to weather
forecasting were it not for the fact that it seems to vary from day to
day in a completely random fashion, but there are regular cycles of
activity covering much longer periods of time. In 1801 Sir John
Herschel discovered an 11-year sunspot cycle, which has since been
confirmed many times and found to correlate with the thickness of
annual rings in trees, the level of Lake Victoria, the number of
icebergs, the occurrence of drought and famine in India, and the great
vintage years for Burgundy wines. All these variables are dependent on
the weather, and it seems certain that this regular pattern of change
is produced by cycles in the sun. An even more sensitive measure has
recently been made available by the study of thin layers of fossil mud
deposited on the bottoms of old lakes. These layers are called varves,
and their thickness depends on the annual rate at which glaciers melt
and therefore provides an indication of climate conditions. Microscopic
measurement of varves going back as much as five hundred million years
shows that, even in Pre-Cambrian times, there were cycles about eleven
years long. (347)
Computer analysis of varves in New Mexico has turned up another, longer
sun cycle as well. (7) The 11-year peaks grow higher and higher for
about forty years and then fade away to complete an 80- or 90-year
cycle. This rhythm has been delicately confirmed by the German botanist
Schnelle, who collected dates for the first annual appearance of
snowdrops in the Frankfurt region from 1870 to 1950, and found that
they formed a smoothly curved pattern. (297) For the first forty years
the flowers always appeared before the average date of February 23, but
after 1910 they blossomed later and later until, in 1925, they were
almost two months behind. Then the snowdrops began to reverse the
trend, and in 1950 they were a full two months ahead of schedule again.
There is a perfect statistical correlation between the snowdrop and
sunspot cycles. (214) In years of great sunspot activity the flowers
bloomed later, and in years of the quiet sun they appeared ahead of
time. The numbers of earthquakes in Chile over the past century seem to
have followed the same cycle. It seems that, overlying the short-term
variations in climate, there is a world-wide uniformity of change and
that this is very largely determined by regular magnetic storms in the
sun.
These and other studies provide ample evidence of the electromagnetic
influence of the sun and the way in which it is mediated by the moon
and affects our weather. Life in turn is influenced by the weather, and
so storms in the sun touch us indirectly, but there is at least one way
in which all living things can be directly controlled by cosmic
activity. The answer lies in some peculiar properties of water and is
quite incredible, so I shall start with basic principles and approach
it cautiously.
Every high school student knows that water is H2O, a chemical compound
of two simple elements. And yet scientific journals are full of
articles arguing the merits of various theories on the structure of
water - and we still do not understand exactly how it works. There are
so many anomalies: water is one of the very few substances that are
more dense in the liquid than the solid state, so ice floats; water is
unique in that it is most dense a few degrees above its melting point,
so that heating it up to 4º C from its melting point of 0º C causes it
to contract even further; and water can act both as an acid and as a
base, so that it actually reacts chemically with itself under certain
conditions.
The clue to some of water's strange behavior lies with the hydrogen
atom, which has only one electron to share with any other atom with
which it combines. When it joins with oxygen to form molecules of
water, each hydrogen atom is balanced between two oxygen atoms in what
is called the 'hydrogen bond'; but having only one electron to offer,
the hydrogen atom can be attached firmly on only one side, so the bond
is a weak one. Its strength is 10 per cent of that of most ordinary
chemical bonds, so for water to exist at all, there have to be lots of
bonds to hold it together. Liquid water is so intricately laced that it
is almost a continuous structure, and one worker has gone so far as to
describe a glass of water as a single molecule. (252) Ice is even more
regular, and forms the most perfectly bonded hydrogen structure known.
Its crystalline pattern is so very precise that it seems to persist
into the liquid state, and though it looks clear, water contains
short-lived regions of ice crystals that form and melt many millions of
times every second. It is as though liquid water remembers the form of
the ice from which it came by repeating the formula over and over again
to itself, ready to change back again at a moment's notice. If one
could take a photograph with a short enough exposure, it would probably
show icelike areas even in a glass of hot water.
So water is tremendously flexible. The tenuous links between its atoms
make it very fragile, and little external pressure is necessary to
break the bonds and destroy or change its pattern. Biological reactions
must occur quickly and take place with very little expenditure of
energy, so a trigger substance such as water is the ideal go-between.
In fact all living processes take place in an aqueous medium, and most
of the body weight of every living organism (in man the figure is 65
per cent) is made up of water.
No scientist now doubts that water behaves like this inside a plant or
an animal. As I intend to show that external, even cosmic, influences
can change the form of water inside an organism, the next step in the
argument is to demonstrate that water outside the body can be
influenced in this way.
At the same time that Frank Brown was busy demonstrating the
unconstancy of 'constant condition' in biological experiments, an
Italian chemist was busy upsetting his contemporaries by showing that
chemical properties were equally inconsistent and changed from one hour
to the next. Giorgio Piccardi, Director of the Institute of Physical
Chemistry in Florence, has always been intrigued by the way in which
chemical reactions occasionally prove idiosyncratic and go off in the
wrong direction or refuse to take place at all. He began his research
with an experimental method of removing incrustations from industrial
boilers. (246) Sometimes it worked well and sometimes it did not. He
suspected that outside influences might be affecting the reaction, and
so he tried enclosing the whole experiment in a thin copper sheet and
found that, with this in place, it always worked well.
Piccardi was interested in the forces that could influence a reaction
like this, and to find out more about them, he designed an experiment
that would yield a large number of observations over a long period of
time. He chose a simple reaction, the speed with which bismuth
oxychloride (a colloid) forms a cloudy precipitate when poured into
distilled water. Three times a day, every day, he and his assistants
carried out this simple test until they had more than two hundred
thousand separate results. These have now been analysed, together with
results of a parallel series of tests made at Brussels University. (63)
There were several kinds of change in the speed of precipitation over
the ten-year period of the experiment. Short-term, sudden changes,
often lasting only a day or two, were frequent, and all were connected
with the sun. The reaction always took place more quickly when there
was a solar eruption and changes in the earth's magnetic field could be
measured. There were also long-term changes, and when these were
plotted on a graph, they formed a curve exactly parallel to that for
sunspot frequency in the 11-year cycle. As a control, Piccardi did
simultaneous experiments with the same solutions under the protection
of a copper screen - and found that precipitation always took place at
the normal speed when shielded from outside influence in this way.
So a chemical reaction taking place in water is influenced by cosmic
activity, which means that either the chemical or the water is
susceptible to electromagnetic radiation. All available evidence points
to the water. Two other Italian chemists have found that they could
alter the electrical conductivity of water simply by exposing it to a
very small magnet. (32) And at the Atmospheric Research Center in
Colorado a series of experiments is in progress that shows that water
is very sensitive to electromagnetic fields. (102)
Piccardi takes the argument the last step along the way. In 1962 he
said, 'Water is sensitive to extremely delicate influences and is
capable of adapting itself to the most varying circumstances to a
degree attained by no other liquid. Perhaps it is even by means of
water and the aqueous system that the external forces are able to react
on living organisms.' (247) This suggestion is nicely complemented by a
recent demonstration which shows that water is particularly unstable,
and therefore most valuable to life, between 35 and 40º C - the body
temperature of most active animals. (205)
Which leaves us, I think, with the conclusion that there certainly are
ways in which the sun, and other cosmic forces, can influence life.
Other Factors
Traveling with us in the solar system are eight other planets, all of
which revolve the same way around the sun, in orbits that lie, with the
exception of Pluto and Mercury, in the same plane as ours. We know that
the planets influence each other, because Lowell in 1914 used
previously unexplained aberrations in the movements of the inner eight
to predict the existence of another planet. It was only in 1940 that
Pluto was actually discovered.
In 1951 John Nelson was engaged by RCA in the United States to study
factors that affect radio reception. By this time it was well known
that sunspots are the major cause of interference, but RCA wanted to be
able to predict disturbances in the atmosphere more accurately. Nelson
studied records for poor reception dating back to 1932 and found, as
expected, that they were closely linked to the occurrence of sunspots,
but he also discovered something else: Sunspots, and therefore radio
disturbances, both occurred when two or more planets were in line, at
right angles, or arranged at 180º to the sun. (228) He worked first
with Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn and found that, by computing their
positions, he could predict the time of future large sunspot actions
with 80 per cent accuracy. (229) In a later study he refined his method
to include data from all the planets and improved his accuracy of
prediction to an impressive 93 per cent. RCA was delighted, and so, of
course, were the astrologists, because this was the first piece of hard
scientific fact to show that we could be influenced in any way by the
planets. What happens, it seems, is that the position of the planets
influences, or is at least an indication of, the sun's magnetic field
and that certain configurations coincide with strong sunspot activity -
and we know that this in turn touches life here.
If the planets can affect the sun, then it seems reasonable to assume
that they also affect the earth, which, with the exception of Mercury,
is much closer to them. One night in 1955 an astronomer using a radio
telescope in Maryland found a foreign body in his pictures of the Crab
nebula. (106) On the following nights it was still there, but it had
moved, which made him think immediately of a planet, so he pointed his
antenna at Jupiter and found that it was sending out strong radio
signals, both short and long wave, with the power of a billion watts.
It has now been shown that Venus and Saturn are also powerful sources
of radio waves. (278) At least part of the planetary effect may be due
to the fact that each body leaves behind it in space a magnetospheric
tail of disturbance like a long wake of disturbed water that takes time
to settle. The tail that earth drags behind it may be more than five
million miles long. (35) So, far from being insignificant specks in
space, it seems that the planets are more like territorial animals that
leave behind them powerful marks whose influence lingers on long after
they themselves have passed by.
The universe does not end with the solar system. On a clear night we
can see about three thousand other individual stars, many of them
larger than our sun, and all of them part of a hundred billion that go
to make up our disk-shaped Milky Way galaxy. Beyond this, scattered
more or less uniformly through space, lie perhaps ten billion other
galaxies of similar size. From all these sources come radiations of
varying strength.
We know that certain stars emit radio waves all the time, while others
send out powerful flares of radiation when they undergo violent
changes. Some large young stars explode and, in the process of becoming
supernovae, produce enormous quantities of cosmic energy. (319) The
normal amount falling each year on the atmosphere of earth is about
0.03 roentgen, but during the time that life has been on earth it has
been exposed at least once to a short, sharp dose of 2,000 roentgen,
about four times to doses of over 1,000 roentgen, and perhaps ten times
to 500 roentgen. The lethal dose for most laboratory animals is between
200 and 700 roentgen, but female mice can be completely sterilised by
only 80 roentgen. So the explosion of supernovae has subjected the
earth at least fifteen times to showers of radiation strong enough to
kill most forms. Plant seeds are radiation resistant, and marine life
would be protected to some extent by water as the land is by the
blanket of air, but these bouts of high radiation could well have been
a significant factor in the evolution of life. Even at lower levels,
radiation from other suns than ours could have a strong influence on
life here.
James Clerk Maxwell revolutionised physics in the middle of the
nineteenth century with a set of laws describing all electric and
magnetic phenomena. In one of these he proved that disturbances in
conditions at one place could be carried across space to another place.
He called his carrier electromagnetic waves and found that, no matter
what the disturbance, all news of it travelled at the same speed - the
speed of light. The electromagnetic spectrum includes X rays, light
rays, and radio and television waves, and covers an enormous range,
from waves longer than the diameter of the earth to waves so short that
a billion strung together would barely cover a fingernail. All these
are broadcast by the cosmos all the time. We are most responsive to
light waves, which lie somewhere near the middle of the spectrum, but
life seems also to be aware of radiation from the electromagnetic
extremes.
Radioactive substances occur in nature, and in all of them nuclear
changes take place that result in three kinds of radiation: Alpha rays
can be stopped by a sheet of paper, beta rays can just about get
through aluminium foil, but gamma rays travel across space with so much
energy that they can penetrate even lead. Their wavelength is so short
that they pass through matter like X rays that have been supercharged,
so that even animals in the deepest caves or at the bottom of the ocean
feel their effects. Frank Brown has tested his planarian worms for
response to a very weak gamma radiation emitted by a sample of cesium
137. (44) He found that worms were aware of the radiation and turned
away from it, but only when they were moving north or south. They
ignored the radiation, no matter where it came from, if they were
swimming in any other direction. This shows that gamma rays can be a
vector force that somehow indicates direction as well as intensity. The
earth rotates from east to west, so any organism that behaves like
these worms and responds to the field in only one direction, has a
mechanism that can be used for navigation and for the recognition of
all the important geophysical cycles.
At the other end of the usual electromagnetic spectrum are enormously
long waves, recently detected by equipment designed to monitor
variations in the magnetic field. Most waves are measured in cycles per
second, but these are so huge that they take more than a second to pass
by - which makes them more than 186,000 miles long, or more than twenty
times the diameter of the earth. Some waves eight seconds long occur at
night, particularly during displays of the aurora, and there are
indications of a few as much as forty seconds, that is seven million
miles, in length. (146) At the moment, we cannot even begin to guess at
the possible significance of these signals; all we can do is record
that such waves exist, that they traverse whole galaxies with little
effort, and that, despite their very low field strength, life might be
sensitive to them.
The entire universe hangs together, or comes apart, depending on your
theoretical bias, by the most basic cosmic force of all, the force of
gravity. Electromagnetic waves react only with electrical charges and
currents, but gravity waves interact with all forms of matter. The
amount of gravitational energy coming from the center of our galaxy is
ten thousand times greater than the electromagnetic energy, but we
still have trouble measuring it. (338) Gravitational waves from the
cosmos have now been recorded, but nobody has yet been able to
demonstrate that life is aware of them. The best evidence so far comes
from a Swiss biologist working on little flying beetles with the
interesting name of cockchafers. (296) He put swarms of the beetles
into an opaque container and found that they responded to the invisible
approach of a lump of lead outside. When lead weighing more than eighty
pounds was moved closer to their container, the beetles gathered on the
side farthest from it. They could not see the lead, and the experiment
seems to have been designed to eliminate all other clues, so we must
assume that these insects at least are aware, by change in gravity, of
the distribution of masses around them. It is possible that the
stronger gravitational fields produced by the sun and the moon could
have similar effects on behavior.
So now we know this much:
Life arose by order out of chaos and maintains this order by collecting
information from the cosmos. Cosmic forces bombard earth all the time,
but the movement of celestial bodies and the movement of earth in
relation to these bodies produces a pattern that provides useful
information. Life is sensitive to this pattern because it contains
water, which is unstable and easily influenced.
Which means that living things are involved in an open dialogue with
the universe, a free exchange of information and influence that unites
all life into one vast organism that is itself part of an even larger
dynamic structure. There is no escaping the conclusion that the basic
similarity in structure and function are ties that bind all life
together and that man, for all his special features, is an integral
part of this whole.
TWO
MAN AND THE COSMOS
Life on earth is like the bloom on a plum. In recent years parts of
this delicate film of mold have got together and, by massive communal
efforts, managed to throw a few tiny spores high enough off the surface
to prevent their falling back. To do this they had to be boosted to the
escape velocity of 17,500 miles an hour, which was a major undertaking,
and yet all this time the plum itself was hurtling along at four times
that speed.
We tend to forget that we are all space travelers. A handful of men,
dogs, chimps, and germinating seeds have been on extravehicular
activity, but the rest of the biosphere has had to stay aboard, where
the ship's life systems can take care of them. We are only just
beginning to learn how important earth's rhythms are to our well-being.
Today jet aircraft move numbers of people rapidly around from one time
zone to another, and like the cockroaches with extra ganglia, they have
foreign rhythms imposed on their own. These cause considerable
distress, because in common with all other living things we are
influenced by the natural cycles produced by earth's rotation.
Human body temperature, for instance, is seldom exactly 37º C but
follows a regular circadian pattern of change. Our temperature rises
with the sun and goes on rising, along with the rate of heartbeat and
urine production, until all three reach a peak of activity in the early
afternoon. Metabolism then gradually slows down until it falls to its
lowest level of activity, at about four in the morning. It is no
accident that this is the hour invariably chosen by secret police and
security forces for the arrest and interrogation of suspects. Life is
at its lowest ebb during the dogwatch just before dawn.
Midwives have always complained about the hours they are forced to keep
by babies that insist on being born just before breakfast. Halberg, the
physiologist who invented the word circadian, has also produced
statistics that show that this is not just an old midwives' tale. (132)
Labor pains begin twice as often at midnight as at noon, and the peak
in births occurs at about four o'clock, just when the metabolic cycle
hits its lowest trough and the mother is likely to be most relaxed.
To test the effect of light and dark on the cycle, Mary Lobban of the
Medical Research Council in Britain took a group of student volunteers
to the Spitzbergen Archipelago one summer. (197) The islands lie north
of Norway, well inside the Arctic Circle, where there is continuous
daylight from May until August. The volunteers were divided into two
groups that lived in colonies on separate islands. All those in one
colony were given wristwatches that ran slow; when these indicated that
twenty-four hours had gone by, twenty-seven had actually elapsed. Those
in the other colony had watches that ran fast, so that their 24-hour
'days' were really only twenty-one hours long. The groups lived
according to their separate schedules and were examined six times every
day.
Body-temperature rhythms of volunteers in both groups quickly adjusted
to the new schedules: Temperature fell to its lowest level during the
sleeping period and was at its highest soon after rising. No matter
whether the person was on a 21- or 27-hour cycle, the rhythm followed
the pattern of activity. It seems that man's temperature changes are
quite independent of light and dark. The cycle of urine production took
longer to acclimatise to the new schedules, but after three weeks all
the volunteers were producing the greatest volumes of urine at the same
time as they reached their temperature peak. This function, too, seems
to be independent of light and tied more to the pattern of activity of
the whole body, but Lobban fortunately took one further measurement of
metabolism and this produced quite different results.
Among other vital trace elements, the human body contains about 150
grams of potassium. This is concentrated in cells such as the nerves,
which carry signals by rapidly exchanging sodium and potassium through
their surface membranes as they are stimulated. As the nerve recovers,
after the impulse has passed, sodium is pushed out, potassium is taken
back, and the cell is cocked, ready to fire again. Each time this
exchange takes place, a little potassium is lost, and about three grams
is excreted from the body each day. Normally, elimination of potassium
follows a rhythmic pattern similar to that of body temperature and
urine production, but at Spitzbergen it was found to be quite
independent. All volunteers showed a cycle of potassium excretion, but
the greatest amounts were being lost at regular intervals of
twenty-four hours - actual hours, not hours as measured by their
dishonest wristwatches. Follow-up studies of men at Arctic and
Antarctic bases have shown that, even after two years away from the
normal rhythms of days and night, 24-hour cycles of potassium excretion
still persist.
It seems that, while gross responses of our organism are susceptible to
short-term environmental changes, the basic activities of life, such as
communication between separate cells, are controlled by deep-seated
mechanisms that respond to the time pattern of the planet as a whole.
Man also has a natural tendency to respond to the annual cycle. Some
workers have found that there is a circannual rhythm in body-weight
change and in the frequency of manic-depressive attacks, but the most
convincing evidence comes from our dates of birth. (244) In the
Northern Hemisphere there are more children born in May and June than
in November and December. The obvious explanation would seem to be that
these children were conceived during August the previous year, when the
parents were on their summer holidays and such things are more likely
to happen. But there seems to be a more fundamental biological
principle involved, because children born during May are, on the
average, about two hundred grams heavier than those born in any other
month. (118) This difference is caused by an annual rhythm in the
production of hormones involved in pregnancy. We still have a breeding
season.
The situation is of course reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. A study
of twenty-one thousand army recruits in New Zealand showed that the
taller men were all born between December and February, which are the
midsummer months down under.
In both hemispheres, being born in the best months seems to carry a
birthright of longer life and greater intelligence. Long life naturally
depends on nutrition and health care and perhaps even hereditary
factors, but the fact remains that in a comparatively homogenous area
such as New England those born in March live an average of four years
longer than those born in any other month. (269) The measurement of
intelligence by IQ alone is suspect, but an analysis of seventeen
thousand school children in New York showed that those born in May
scored better at these tests than those born at any other time. (156) A
similar survey of mentally deficient children in Ohio showed a
different pattern, with most being born in the winter months of January
and February. (179)
Man and Moon
The third basic rhythm of life, the lunar cycle, also appears in
patterns of human birth times. The moon is so closely linked to birth
that in some places it is even called 'the great midwife'. To test this
possibility, the two doctors Menaker collected information on more than
half a million births that occurred in New York hospitals between 1948
and 1957. This enormous sample showed a clear and statistically
significant trend for more births to take place during the waning moon
than the waxing moon, with a maximum just after the full moon and a
clear minimum at new moon. Other studies, in Germany and in California
with smaller samples, have found no such relationship, but it is worth
bearing in mind that lunar influences differ in different geographic
locations. Tides in the Bay of Fundy rise and fall over fifty
incredible feet, while the difference between low and high tide in
Tahiti is only a few inches. There is a connection between birth and
tides. The times of births in communities living on the North Sea coast
of Germany show that an unusually large number occur just at the time
of high tide. In other words, there is a sudden increase in births each
day just when the moon is passing directly overhead. A similar
relationship occurs in Cologne, which is on the same latitude but far
from the sea, so it is not the tides themselves that control uterine
contractions, but the moon that influences both.
The time of birth is of course directly connected to the time of
conception, and this depends on the phase of the menstrual cycle. It
has not escaped notice that the average length of the female cycle is
almost identical to the period between two full moons. All the women in
the world do not of course menstruate on the same day at the same phase
of the moon, but it is difficult to believe that the similarity between
the two cycles is purely coincidental. The great Swiss chemist Svante
Arrhenius once recorded 11,807 menstrual periods. He found that there
was a slight relationship to the lunar cycle: the onset of bleeding
occurred more often during the waxing than the waning moon, with a peak
on the evening before new moon. A recent German study of ten thousand
menstruations also found a peak near the new moon. Other workers have
found no such correlation, but it is possible that some confusion is
caused by the method of measurement. We say that the menstrual cycle
begins with the first day of bleeding, but this is just a convention:
the uterine lining breaks down for three or four days and bleeding can
become evident at any time during this process. The moment of
ovulation, when the follicle bursts and discharges the egg, is a much
more precise and important biological event and surveys made using this
as the beginning of the cycle might show closer lunar connections.
The egg lives less than forty-eight hours, and unless a sperm reaches
and fertilises it during this time, it dies. So conception can occur
only during this rather short period. Eugen Jonas of Czechoslovakia has
discovered that the time of ovulation is connected with the moon, and
that the ability of a mature woman to conceive coincides with the phase
of the moon that prevailed when she was born. (284) He has set up a
service in several Eastern European countries that provides each woman
with a chart based on her own lunar affinities. Used as a contraceptive
measure, these charts have proved to be 98 per cent effective - which
is as good as The Pill, and with no side effects. Of course the charts
also give a woman notice of all those days in her life on which she can
conceive, and they are now being used extensively to ensure
fertilisation as well as to avoid it.
Jonas had many critics among obstetricians, but it must be said in his
defense that menstruation as a whole is such a paradoxical process that
there is a great deal about it that we do not yet understand. It is
unique in our bodies in that it involves the regular destruction of
tissues in a normal healthy individual. George Corner of Princeton
calls it 'an unexplained turmoil in the otherwise co-ordinated process
of uterine function'. (306) Perhaps the paradox once owed much more to
lunar influence, and the present range in the length of menstrual
cycles from nineteen to thirty-seven days is just an indication of its
growing independence of this cosmic influence. Two American Air Force
scientists have recently shown that it is possible to influence the
cycle with an artificial moon. They selected twenty women with a
history of chronic menstrual irregularity and persuaded them to leave
their bedroom lights on all night on the three days closest to
ovulation. All the women menstruated exactly fourteen days later, so
perhaps the moon still influences menstrual bleeding quite strongly.
(88)
There is definitely a close connection between the moon and bleeding in
general. Superstition has it that the moon controls blood flow in the
same way that it controls the tides. When bloodletting was a customary
form of medical treatment, it was always done when the moon was waning,
for it was believed that it was too dangerous to let blood when the
light was increasing and the tide beginning to flood. This superstition
may be founded in fact. Edson Andrews of Tallahassee reports that in a
survey of over a thousand 'bleeders' - patients needing unusual means
of hemostasis on the operating table or having to be returned to the
theater because of hemorrhaging - 82 per cent of all the bleeding
crises occurred between the first and last quarters of the moon, with a
significant peak when the moon was full. Dr Andrews ends his report
with the comment: 'These data have been so conclusive and convincing to
me that I threaten to become a witch doctor and operate on dark nights
only, saving the moonlit nights for romance.' (155)
There is something about moonlight nights that affects a number of
people in strange ways. The very word 'lunacy' suggests a direct
connection between the moon and madness; in fact this superstition is
so widely believed that it was once even written into law. Two hundred
years ago a distinction was made in English law between those who were
'insane', meaning chronically and incurably psychotic, and those who
were 'lunatic' and therefore susceptible only to aberrations produced
by the moon. Crimes committed at the full moon by those in the second
category were considered more leniently by the courts. Superintendents
of asylums have always feared the influence of the moon on 'loony'
inmates and canceled staff leave on nights when the moon was full. In
the eighteenth century, patients were even beaten the day before full
moon as a prophylactic against violence on their part the following
night. Official violence of this kind is now thankfully outlawed, but
much of the old moon lore lingers on. There could be something in it.
The American Institute of Medical Climatology has published a report on
the effect of full moon on human behavior in which it records that
crimes with strong psychotic motivation, such as arson, kleptomania,
destructive driving, and homicidal alcoholism all show marked peaks
when the moon is full and that cloudy nights are no protection against
this trend. (155) Leonard Ravitz, a neurologist and psychiatric
consultant, has discovered a direct physiological connection between
man and moon, which could explain these correlations. (266) For many
years he has been measuring the differences in electrical potential
between the head and the chest of mental patients. He has also tested
passers-by selected at random and found that all people show a cyclic
pattern that changes from day to day and that the greatest differences
between head and chest readings occur at full moon, particularly in
mental patients. Ravitz suggests that, as the moon modifies earth's
magnetic field, these changes precipitate crises in people whose mental
balance is already rather precarious. 'Whatever else we may be, we are
all electric machines. Thus energy reserves may be mobilised by
periodic universal factors (such as the forces behind the moon) which
tend to aggravate maladjustments and conflicts already present.'
Studies continue to be made on other possible physiological relations
between man and the moon. It has been claimed that deaths caused by
tuberculosis are most frequent seven days before full moon and that
this may be linked to a lunar cycle in the pH content (the ratio of
acid to alkali) in blood. (245) And a German physician reports
correlations among lunar phases, pneumonia, the amount of uric acid in
the blood, and even the time of death. (131)
The moon obviously affects man in many ways. The influence of lunar
gravity is a direct effect, but where light is concerned, the moon is
just a middleman basking in the reflected glory of the sun. So it is
not surprising to find that man is even more strongly touched by the
sun.
Man and Sun
The black death that drove Newton from his college and into a momentous
discovery swept England in 1665. Astronomical records of the time show
that this was a year of intense sunspot activity, and studies of annual
tree rings, which are wider when the sun is disturbed, reveal that the
terrible plague of 1348 was also accompanied by an active sun. (30) A
Russian professor of history has been collecting correlations of this
kind for forty years, many of them spent in Siberia for daring to
suggest that major social changes might be due more to sunspots than
dialectical materialism. (316) Tchijevsky claims that the great
plagues, the diphtheria and cholera outbreaks in Europe, the Russian
typhus, and the smallpox epidemics of Chicago all occurred at the peaks
of the sun's 11-year cycle. He also points out that in the century 1830
to 1930 there were Liberal governments in power in England during
sunspot peaks and that Conservatives were elected only in quieter years.
This sounds incredible, but we know that behavior is governed by
physiology and we now have evidence that the sun has a direct effect on
some of our body chemistry. Maki Takata of Toho University, in Japan,
is the inventor of the 'Takata reaction', which measures the amount of
albumin in blood serum. This is supposed to be constant in men and to
vary with women according to the menstrual cycle, but in 1938 every
hospital that used his test reported a sudden rise in level for both
sexes. Takata started an experiment with simultaneous measurements of
the serum from two men one hundred miles apart. Over a period of four
months, their curves of daily variation were exactly parallel and
Takata concluded that the phenomenon must be world-wide and due to
cosmic factors. (313)
Over a period of twenty years, Takata has been able to show that the
changes in blood serum occur mainly when major sunspots are interfering
with earth's magnetic field. He made tests during the eclipses of 1941,
1943, and 1948 and found that these inhibited his reaction as much as
performing them in a mine shaft six hundred feet underground. (312) He
also experimented on subjects in an aircraft at over thirty thousand
feet and discovered that the reaction took place more strongly at
heights where the atmosphere was too thin to provide effective
protection from solar radiation. Recent Soviet work lends support to
the idea that our blood is directly affected by the sun. (299) Over
120,000 tests were made on people in a Black Sea resort to measure the
number of lymphocytes in their blood. These small cells normally make
up between 20 and 25 per cent of man's white blood cells, but in years
of great solar activity this proportion decreases. There was a big drop
during the sunspot years of 1956 and 1957, and the number of people
suffering from diseases caused by a lymphocyte deficiency actually
doubled during the tremendous solar explosion of February 1956.
Other diseases directly affected by magnetic disturbance include
thrombosis and tuberculosis. (280) On May 17, 1959, there were three
very powerful solar flares. The next day twenty patients with heart
attacks were admitted to a Black Sea hospital that normally deals with
an average of two each day. Two French heart specialists have found
that there is a very high correlation between the sun and myocardial
infarctions (heart failure caused by blood clots). (253) They suggest
that solar radiation promotes the formation of blood clots near the
skin in people so predisposed and that these clots then produce fatal
blockages in the coronary artery. Hemorrhage in the lungs of tubercular
patients follows a similar pattern. (198) The most dangerous days are
those in which the aurora borealis can be seen - that is, those days
when strong solar radiation activity disturbs the atmosphere.
Many of the body's functions seem to be influenced by sun-induced
changes in the earth's magnetic field. If this is so, one would expect
to find that the nervous system, which depends almost entirely on
electrical stimuli, would be the most affected. This seems to be the
case. A study of 5,580 coal-mine accidents on the Ruhr shows that most
occurred on the day following solar activity. (207) Studies of traffic
accidents in Russia and in Germany show that these increase, by as much
as four times the average, on days after the eruption of a solar flare.
(249) A survey of 28,642 admissions to psychiatric hospitals in New
York shows that there is a marked increase on days when the magnetic
observatory reports strong activity. (109) This suggests that accidents
may be due to a disturbance deeper than a simple decrease in reaction
time. These results make it clear that man is, among other things, a
remarkably sensitive living sundial.
The Planets
Our sensitivity to the sun extends from light rays into the longer
wavelengths of radio. We see the sun, we feel its warmth, and we
respond to changes it produces in the earth's magnetic field. These
changes affect radio reception in a pattern that, as Nelson has shown,
can be predicted by the position of the planets. (229) The amount of
change is small, but its effect is most marked on biochemical processes
such as nerve activity. Even by drilling two holes in the trunk of a
tree, one can measure variations in electrical potential that follow
the movements of bodies in our solar system, so it is no surprise to
find that the complex human organism is affected by the planets. (54)
Michel Gauquelin, of the Psychophysiological Laboratory at Strasbourg,
was the first to quantify this effect. His twenty years of painstaking
research are summarised in his excellent book The Cosmic Clocks. (119)
In 1950 Gauquelin became interested in planetary rhythms and looked for
possible correlations on earth. As our planet spins on its axis, the
sun and the moon appear to move overhead, rising and setting in solar
and lunar days whose length depends on our latitude and the time of
year. The other planets travel across our horizon in the same way,
producing Venusian and Martian days that are equally predictable. In
Europe all local authorities record the exact moment of birth in
official registers, so Gauquelin was able to collect this information
and match it with the positions of planets computed from astronomical
tables. (119) He selected 576 members of the French Academy of Medicine
and found, to his astonishment, that an unusually large number of them
were born when Mars and Saturn had just risen or reached their highest
point in the sky. To check these findings, he took another sample of
508 famous physicians and got the same results. (120) There was a
strong statistical correlation between the rise of these two planets at
a child's moment of birth and his future success as a doctor.
Taken together, the two tests produce odds of ten million to one
against this happening just by chance. For the first time in history a
scientist had produced evidence that the planets actually influence, or
indicate an influence, on our lives. This gives science a point of
vital contact with the old beliefs of astrology.
Astrology is based upon the fundamental premise that celestial
phenomena affect life and events here on earth. No scientist, and
certainly no biologist familiar with the latest work on weather and
natural rhythms, can deny that this premise is proved. Earth and its
life are affected by the cosmos and there is room for argument only in
the matter of degree. Astrologers make many claims that are still
without foundation and may well be ill-conceived, but there is a
growing body of evidence to show that some of it, at least, is true.
Michel Gauquelin continues to make the most important contributions in
this field. Following his discovery of the link between Mars and
medicine, he extended his studies to other professions and collected
all the birthdates of famous Frenchmen he could find. (115) Once again
there was an impressive correlation between the planets and
professions. Famous doctors and scientists were born as Mars was coming
over the horizon, while artists, painters, and musicians were seldom
born at this time. Soldiers and politicians were born more frequently
under the influence of a rising Jupiter, but babies born when this
planet was in the ascendant seldom became scientists.
No famous French writer was born with Saturn in the ascendant, but not
all relationships were so clear-cut. Gauquelin had to resort to
statistical techniques to demonstrate correlations - and the use of
these raises certain problems. We know that in the Northern Hemisphere
the month with the highest birth rate is June and that the days in June
are longer than in any other month. So, despite the fact that there are
equal amounts of light and dark in any year, there is a greater chance
that babies will be born in daylight. We also know that births follow a
rhythmic pattern, with more babies being born in the morning than the
afternoon, and this introduces yet another bias. Planets follow the
same kind of motion as the sun, so the chances of a birth taking place
in all hours of the planetary day are not equal. Gauquelin applied
corrections for all these conditions before comparing his samples and
assessing their significance. His statistics were examined in detail by
Tornier, professor of mathematical theory in Berlin, who could find no
fault with them, but another statistician suggested that the results
merely reflected a national peculiarity of the French and that the same
methods applied to other countries might produce different results.
Gauquelin was forced to do similar work in Italy, Germany, Holland, and
Belgium until, three years later, he had twenty-five thousand records.
The results were the same. (116) Scientists and doctors were positively
linked with Mars and Saturn; soldiers, politicians, and team athletes
with Jupiter. Writers', painters', and musicians' births were not
linked to the presence of any planet, but clearly avoided Mars and
Saturn, while scientists and doctors were negative on Jupiter. Solo
performers such as writers and long-distance runners were much more
markedly linked to the moon than to any of the planets. This time three
well-known statisticians, including Faverge, the professor of
statistics at the Sorbonne, studied the results and could find no fault
with Gauquelin's calculations or the methods he used to collect his
data. A control experiment was performed on people selected at random,
which yielded results strictly according to the laws of chance.
One persistent critic of this work, though forced now to admit rather
reluctantly that the position of certain bodies in our solar system has
something to do with at least nine different professions, dismisses the
whole thing by declaring that it is 'the absurd expression of an absurd
experience'. His emotional dislike of anything occult disguises the
fact that the work falls a long way short of showing astrology to be a
proven fact. It shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that the position of
the planets means something - the position, and not the planets
themselves. We still have to decide whether the planets are acting
directly on us or whether their position is merely symbolic of some
much larger cosmic pattern of energy of which they, and we, are just a
small part.
I want to return to this problem later, because, in a sense, it does
not really matter what the causal agent is. If an astrologer can use
the position of the planets as a reliable key to interpreting and
predicting the action of a cosmic force, it makes no difference whether
this force comes from Andromeda or from a flying saucer. Electricity
was discovered and used very effectively a long time before anyone
understood how it worked. What matters more at this moment is
understanding the effect that the planets seem to have on us.
Firstly, we know that labor in pregnancy is more easily induced when
the mother is relaxed at the lowest point of her circadian cycle. It
has also been shown that there is a marked increase in births during
magnetic storms, so it is possible that electromagnetic conditions at
the time that a planet such as Mars comes over the horizon could bring
on labor pains and induce birth to take place. (270) This would mean
that only the mother was involved and that conditions at the moment of
birth made no difference to the child at all, but it does not explain
the link between the planet and the child's ultimate profession.
The second possibility is that the planet, or the prevailing
conditions, modify the child at the moment of birth and determine its
future in some way. This is of course the orthodox astrological
attitude: the pattern of the heavens at the exact moment of birth
impinges on the child and shapes its destiny. Most modern astrologers
are by no means fixed in this rigid, rather awkward belief, and I must
say that, as a biologist, I find it unsatisfactory. What, for instance,
is the moment of birth? The average time taken for the birth of a first
child, from the moment the head meets the pelvic floor until the last
limb emerges, is two hours. During this time a planet can change its
position altogether. Some astrologers measure life from the moment of
the child's first cry, but it is difficult to see why this should be
the significant moment. There are other, more critical, times in
childbirth. The journey down the four-inch birth canal is probably the
most dangerous we ever take, and at one point the child undergoes
considerable trauma and discomfort, which might make it more than
usually susceptible to outside influence. The pelvis rotates the baby's
head into the best position for birth, and the softness of the skull
bones, together with the space between them, allows it to pass without
overt damage, but the uterus is shoving from behind with a force strong
enough to break an obstetrician's finger. This could be the
astrological moment, when the brain is tormented into a new kind of
activity by the physical pressure on it and opens itself to cosmic
influence. But this does not account for the normal lives of those born
by Caesarean section, who, though deprived of the birth drama, still
have their own unique destinies.
A stronger objection to the 'moment of birth' theory comes from what we
now know about the cosmic forces involved. The womb was once thought of
as the living equivalent of that 'constant condition' chamber much
beloved of experimental zoologists, but belief in both must now be
abandoned. The womb is certainly warm and comfortable, temperature and
humidity controlled like a room in a Hilton hotel, but other conditions
are not so uniform. A certain amount of light penetrates the thin,
distended skin of the mother's stomach; every mother knows that a loud
sound can frighten an unborn child and make it hammer on the walls of
the womb in protest; and most radiation passes through the bodies of
mother and child alike almost without pause. It is difficult to believe
that electromagnetic forces from the environment influence a child only
at the moment of birth, when it has been exposed to these forces
throughout the period of gestation.
A far more likely theory is that the cosmic environment plays an
important part at the moment of conception or soon afterward, when the
raw materials of heredity are still sorting themselves out into the
ultimate arrangement for the new individual. Even the smallest nudge at
this time would be enough to alter the direction of development
sufficient to produce a major effect on the end product. The amount of
energy necessary to produce an effect increases as the embryo gets
older, bigger, more complex, and less flexible. Most cosmic stimuli are
fairly subtle, and it seems much more likely that they would act in the
early stages of development than later on, at birth. Although the womb
is by no means quiet, an embryo is cushioned from the environment and
protected from some of its more obvious effects. In this relatively
peaceful place, it is possible that the child learns to respond to
signals that are masked from us by the barrage of stimuli outside. A
hamster deprived in the laboratory of the sun, which once told him when
to hibernate, learns to change up from nature to Supernature and
responds instead to the more subtle rhythm of the moon passing by. An
unborn child might well be more sensitive than its mother to delicate
synchronisers from space and even use these cues to 'decide' when to be
born. The placenta and the fetus originate from the same cell, they are
indeed the same flesh, so it is not unlikely that it is the child that
gives the signal to the placenta that starts uterine contractions and
begins the labors of birth. Which leaves us with the notion that cosmic
forces could best influence man by acting at an early stage on the
embryo to modify the blueprint in some way, and that the developing
embryo remains in tune with the cosmos, perhaps even to the extent of
setting the scene for its own first public appearance.
Gauquelin feels that the tendency for the baby to be born under a
certain planet might be hereditary. To test this idea, he worked for
more than five years on the birth data of several counties near Paris,
collecting information on more than thirty thousand parents and their
children. He plotted the positions of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn
for all the people involved and found overwhelming evidence that
parents born when one of these planets was rising most often gave birth
when the same planet was in the same position. Factors such as the sex
of the parent, the sex of the child, the length of the pregnancy, and
the number of previous children had no effect on the results; but the
correlation was highest if both parents were born under the same
planet. This idea is easily linked to the earlier one of the child
itself setting the birth pace, by assuming that each individual carries
a gene that makes him sensitive to a particular pattern of cosmic
stimuli. We know that this is what happens in fruit flies, which
unerringly emerge at dawn. Gauquelin concludes that a child's whole
career depends on its genetic structure and that part of this
determines when it will be born. He suggests that, by study of the
position of the planets at birth, '... it seems possible to develop a
forecast of the individual's future temperament and social behavior.'
(117)
Michel Gauquelin himself seems reluctant to admit it, but this is
exactly what astrology claims to do. It is time that we had a closer
look at astrology.
Astrology
For a start, we can discard the popular newspaper version of astrology
altogether. Glib, all-embracing predictions, in which everyone born
under Pisces will have a good day for making new plans, while another
twelfth of the world's population will be busy meeting attractive
strangers, have nothing to do with astrology. They are held in
well-deserved contempt both by astrologers and by their critics.
Perhaps the best approach to the real astrology is to examine the tools
of the trade and see how they are used. The most basic instrument is
the horoscope, which literally means a 'view of the hour' and consists
of a detailed and formal map of the heavens as they were at the exact
place and at the precise time that the person was born. Every horoscope
is different; if it is well drawn, with proper attention to detail, it
can be almost as distinctive as a fingerprint.
There are five steps in the construction of a horoscope:
1. Establish the date, time, and place of birth.
2. Calculate the appropriate sidereal time.
We operate for convenience on a 24-hour day, but the real day length,
the period of rotation of the earth relative to the universe, is four
minutes shorter. Sidereal time is obtained from standard tables based
on Greenwich in England, and corrections must be made for the time
zone, longitude, and latitude of the birthplace.
3. Find the 'rising sign'.
The planets all move around the sun in the same plane, so we see them
passing overhead always through the same belt of sky that extends all
the way around earth. Situated along this line, which is called the
ecliptic, are twelve main groups of stars, with the famous zodiac
names. Some of these constellations are bigger and brighter than the
others, but all are given the same value by dividing the belt up into
twelve equal portions of 30º. The rising, or ascendant, sign is the
constellation zone that is coming up over the eastern horizon at the
moment of birth. This is not necessarily the same as the 'sun sign'.
When someone says, 'I'm Aries', he means that he was born between March
21 and April 20, when the sun rises at the same time as that
constellation. If a person is born at sunrise, his rising sign and sun
sign will be the same.
4. Find the 'mid-heaven sign'.
This is the constellation zone that is directly overhead at the time of
birth. Like the rising sign, it can be found from standard tables.
5. Plot the positions of sun, moon, and planets on a birth chart.
This map includes all the planets, even those below the horizon at the
moment of birth. All details are taken from a book called an
'ephemeris' - meaning that which changes - which is published every
year.
So far the technique is perfectly respectable; no scientist could take
exception to the logic involved and no astronomer can find fault with
the tables used in calculation. The division of the ecliptic into
twelve zones is in some ways an arbitrary one, but it is convenient
and, as long as all the zones are the same size, there can be no
objection to their being compared with one another. The animal or
character that is supposed to inhabit each of the twelve zones is more
an aid to memory than a real star pattern or a cosmic force. In fact,
since the ancient Babylonians set up their celestial Rorschach test and
gave names to the splashes of stars, our axis had shifted slightly and
the zones of the zodiac are no longer exactly in line with the
constellations after which they were named. But this does not matter at
all; the zones are precisely defined in the tables used to calculate a
horoscope, and their symbolism is unimportant.
The basic tool of astrology is therefore a valid one and beyond
dispute. Arguments arise only over the use of the tool, the way in
which the horoscope is interpreted; but it is surprising how far
science and astrology are in agreement. Astrologers begin their
interpretation of the birth data by saying that things on earth are
influenced by events outside. Scientists must agree. Astrology says
that persons, events, and ideas are all influenced at their time of
origin by the prevailing cosmic conditions. Science, which spends a
large amount of its time measuring the continual changes in the cosmic
scene, must concede that this is possible. Astrology claims that we are
most influenced by the celestial bodies nearest to us, the ones in our
solar system, and that the two most important are the sun and the moon.
Once again science, now that it knows about photoperiodism and the
action of solar and lunar rhythms, can only agree. Astrology goes on to
claim that the relative positions of the planets is important to us,
and science, with Nelson's work on the influence of planets on radio
reception in hand, must grudgingly admit that this, too, is a
possibility. Then astrology goes out onto more shaky ground with the
claim that each of the planets influence life in a different way. But,
since Gauquelin's work on the connection between planets and
professions, even this idea now begins to have a certain scientific
respectability.
The real division between the establishments of science and astrology
comes, not when astrologers point to changes in the cosmos but when
they claim to know exactly what these changes mean. Both scientists and
astrologers describe celestial events and plot the discernible changes
these produce in the environment, but the astrologers go further than
this and have erected an intricate, and what seems to be completely
arbitrary, framework to help them interpret what they see. Most
practicing astrologers now no longer even bother to look any more, but
rely entirely on the traditional framework to make their
interpretations for them. As this is the present stumbling block
between the disciplines, it is worth examining the nature of the
tradition more closely.
Astrology is an equation in which the positions of all the large bodies
in our solar system are variables. The positions of the moving bodies
around a fixed spot at a given time are predictable, and they combine
to produce a unique set of conditions that can influence anything
taking place at that spot. Astrology claims that each of the bodies has
a special effect on us (Mercury controls the intellect), but that this
effect is modified by the stars behind it at the time. Each of the
twelve star patterns in the zodiac also has its own special influence
(Virgo is said to have critical, analytic attributes), so Mercury
appearing in the zone of Virgo at someone's birth is thought to make
that person not only intelligent, but able to apply this intellect
shrewdly and well. On the horoscope, or map of the heavens for that
time, the planet is shown inside the 30º arc that is thought to
encompass Virgo's sphere of influence.
Also on the horoscope chart is a second subdivision into twelve
sections that is not based on any known astronomical observation. These
are called the 'houses', and each of them, like the star zones,
occupies 30º of the circle of the heavens. The first house starts on
the eastern horizon and projects below it, and the rest follow on in
sequence until the twelfth house, which lies just above the eastern
horizon. So the rising sign is always in the twelfth house, but the
zodiac zones and the houses never coincide exactly unless a baby is
born just as one zone gives way to the next one. Like the planets and
the stars, the houses also have traditional attributes. The tenth
house, for instance, is said to relate to ambition and public standing.
So if our subject with Mercury in Virgo also has these two in his tenth
house, an astrologer would predict that the shrewd application of his
intellect would probably make this person very famous.
So astrology claims that long experience has shown that planets have a
predictable influence on character that is modified by secondary,
though equally predictable, effects of stars in conjunction with the
planet at that moment, and that the combined effects of these forces on
a person are determined by the position of the planet/star combination
in space at the moment of the child's birth. There are ten large bodies
in our solar system, twelve groups of stars, and twelve areas they can
all occupy, but astrologers believe that the most important
associations are those actually on the eastern horizon at the time of
birth (the rising signs) and those that will be there when the sun
comes up (the sun signs). This tallies with Gauquelin's finding that it
was the planet rising at birth that was linked with the profession. So,
if a cosmic force exerts a special influence just as the earth turns
toward it, it seems reasonable that this would be reinforced by the sun
coming into view at the same time as well. Once again there is little
in the mechanics of these suggested effects that would offend a
broad-minded scientist, but it is with the specific attributes of the
astrological tradition that difficulties arise. There is more of both
to come.
Astrology goes on to claim that a person's character (as determined by
a planet) and its manifestation (as influenced by a star group) are
even further modified by the relationships of the different planets to
each other. When a planet stands at a certain angle to another, they
are said to be 'in aspect'. If the two can be seen together at the same
point in the sky, they are in 'conjunction' and said to exert a
powerful influence on events. If one is on the eastern and the other on
the western horizon, they are 180 degrees apart and in 'opposition',
which is said to be a negative, or bad, relationship. If one is on the
horizon and the other is directly overhead, they are 90 degrees apart,
in 'square', and this, too, is bad. But if the angle between them is
120 degrees, they are in 'trine', which is positive and good. These are
the main aspects, but angles of 30, 45, 60, 135, and 150 degrees are
also significant. In practice, a variation of up to 9 degrees from
these set aspect angles is regarded as permissible.
When interpreting an aspect, the astrologer uses the traditional value
of the angle between them to assess the combination of their
traditional attributes. Uranus, for instance, is said to be connected
with 'sudden change' and Pluto with 'elimination'. Once every 115 years
they come into conjunction; it happened in 1963, and astrology says
that anyone born under this aspect is destined to become a world leader
with enormous powers for either good or evil. It is fascinating at this
point to look back at Nelson's work on radio reception. (229) He found
that disturbance occurred when two or more planets were in conjunction
or in 90- or 180-degree aspect to the sun. These are precisely the
aspects that astrology claims are strong ones and can be
'disharmonious' or 'bad'. Nelson also found that predictably good,
disturbance-free conditions occurred when planets lined up in 60- or
120-degree angles to the sun. And these are the aspects that
astrological tradition finds to be 'good'.
These factors and measurements are highly complex, but they form only a
part of the vast latticework of intricate relationships used by
astrologers. There are hundreds of thousands of recorded guides to
interpretation, which cover millions of possible combinations of cosmic
events. Even the most ardent devotees of astrology admit that their
study lacks a clear philosophic basis, that the laws and principles
governing it are still uncoordinated, and that the records are
scattered and contain many errors. But the sum total of what can be
examined is an impressive body of opinion which is full of rich,
interrelated symmetries that seem to form an elegant and internally
consistent system.
Our next step must be to examine the evidence of astrology in action.
It is impossible to investigate the traditions themselves; most of them
are supremely illogical and seem to have no basis in any kind of
dialectic system, and their origins are obscured in myth and ancient
lore and are not available for scrutiny. But we can test the effects of
the traditions and their accuracy in interpretation. The proof of the
astrological pudding lies in the ability of astrologers to stand up to
the consumers' test. The most rigorous and scientific test to date was
one made in 1959 by an American psychologist, Vernon Clark.
Clark's first test was to examine the astrologer's claim to be able to
predict future talents and capabilities directly from a birth chart.
(75) He collected horoscopes from ten people who had been working for
some time in a clearly defined profession. These included a musician, a
librarian, a veterinarian, an art critic, a prostitute, a bookkeeper, a
herpetologist, an art teacher, a puppeteer, and a pediatrician. Half
were men and half women, all were born in the United States, and all
were between forty-five and sixty years old. These horoscopes were
given to twenty astrologers, together with a separate list of the
professions, and they were asked to match them up. The same information
was given to another group of twenty people - psychologists and social
workers - who knew nothing about astrology. The results were
conclusive. The control group returned only a chance score, but
seventeen out of the twenty astrologers performed far better, with
results that were a hundred to one against chance. This shows that
people's characters do seem to be influenced by cosmic patterns and
that an astrologer can distinguish the nature of the influence just by
looking at the horoscope, which is a traditional, ritualised picture of
the cosmic pattern.
Clark then went on to test the astrologers' ability not only to
distinguish between patterns but to predict the effect of a pattern. He
gave the same astrologers ten pairs of horoscopes; attached to each
pair was a list of dates showing important events such as marriage,
children, new jobs, and death that had taken place in the life of the
person who belonged to one of the two charts. The astrologers had to
decide which horoscope predicted such events. The test was made more
difficult by the fact that the two charts in each pair belonged to
people of the same sex who lived in the same area and were born in the
same year. Three of the astrologers got all ten right, and the rest
again scored better than a hundred to one against chance. This shows
that an astrologer can tell, from the birth data alone, whether an
accident or a marriage belongs to a particular horoscope. Which means
that he could, in theory, have predicted these events before they
happened.
Still not satisfied, Clark arranged a third test. He thought the
astrologers might have had too many clues to work with, and so he gave
them a further ten pairs of birth data with no case history, no dates
of important events, no personal information of any kind except that
one member of each pair was a victim of cerebral palsy. Once again the
astrologers were able to pick the right one far more often than could
be attributed to chance. Clark concluded that 'astrologers, working
with material which can be derived from birth data alone, can
successfully distinguish between individuals'. In fact these tests, in
which the astrologer works 'blind', without seeing his subject, are
like a physician diagnosing a disease without seeing his patient. To
me, as a scientist, they provide impressive evidence that the
astrological tradition is not just a meaningless jumble of
superstitions, but a real instrument that can be used to extract more
information from a simple map of the heavens than any other tool at our
disposal.
These results, taken together with those of Nelson and Gauquelin, imply
very strongly that cosmic events affect conditions on earth, that
different events affect conditions in different ways, and that the
nature of these effects can be determined and perhaps even predicted.
One field of prediction in which astrologers are very often consulted
is, 'Will it be a boy or a girl?' They enjoy some success in their
forecasts, which is hardly surprising in view of the limited number of
possibilities, but news filters out of Czechoslovakia about a new
technique that promises much more than a 50 per cent chance of a right
answer.
Eugen Jonas is the Czech psychiatrist whose interest in lunar rhythms
led to the discovery of a successful natural method of birth control.
In following up his work, he has hit on a new lunar correlation that
makes it possible to predict the sex of a child with great accuracy.
(168) The method is based on the moon's position in the sky at the time
of conception. In classical astrology, each of the zodiac zones has a
polarity, or sex - Aries is male, Taurus female, and so on. Jonas has
discovered that intercourse leading to conception at a time when the
moon was in a 'male' star zone produced a male child. At a clinic in
Bratislava, he made the necessary calculation for eight thousand women
who wanted to have boys, and 95 per cent of them were successful. When
tested by a committee of gynecologists, who gave him only the time of
intercourse, he was able to tell the sex of the child with 98 per cent
accuracy.
Work now in progress on artificial insemination shows that it is
possible to separate male and female sperm by passing a weak electric
current through a sample of semen. (217) We know that the moon produces
regular changes in the earth's magnetic field, and we know that life is
sensitive to these changes. It is a simple and logical step from these
premises to the assumption that a similar kind of sorting could take
place in semen in a living organism. The effect of environmental fields
on the sperm would be enhanced by the fact that semen is made and
stored outside the body of most mammals. Jonas' discovery tells us two
important things about this process. One, that it seems to be governed
by a regular, two-hourly cosmic rhythm, one of the shortest yet
discovered; and two, that this rhythm is exactly as predicted in
traditional astrology.
We are left with a picture of astrology far removed from that given by
stargazing newspaper columns, where facile guidance is offered on the
basis only of the sun sign. In many people's minds the zodiac and
astrology are synonymous, but Virgo and her friends are only part of a
very much larger and more sophisticated complex. In fact the complex is
so cohesive that it is difficult to understand how it could have come
about. The accepted background for astrology is that it owes most to
the Babylonians (or Chaldeans), who, being nomadic in a climate that
allowed an unobstructed view of the sky, readily accepted the idea that
divine energy is manifest in the movement of the heavenly bodies. The
textbook history goes on to recount how this concept gradually became
enlarged as omens and portents were included, until the planets became
associated with every aspect of life. Then this ritual was handed on to
and refined by the Greeks and the Romans and the Arabs, until it
reached its full flowering in medieval times. John West and Jan Toonder
reject this account and suggest, in a meticulous historical and
critical survey called The Case for Astrology, that it owes much more
to the Egyptians, who in their turn brought together the pieces of 'an
ancient doctrine that at one time fused art, religion, philosophy and
science into one internally consistent whole'. (339)
It is possible that the roots of astrology go back as far as the last
ice age - a bone more than thirty thousand years old was discovered
recently to be marked in a way that suggests lunar periodicity. But an
awareness of the planetary paths and periods can be traced only as far
back as the building of the first pyramid, about 2870 BC. Five thousand
years is only two hundred generations, and it is difficult to believe
that this is time enough to compile a system whose most simple
contention could only be checked a generation later. Some of the more
unusual events take place so seldom - Uranus and Neptune have been in
conjunction only twenty-nine times in recorded history - that this type
of trial-and-error development is inconceivable. The picture of
astrology growing slowly over the years, as bits and pieces of evidence
were discovered and added from time to time, is an equally unlikely
one. Trying to decide which cosmic pattern produced a particular effect
is like trying to discover which particular gene of the thousands on a
chromosome controls the color of an individual's eyes. The American
Federation of Astrologers has thirteen hundred members, and the
American Society of Geneticists has double this number, so it is fair
to compare their efforts in an attempt to give some idea of the scope
of the problem. The major tool in genetic research is the fruit fly;
one fruit-fly generation lasts two weeks; two hundred generations would
last eight years; work on the fly began in 1909, but it took more than
fifty years for a full picture of even one chromosome to be completed.
Even if we accept the problems as being roughly comparable, that
represents a span of fourteen hundred human generations, or thirty-five
thousand years of intensive research to build up the astrological
picture. In fact, the scheme of traditional astrology is so much more
complex that we are driven to the conclusion that it must have
originated in some other way.
It seems obvious that astrology is not the result of some sudden
insight of the 'Eureka!' kind; it never sprang fully formed from
anyone's mind. So if it did not arise in either of these ways, there is
only one other possibility: that it evolved, like a living organism,
out of the very stuff of which it is made.
In the bush country around Darwin, in Northern Australia, there lives a
termite that constructs a weirdly shaped nest. Many termites cement
fine grains of sand together with saliva and pack it into huge,
rock-hard mounds, but this species builds slabs ten feet square and
only a few inches thick that are scattered across the outback like
enormous tombstones. The fact that every single one of them has its
long axis oriented exactly along the north-south line gives the insect
its name Omitermes meridionalis, the compass termite. Each termitarium
is like an iceberg, with most of its structure beneath the surface, and
the part above the ground is honeycombed with ventilation shafts that
form the air-conditioning plant for the entire fortress. Thousands of
workers rush up and down the airshafts, opening and closing them like
valves as they labor to keep the temperature in the deeper, brood
chambers constant all day long. In the cool of the early mornings they
need to take up as much heat as possible, and so the broadside of the
mound faces directly into the rising sun. At noon they are more
concerned with losing heat, so the mound exposes only its knife-edge to
the sun, now directly overhead. Built into every single one of the
termite laborers is an awareness of the sun's movements that leads it
to construct its little bit of the mound so that the whole thing
relates to the cosmos in a way that expresses the needs of the society.
The termitarium is literally shaped by cosmic forces.
I believe that astrology arose in this way: that an awareness of cosmic
forces predisposed man to certain ideas and patterns, and that, despite
the fact that each contributing astrologer could see only his little
bit of the structure, the final synthesis took on a natural and
relevant form.
I know that this sounds mystic, but there are good scientific grounds
for my belief. As chemistry was discovering that all life was built up
of the same few basic substances, physics was investigating the
substances themselves and discovering that fundamental particles of
matter all behave in the same way. They all have a wave motion. We know
that information, whether it is a sound signal or an electromagnetic
impulse such as light, travels in waves; now the new field of quantum
mechanics shows us that there are matter waves as well and that an
organism receiving information is itself vibrant with wave patterns. If
two waves of different frequencies are superimposed, there will be
points along their path where the two touch, where they both peak
together and interfere with each other. This interference is called a
beat, and a number of beats in a regular sequence produces a rhythm.
Everything in the cosmos dances to these rhythms.
John Addey, an English philosopher, has discovered such rhythms in
human birth times. He tried to find out whether it was true that those
born under the sun sign of Capricorn were longer lived than others, by
collecting the data for 970 ninety-year-olds from Who's Who. (2) There
were no more Capricorns than any other sign, of course, so he went on
to see whether it was true that Pisceans were short-lived by collecting
data on young polio victims. (3) Once again there was no connection,
but when Addey looked at the data from both tests more carefully, he
found a wave pattern running through the year. This was a regular
pattern, which had 120 peaks in the year - it was vibrating in the
120th harmonic. A horoscope is built around the ecliptic circle of 360
degrees, so if the wave pattern is applied to this, it peaks once every
3 degrees. Addey went back to his test data and found that a child born
every third degree was 37 per cent more likely to contract polio than a
child born at other times.
Addey went on to apply wave analysis to other sets of data (339) and
found that the birth times of 2,593 clergymen corresponded to the 7th
harmonic and that 7,302 doctors fitted into the 5th harmonic. (4) This
is probably the most important of all recent discoveries that give the
old astrology and the new science a place to meet on common ground. It
demonstrates quite clearly that astrological data are amenable to a
statistical approach and that, treated in this way, they yield results
that are in direct accordance with our knowledge of the basic laws of
matter. The cosmos is a chaotic frenzy of wave patterns, some of which
have been orchestrated on earth into an organised life system. The
harmony between the two can be understood only with the aid of a score,
and of all the possibilities open to us at this moment, astrology (for
all its weird origins and sometimes weirder devotees) seems to offer
the best interpretation.
I come to this conclusion from two directions: On one journey I travel
as a scientist, picking my path with care and logic, guided by the map
of established knowledge, and arrive satisfied that astrology, if not
proved, has at least not been disproved. There is good evidence, which
is soundly based and amenable to both examination and repetition, to
suggest that there is enough truth in astrology to warrant that it be
taken seriously and pursued further. On the other path I travel as an
individual with a training in science but with a willingness to stop
and consider almost anything out of the ordinary. I come upon astrology
this way and live with it long enough to satisfy myself that there is
something in it. To be sure, there are inconsistencies and vague,
ambivalent statements - astrology is particularly weak and open to
criticism in the field of prediction - but still I am left with a
feeling of rightness. A feeling that, even if the goals are sometimes
questionable and the reasoning often weak, astrology has hit upon a
form that makes basic sense.
I do not believe that emanations from the planet Mars make a man
'decisive, freedom-loving, and a pioneer'. This is simplistic nonsense.
But I do believe that there are complex patterns of cosmic forces that
could predispose an individual to develop along these lines. The
astrologers may be right in asserting that these conditions prevail
when Mars is coming over the horizon, but even if that is true, the
planet is merely a symptom of the over-all complexity. It is like the
second hand of a watch, which provides a visible indication of the
precise time but depends entirely on all the hidden springs and wheels
that actually set the pace. I also disagree with the notion that birth
is the critical moment. It seems far more reasonable to assume that
cosmic forces are acting on everything all the time and that the moment
of birth bears the same relation to the rest of life as the momentary
position of Mars does to the rest of the cosmos. We know that the time
of birth is related to lunar cycles, to solar rhythms, and to an
inherited tendency to respond to these patterns in a certain way. It
seems likely that birth, the early stages of fetal development,
fertilisation, and even intercourse are related in the same way,
forming a continuum in which no one moment is intrinsically more
important than another.
There are some mystical things about astrology, but there is nothing
supernatural about the way it works. Man is affected by his environment
according to clearly defined physical forces, and his life, like all
others', becomes organised by natural and universal laws. To believe
otherwise is tantamount to assuming that the Encyclopaedia Britannica
was thrown together by an explosion in a printing works.
THREE
THE PHYSICS OF LIFE
We choose to live. We have to choose, because a hundred million
impulses pour down on our nervous system every second and, if we were
to accept them all, we would soon be overwhelmed and die in confusion.
So the input is monitored and carefully controlled; of all the millions
of incoming signals, only a small number reach the brain and a still
smaller number get passed on to those areas where they can give rise to
conscious awareness.
A tape recording always seems to pick up more background noise than
there is in a real-life situation, but sounds such as passing traffic
and the ticking of a clock are there all the time - our brain just
ignores them. All life is selective in this way. From the background of
continuous clamor, what Milton called 'the dismal universal hiss', an
organism makes its choice. The chosen pieces are not necessarily the
most dramatic stimuli - the loudest sounds or the brightest lights;
very often they are subtle changes in the environment made conspicuous
only because of their incongruity. While director of a zoo I was once
obliged to keep a pair of bat-eared foxes in my house. These are tiny,
delicate desert animals with huge, leaf-shaped ears that quiver and
scan like radar antennas, constantly seeking out new sounds. Heavy
vehicles thundered down a thoroughfare past the house, often loud
enough to drown out conversation with their clamor and vibration, but
even in the midst of this confusion the foxes were able to hear sounds
as soft as the furtive rustle of cellophane two rooms away and would
appear like magic on the arm of my chair to find out what I was
unwrapping.
Living organisms select, from the barrage of electromagnetic waves in
their environment, only those frequencies likely to contain the best
information. Earth's atmosphere reflects or absorbs large parts of the
spectrum coming in from space: infrared and ultraviolet radiation are
partly eliminated, but visible light, with a wavelength intermediate
between these two, passes almost unimpaired. So it is no accident that
life should be very sensitive to this potentially valuable source of
intelligence. Human vision responds to wavelengths from 380 to 760
millimicrons, which is exactly the range of frequencies least affected
by the protective blanket of the atmosphere. We get a selective picture
of the cosmos through a number of narrow windows of this kind in our
sensory system.
It used to be said that there were only five such windows: those of
sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. But our ideas of the
architecture of life are being continually revised as we discover new
senses in ourselves and new combinations of the old ones in other
species. Bats 'see' with their ears, building up accurate pictures of
their environment by sending out high-frequency sounds and listening to
the patterns of returning echoes. Rattlesnakes 'see' with their skin,
following the movements of prey in complete darkness with
heat-sensitive cells in two shallow dimples between their eyes. Flies
'taste' with their feet, trampling their food first to find out whether
it is worth eating. The whole body is a sense organ, and most
apparently supernatural abilities turn out on close examination to be
variables of this kind, developed by a particular species to meet its
own special needs.
In the red, muddy rivers of central Africa live a family of fish called
mormyrids. They include some of the most peculiar-looking fish in the
world, elongated and stiff-backed, with tiny eyes and drooping,
elephant-trunk snouts. Some of them grub in the thick mud for worms,
most of them operate only at night, and all of them have an
extraordinary ability to respond to stimuli invisible to man. If a comb
is drawn through hair, it becomes electrified with the power of less
than one millionth of a volt, and yet, if such a comb is held near the
glass on the outside of an aquarium containing a mormyrid, the fish
reacts violently to the minute electrical field produced in the water.
Professor Lissmann of Cambridge has kept one species of mormyrid,
Gymnarchus niloticus, for almost twenty years and made a detailed study
of its strange world. (200) In spite of its degenerate eyes, which can
only just tell the difference between light and dark, this fish
maneuvers with precision in and out of obstacles, darting after other
small fish, on which it feeds. Lissmann has discovered that it 'sees'
with electricity, which it generates in an electric organ made of a
battery of muscles in its long, pointed tail. By dipping a pair of
electrodes into the water, he found that the fish was sending out a
constant stream of small electrical discharges at the rate of about
three hundred per second. During each discharge, the tip of the tail
becomes momentarily negative with respect to the head and Gymnarchus
acts like a bar magnet, producing a field with lines of force that
radiate out from it in a spindle shape. In open water the field is
symmetrical, but an object nearby distorts the field and the fish feels
this is an alteration of the electrical potential on its skin. The
sensory cells are small pores on the head which are filled with a
jelly-like substance that reacts to the field and sends information on
to a special electrical sense area in the head which is so large that
it covers the rest of the brain like a spongy hat.
Lissmann trained Gymnarchus to come to food hidden behind one of two
similar ceramic pots at one end of its aquarium. The fish cannot see or
smell the contents of the pots, but the walls are porous, and when
soaked in water, present no obstacle to an electrical field. By using
its electric location sense, Gymnarchus was able to tell the difference
between tap water and distilled water, or between a glass rod one
millimeter thick and another two millimeters thick, and always went for
food to the pot that was the best conductor. If two or more fish are
operating in the same area, they avoid confusion by adopting a slightly
different frequency, which gives each individual its own distinctive
electrical voice. When electrodes are connected to a loudspeaker and
dipped into the water near the riverbank where the fish rest up during
the day, one can hear a bewildering confusion of rattles, hums, and
whistles as they conduct their electronic conversations.
Gymnarchus can tell the difference between living and non-living
objects, even when the living one is completely stationary. It does not
use shape as a clue, because it can distinguish a live fish from a dead
one of the same species, so presumably it responds to an electrical
signal of some kind. (199) Lissmann had found that many species of fish
that are supposedly non-electric, do in fact put out strong discharges,
and he suggests that they are in the process of developing an electric
system of location, or may already use it to supplement their normal
senses. Every time a muscle contracts, it changes its potential, so it
is possible that a living organism, in which there is always some
muscular activity going on, produces a field strong enough to be
recognised by the specialist such as Gymnarchus. All the highly
electrical organisms known live in water, which is a good conductor.
Air is a poor conductor, and a much greater source of power would be
necessary for effective navigation. No species seems to have found the
effort of developing such a system worthwhile, but it seems that all
life forms can produce and perhaps recognise a weak electrical field.
Life Fields
Harold Burr, of Yale, demonstrated life fields with one of the most
simple and elegant biological experiments ever made. He started with
the principle of the dynamo, which is a machine that produces
electricity from some purely mechanical source such as falling water or
a passing wind. In its most simple form, the dynamo consists of an
armature, usually a loop of copper wire, which is rotated inside a
magnetic field so that it makes and breaks the field in rapid
alternation. This produces an electric current. In Burr's experiment,
the dynamo consisted of a live salamander floating in a dish of salt
water. He assumed that the salamander, which is a small amphibian that
looks a little like a lizard, was producing a field and that he would
be able to interrupt this field and generate a current. So he chose
salt water, which conducts electricity almost as well as copper wire,
as his armature and rotated the dish around and around the floating
salamander. It did break the field, and electrodes immersed in the
water soon began to pick up a current. When this was fed into a
galvanometer to measure the charge, the needle was deflected to the
left and then to the right in the regular negative and positive pattern
of a perfect alternating current. If the dish was rotated without the
floating amphibian, no current was produced.
Having proved that even a small, fairly slow-moving animal produces its
own electric field, Burr went on to develop an instrument sensitive
enough to measure the potential of the field. (57) He adapted a
standard vacuum-tube voltmeter by giving it a very high resistance in
order to prevent it from affecting the voltage by taking any current
from the animal being measured. This meter he equipped with a scale and
two perfectly matched silver-chloride electrodes. These are never put
into actual contact with the specimen being measured, but are separated
from it by a bridge of special paste or a salt solution of the same
ionic concentration as the organism itself.
Burrs' first test with the instrument was on a number of student
volunteers. (60) The electrodes were fed into two small dishes of salt
solution and the subjects placed their index fingers in the dishes,
then reversed them to give an average reading. This was done at the
same time every day for over a year, and Burr found that each person
showed a small daily fluctuation, but that all the female students
produced one huge increase in voltage, lasting about twenty-four hours,
once each month. These changes seemed to take place near the middle of
the menstrual cycle, and Burr thought they might coincide with
ovulation. To test this idea, he turned to work on rabbits. The female
rabbit has no regular menstrual cycle or breeding season, but true to
her fertile reputation, can breed at any time. Like many small mammals,
she is a 'shock ovulator'. All that is necessary is that the male
should be rough enough during mating to stimulate the cervix strongly
(some species even have an explosive dart in the penis for doing this),
and ovulation occurs about nine hours later. Burr stimulated a female
rabbit artificially, waited eight hours, anesthetised it, opened it,
and placed his electrodes on the ovary. While the voltage pattern was
being continuously recorded, he watched the ovary through a microscope.
To his enormous delight, there was a dramatic change in the voltage at
the exact moment that he saw the follicle rupture and release an egg.
(56)
Ovulation causes a marked change in the body's electrical field. This
finding was confirmed on a human subject who was about to undergo an
operation but agreed to postpone it until Burr's voltmeter indicated
that ovulation was taking place. (58) When her ovaries were uncovered
in the operating theater, one contained a follicle that had just
ruptured. This discovery of an electrical method of detecting
ovulation, which is so simple that the subject just has to dangle her
fingers in bowls of water, has been put forward as a system of birth
control for those who cannot bring themselves to trust Eugen Jonas'
lunar timetables. Both systems are far safer than the purely
mathematical rhythm method, which, as many women have discovered to
their dismay, makes no allowance for what can be a big variation in the
time of ovulation. Burr's method has now also been used to ensure
conception and for timing artificial insemination, but it does not end
there.
Having discovered that a life field exists and that changes in the
field are not random but connected with basic biological events, Burr
wondered if the field would also be influenced by disruptions produced
by disease. He took his equipment to an obstetrician, and together they
tested over a thousand women in New York's Bellevue Hospital. (59) In
102 cases, they found abnormal gradients between the abdomen and the
cervix, and in subsequent surgery for other complaints, ninety-five of
these women proved to have malignant cancer of either the cervix or the
uterus. So the life field changes even before the symptoms of the
disease become manifest, and once the changes are understood, it seems
likely to become a valuable early warning system and diagnostic aid.
Burr goes even further than this: He claims that the gradient of the
electrical response is directly connected to the rate of healing and
that he can use his voltmeter as a sort of super X ray. (55) Internal
scars do not show up well on normal equipment, but Burr has been able
to determine the condition of surgical wounds just by following the
changes in the external life field.
This field is one concerned with direct-current potentials and has
nothing to do with brain waves or the impulses recorded by an
electrocardiograph. Every time the heart beats or the brain is
stimulated, it produces a measurable electric charge, but the life
field seems to be the sum-total effect of these and all the other small
electric charges that occur as a result of chemical events that
continually take place in the body. The life field can be measured even
with the electrodes held a little way from the skin, which indicates
that it is a true field effect and not merely a surface electrical
potential. The field persists as long as life lasts, undergoing regular
small changes in healthy subjects and more dramatic aberrations in a
diseased subject. Measured over a long period, the rise and fall of
voltage can be plotted in steady cycles that indicate the time when an
individual is at his best and the times when his vitality is diminished
and his efficiency is likely to suffer. In a healthy person, the cycles
are so regular that they could be used to predict 'high' and 'low'
times weeks in advance and warn someone in a hazardous occupation such
as motor racing of days when he should take extra care or even stay at
home in bed. In this respect, we are getting very close again to
astrology, which specialises in predicting times that will be
'auspicious' or 'unfavorable' for undertaking particular projects, so
it is not surprising to discover that changes in the life field follow
a cosmic rhythm.
It is obviously impossible to keep a man tied to a voltmeter for months
on end, but there is a magnificent old maple tree in New Haven,
Connecticut, that has been wired up for thirty years of continuous
recording. (52) Analysis of this record shows irregular patterns
produced by electrical disturbance from nearby thunderstorms and local
fluctuations in earth's magnetic field, but it also shows that the tree
responds to a 24-hour solar rhythm, a 25-hour lunar rhythm, and a
longer lunar cycle that reaches its peak as the full moon passes
directly overhead. Only one long-term study of this kind has been made
on man. Leonard Ravitz made continuous recordings of several months
that showed that the life field reaches a maximum positive value at
full moon and a maximum negative value two weeks later, at new moon.
(267) We know that the passage of the sun, moon, and planets all
produce variations in magnetic conditions that radically alter the
earth's field. And now we know that living things have their own
fields, which are in turn influenced by changing patterns in the earth.
The chain is complete. Here is a natural and measurable mechanism that
can account for the connection between man and the cosmos. The
supernatural makes way for Supernature.
The idea of having an electrical field we cannot see or hear or taste
is in itself rather mysterious, so it is worth explaining that a field
does not exist in its own right. It is simply an area in which certain
things happen. If an electrical charge is brought into an electrical
field, forces will act on it. Every atom carries an electrical charge
and is therefore acted on by the field of an organism. Even a simple,
single-celled animal such as Euglena has its own field and builds atoms
and molecules into its structure, modifying its field by incorporating
their charges. So a complex organism has a composite field which is a
sum of all its component parts. This field can be measured as a whole
to get the 'flavor' of the entire structure, or separate measurements
can be made of organs and perhaps even of individual cells within the
organism. Each component has its own function and develops its own
potential as a result of that function. Burr has been examining these
differences and has come up with an exciting discovery.
He introduced microelectrodes into a newly laid frog egg and found
that, even before the egg began to divide and develop into a tadpole,
he could measure voltage differences in those parts of the egg that
were due to become the nervous system. (50) The egg material that would
eventually serve the function of communication was already displaying
the voltage characteristic of that part of the organism. This implies
that the life field has an organising ability, that it is a kind of
template, which lays down the form and function of the organism being
developed. Edward Russell has seized on this one example of
anticipation and elaborated it into a thesis just published as Design
for Destiny. He sees the field as an integrating mechanism that not
only designs the organism but lives on after it dies, as the soul. (285)
It would be splendid to find scientific proof of the soul, as
advertised on the jacket of Russell's book, but I regret that this is
not it. Burr took measurements from the frog egg that enabled him to
predict where its future nerve cord would be formed, but at no point
does he claim that the life field of the egg was identical to that of
the adult frog. It would have to be the same if it existed before the
frog as a blueprint, lived with it as intelligence, and survived it as
a soul. All the available evidence points in the opposite direction.
Burr showed that a life field deviated from the normal as an early
warning signal of disease, but certainly never claimed that the change
in the field produced the disease. His work demonstrates instead that
the life field is very much a product of life, providing an accurate
electronic mirror image in which certain details are detectable before
they become apparent to our other senses. Life produces the life field,
and when life dies, the field dies with it. Gymnarchus cannot
distinguish a dead fish from a wax model.
During its life, any change in an organism is reflected by a change in
its field. Burr proved this with another neat experiment. When two pure
strains of corn are crossed, they produce a cob that contains a mixture
of pure-breeding and hybrid seeds. These look identical, and internally
they differ only in the arrangement of one small gene, which cannot be
seen even with an electron microscope. But Burr showed that they had
different electric potentials, and he was able to sort the seeds
successfully into pure and hybrid plants just by using his voltmeter.
(51) This is reminiscent of the astrologers successfully predicting
later life patterns on the basis only of the horoscope, and it is worth
pursuing the analogy. The measurement of electrical potential is like
the identification of a rising sign: both are indicative of a pattern
of events, but neither is a determining factor in itself. The life
field is a vital discovery, but it is not the secret of life or of
survival after death. It is more of a means to an end, a key to the
understanding of Supernature.
One result of the new research into life and electricity is a theory
that could explain how life is influenced by events outside our solar
system. Together with light from the stars, we also receive an
equivalent amount of energy in the form of very-short-wavelength cosmic
rays. Most of these are absorbed in the atmosphere, where their energy
is used partly to turn carbon dioxide into the radioactive isotope
carbon 14, which gets into all living things and provides us with a way
of dating many fossils. The rest of the energy from this cosmic
bombardment goes into ionising the air, breaking up the gases into
atoms that carry electrical charges. This charged air gathers at about
sixty miles above the earth's surface in a layer called the ionosphere,
which reflects the longer radio waves and makes it possible for us on
the ground to send radio signals beyond the horizon by bouncing them
off this invisible ceiling.
Part of the ionised air seeps down to lower layers of the atmosphere as
ozone, which has a marked effect on life. In a concentration of only
one part in four million parts of air, ozone kills many bacteria and is
sometimes injected into the air conditioning of mines and underground
railways for this purpose. (213) We can detect ozone in this
concentration by its fresh, sort of seaside, smell, but we are also
aware of ionised air in much lower concentrations and can even
distinguish between positive and negative charges. (185) Air with a
preponderance of positive ions has a depressing effect on man, while
negative ions tend to be more stimulating. There is no way in which we
could make distinctions of this kind without ourselves carrying an
electrical charge that either attracts or repels particles around us.
Ravitz showed that our fields are positively charged at full moon, so
at this time we would attract negative ions to us and be more
stimulated. (267) Which provides an elegant explanation for the fact
that psychotic characters go into their manic phases at this time and
that everyone bleeds more easily at full moon. The life field forms a
perfect mechanism for linking us with cyclical events in our
environment.
The moon produces tides in water, air, and earth, which alter the
magnetic field, and this in turn affects the charge on our life fields.
To accentuate this change and make us even more aware of the lunar
rhythm as a basic timekeeper, cosmic rays produce ionised air, which
reacts with our field and exaggerates our responses. We are sensitive
to the moon, but this sensitivity is modified by events that originate
many light-years away. Once again we find complex interrelationships
that make earth and every living thing on it an integral part of the
cosmos.
At the opposite end of the spectrum to the tiny cosmic rays are some
very long waves, whose origins also seem to lie outside our solar
system. The frequency of these waves is measured in tiny fractions of a
cycle per second, their wavelength being millions of miles, and their
energy is so weak as to be barely measureable, but we seem to be aware
of them. A study made in Germany on fifty-three thousand people found
that they took longer to respond to normal stimuli when waves of this
length were passing by. (182) It is highly significant that the pattern
of these very-low-frequency waves is almost indistinguishable from the
patterns an electroencephalograph records in the human brain.
Brain Waves
Electrophysiology began in the middle of the eighteenth century, soon
after methods of generating electricity became available. At first the
experiments were rather wild: it is reported that Louis XV in an idle
moment 'caused an electric shock from a battery of Leyden jars to be
administered to 700 Carthusian monks joined hand to hand, with
prodigious effect'. (335) Later an awareness grew that not only was all
living tissue sensitive to electric currents but the tissue itself
generated small voltages, which changed dramatically when it was
injured or became active. In 1875 an English physician found that the
brain also produced such currents. The early experiments were done on
the exposed brains of frogs and dogs, but as soon as more sensitive
equipment was invented, investigations began in earnest on intact
animals and men. In 1928 Hans Berger discovered that the current
produced by the brain was not constant, but flowed in a rhythmic wave
pattern, which he demonstrated on his 'Elektrenkephalogram'.
Today Berger's single wobbly line has been broken up into many
components by instruments that can detect fluctuations as small as one
ten-millionth of a volt. To give some idea of the minuteness of such a
current, it would take about thirty million of them to light a small
flashlight bulb. Hidden in the confusion of these very subtle stimuli
are four basic rhythmic patterns, which have been named alpha, beta,
delta, and theta. Delta rhythms are the slowest, running between 1 and
3 cycles a second, and are most prominent in deep sleep. Theta rhythms
are those with a frequency of 4 to 7 cycles a second, which seem to be
connected with mood. From 8 to 12 cycles are the alpha rhythms, which
occur most often in relaxed meditation and are disrupted by attention.
And beta rhythms, between 13 and 22 cycles per second, seem to be
confined to the frontal area of the brain, where complex mental
processes take place.
Early research into these rhythms was confined to simple experiments
such as the effect of opening and closing the eyes, doing mental
arithmetic, and taking drugs, but the results were very meager. To find
out more about the scope and sensitivity of the brain, Grey Walter and
his associates decided in 1946 to try imposing new patterns of the
existing brain rhythms through the senses. They began by flashing a
light at regular intervals into the subject's eyes and found that this
flicker produced new, strange patterns on the graphs. At certain
frequencies the flicker also produced violent reactions in the subject,
who was suddenly seized by what seemed to be an epileptic fit.
Walter turned immediately to the study of the normal, resting brain
waves of known epileptics and found that their brain rhythms were
grouped in certain frequencies. 'It was as if certain major chords
constantly appeared against the trills and arpeggios of the normal
activity.' This harmonic grouping suggested to him that all that was
necessary to get the rhythms to synchronise in a tremendous explosion
was an outside co-ordinator, a conductor who could bring the separate
chords together into a simultaneous grand convulsion. A flicker
somewhere in the alpha-rhythm range, between 8 and 12 cycles a second,
acted in just this way on epileptics, provoking them into a seizure at
any time. This technique has now become a valuable clinical aid in the
diagnosis of epilepsy, but it has also been discovered that a large
number of otherwise normal people show a similar response under certain
conditions.
Walter examined hundreds of people who had never had any kind of fit or
attack and found that about one in every twenty responded to carefully
adjusted flicker. They experienced 'strange feelings' or faintness or
swimming in the head; some became unconscious for a few moments or
their limbs jerked in rhythm with the light. As soon as any such
sensation was reported, the flicker was turned off to prevent a
complete convulsion. In other subjects, the flicker had to be exactly
matched with the brain rhythm to produce any effects. A feedback
circuit, in which the flashing light was actually fired by the brain
signals themselves, produced immediate epileptic seizures in more than
half the people tested.
Driving down a tree-lined avenue with the sun flickering through the
trunks at a certain rhythm can be very disturbing. There is a record of
a cyclist who passed out on several occasions while traveling home down
such an avenue. In his case the momentary unconsciousness stopped him
from pedaling, so he slowed down to a speed at which the flicker no
longer affected him and came around in time to save himself from
falling. But a motorcar has more momentum, and the chances are that it
would keep going at the critical speed and influence the driver long
enough to make him lose control altogether. There is no way of knowing
how many fatal crashes have occurred in this way.
In another case, a man found that every time he went to the cinema he
would suddenly find that he was consumed by an overwhelming desire to
strangle the person sitting next to him. On one occasion he even came
to his senses to discover that he had his hands clutched around his
neighbor's throat. When he was tested, it was found that he developed
violent limb jerking when the flicker was set at twenty-four cycles per
second, which is exactly the rhythm of film recorded at twenty-four
frames a second.
The implications of this discovery are enormous. Every day we are
exposed to flicker in some way and run the risk of illness or fatal
fits. The flash rate of fluorescent lights at 100 to 120 per second is
too high for convulsions, but who knows what effect it may be having on
those exposed to it for many hours each day. The British Acoustical
Society has become concerned about the low-frequency vibration produced
by motor vehicles running at sustained speed. (318) These 'infrasounds'
are at the level of 10 to 20 cycles per second, which is below the
limit of human hearing, but they can affect us in the same way as
flickering lights. The Society warns that these sounds can produce
symptoms of recklessness, euphoria, lower efficiency, and dizziness due
to loss of balance. They believe that infrasounds are responsible for
the way in which some drivers wander across the central strip of
high-speed roads apparently quite oblivious to the danger of oncoming
traffic, and that the vibrations may account for a large number of
otherwise inexplicable accidents.
Professor Gavraud is an engineer who almost gave up his post at an
institute in Marseilles because he always felt ill at work. He decided
against leaving when he discovered that the recurrent attacks of nausea
only worried him when he was in his office at the top of the building.
Thinking that there must be something in the room that disturbed him,
he tried to track it down with devices sensitive to various chemicals,
and even with a Geiger counter, but he found nothing until one day,
nonplussed, he leaned back against the wall. The whole room was
vibrating at a very low frequency. The source of this energy turned out
to be an air-conditioning plant on the roof of a building across the
way, and his office was the right shape and the right distance from the
machine to resonate in sympathy with it. It was this rhythm, at seven
cycles per second, that made him sick.
Fascinated by the phenomenon, Gavraud decided to build machines to
produce infrasound so that he could investigate it further. In casting
around for likely designs, he discovered that the whistle with a pea in
it issued to all French gendarmes produced a whole range of
low-frequency sounds. So he built a police whistle six feet long and
powered it with compressed air. The technician who gave the giant
whistle its first trial blast fell down dead on the spot. A post-mortem
revealed that all his internal organs had been mashed into an amorphous
jelly by the vibrations.
Gavraud went ahead with his work more carefully and did the next test
out of doors, with all observers screened from the machine in a
concrete bunker. When all was ready, they turned the air on slowly -
and broke the windows of every building within half a mile of the test
site. Later they learned to control the amplitude of the infrasound
generator more effectively and designed a series of smaller machines
for experimental work. One of the most interesting discoveries to date
is that the waves of low frequency can be aimed and that two generators
focused on a particular point even five miles away produce a resonance
that can knock a building down as effectively as a major earthquake.
These frequency-7 machines can be built very cheaply, and plans for
them are available for three French francs from the Patent Office in
Paris.
For many years now, seismic waves have been recorded in the same way as
brain waves. Seismographs have been developed that are sensitive enough
to pick up vibrations in the ground that we cannot consciously
perceive. These records show when earthquakes are taking place even on
the farthest side of the earth. During the Chilean earthquake of May
1960, for instance, the whole planet rang like a gong with long-wave
oscillations that had periods of up to an hour. But it has now been
discovered that an earthquake is also accompanied by, and preceded by,
periods of low-frequency vibrations that fall into the range from seven
to fourteen cycles per second. These start minutes before the first
obvious shocks of the quake itself and provide an early-warning system
to which many species seem to respond. The Japanese, who live right on
a fracture system, have always kept goldfish for this reason. When the
fish begin to swim about in a frantic way, the owners rush out of doors
in time to escape being trapped by falling masonry. The fish have the
advantage of living in a medium that conducts vibrations well, but even
animals living in the air are able to pick up warning signals. Hours
before an earthquake, rabbits and deer have been seen running in terror
from the epicenter zones. Some people, particularly women and children,
are also sensitive to these frequencies.
The fact that the frequencies coincide with those that make people
disturbed and ill would account for the wild, unreasoning fear that
goes with an earthquake. F. Kingdon-Ward lived through the great Assam
shock of 1951 and described his feelings at the time. (175) 'Suddenly,
after the faintest tremor (felt by my wife but not by me) there came an
appalling noise and the earth began to shudder violently ... the
outlines of the landscape, visible against the starry sky, blurred -
every ridge and tree fuzzy - as though it were moving rapidly up and
down ... the first feeling of bewilderment - an incredulous
astonishment that these solid-looking hills were in the grip of a force
which shook them as a terrier shakes a rat - soon gave place to stark
terror.' This earthquake was a major one in which they were in great
danger, but the feelings of terror seem to have no connection with the
magnitude of the tremor. I remember running outside during a small
earthquake in Crete in 1967 and, despite the fact that I was perfectly
safe out of doors and was fascinated by what was going in, feeling an
irrational fear so deep-seated that I was unable to sleep indoors for
more than a week.
Vibrations of a frequency too low to hear could account for the
feelings of depression and fear that seem to be attached to certain
places. Many people feel intensely uncomfortable on the island of
Santorini, in the southern Aegean, and few visitors stay more than a
day or two. This island, which is now believed by some to be the site
of old Atlantis, erupted violently in 1450 BC and suffered an
earthquake in 1956. Since the recent disaster, a seismological station
has been established there, which reports a constant undercurrent of
very-low-frequency murmurs. Earth gives her warnings in a soft, low
voice.
An unexpected discovery was made as a result of the Tashkent quake of
1966. For a year prior to the shock, scientists had been surprised to
find that there were increased concentrations of the inert gas argon in
the city's water supply, which comes from deep artesian wells. On April
25 this had reached four times its normal level, and on the 26th the
earthquake struck. The day following the disaster, the argon
concentration was back to its normal level. The reason for the change
is not known, but it forms yet another of those inconspicuous clues to
which life may well be able to respond like magic.
The one thing that earth tremors, air tides, and cosmic rays all have
in common is that they operate on very low energy and send out
extremely subtle signals. The apparently supernatural ability of life
to respond to stimuli such as the position of the unseen moon, the
concentration of invisible ions, and the minute magnetic influence of a
planet on the horizon can all be attributed to a single physical
phenomenon - the principle of resonance.
Resonance
If a tuning fork designed to produce a frequency of 256 cycles a second
(that is, middle C), is sounded anywhere near another fork with the
same natural frequency, the second one will begin to vibrate gently in
sympathy with the first, even without being touched. Energy has been
transferred from one to the other. An insect without ears would not be
able to hear the sound of the first fork, but if it were sitting on the
second one, it would very soon become aware of the vibration - and thus
of events taking place beyond its normal sphere. This is what
Supernature is all about.
An event in the cosmos sets up the vibration of electromagnetic waves,
which travel across space and create an equivalent vibration by
resonance with some part of earth that has the same natural frequency.
Life may respond to these stimuli directly, but more often it reacts by
resonating in sympathy with part of its immediate environment. A
flashing light on the same frequency as a brain rhythm produces
resonance and alarming effects, even though the flicker may be too fast
for us to see. A very weak electrical or magnetic field becomes
noticeable because it resonates on the same frequency as the life field
of the organism reacting to it. In this way, very subtle stimuli, too
small to make any impression on the normal senses, are magnified and
brought to our notice. The supernatural becomes part of natural history.
In most musical instruments, sound is produced by strings, stretched
membranes, rods, or reeds, and an important part of all of them is a
structure that increases the area of contact these vibrators have with
the air. A guitar string has a sounding box and a clarinet reed has a
pipe. The shape of the structure determines the way in which the air
will resonate and the quality of the sound. Shape and function are very
closely related, not only for the sender of the signal but also for the
receiver. If the listener is to hear the sound properly, he cannot sit
in a room of the wrong shape or wear a football helmet.
Ultimately, sensitivity to sound depends on vibrations being set up in
the fluid of the inner ear, but the sound first has to be collected by
the external ear. In man, the passage between the eardrum and the
outside world is funnel-shaped, with the walls making an angle of about
30 degrees to the drum. This is exactly the angle best suited to
magnification of sounds in the critical range. The most popular, and
therefore presumably the most effective, old-fashioned ear trumpet is
one that also has this angle of 30 degrees. This could be just
coincidence, but I doubt it.
Sound, of course, is a vibration that can be conducted only through an
elastic medium; it cannot travel through a vacuum. Electromagnetic
waves do travel through free space, and we know far less about the
factors governing their resonance. There is, however, one quite
extraordinary piece of evidence which suggests that shape could be
important in receiving even cosmic stimuli. It comes from those
favorites of mystics throughout the ages - the pyramids of Egypt.
The pyramids on the west bank of the Nile were built by the pharaohs as
royal tombs and date from about 3000 BC. The most celebrated are those
at Giza, built during the fourth dynasty, of which the largest is the
one that housed the pharaoh Khufu, better known as Cheops. This is now
called the Great Pyramid. Some years ago it was visited by a Frenchman
named Bovis, who took refuge from the midday sun in the pharaoh's
chamber, which is situated in the center of the pyramid, exactly one
third of the way up from the base. He found it unusually humid there,
but what really surprised him were the garbage cans that contained,
among the usual tourist litter, the bodies of a cat and some small
desert animals that had wandered into the pyramid and died there.
Despite the humidity, none of them had decayed but just dried out like
mummies. He began to wonder whether the pharaohs had really been so
carefully embalmed by their subjects after all, or whether there was
something about the pyramids themselves that preserved bodies in a
mummified condition.
Bovis made an accurate scale model of the Cheops pyramid and placed it,
like the original, with the base lines facing precisely north-south and
east-west. Inside the model, one third of the way up, he put a dead
cat. It became mummified, and he concluded that the pyramid promoted
rapid dehydration. Reports of this discovery attracted the attention of
Karel Drbal, a radio engineer in Prague, who repeated the experiment
with several dead animals and concluded, 'There is a relation between
the shape of the space inside the pyramid and the physical, chemical,
and biological processes going on inside the space. By using suitable
forms and shapes, we should be able to make processes occur faster or
delay them.' (233)
Drbal remembered an old superstition which claimed that a razor left in
the light of the moon became blunted. He tried putting one under his
model pyramid, but nothing happened, so he went on shaving with it
until it was blunt, and then put it back in the pyramid. It became
sharp again. Getting a good razor blade is still difficult in many
Eastern European countries, so Drbal tried to patent and market his
discovery. The patent office in Prague refused to consider it until
their chief scientist had tried building a model himself and found that
it worked. So the Cheops Pyramid Razor Blade Sharpener was registered
in 1959 under the Czechoslovakian Republic Patent No. 91304, and a
factory soon began to turn out miniature cardboard pyramids. Today they
make them in styrofoam.
The edge of a razor blade has a crystal structure. Crystals are almost
alive, in that they grow by reproducing themselves. When a blade
becomes blunted, some of the crystals on the edge, where they are only
one layer thick, are rubbed off. Theoretically, there is no reason why
they should not replace themselves in time. We know that sunlight has a
field that points in all directions, but sunlight reflected from an
object such as the moon is partly polarised, vibrating mostly in one
direction. This could conceivably destroy the edge of a blade left
under the moon, but it does not explain the reverse action of the
pyramid. We can only guess that the Great Pyramid and its little
imitations act as lenses that focus energy or as resonators that
collect energy, which encourages crystal growth. The pyramid shape
itself is very much like that of a crystal of magnetite, so perhaps it
builds up a magnetic field. I do not know the answer, but I do know
that it works. My record so far with Wilkinson Sword blades is four
months of continuous daily use. I have a feeling that the manufacturers
are not going to like this idea.
Try it yourself. Cut four pieces of heavy cardboard into isosceles
triangles with the proportion base to sides of 15.7 to 14.94. Tape
these together so that the pyramid stands exactly 10.0 of the same
units high. Orient it precisely so that the base lines face magnetic
north-south and east-west. Make a stand 3.33 units high and place it
directly under the apex of the pyramid to hold your objects. The sharp
edges of the blade should face east and west. Keep the whole thing away
from electrical devices.
I have discovered that the speed of dehydration of organic materials
depends very much on the substance involved and on the weather
conditions. This much one would expect, but I tried keeping the same
objects - eggs, rump steak, dead mice - in both pyramid and in an
ordinary shoe box, and the ones in the pyramid preserved quite well
while those in the box soon began to smell and had to be thrown out. I
am forced to conclude that a cardboard replica of the Cheops pyramid is
not just a random arrangement of pieces of paper, but does have special
properties.
There is a fascinating postscript to this pyramid story. In 1968 a team
of scientists from the United States and from Ein Shams University in
Cairo began a million-dollar project to X-ray the pyramid of Chephren,
successor to Cheops. They hoped to find new vaults hidden in the six
million tons of stone by placing detectors in a chamber at its base and
measuring the amount of cosmic-ray penetration, the theory being that
more rays would come through hollow areas. The recorders ran
twenty-four hours a day for more than a year until, in early 1969, the
latest, IBM 1130, computer was delivered to the university for analysis
of the tapes. Six months later the scientists had to admit defeat: the
pyramid made no sense at all. Tapes recorded with the same equipment
from the same point on successive days showed totally different
cosmic-ray patterns. The leader of the project, Amr Gohed, in an
interview afterward said, 'This is scientifically impossible. Call it
what you will - occultism, the curse of the pharaohs, sorcery, or
magic, there is some force that defies the laws of science at work in
the pyramid.'
The idea of shape having an influence on the functions taking place
within it is not a new one. A French firm once patented a special
container for making yogurt, because that particular shape enhanced the
action of the micro-organism involved in the process. The brewers of a
Czechoslovakian beer tried to change from round to angular barrels but
found that this resulted in a deterioration in the quality of their
beer despite the fact that the method of processing remained unchanged.
A German researcher has shown that mice with identical wounds heal more
quickly if they are kept in spherical cages. Architects in Canada
report a sudden improvement in schizophrenic patients living in
trapezoidal hospital wards.
It is possible that all shapes have their own qualities and that the
forms we see around us are the result of combinations of environmental
frequencies. In the eighteenth century the German physicist Ernst
Chladni discovered a way of making vibration patterns visible. He
mounted a thin metal plate on a violin, scattered sand on the plate,
and found that when a bow was drawn across the strings, the sand
arranged itself into beautiful patterns. These arrangements, now known
as Chladni's figures, develop because the sand ends up only on those
parts of the plate where there is no vibration. They have been
extensively used in physics to demonstrate wave function, but they also
show very well that different frequencies produce patterns with
different forms. By juggling around with powders of different densities
and by playing notes with a wide range of frequencies, it is possible
to induce a pattern to take on almost any form. It is interesting, and
perhaps significant, that Chladni's figures most often adopt familiar
organic forms. Concentric circles, such as the annual rings in a tree
trunk; alternating lines, such as the stripes on a zebra's back;
hexagonal grids, such as the cells in a honeycomb; radiating wheel
spokes, such as the canals in a jellyfish; vanishing spirals, such as
the turrets of shellfish - all these commonly occur. The study of this
phenomenon, the effect of waves on matter, is called cymatics. (166)
The basic principle of cymatics is that environmental pressures are
brought to bear in wave patterns and that matter responds to these
pressures by taking a form that depends on the frequency of the waves.
There are a limited number of frequencies involved, and nature tends to
respond to these in predictable ways, by repeating a limited number of
functional forms. The helical pattern of an updraft of heated air (a
thermal) is mirrored in the growth of a creeper twined around a tree
and in the arrangement of the atoms in a molecule of DNA. The manta ray
flows through tropical waters with muscular waves that run in trains
across its broad, flat back like wind-blown patterns on the surface of
the sea. Mollusks without shells and flatworms that live in water move
in exactly the same way. Given the same problem, nature will usually
find the same solution. It could not do this with such widely divergent
raw materials unless they were responding to identical pressures. There
is even an example of convergent evolution at a molecular level in two
enzymes, one from soil bacteria and the other from man, which have
exactly the same pattern of amino acids at the 'business ends'. (184)
The recurrence of a small basic repertoire of shapes cannot be
accidental. There are many variations on the chosen themes, but these
are usually a compromise between the environmental pressures and
individual needs. The embryonic material of most reptiles, for
instance, is enclosed in one of the standard packages, a perfect
sphere, because this is the shape that combines maximum volume with
minimum surface area and use of materials. Crocodiles and turtles
produce round eggs with thin elastic shells that have to be buried in
moist soil to prevent their drying out. Birds, however, have gone an
evolutionary stage further and become relatively independent of the
ground and more concerned with parental care. They keep their eggs in
the air, and to prevent desiccation, have developed a harder, less
porous shell. But this raises a new problem. The brittle, non-elastic
package is more likely to break under the pressure of gravity, so the
eggs of nearly all birds are now spheres that have become rather
pointed. They have been distorted in the one way that could give them
the greatest possible mechanical strength without internal
modifications of any kind. The basic shape was determined by
environmental pressures and modified to meet specific needs.
In Switzerland during the past ten years Hans Jenny has been refining
Chladni's figures and producing elegant proof that form is a function
of frequency. One of his inventions is a 'tonoscope', which converts
sounds into visible three-dimensional patterns in inert material. (167)
This can be used with the human voice as the sound source, and when
someone speaks the sound for the letter O into the microphone, it
produces a perfectly spherical pattern. The sphere is one of nature's
basic forms, but it is startling to discover that the shape produced by
the frequency of the 0 sound is exactly the shape we have chosen to
represent it pictorially in our script. It raises specters of ancient
beliefs that words and names had properties of their own. Today we
still tend to regard personal names as something special, and find that
children are often anxious to conceal theirs. Young children in
particular always demand to know what the name of a thing is, never
questioning that it has one, and regard this as a valuable acquisition.
Is it possible that words have a power by virtue of their own special
frequencies? Can magic words and sacred formulas and chants in fact
exert an influence that differs from other sounds chosen at random? It
seems so, and with Jenny's discovery of word patterns, I find myself
looking with some discomfort and awe at St John's assertion, 'In the
beginning was the Word.'
As a biologist, I would have to paraphrase it as 'In the beginning was
the Sound of the Word,' because there is an enormous national and
individual variation in the speech sounds used to portray the same
written word. (242) The International Phonetic Alphabet overcomes this
difficulty by providing symbols to represent every shade of sound in
most human languages. Analysing this alphabet, one can see certain
basic patterns. A speech sound is produced by allowing air to resonate
in the throat, mouth, and nasal chambers, while subjecting it to some
sort of modification by uvula, palate, tongue, teeth, or lips. There
are two basic kinds of sound - vowels, which are produced without
friction or stoppage, and consonants, which are characterised by
friction, squeezing, or stoppage of the breath in some part of the
passage. Vowel sounds are always accompanied by vibration of the vocal
cords and have far more power than the largely unvoiced consonants. The
power of vowels ranges from nine to forty-seven microwatts, while
consonants seldom reach two microwatts, so the vowels carry further and
are more easily received. Resonance in the fluid of man's ear makes the
vowel sounds ah, aw, eh, ee, and 00, in that order, the easiest of all
speech sounds to hear. (The vowels in Swahili, which is a lingua franca
for over two hundred tribes in East Africa, are pronounced exactly like
this.) Consonants, on the other hand, are often explosive, as when the
air is released suddenly from behind an obstruction as in a 'p' sound,
or else they are fricative, as when air escapes gradually, as in the
formation of an 's' sound. These produce little power, but they have
much higher frequencies than the vowel sounds. When calling a cat,
which is an animal designed to respond to the high-frequency sounds of
its prey, people of all languages use combinations of these two
short-wave consonants.
So the sounds of words do have different physical properties. If
resonance can be produced between an air column in a sender's throat
and another in a receiver's ear, then similar transfers of energy can
take place between the throat and other parts of the environment. When
Joshua's people 'shouted with a great shout', the walls of Jericho fell
down. The sudden loud cry of a samurai swordsman breaks the nerve of an
adversary, and the trill of a soprano shatters glass. These are
sustained effects, much like the burning heat of the midday sun, but we
know that life responds to things as subtle as the moon filtered
through twenty feet of water, so it is not unreasonable to assume that
living matter is sensitive in different ways to the equally subtle
frequency changes and patterns in human speech.
Linguists have not solved the problems of the origins of speech. There
are many ideas, some with picturesque names, such as the 'bow wow'
theory, which holds that language arose in imitation of sounds that
occur in nature, or the 'yo he ho' theory, to the effect that it came
from grunts of physical exertion. But there does not seem to have been
any concerted attempt to look for biological origins among the basic
sounds in the phonetic alphabet. Jenny's demonstration that the 'oh'
sound has a spherical shape is dramatic, but it should not come as a
surprise. It feels right. We make a round mouth to produce the rounded
sound, and when doing it, even our eyes round out. A face making the
'oh' sound is also making the expressing that most primates use to
indicate an aggressive threat. Students of animal behavior assume that
the face arose from various compromise body postures that occur in
threat situations and that the expression is accompanied by a hard
'oh'-sounding grunt to reinforce the effect. But it is also possible
that the sound came first and produced the face, and, taking it one
stage further, that the sound itself was adopted because it had the
effect of disturbing an opponent. Its frequencies produced the right
kind of resonance, perhaps including infrasounds, to mesh with an
opponent's brain waves and put him to flight in panic. The Japanese
have developed this use of sound to a fine art with the fighting cry,
or kiai, of the samurai. It is said that a kiai in a minor key produces
partial paralysis by a reaction that suddenly lowers the arterial blood
pressure. A major key, if loud and sudden, certainly has the opposite
effect.
Music provides another example of waves spaced in a meaningful manner.
Donald Andrews has incorporated harmonic motion into a complex theory
of the universe that he calls the 'symphony of life'. In this system
atoms provide the musical notes, each one vibrating like a spherical
bell. Molecules are chords composed of orderly patterns of these notes,
and the music is played on instruments whose shape is provided by the
organism itself. Andrews showed that even a violin lying still on a
table is always humming gently to itself, and he believes this to be
true of all matter. Certainly muscles under tension produce an audible
sound. In one imaginative experiment, Andrews went around Baltimore
Museum tapping bronze and marble statues with a hammer and recording
the sounds on a high-speed tape in the hope of capturing the essential
vibrations characteristic of their shapes. He did in fact find that
identical shapes in the size ratio of two to one produced the same
fundamental tone but an octave apart. This is exactly the effect one
gets by halving the length of a violin string, and it suggests that
three-dimensional objects could operate on the same basic musical
principles.
The cosmos is full of 'noise', irregular jumbles of wavelengths, but
all its useful signals are regular patterns. Combinations of musical
notes chosen at random jar on our nerves; we find them unpleasant. But
tones with certain regular intervals between them are harmonious; we
find them pleasing. A note played together with another one that has
exactly double its frequency, that is, one octave higher, makes a very
harmonious sound. Three notes go well together as a chord if their
relative frequencies are in the proportion of 4:5:6. These are purely
mathematical relationships, but we know from experience that these are
the ones to which man responds. Music is being played to other animals
on farms and in zoos with similarly marked effects. Preferences differ
from species to species, presumably because their structure and
sensitivity, and therefore their resonant frequencies, differ. Research
is now going on into the effect of music on plants. It has been
discovered that geraniums grow faster and taller to the accompaniment
of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. If the dominant frequencies in these
pieces of music are broadcast to the plants, they have some effect, but
growth is more marked if the frequencies occur in the spatial
relationship so carefully designed by the composer. Bacteria are
affected in the same way, multiplying under the influence of certain
frequencies and dying when subject to others. It is not a long step
from this discovery to the old idea that frequent repetition of certain
chants or songs could cure disease.
There are other spatial relationships that have an effect on us.
Artists have known for centuries that certain proportions are more
pleasing than others. If people are presented with a large number of
four-sided shapes ranging from a square to a very long, thin rectangle,
most of them will choose a shape whose length is a little more than one
and one half times its height. (33) This shape, which the majority of
people find to be the most pleasing, is called the Golden Mean; its
exact dimensions have been established as a ratio of 1 to 1.618. There
are enormous differences between the traditional arts of different
peoples, but it seems that aesthetic tastes in all are governed by
similar basic laws. (98) A study in London found cross-cultural color
and design similarities in large-scale tests with British and Japanese
students. Our response to proportions is presumably governed by the
common distance between our eyes. A man who had been blind in one eye
from birth and never known binocular vision, would probably find a
square more pleasing. We know that people with only one eye have an
unequal development of one half of the brain and that this is reflected
in their brain waves. Having different rhythms, they respond to
different frequencies.
Following discoveries about the nature of light, magnetism, and
electricity in the nineteenth century, the theory of a 'vibrating
universe' became very popular in occult circles, but it was Pythagoras,
in the fifth century BC, who first developed the idea. The notion that
all the universe is connected in a grand design has always been
fundamental to magic, and the Pythagoreans used the mathematical
relationship of musical intervals to express this pattern numerically.
They were the first professional numerologists. Devotees of number
systems point to the seven colors in the rainbow, the seven days in the
week, the seven seals of Christendom, the seven Devas of Hinduism, the
seven Amsha-Spands of Persian faith, and so on, claiming occult
properties for this and other special numbers. Goethe was obsessed with
three, Swoboda swore by twenty-three, and Freud believed in periods of
twenty-seven. It is difficult to see biological significance in any of
these intervals, and tempting to dismiss the whole idea on the grounds
that any number is as likely as any other, but it seems that this is
not true.
An American mathematician noticed that the earlier pages in books of
logarithms kept in his university library were dirtier than later ones,
indicating that science students, for some reason, had more occasion to
calculate with numbers beginning with 1 than with any other number.
(261) He made a collection of tables and calculated the relative
frequency of each digit from 1 to 9. Theoretically they should occur
equally often, but he found that 30 per cent of the numbers were 1,
whereas 9 only occupied 5 per cent of the space. These are almost
exactly the proportions given to these numbers on the scale of a slide
rule, so the designers of that instrument clearly recognised that such
a bias existed. This preponderance of the number 1 may have been caused
by the fact that the tables were not really random, but bigger tables
provide a similar bias. The ecologist Lamont Cole worked with a Rand
Corporation publication that gives a million random digits. (262) He
selected numbers at regular intervals to represent the level of
metabolic activity of a unicorn at the end of each hour over a long
period. There should have been no relationship between the numbers and
no kind of cyclic pattern, but Cole is now credited with the shattering
zoological discovery that unicorns are busiest at three o'clock in the
morning. (77)
It is possible that these discrepancies may be due to some peculiarity
in our way of counting, but it looks as though the bias follows a
natural law. Nature seems to count exponentially. Not 1 2 3 4 5, but 1
2 4 8 16, the numbers growing by a logarithmic power each time.
Population increases in this way, and, even at an individual level,
things such as the strength of a stimulus and the level of response to
it vary in an exponential way. This is, however, nothing more than an
observation; it does not explain the anomalous way in which numbers
behave.
The unexpected grouping of similar numbers is something like the
unusual grouping of circumstances that we call coincidence. Everyone
has had the experience of coming across a new word or name for the
first time and then seeing it in a dozen different places in quick
succession. Or of finding oneself in a small group of people, three of
whom have the same birthdays. Often these coincidences come in
clusters: some days are particularly lucky, while on others it is just
one damn' thing after another. Several people have made it part of
their life's work to collect information on coincidences of this kind.
The biologist Kammerer was one, and it was he who gave the phenomenon
the name of seriality. He defines a series as 'a lawful occurrence of
the same or similar things or events ... which are not connected by the
same active cause' and claims that coincidence is in reality the work
of a natural principle. (171) Kammerer spent days just sitting in
public places noting down the number of people passing, the way they
dressed, what they carried, and so on. When he analysed these records,
he found that there were typical clusters of things that occurred
together and then disappeared altogether. This kind of wave pattern in
events is familiar to all stockbrokers and gamblers, and every
insurance company runs its entire business of assessment on similar
tables of probability.
These 'coincidental' clusters are a real phenomenon. Kammerer explains
them by his Law of Seriality, which says that working in opposition to
the second law of thermodynamics is a force that tends towards symmetry
and coherence by bringing like and like together. In a strange,
illogical way, this idea is rather persuasive, but there is no good
scientific evidence to support it and the theory is not very important
to us here. It is enough to know that there is a discernible
organisation of events. Taken together with musical and artistic
harmony, with the non-randomness of numbers, and with the periodicity
of planetary movements, we begin to get a picture of an environment in
which there are recognisable patterns. Superimposed on the cosmic chaos
are rhythms and harmonies that control many aspects of life on earth by
a communication of energy made possible by the shape of things here and
their resonance in sympathy with cosmic themes.
Biophysics
We are all sensitive to the physical forces around us, and it seems
that there are ways of enhancing this sensitivity. One has been in use
for at least five thousand years. Bas-reliefs from early Egypt show
figures in strange headgear carrying, at arm's length in front of them,
a forked stick; and Emperor Kwang Su of China is depicted in a statue
dated 2200 BC carrying an identical object. Both, it seems, were in
search of water.
Many animals have an extraordinary sensitivity to water, and some, such
as the elephant, succeed in finding it underground. In times of
drought, elephants often perform vital community services by using
their tusks and pile-driving feet to expose hidden water sources. It is
possible that they can smell the water percolating through the soil or
that they have come to have a fairly elementary knowledge of geology,
always digging at the lowest point on the outside curve of a dry river
bed, where water is most likely to collect. But there are instances in
which neither of these solutions is tenable, and we are left with the
possibility that there are ways of enhancing this sensitivity. One has
been earth, two thirds of most animals is water. One of the
preconditions for resonance is that there should be similar, or at
least compatible, structures in sender and receiver, so if the energy
is broadcast by a water source, it could probably find a response in
the body of most mammals. Our brains are 80 per cent water, which makes
them even more liquid than blood, so the resonance might take place
there, but the response seems to be most manifest in the long muscles
of our bodies.
The classical method of water divining, or dowsing, is to cut a forked
twig from a shade tree such as willow, hazel, or peach and hold it out
in front of the body parallel to the ground. In this position the
muscles of the arm are under some tension; it is claimed that as the
dowser approaches water, this tension somehow extends into the twig and
induces it to move. The patterns of movement depend very much on the
individual. Some say that an upward thrust of the dowsing rod indicates
the upstream side of a water flow and the pattern of gyration indicates
depth, but others disagree completely. There is a tremendous variation
in technique among dowsers. Instruments in use include metal rods, coat
hangers, whalebone, copper wire, walking sticks, pitchforks, bakelite
strips, surgical scissors, pendulums, and even, it is said, a German
sausage. For each dowsing aid there are many different ways of holding
it and interpreting the way it moves. Just one thing takes all this
extraordinary pantomime out of the area of sheer farce - the dowsers
enjoy a very high rate of success.
Every major water and pipeline company in the United States has a
dowser on its payroll. The Canadian Ministry of Agriculture employs a
permanent dowser. UNESCO has engaged a Dutch dowser and geologist to
pursue official investigations for them. Engineers from the US First
and Third Marine divisions in Vietnam have been trained to use dowsing
rods to locate booby traps and sunken mortar shells. The
Czechoslovakian Army has a permanent corps of dowsers in a special
unit. The geology departments of Moscow State and Leningrad
universities have launched a full-scale investigation into dowsing -
not to find out if it works, but to discover how it works. There is
obviously something in it.
Serious research into dowsing seems to have begun in France in 1910. It
was largely instigated by the Vicomte Henri de France, who published Le
Sourcier Moderne and was, in 1933, partly responsible also for the
formation of the British Society of Dowsers. Research in both countries
is summarised in two books, The Divining Rod (16) and The Physics of
the Divining Rod (204), which are interesting but clearly show the
limitations of small-scale private projects. The fact that these are
conducted without proper supervision and are poorly reported allows
most Western scientists to dismiss the subject altogether, but in
Russia research into dowsing now enjoys state backing, and it is there
that the biggest advances are being made.
These researches began when an official commission appointed well-known
geologists and hydrologists to work in conjunction with dowsers from
the Red Army. After thousands of tests the commission reported that
forked twigs responded, both to underground sources of water and to
electrical cables with a force that was measured as high as 1,000 gram
centimeters. They found that no matter how quickly a dowser walked, or
how carefully he was screened with steel plates or lead armor, the rods
still responded. The report also mentions that the twigs were
successful for only two or three days, and that a broken one could not
be repaired without a loss of sensitivity. In some of the tests, lead,
zinc, and gold were detected at a depth of 240 feet, and the commission
concluded that dowsing could be used with striking success to locate
underground electrical cables, pipes, damaged points in cable networks,
minerals, and water. They suggested that the old Russian name meaning
'wizard rod' be abandoned, and so today research on dowsing carries on
under the safe, new, demystified name of 'The Biophysical Effects
Method'.
In 1966 a Leningrad mineralogist, Nikolai Sochevanov, directed an
expedition to the Kirghiz region, near Russia's border with China. They
started with a survey in an airplane equipped with a magnetometer of
the kind used by mining companies for aerial prospecting. Inside the
plane Sochevanov and several other 'operators' stood with dowsing rods
at the ready. Flying over the river Chu, they found that the vast
amount of water in the center of the river had no effect, but that all
of them could feel pressure on the rods near the shores, on either
side. Tests in other parts of the world have shown similar results, and
it seems to be true that water influences man most strongly not where a
large mass is moving at great speed but where it is in friction with
the soil, particularly where soil surface in contact with the water is
large, as it is in ground saturated with water moving slowly through
tiny capillaries. Flying over known mineral deposits, Sochevanov
experienced marked reactions, and, in follow-up tests on the ground,
his team located a seam of lead only three inches thick at a depth of
almost five hundred feet.
With larger deposits near the surface, they found that the rods were
being jerked right out of their hands, so Sochevanov designed a new,
steel instrument that could rotate freely. This is a U shape with
roller-bearing handles about two feet apart at the ends and an 8-inch
loop twisted into the center of the curve. He claims that the number of
turns made by the rod gives an indication of the depth and size of the
underground deposit and has engineered an automatic recording device
that is attached to the instrument and graphs its behavior. In
large-scale tests with hundreds of operators, profiles have been
constructed of whole areas of land. One such survey was made on 21
October 1966 in an area near Alma-Ata where three million cubic meters
of rock were to be destroyed by explosives in a development project.
The team covered this site just before the explosion and returned
immediately afterward to make a second survey. Their rods reported
enormous changes in underground patterns, and for four hours following
the explosion, the shape of the profile continued to change as they
plotted it. Finally it settled down, and when seismographs indicated
that the tremors had subsided, the dowsers found that the pattern had
returned almost to its preblast configuration. The small differences
between the 'before' and the 'after' patterns were later determined by
excavation to be due to underground fractures produced by the explosion.
Sochevanov made field tests with dowsers operating inside moving
vehicles, with their recording devices linked to the drive shaft. He
found that the rods continued to respond, but that at greater speeds
they made fewer revolutions. The fact that there was any response at
all inside a metal vehicle seems to indicate that the energy involved
is not electrical, and any attempt to strengthen incoming signals by
attaching long wire aerials to the dowsers' wrists has so far only
diminished the response. Powerful magnets strapped on operators' backs
had no effect, but leather gloves killed the response altogether.
Groups of dowsers linked together had no cumulative effect, but when a
seasoned dowser touched the hand of a non-operator, the rod came to
life in the novice's hands.
Experiments in all countries suggest that, whatever the dowsing force
may be, it cannot work on the rod alone. A living being has to act as a
'middleman'. The Dutch geologist Solco Tromp has shown that dowsers are
unusually sensitive to the earth's magnetic field, and respond to
changes in the field that can be verified with magnetometers. (323) He
has also discovered that a good dowser can detect an artificial field
only one two-hundredth the strength of the earth field and that he can
use his rod to chart its extent in an experimental room. Dowsers tested
in the Laboratoire de Physique in Paris were able to tell whether an
electric current was switched on or off simply by walking past a coil
at a distance of three feet with their dowsing rod held at the ready.
(279) At the University of Halle it has been discovered that dowsers
show an increase in blood pressure and pulse rate in some fields. (233)
The Soviet scientists divide all people into four basic groups
according to the way the dowsing rod 'sees' them. The rod is attached
to the first group which includes all women (who have a 40 per cent
higher success rate in dowsing than men). Group two consists of men who
repulse the rod completely, while those in the last two groups repel
the rod from shoulders and waist respectively. Polarity maps of the
human body, prepared with an electrocardiograph by Tromp, support this
grouping.
Dowsing fields, areas in which dowsers get strong responses, have been
confirmed with proton magnetometers sensitive enough to measure the
magnetic field in an atom. Experiments with these naturally occurring
fields have produced interesting results. Mice placed in a long
enclosure half on and half off a dowsing zone refused to sleep inside
the field. (323) Cucumbers, celery, onions, maize, privet hedges, and
ash trees will hardly grow at all if planted in the ground above a
dowsing zone. It is said that ants always build their nests directly in
a zone and that bees swarm on branches above such a field. It has also
been suggested that rheumatics experience muscular contractions and
pain in the joints in a field produced by water, and that strong
dowsing zones of any kind have a bad effect on human health. The
dowsing literature is full of incidents involving 'noxious rays' and
'harmful radiation' that can be minimised by moving a chair or bed from
the afflicted zone or by planting complex coils of copper wire inside
the field to 'neutralise' it. It is very difficult to judge these
reports objectively and to know how big a part suggestion played in the
alleged cures, but the fact remains that an electrocardiogram attached
even to the body of a non-dowser registers a difference in potential
when the person moves into a dowsing zone.
The literature also abounds with accounts of dowsers locating missing
persons, criminals, and dead bodies by following the indications of a
'sensitised' rod. This is usually a pendulum with a hollow bob
containing something belonging to the person being sought, or one that
has been 'tuned' by holding it over a sample object to find out how
long the thread needs to be to produce the right reaction. There have
been many celebrated and well-publicised successes with this technique,
the most impressive being those in which the dowser locates his prey by
working not in the field but over a large-scale map of unfamiliar
territory. As far as it is possible to judge, from records that are
seldom scientific, of events that by their very nature are
unrepeatable, the method works. Knowing something of the influence of
shape on frequency, it is possible to speculate that the
two-dimensional shapes on maps or photographs might have some
properties similar to real objects, but the mind boggles at the idea.
This technique, of using a pendulum to acquire information not only
about an object's location but also of its character, has become known
as 'radiesthesia' - meaning sensitivity to radiations. It is used,
among other things, for sex detection. The Japanese have always been
expert in the difficult art of determining the sex of day-old chicks,
but now they are able to do it even before the eggs hatch, with the aid
of nothing more than a bead on the end of a piece of silk thread. Eggs
pass by the expert on a conveyor belt with their long axes north-south.
The bead is held over the line and swings along the same axis if the
egg is sterile, gyrates in a clockwise circle for a cock chick, and
anti-clockwise for a hen. The factories claim a success rate of 99 per
cent for this system. There are practitioners in England who apparently
can sex humans in the same way when provided only with a drop of blood
or saliva on a piece of blotting paper. (20) They have been used
several times to assist police forensic laboratories in murder
investigations.
It is very easy to say, as dowsers do, 'All matter gives off a ray, and
the human body, acting in much the same way as the receiver of a
wireless set, picks it up.' (322) But glib statements like this tell
absolutely nothing about the process or the biology involved. The sum
total of hard knowledge about dowsing seems to amount to this: Water,
by the action of friction between itself and the soil, creates a field
that could have electromagnetic properties. Rubber and leather insulate
this field, but metals seem to have no effect. Metals themselves,
perhaps by their position in the earth's magnetic field, also exert a
field effect. The fields created or modified by inorganic objects are
appreciable to some animals and people. An unconscious sensitivity to
these fields can be made manifest by using an object such as a rod or a
pendulum as a visible indicator of field strength and direction.
Man has used dowsing techniques for such a long time that we may find
animals that can do the same thing. Antelope and wild pigs have curved
horns and tusks, which are similar in shape to the traditional forked
twig, and both these species are very successful in finding hidden
water sources. Could it be that their built-in dowsing rods help in
some way? The best human dowsers can work with their bare hands, so it
is possible that even animals without antennas can navigate in this
way. As far as I know, no student of bird migration has ever considered
this possibility. If the willow twig works in man's hands, how does it
function when attached to the tree? The roots of trees are positively
geotropic - they grow directly toward the source of gravity - but they
also seek out sources of water. Perhaps they do this by dowsing?
The discovery that animals are sensitive to the dowsing field and react
strongly to it will not surprise anyone who has ever watched a wild
mammal settling down to sleep. The choice of a resting place naturally
has to be made very carefully with regard to warmth and shelter and
safety from predators, but often an animal will choose a place that
seems to be far less appealing on these grounds than another only a
short distance away. Domestic dogs and cats show the same behavior, and
their owners know full well that it is no good making this decision on
the pet's behalf - they have to wait until the animal chooses its own
place and then put the sleeping basket there. There are some places on
which an animal will not lie on any account. That humans have similar
abilities has been shown by Carlos Castaneda in a recent book on Yaqui
beliefs that is the most vivid and exciting piece of ethnography I have
ever read. (67) The sorcerer Don Juan has told Castaneda that there is
one spot on the porch of his house that is unique, where he can feel
happy and strong, and that he must find it for himself. Castaneda tries
for hours, sitting everywhere in turn and even rolling around on the
floor, but nothing happens until he focuses his eyes on a spot directly
in front of him, and the whole world out of the corners of his eyes
turns greenish yellow. Then, '... suddenly, at a point near the middle
of the floor, I became aware of another change in hue. At a place to my
right, still in the periphery of my field of vision, the greenish
yellow became intensely purple. I concentrated my attention on it. The
purple faded into a pale, but still brilliant, color which remained
steady for the time I kept my attention on it.' He decided to lie down
on this spot, but 'I felt an unusual apprehension. It was more like a
physical sensation of something pushing on my stomach. I jumped up and
retreated in one movement. The hair on my neck pricked up. My legs had
arched slightly, my trunk was bent forward, and my arms stuck out in
front of me rigidly with my fingers contracted like a claw. I took
notice of my strange posture and my fright increased. I walked back
involuntarily and ... slumped to the floor.' He had found his spot.
In 1963 a 12-year-old South African named Pieter van Jaarsveld became
world famous as 'the boy with X-ray eyes' for his ability to detect
water hidden deep underground. He used no sort of dowsing rod but
claimed to be able to see water 'shimmering like green moonlight'
through the surface of the soil. Pieter was very surprised to learn
that other people could not see it equally well. I think that soon, as
we begin to realise that nature and the classic five senses are only a
small part of the real magic of Supernature, more of us might begin to
join him in seeing things as they really are.
PART TWO
MATTER
'What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?'
ALBERT EINSTEIN, in The World As I See It, 1935.
The Greek philosophers sliced matter up into thinner and thinner
sections until Democritus put a stop to the discrimination by declaring
that there was a limit beyond which particles became invisible or
a-tomic. More than two thousand years later John Dalton showed that all
matter in the universe was composed of basic building blocks, or atoms.
Both of them were right, but we now know that one further division is
possible and that atoms can be split into even more fundamental
particles. At first it seemed as though these operated on a planetary
principle, with electrons travelling in orbit around a central nucleus.
More recently it has become apparent that electrons are more like
clouds of electricity vibrating with wave patterns. None of this can be
seen, but there is clear evidence that at the center of the fog is a
collection of nuclear bits and pieces that contain nearly all the mass
of the atom and nearly all of its energy. If the atom were to be
inflated until it filled an Olympic stadium, this nucleus would be the
size of a pea lying alone in the center of the track. There is
proportionally as much empty space inside the atom as there is in the
universe.
All matter is like this. Take a man and squeeze the empty spaces out of
him, like the holes in a sponge, and you are left with a little pile of
solid substance no larger than a flyspeck. We are the hollow men and
our insubstantial bodies are strung together with electromagnetic and
nuclear forces that do no more than create the illusion of matter. In
this respect there is little to separate the living from the
non-living; both are composed of the same sparse fundamental particles
interacting with each other in the same elementary ways.
The only real difference is that the atoms of life are organised. They
have become arranged into self-replicating patterns that defy cosmic
chaos by constantly repairing and replacing themselves. Feeding on
order, they learn to recognise and respond to it; the more organised
they are, the more responsive they become. Life must be in close touch
with matter, and at the highest levels this means that it not only
takes energy and information from its surroundings but returns them as
well.
In this second section I want to look at the ways in which life can influence its environment.
FOUR
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 thirty-six, 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 of ten 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 so-called 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, 'A piece 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. All 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 teen-ager 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.
FIVE
MATTER AND MAGIC
In theory, games such as roulette and dice depend only on chance, but
if people believed this, gambling would soon die a natural death. Those
who take part in horse racing, football, and poker clearly exercise a
great deal of skill, and those who bet on the ability of their
favorites also have to show some skill in assessment. But many of the
most popular 'games of chance' survive purely because the gambler
believes that he can somehow control their outcome. He believes that by
manipulating the objects involved, either directly or from a distance,
he can exert an influence that will be to his benefit. He calls this
influence luck, but it looks very much like psychokinesis.
Richard Taylor recently asked subjects in his laboratory to guess the
sequence of colors in a shuffled pack of playing cards. After the first
run, those with high scores were separated from the others, and in
following tests the 'lucky' ones continued to do much better than the
'unlucky' group. Taylor cautiously concluded that 'this data provides
some empirical support for the popular notion of luck'. (315) Similar
evidence led the Director of the Netherlands Foundation for Industrial
Psychology to say, 'There are clear indications that some people have a
certain flare for attracting good fortune.' (326) These are valid
comments, but both just miss the point that becomes clear as soon as
one takes Taylor's test just one stage further. If a group of subjects
are selected at random following the first run, regardless of their
score, and told that they have done exceptionally well and are very
lucky, this group continues to score significantly better than the
others. Luck, it seems, is a state of mind.
All casinos know that certain individuals keep on winning slowly and
consistently, and now the staff of a gambling magazine have produced a
book that gives detailed instructions on how to join that fortunate
few. They have examined the methods of laboratory investigation into
psychokinesis and adapted them to the casino environment. Included in
their advice is the importance of cultivating the proper attitude for
winning, which they describe as 'confident, relaxed, and almost
playful'. (283) We are still a long way from a situation where gambling
houses are put right out of business by an invasion of
parapsychologists, but there are signs that a few people are beginning
to learn how to tip the odds in their favor.
For psychokinesis to be of any real use in gambling, it would have to
be strong enough to move dice and balls. This is already a highly
developed talent and it would seem to be more useful to start a survey
of PK in action with examples at a molecular level. The objects most
easily influenced are those already moving or in a state of
disequilibrium; in our technology, few unstable systems are more common
than silver nitrate in the emulsion of unexposed photographic film.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, during an occult craze
that had thousands tapping tables and pushing planchettes over ouija
boards, another popular pastime was spirit photography, in which they
tried to get pictures or 'psychic images' to appear on photographic
plates. Many claimed success, but not one of the results really stood
up to close investigation, and interest waned. In Japan between 1910
and 1913, Tomokichi Fukurai made what seems to be the first scientific
investigation of pictures produced by the mind. He succeeded in getting
thought images transferred directly onto dry, wrapped photographic
plates under apparently well-controlled conditions, but little
attention was given to his results until the advent of the incredible
Ted Serios.
Thoughtography
Serios was born in 1918 in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of a Greek
cafe owner. In 1963 he was an unemployed, often drunken, ex-hotel
porter in Chicago when he met and impressed Jule Eisenbud, Professor of
Psychiatry at the Medical School in Denver. Eisenbud put Serios through
three years of intensive investigation and proved beyond reasonable
doubt that he can produce recognisable images of distant objects just
by staring into cameras. In front of scores of reputable witnesses, in
a variety of carefully controlled situations, Serios has made hundreds
of pictures of buildings, people, landscapes, rockets, buses, and
racing cars. He has been stripped to the skin, medically examined,
X-rayed, sewn into a restraint suit that allowed him to move nothing
but his head, and tested with cameras and film provided by independent
and critical observers. In spite of all precautions, and without
touching any of the apparatus involved, he still succeeds in producing
his 'thoughtographs'. (96) The full details of test situations, the
testimony of witnesses, and the pictures themselves can all be found in
Eisenbud's book, but it is worth looking at some of the results in
relation to what we now know about psychokinesis.
Magnetic fields seem to have no effect on Serios. He has produced his
pictures inside a field of twelve hundred gauss, which is thousands of
times stronger than the earth's field, and inside a Faraday cage that
reduced the natural field to one third its normal strength. He has also
been tested inside the 5-inch-thick steel walls of a radiation counting
chamber with a sensitive crystal pickup designed to detect
electromagnetic radiation. It found nothing unusual when Serios was
producing his pictures just eighteen inches away. He has been able to
get pictures when the camera was pointed at him through half an inch of
lead-impregnated glass in the window of a hospital chamber designed to
exclude X radiation. Infrared and ultraviolet were also excluded when
he worked through barriers of wood and plastic. These conditions
virtually dispose of the possibility of any of the common kinds of
electromagnetic radiation, from long, radio waves to short, gamma
waves, being responsible for the pictures. It would be fascinating if
Serios could be examined in Russia by the Sergeyev Detector to see if
he produced the same reactions as Nelya Mikhailova, but the chances of
co-operation at this level seem remote.
We know a little about the physiology of thought pictures. While
working, Serios usually went into a state of 'intense concentration,
with eyes open, lips compressed, and a quite noticeable tension of his
muscular system. His limbs would tend to shake somewhat, as if with a
slight palsy, and the foot of his crossed leg would sometimes begin to
jerk up and down a bit convulsively. His face would become suffused and
blotchy, the veins standing out on his forehead, his eyes visibly
bloodshot.' During all tests he drank heavily and his heartbeat often
ran very high. It is clear from this description that Serios builds up
the same kind of rage as Mikhailova, but in his case it often broke out
into abuse and attacks on the cameras that would not co-operate with
him. There seem to be good grounds for the assumption that both
operated on the same principle. The Russian demonstrations tell us
little about the mental factors involved, but in the pictures of Ted
Serios we have a vivid, ready-made analysis of his state of mind.
Eisenbud says that Serios sometimes seems to have control over the
subject matter of his pictures, but that most of the time 'Ted appeared
to act like the passive observer of unidentified floating objects for
which his mind was merely a reflecting screen.' Sometimes there was
conflict between images that he was consciously aiming at and other
images that intruded despite his strongest efforts to keep them out,
and Ted would act 'like a slightly exasperated referee in a boxing
match between two youngsters that can't quite keep to the rules'. It
seems clear that the pictures are expressions of his personality. When
asked to produce a picture of the Arc de Triomphe, Serios would come up
with a picture of a Triumph motorcar, in which he was far more
interested. Cars and buildings are recurrent themes in his pictures. He
has produced recognisable shots of Westminster Abbey, Munich's
Frauenkirche, and the Denver Hilton Hotel. These show great detail, but
the really interesting thing about them is that they also include
detail that never existed and shadows that could not exist, taken from
vantage points that would only be possible for a camera in a balloon.
The source of the image seems to be something that Serios has seen in
real life or in a photograph, but that has been hidden away in his
unconscious and modified by memory and imagination.
Psychoanalysis of Serios indicates immaturity in many ways, and once
again we find a link between psychokinesis and childlike behavior. A
recent survey of children's imagination has revealed that a
surprisingly large number of them have what is known as eidetic
imagery. This is the ability to shut the eyes after looking briefly at
a picture and still retain a vivid visual image of what has been seen.
(130) The fact that the image is real and detailed has been clearly
demonstrated in a most impressive way. A drawing of a man's face was
broken down into a large number of meaningless squiggles and then split
into two separate patterns that, on their own, meant nothing. The
children were briefly shown one of the patterns and then allowed to
look for a longer time at the other. Those with eidetic ability were
able to summon up an image of the first pattern, mentally superimpose
it on the second, and see the original face. In most of the children
tested, images lasted about ten minutes, but others retained them for
weeks. As the images faded, they transformed themselves like cinematic
cartoons until they bore only a tenuous relationship to the original.
This is exactly what happens to the pictures that Ted Serios produces.
As children grow older and their minds become occupied with the
paraphernalia of education, they seem to lose the eidetic ability, but
in a few adults, such as Serios, who have little formal education and a
simple view of life, the ability is retained.
This offers us a mechanism of mind capable of the precise visual recall
necessary to produce accurate pictures, but it does not solve the
problem of transmitting the pictures to film. We know that it helps to
'become as little children', but we are still no closer to an
understanding of the physics involved. Actually, as it is the emulsion
on the film that is being affected, it is more of a chemistry problem.
Perhaps the answer lies in other studies, of the influence of PK on
chemical reactions.
Bernard Grad of McGill University has done pioneer work in this field.
His subject was a faith healer who claimed to be able to cure disease
by the biblical method of 'laying on of hands'. In a preliminary test
involving three hundred mice with identical injuries, those held by the
healer for fifteen minutes a day did in fact heal more quickly than
those held by other people. (127) Grad tried to expose this ability to
more critical analysis by narrowing down its effect in an ingenious
experiment with barley seeds. The seeds were treated with salt and
baked in an oven for long enough to injure but not kill them. Then
twenty seeds were planted in each of twenty-four flower pots and
watered each day. The water to be used was taken straight from a tap
into two sealed glass bottles, and each day the healer held one of
these in his hands for thirty minutes. An experimental procedure was
designed so that no person knew which plants were being given the
treated water, but after two weeks it was found that those given the
benefit of the healer's hand on their water supply were not only more
numerous but also taller and gave a higher yield. (124)
Grad tested the treated water and found no major changes, but a later
analysis showed that there was a slight spreading between the hydrogen
and oxygen atoms. (125) The change in what we know to be an unstable
molecule was apparently triggered by the action of an individual human
field. Following this clue, Grad tried to assess the personality
involved in this healing response. He had water for a second
barley-seed test treated by three different people. One was a
psychiatrically normal man, one was a woman with a strong depressive
neurosis, and the third was a man with psychotic delusional depression.
The water treated by the normal man produced seeds that showed no
difference from control ones, but the growth of all seedlings that
received water handled by the depressed patients was greatly retarded.
(126) The discovery of a negative as well as a positive response is
important. It is conceivable, even in an experiment as carefully
contrived as this one, that some factor could have been overlooked and
that the positive result had nothing to do with the healer. But when a
negative subject - a sick person - produces an appropriately negative
response, then the original premise is greatly strengthened and the
case for the healer looks good.
In this example, the man exercising his influence never saw the plants
at all; he charged the water, and it did the rest for him. In an
experiment in France, attempts were made to affect a living organism
directly. (17) At the Institute of Agronomy in Bordeaux, two kinds of
parasitic fungi - Stereum purpureum and Rhizoclonia solani - were
seeded onto a growth medium in glass dishes, and for fifteen minutes a
day the experimenters sat and stared at the dishes and tried to inhibit
their growth by concentration. Special care was taken to ensure that
the fungi were genetically pure, that the composition of the growth
media was identical and that all dishes were kept at the same
temperature and humidity. In thirty-three out of thirty-nine tests the
fungi were inhibited, as compared with control dishes, to a degree that
gave odds of many millions to one against chance. There can be little
doubt that, for these two fungi at least, man can influence growth just
by being nearby for a short while each day.
Gardeners have always contended that the exact time of planting is
important, and our new knowledge of lunar rhythms has begun to make
sense of their old superstitions about planting seeds only at the full
moon. Now it seems that there might be something in the idea of the
proverbial 'green thumb'. There are certainly some people who have an
almost magical ability to make things grow, while others using exactly
the same methods and spending just as much time in their gardens end up
with nothing but withered leaves and aphids. The good gardeners may
generate a field that has a beneficial effect on plant growth. And it
is by no means impossible that a variant of this field could be equally
beneficial to human beings. There are people who even in a crowd seem
to radiate powerful goodwill or equally powerful evil. We are not a
great deal nearer understanding this effect, but the experiments of
Grad and those on the fungi make it impossible to deny that such
effects could exist.
The inhibition of fungus, like the growth of barley seeds, could have
been caused by a molecular change in the structure of water, but there
is one experiment in which the induced change is behavioral and must be
due to more complex chemical effects. Nigel Richmond tried exerting his
will power over Paramecium caudatum, the little, free-swimming
protozoan that rows itself along through the water of stagnant pools
like a tiny blob of transparent jelly equipped with a thousand
fluttering eyelashes. They are probably the most businesslike of all
the single-celled animals, gliding purposefully around at speeds of
almost one tenth of an inch per second. Richmond watched them through
the eyepiece of a microscope that was divided by cross hairs into four
equal segments. He located a Paramecium that looked as though it was
about to go somewhere, fixed it at the center of his sights, and tried
to make it move into one of the four segments chosen at random. In
three thousand such trials, he was successful with a score of ten
million to one against chance. (277) Paramecium normally finds its way
around by a trial-and-error system of swimming until it hits an
obstruction or gets into an area that is too hot or too cold, too acid
or too alkaline, then it backs out a little way and tries again. This
avoiding reaction goes on until it gets away from an unfavorable area.
So the animal, which knows only what it doesn't like, is a random
system under normal circumstances and therefore a perfect surface on
which PK can work by just tripping a balance minutely. It seems that
man can do this with his mind.
These PK effects are being demonstrated by experimenters who have
chosen to work in the fringe field of parapsychology. It is almost
impossible to get finance for this kind of research; experiments are
long and often very tedious, results are meager and difficult to
publish, and scorn is plentiful and easy to find. It is safe to assume
that anyone doing work in this area is an unusual person to begin with,
so we cannot hold up Richmond, for instance, as proof that anyone can
produce PK results. But even he came to the field without special
training, so it is likely that with the right sort of approach, most
people could do these things. If it is true that everyone has a latent
PK ability, then a new question arises: Why? What do we get out of it?
Gambling may be fun, but it is not a biological necessity. Pushing
Paramecium around may be good for the ego, but it does not have real
survival value. So why should evolution have given us this talent? The
answer could be that there is a feedback and that the force field that
carries our influence to the environment also brings information from
it.
Hydra had nine heads, and whenever Hercules cut one off, two grew in
its place. In the shallow water of unpolluted streams there is a naked
little polyp that has the same ability and the same name. Hydra pirardi
is just half an inch long with a body thin as thread that ends in five
frayed tentacles. It has a marked preference for light and finds it in
the same negative way as Paramecium. When a shadow, even that cast by
its own body, reaches one of the tentacles, Hydra withdraws the arm
abruptly and moves in the other direction. Its whole body is
supersensitive to light, and yet it has no eyes or eyespots or
light-sensitive cells of any kind. Light instead produces a chemical
reaction in its body fluid - the viscosity of the protoplasm changes,
fats saponify, and enzymes are inactivated. When light is removed, all
these processes are reversed and the animal moves away and back into
the light again. (38) This sensitivity is probably not confined to
freshwater polyps.
Eyeless Sight
When the first white men arrived in Samoa, they found blind men that
could see well enough to describe things in detail just by holding
their hands over objects. In France just after the First World War,
Jules Romain tested hundreds of blind people and found a few that could
tell the difference between light and dark. He narrowed their
photosensitivity down to areas on the nose or in the fingertips. In
Italy the neurologist Cesare Lombroso discovered a blind girl who could
'see' with the tip of her nose and the lobe of her left ear. When a
bright light was shone unexpectedly on her ear, she winced. In 1956 a
blind schoolboy in Scotland was taught to differentiate between colored
lights and learned to pick out bright objects several feet away. In
1960 a medical board examined a girl in Virginia and found that, even
with wads of bandage and tape over her eyes, she was able to
distinguish different colors and read short sections of large print.
(95) The phenomenon is obviously not new, but it has reached new peaks
of sensitivity in a young woman from a mountain village in the Urals.
Rosa Kuleshova can see with her fingers. She is not blind, but growing
up in a family of blind people she learned to read Braille to help them
and then went on to teach herself to do other things with her hands. In
1962 her physician took her to Moscow, where she was examined by the
Soviet Academy of Science and emerged a celebrity, certified as
genuine. (161) The neurologist Shaefer made an intensive study with her
and found that, securely blindfolded with only her arms stuck through a
screen, she could differentiate among three primary colors. To test the
possibility that the cards reflected heat differently, he heated some
and cooled others, without affecting her response to them. He also
found that she could read newsprint and sheet music under glass, so
texture was giving her no clues. Tested by the psychologist Novomeisky,
she was able to identify the color and shape of patches of light
projected onto her palm or portrayed on an oscilloscope screen. In
rigidly controlled tests, with a blindfold and a screen and a piece of
card around her neck so wide that she could not see round it, Rosa read
the small print in a newspaper with her elbow. And, in the most
convincing demonstration of all, she repeated these things with someone
standing behind her pressing hard on her eyeballs. (281) Nobody can
cheat under this pressure; it is even difficult to see clearly for
minutes after it is released.
Rosa really started something in Russia. Following her success, surveys
were made and it was found that about one in six people could learn to
recognise the difference between two colors after only an hour's
training. Novomeisky soon had eighty students attending his classes in
eyeless sight. They agreed that colors have textures that are more or
less smooth to the touch. Yellow is very slippery, red is sticky, and
violet has a braking effect on the fingers. (231) With the colored
papers in insulated trays, they could feel these effects in the air
above the cards. These students all had perfectly good eyes without
their blindfolds, but at the Sverdlovsk Institute the same skills are
being taught to the blind. Many sightless people say during these
lessons that they were always aware of the difference in feel between
the colors but that nobody ever told them what these meant. Some of the
more advanced blind children at the Institute are reading colors
through copper plate - they are 'seeing' things invisible even to their
teachers.
If light affects the chemistry of Hydra sufficiently to move it into a
favorable environment, it does not seem unreasonable to assume that the
body fluids of man could have some similar sensitivity. The fact that
blind children are 'seeing' with their ears and tongues and the tips of
their toes suggests that there are no special sensory cells at work but
that the ability is scattered throughout the body and is one common to
all cells. If this is true, it is possible that different frequencies
and patterns of light affect the chemistry in different ways and that
one can learn to appreciate this difference and distinguish among the
sources of light. This explains why the Russians have found that the
ability is best in bright light, and fades, exactly like normal sight,
as darkness falls. But it does not explain why insulated trays help to
broadcast the effect at a distance or why it fails when the objects, or
the hands of the person, are electrically grounded. This may be where
psychokinesis comes in.
Once again the ability is most strongly manifest in children and
reaches a peak at the age of eleven. It could be that the human field
plays a vital role in this kind of sensing, broadcasting in much the
same way as the bat's sonar system, picking up echoes and translating
them into meaningful patterns. When one of our primary senses fails,
this branch of Supernature takes over to supplement the missing
faculty, but even in normally sighted people it could be 'feeling' the
area in our immediate vicinity like the whiskers of a cat, giving us
information that could be vital for survival.
If we do have a physiological response to light and this varies with
the frequency of the light concerned, then this would explain some of
the mystic values attached to colors. The apparent color of an object
depends directly on the wavelength of the light it reflects, so it is
possible that this physical difference could affect us in other ways.
Manufacturers have discovered by trial and error that sugar sells badly
in green wrappings, that blue foods are considered unpalatable, and
that cosmetics should never be packaged in brown. These discoveries,
given such commercial impetus, have grown into a whole discipline of
color psychology that now finds application in everything from fashion
to interior decoration. Some of our preferences are clearly
psychological. Dark blue is the color of the night sky and therefore
associated with passivity and quiescence, while yellow is a day color
with associations of energy and incentive. For primitive man, activity
during the day meant hunting and attacking, which he soon saw as red,
the color of blood and rage and the heat that came with effort. So it
was natural that green, the complementary color to red, should be
associated with passive defense and self-preservation. Experiments have
shown that colors, partly because of their psychological associations,
also have a direct physiological effect. People exposed to bright red
show an increase in respiration rate, heartbeat, and blood pressure;
red is exciting. Similar exposure to pure blue has exactly the opposite
effect; it is a calming color. Because of its exciting connotations,
red was chosen as the signal for danger, but closer analysis shows that
a vivid yellow can produce a more basic state of alertness and alarm,
so fire engines and ambulances in some forward communities are now
rushing around in bilious hues that stop the traffic dead.
Aesthetic, learned responses to color and more primitive, instinctive
reactions have been combined into a very sensitive test of personality.
The Lüscher Color Test was developed in Basel; it involves selection of
personal preferences from a panel of twenty-five different hues. (301)
Dark blue is said to represent 'depth of feeling', bright yellow
'spontaneity', orange-red 'force of will', and so on. On the surface
this sounds a little facile and suspiciously like the popular
psychology of a newspaper horoscope, but the test concerns itself more
with the order of preference and the detailed significance of color
combinations. It is finding wide and enthusiastic reception in
medicine, psychiatry, marriage guidance, and personnel selection.
A person's choice of color, in this test or for wallpaper in his
bedroom, seems to be guided by the effect the color has on him, and can
be used as an indication of his state of mind. A trained observer looks
at the color and the person together and, by virtue of his special
knowledge, can describe the connections between them. But we all have
responses of the 'My, that color suits you' kind. This could be because
our own psychological reaction to that color agrees with our subjective
assessment of that person's character, but the fact that there is
usually widespread agreement about the combination suggests that
something more basic is involved. I suggest that the principle of
resonance is at work and that the wavelength of the color and the
frequency of the person's field are in sympathy when we find their
combined effect harmonious. This is a wildly mystical notion, fully in
keeping with all the old superstitions about color, but it feels right
to me when I look at the problem of color and camouflage.
The eggs of the lapwing plover are mottled, like the ground on which
they rest; the wings of the carpet moth have a broken pattern, like the
lichen-covered bark of its favorite trees; the body of the copperhead
viper is a patchwork of hues exactly like the leaf litter in which it
lives. All these wonderful effects serve the purpose of concealment and
have been evolved over millions of years of natural selection, but they
were not produced by the animals themselves. The colors and patterns
cannot be seen by the animal wearing them; their effect is visible only
at a distance, so an outside agency in the form of a predator has to
come along like an art critic and pick out the least successful
camouflage patterns, leaving the better ones alive to produce others of
their kind.
This process works well over long periods of time, in which adaptations
occur over thousands of generations, but some species produce instant
changes in their camouflage patterns. A chameleon very quickly takes on
the pattern and the color best suited to any background on which it
finds itself. Part of this ability depends on what it is able to see
around it, but a completely blind chameleon still takes on the
camouflage appropriate to its surroundings. It produces a pattern that,
from a distance, harmonises with the environment. This has long been a
problem in biology, and I see no way of solving it now unless one
assumes that there is a reciprocal interaction between the animal and
its habitat. One has only to watch a chameleon in action to realise
that it is not a matter of trial-and-error matching, of producing a
black stripe on the tail because there is a corresponding black stripe
just there on the background. What the reptile does is to assume a
pattern that blends with the black stripe; it may not even be the same
color, but it is always one that fits so well with the background that
it is naturally congruous. The blind chameleon 'suits' its
surroundings; it does so in a flash, and from a distance the effect is
perfect. It seems to me that this harmony can be explained only by
assuming the existence of something like the life field, which picks up
the frequency of the environment and translates this into an
appropriate and resonant frequency of its own.
If such an ability exists, it could account for a phenomenon that is a
cause of dissension even among occultists. Some claim that, just by
holding an object, they can get information about its previous owners.
Dealers in antiquities, whose livelihood depends on assessing objects
correctly, will often just hold an Egyptian bronze cat or a piece of
Mexican jade in their hands and say that it 'feels right'. They may be
responding to any number of cues associated with the object, but can
seldom point to any one as positive proof of authenticity, preferring
to rely on a sense of 'rightness' acquired by exposure to other objects
with established pedigrees. This subliminal sensitivity is not
uncommon, and although it is almost impossible to prove, it seems
reasonable to assume that people leave some kind of mark on things
around them. The alleged ability to read these traces has been called
psychometry.
Psychometry
A bloodhound can detect the traces of a particular person in a room
long after he has left it, perhaps even after he has died elsewhere.
The psychometrist claims to do the same, but not by smell. If a healer
changes the structure of water just by holding it in his hand for half
an hour, what effect does he have on a wristwatch he wears for half a
lifetime? If a barley seed can tell the difference between ordinary and
handled water, is it unreasonable to assume that a man can distinguish
a brand-new object, untouched by human hand, from one that has been
fondled for twenty years? I believe that there are differences and that
they are discernible, but proving this is another matter. There have
been casual tests made by presenting objects for psychometry in sealed
containers, but no good, controlled investigation has yet been made. I
predict that when one is, it will provide evidence of our ability to
detect traces of human contact with things, but that there will be a
limit to the amount of information we can get in this way. A fox can
tell from traces on a tree not only that there is a male in the
territory but who he is and what he last had to eat. Our territorial
displays are now predominantly visual: the initials carved on the tree
include a date and perhaps even an address, but there must have been a
time when early man, with a comparatively poor sense of smell, could
have made good use of a talent such as psychometry. (194) There are
people today who claim to be able to tell the sex of the person who
last used a particular Stone Age hand ax. This might once have been a
very useful piece of information.
The nearest we can get to some sort of understanding of psychometry is
an extraordinary series of experiments still going on in
Czechoslovakia. They began with Robert Pavlita, design director of a
textile plant near Prague. He invented a new weaving process that was
so successful he could afford to retire and devote all his attention to
his hobby of metallurgy. This continued until he discovered that an
alloy of a particular shape had strange properties. If handled often,
it seemed to accumulate energy and to attract even non-magnetic
objects. This sounds like electrostatic energy, which can be built up
by friction in amber until it is strong enough to pick up paper, but
static electricity does not work under water - and Pavlita's
'generator' does.
He took it to the physics department at Hradec Králové University.
There they sealed it on his instructions into a metal box alongside a
small fan driven by an electric motor. Pavlita stood six feet away and
did no more than stare hard at his generator. After a while the blade
on the fan began to slow down, as though the current had been cut off;
then it stopped altogether and began to rotate in the opposite
direction. (233) For two years the department worked with him to try to
unravel the mystery, but got nowhere. It has nothing to do with static
electricity, air currents, temperature changes, or magnetism, but it
works, and they now have a whole collection of generators in a variety
of shapes that look like miniature metal sculptures by Brancusi. All of
them have the same inexplicable ability to store energy from a
particular person that can be released later to do a particular job,
such as driving an electric motor.
At this point the government stepped in and appointed the physiologist
Zdenek Rejdak to investigate the claims. He could find no indications
of fraud and continued to work with Pavlita. Together they produced a
generator shaped like a doughnut that killed flies placed inside the
ring; then they went on to build a square one that accelerated the
growth of bean seeds when placed in a pan of soil. And finally they
turned out a small one that could be dropped into water polluted by
factory effluent and would leave it crystal clear in a short while. An
official chemical analysis of the water concluded that it could not
have been purified with a chemical agent and added the splendid comment
that the molecular structure of the water was slightly altered. Again
the fact crops up, and we find reactions working first on the
instability of the universal trigger substance - water.
So far the only theory put out about the generators is that their
secret lies in the form, which is critical, and that only one
configuration can produce a particular effect. These developments are
very difficult to follow from a distance - as yet, no details of any of
the generators have been published, but Pavlita has said that he got
his original description and inspiration from an ancient manuscript,
and we know that the libraries of Prague abound in untranslated and
unexplored texts of the alchemists.
Alchemy
Alchemy flourished until 1661, when Robert Boyle published the
Sceptical Chymist and demolished the old, Aristotelian idea of the four
'elements' - fire, earth, air, and water. Eighty years later Black
introduced quantitive chemistry, and soon after that Priestley
discovered oxygen and Lavoisier analysed air and water. This chemical
revolution swept away the romance and adventure of the alchemist's
quest and ushered in a new objectivity. The idea of converting one
element into another was laughed out of the laboratory until in 1919
Lord Rutherford used alpha particles from a radioactive source to
bombard nitrogen and turn it into oxygen. Today, with instruments such
as the strong-focusing synchrotron, the transmutation of metals has
become commonplace and the alchemists begin to look quite good.
There were two arms of alchemy, one outward and concerned with the
attempt to find the Philosopher's Stone, and the other hidden and more
concerned with the development of a devotional system. The mundane
transmutation of metals was merely symbolic of the transformation of
man into something more perfect, through an exploration of nature's
potential. The psychologist Jung realised this and regarded alchemy as
the predecessor more of modern psychology than of modern chemistry. In
his autobiography he makes it clear that he considers the roots of his
psychology of the unconscious to have been firmly planted in the
alchemical treatises that he spent ten years of his life studying. The
elusive Stone was credited not only with the power of turning base
metals into gold, but with the power also to prolong human life
indefinitely. Colin Wilson describes this aspect of the search as
'man's attempt to learn to make contact, at will, with the source of
power, meaning and purpose in the depths of the mind, to overcome the
dualities and ambiguities of everyday consciousness'. (342)
The origins of alchemy lie in early agricultural communities, when
technology had not yet been segregated from other aspects of daily life
and the craftsmen who made metal farming implements and the dyes of
weaving carried out their trades to the accompaniment of religious and
magical rites. The Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Arabs all contributed
their skills and philosophies, and some great discoveries were made. In
the Bagdad Museum are some stones found in a remote part of Iraq and
classified as 'ritual objects', but that have now been shown to be the
cores of electric batteries invented two thousand years before Galvani.
(240) Some pieces of bronze, dredged up off the shores of Greece at
Antikythera and dated sixth century BC, turn out to be components of an
early computer for calculating astronomical positions. (333) So many of
our proudest new achievements seem to have been anticipated by the
alchemists and their contemporaries that one wonders what other lost
skills we have yet to rediscover.
In the Mayan city of Chichén Itzá, in Yucatán, are hundreds of feet of
reliefs, many carved almost in the round, by a people without metal
tools. In the walls of the Incan city of Cuzco, in Peru, are vast
blocks of stone of irregular shape that have been so perfectly cut that
they jigsaw together without room to fit a knife blade between them.
(290) Engineers and architects stand in awe of these achievements,
which, with all our technical skills, we find hard to duplicate today.
It may well have been done by a scientific development that has since
been lost and smacks almost of psychokinesis. The Incas may have known
how to soften stone. Colonel Fawcett, the British explorer who
ultimately disappeared into the jungles of the Amazon, records in his
diaries that on a walk along the river Perené, in Peru, a pair of large
Mexican-type spurs were corroded to stumps in one day by the juice from
a patch of low plants with red, fleshy leaves. A local rancher
described them as 'the stuff the Incas used for shaping stones'. There
are reports, too, of a small, kingfisher-like bird, probably the
white-capped dipper Cinclus leucocephalus, which nests in spherical
holes in the Bolivian Andes and bores these out of solid rock on the
banks of mountain streams by rubbing a leaf on the stone until it is
soft and can be pecked away. It seems that the Incas knew enough about
chemistry to extract and distill the same substance. An excavation of a
burial ground in central Peru turned up an earthenware jug containing a
black viscous fluid that, when spilled on the ground, turned the rocks
on which it fell into a soft, malleable putty.
This is the kind of discovery that most delighted the alchemists. In
the course of working toward a higher consciousness, they learned
almost by accident how to control matter and to liberate energy, so it
is by no means impossible that in one of their texts are instructions
for making generators like those of Robert Pavlita. Perhaps one of them
was long and thin and looked like a magic wand.
One thing magic and science have in common is that both operate on the
assumption that there is some scheme of order and regularity in the
universe. Both attempt to discover this scheme by establishing
relationships between things that are superficially different, and by
analogical reasoning. The search for order is the only way life can
survive in a cosmos tending toward maximum disorder. In man the search
becomes more complex, because he looks not only for order but for
meaning, so that he may be sure of being able to rediscover or even
re-create that order. Superstition is one of the prices we pay for our
habit of constantly scanning for patterns in everything. As Konrad
Lorenz puts it, magic rituals have 'a common root in behaviour
mechanism whose species-preserving function is obvious; for a living
being lacking insight into the relation between causes and effects it
must be extremely useful to cling to a behaviour pattern which has once
or many times proved to achieve its aim, and to have done so without
danger.' (203) In other words, if success follows a complex set of
actions and you do not know which parts of the whole performance were
the vital ones, it is best to repeat all of them exactly and slavishly
every time, because 'You never know what might happen if you don't.'
So the Pedi, in South Africa, believe that infection can be cured by
eating grain that has been chewed by a cross-eyed child and hung for
three days in a gourd shaped like a snake that is suspended from a
particular tree that grows near the water. And they are right, because
under these conditions the grain grows a mold like Penicillium, with
antibiotic properties, but the child's eyes and the gourd's shape and
the species of the tree do not necessarily have anything to do with the
cure. In just this way, alchemy stumbled on some great truths but
produced theoretical structures in which the line of reasoning between
cause and effect was cluttered up with all sorts of irrelevant mystical
and magical red herrings. This has discouraged modern science from
investigating the source material, which is a pity, because we can
probably still learn a great deal from a discipline that flourished for
over two thousand years and included devotees such as Roger Bacon,
Thomas Aquinas, Ben Jonson, and even Isaac Newton.
The role of sympathetic magic and of superstition in psychokinetic
phenomena is undoubtedly a large one, but I believe that, even without
these props, we now have enough evidence to warrant the serious
consideration of PK as a biological reality. There is a long way to go
before we understand how it works, but we can already begin to think
about its evolutionary implications. In man the ability seems to be
manifest mainly in children, or essentially childlike personalities,
and then most often as a casual, almost accidental effect. It is
apparently important to believe that the mind can influence matter, or
at least not to disbelieve that it can. This suggests that its origins
lie in some more primitive condition, which is preserved in the
unconscious and later smothered by acquired cultural and intellectual
pressures. But learning to produce PK effects on demand, by a conscious
physical process, is probably a new development altogether.
We have no evidence as yet to suggest that any other species is capable
of producing psychokinetic effects. We describe them as 'mind over
matter', but consciousness may not be a necessary precondition for PK.
It is possible that many organisms at all levels of development are
capable of generating the force fields that seem to be responsible for
action at a distance. If this is true, then the ability could well turn
out to be a major biological determinant, forging even closer bonds
between life and its environment than even the most visionary
ecologists dreamed possible.
I suspect that Supernature holds many such surprises in store.
PART THREE
MIND
'The answer is "yes" or "no", depending on the interpretation.'
ALBERT EINSTEIN, in Scientific American, April 1950.
Matter is a form of energy. Living matter is energy organised in such a
way that it retains its unstable state. The brain is that part of
living matter given over to the co-ordination of such organisation. So
far so good, but the next stage of evolution is impossible to describe
in these simple, mechanistic terms. Life is an affair of chemistry and
physics, but the mind is not amenable to this kind of analysis; it
seems to be independent of energy.
Mind is something we experience, rather than something we observe. The
physiologist watches an electric tide that sweeps across the living
brain and rightly interprets this as one of the signs of mind, but his
instruments cannot cope with the monster that produced these ripples on
the surface. The ethologist studies patterns of behavior, and in these,
too, he can see manifestations of mind; he can even produce behavioral
changes that seem to depend on a change of mind; but none of this gets
him very much closer to the problem. The mind is responsible for
awareness, and probably the greatest contribution yet made by
comparative ethology is the discovery that something like consciousness
exists in other species and must have evolved a number of times in the
course of evolution.
During the past five million years, evolution seems to have
concentrated most of its creative energy in the process of human
development. This intensity has produced a species substantially
different from even his nearest living relatives, but I believe that
even in the nebulous affairs of the mind this difference is largely one
of degree. I have no intention of belittling the importance of the
distinctions between man and other animals, but I cannot agree with
those who would place man outside the order of nature. Lists of
distinctive human characteristics usually include such things as his
capacity for abstract thought, his ability to make and use symbols, and
his engagement in apparently meaningless patterns such as play. But we
now know that even birds can form abstract concepts - ravens can be
taught to choose a food dish on the basis only of the number of spots
with which it is marked. The dance language of the bees is a marvel of
symbolism, indicating by movements such complex information as what to
look for, in which direction, how far, and what lies in the way. And
play not only occurs in animals but can take on almost aesthetic
overtones - as in the absorption and skill shown by a chimpanzee with a
paintbrush.
To me this continuity suggest that none of man's qualities is new. No
component of our brain or behavior has been added by supernatural means
to make us what we are. Not one of our abilities can be denied to some
other animal somewhere, but what we have done is to arrange everything
in an entirely new way. Man is a unique pattern, a new and powerful
combination of old talents. For a long time, one or more of these
abilities has been predominant and effectively masked the others, but
we are now beginning to rediscover more of our extraordinary gifts.
In this section I want to look at some of the signs of mind and at the strange things we can do with it.
SIX
SIGNS OF MIND
In 1957, following a series of nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific,
concern began to grow about the dangers of radio-active fallout. The
World Health Organization issued a warning in March that year about the
genetic effects of radiation, and very soon afterward medical
physiologists in several places reported with horror that the
white-blood-cell count in a very large number of patients was
undergoing a rapid and possibly damaging change. As it happened those
effects were being produced by radiation from nuclear reaction - but
not in the Pacific. The years 1957 and 1958 were ones of tremendous
activity, but of a type beyond the controls of any test-ban treaty,
because the explosions that irradiated earth were taking place in the
sun. (300)
This discovery is now included in a growing body of knowledge that
demonstrates the sensitivity of life to subtle stimuli, but time and
again we still make the mistake of assuming that only the dramatic and
obvious events around us can be of any importance. This kind of myopia
has come to be known as the 'Clever Hans' error in honor of a famous
problem-solving horse who mystified scientists in nineteenth-century
Europe. They believed that the animal was solving problems set out on a
blackboard in front of it, while it was actually getting the
information it needed for correct answers by watching the involuntary
gestures made by the scientists themselves in expectation of these
answers. A large part of animal communication is based on the
interpretation of very slight manifestations of mood in others of its
kind, and the horse simply responded to the gathering of very
distinguished scientists as though they, too, were horses.
In physiological terms, the gulf that separates us from other animals
is not a wide one, and despite the fact that we now have an elaborate
vocal language and other sophisticated communication systems, our
bodies continue to show external signs of our inner feelings.
Instinctively we continue to respond to these signals. We can listen to
a discussion on the radio and understand exactly what the speaker is
trying to communicate, but where more spontaneous, emotional material
is involved, we find the lack of vision a serious handicap. Anyone who
has ever used a telephone knows how difficult it is to convey really
complex feelings with the voice alone and how comparatively easy it is
to tell lies to someone who cannot watch you while you do so. Deaf
people, who miss the information provided by the voice, learn again to
communicate by gesture alone, and now this old talent has been made a
new psychoanalytic and research tool by students of body language, or
kinesics. (100)
Laboratory and clinical studies of body language have shown that it
often directly contradicts verbal communication and that the person who
says 'I am not afraid' will at the same time be sending out automatic
signals that betray his fear. This outward manifestation of an inner
feeling is by no means restricted to the long muscles; it shows up even
in the eyes. (147) Eckhard Mess at the University of Chicago discovered
that there was a direct relation between pupil size and mental
activity. In a series of tests in which subjects' eyes were
photographed as they watched changing pictures, he found that the
pupils expanded when looking at something interesting or appealing, and
contracted when exposed to anything distasteful or unappealing. And the
fact that we automatically respond to these changes in another person
was demonstrated by showing a group of male subjects two pictures of an
attractive girl that were identical except that her pupils in one of
the pictures had been retouched to make them larger. When questioned
about these photographs, the subjects reported that they could see no
difference between them, but their eyes showed that they responded very
much more strongly to the girl with large pupils. They presumably found
her more attractive because unconsciously they were reading her signal,
which says 'I am very interested in you.'
It is not surprising that the response of the pupil should be connected
directly with mental activity. Embryologically and anatomically the eye
is an extension of the brain, and looking into it is almost like
peering through a peephole into a part of the brain itself. The reflex
action of the eye in response to light is determined by the
parasympathetic nervous system, and the emotional response is brought
about by the sympathetic system. So both branches of our autonomic
nerve network are involved, and we can expect to find that other parts
of the body supplied by these systems are also going to show signs of
mind.
In emotional situations, pupil reactions are connected with an increase
in the heart rate and blood pressure, more rapid respiration, and
greater sweating. One of the first places in which sweat appears is on
the palms of the hands, in what is known as a psychogalvanic response.
This is an electrical storm in the skin that suddenly breaks when the
owner of the palm becomes anxious. It is used extensively in the
so-called lie-detector tests, which measure the electrical resistance
of the skin. The results of the tests are not usually acceptable in a
court of law, because they give no indication of truth or falsity, but
they do provide a measurement of emotional stress. Often this state is
apparent from a distance when a nervous man rubs wet palms together or
wipes them down his thighs to dry them. It is also of course
immediately apparent when shaking hands, and this offers an explanation
for the origin of the custom, which makes more biological sense than
the traditional one of indicating a lack of weapons.
The reason for sweating on the palms of the hands rather than on the
elbows or behind the ears seems to be connected with another kind of
signaling from a distance: communication by smell. Most mammals mark
out their territories with the secretion from special scent glands.
Some antelope have glands in their feet and leave distinctive tracks
wherever they go; others have to trample in their dung and carry the
smell of this around with them on their feet. Tree shrews first prepare
a little puddle of urine, trip about in it, and then scamper around,
leaving smelly footprints everywhere. Bushbabies and lemurs urinate
directly onto their hands before the leap, so every handhold becomes an
advertisement for the occupier as distinctive as the nameplates we put
up on our office doors and gateposts.
In a primate the most obvious areas for spreading smell are the
hairless palms and the soles of the feet. Most of the higher primates
have developed a sense of sight at the expense of their sense of smell,
but they still seem to use their noses a great deal. None of the great
apes urinate on their hands, but all of them have well-developed sweat
glands on the palms, and these seem to carry a smell that is
distinctive for every individual. One does not have to be a chimpanzee
to appreciate the differences. Part of the palm smell is produced by
food - just try smelling your hands a few hours after eating asparagus
and you will find that the distinctive smell comes right through the
pores of your skin. But part of every smell is also sexual in origin.
Internal physiology is regulated by hormones, and it is now known that
similar chemicals are secreted externally for communication and the
regulation of the physiology of others. These are pheromones; migratory
locusts secrete them to accelerate the growth of their young, ants use
them to lay trails to and from the nest, female moths use them to
attract males from a great distance. In man, striking sexual
differences have been found in the ability to smell certain substances.
(343) A French biologist has reported that the odor of a synthetic
lactone can be detected only by mature females and is perceived most
clearly at the time of ovulation. Men and young girls cannot smell this
substance at all - unless they first have a huge injection of the
female hormone estrogen. It seems that a chemical very like this one is
part of man's natural bouquet and is secreted through sweat glands,
largely in the palms of the hands.
So the palm not only becomes moist in moments of emotional stress, but
in doing so it also communicates intentions, sex, and individual
identity.
Palmistry
Apart from a unique smell, each person also carries an exclusive
pattern in his hands. The dermis of the skin has a distinctive
assortment of loops, worls, and arches in the fingertips and on the
palm. This is unlike any design ever borne by any other person. There
is no authenticated case of indistinguishable patterns, even in
so-called identical twins, so the shapes have been used for
identification purposes ever since the Chinese perfected a system of
classification in AD 700.
Dermatoglyphics is the study of the ridge and furrow patterns on the
palms and on the soles of the feet. These are the designs that have
always been used in police work and as such have been the subject of
serious statistical study in several countries for a long time. More
recently the patterns have become of interest to geneticists, because
they show hereditary characters and, forming during the third or fourth
month of fetal development, persist unchanged throughout life. The
distribution of the ridges is determined by the arrangement of sweat
glands and nerve endings and is so firmly established that it is
impossible to destroy or change the patterns permanently. They reappear
as healing brings the natural skin to the surface again after severe
burns and even after skin grafting.
There is little controversy surrounding the ridges, as these are not
the marks used by gypsy fortunetellers. Jan Purkinje, a Czechoslovakian
physician, was the first to describe the patterns, and his
classification and interpretation are still followed. In London, a
Society for the Study of Physiological Patterns in the Hand has begun
to collect data in an attempt to establish connections between
distinctive patterns and certain pathological conditions. So far the
results look promising, but far more are needed for statistical
significance.
Superimposed on the art-nouveau background of finely etched designs in
the hand are the more obvious lines and creases. These are the stuff of
the fairground palmist, and surprisingly, it is with these lines that
we find some exciting biological correlations. Anatomists describe the
creases in the palm as 'lines of flexure', but there is no good
functional reason for these lines to fall in one position rather than
another. Every hand seems to have its own idiosyncrasies, and the
palmists insist that these mean something.
Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was one of the first
reputable scientists to take the idea of palmar diagnosis seriously. He
made a collection of palm prints and presented them to the University
of London at the same time that he endowed a professorship there and
founded the science of eugenics. The Galton Laboratory has carried on
with these studies and in 1959 showed that Mongolism was due to a
chromosomal abnormality that also produced a characteristic line, known
as the 'simian crease', across the top of the palm. (158) Since then,
about thirty different congenital disorders have been connected with
particular patterns in the palm, some of which are apparent even before
the disease appears. In 1966, abnormal palm prints were linked for the
first time with a virus infection. Three New York pediatricians
palm-printed babies born to mothers who had caught German measles
during early pregnancy and found that, even if the babies were not
affected in any other way, all had a characteristic and unusual crease
in their hands. (306)
In 1967 a team of Japanese doctors extended their system of baby
identification to include patients of all ages admitted to an Osaka
hospital. After collecting over two hundred thousand prints and their
relevant case histories, they discovered that there were many
correlations between the patterns and the diseases treated. They claim
that not only is the position of a particular line important, but that
its length, breadth, the degree to which it has been broken up into
islands or triangles, and even its color have diagnostic significance.
They are now able to tell just by looking at a palm print, whether a
patient is suffering or has recently suffered from organic diseases
such as thyroid deficiency, spinal deformation, and liver and kidney
malfunctions. They also say that it is possible to predict with a high
degree of accuracy, whether a particular patient is likely to contract
infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and perhaps even cancer.
There are an enormous number of nerves ending in the hand in sensors of
heat and cold, pressure and pain. So many of these make direct
connections with the brain and if human proportions were determined
only by the nerve supply, we would have hands the size of beach
umbrellas. If the palmists are right in asserting that these nerves
carry a two-way traffic and that all internal physical conditions are
mirrored externally in our palms, then it makes very little sense for a
general practitioner to ask to see a patient's tongue. Even going on
the evidence already clearly established, he could learn a great deal
more by saying, 'Good morning. How are you? Please put out your hand.'
Fortunetelling by lines in the hand bears the same relationship to the
serious study of chirology as newspaper horoscopes do to true
astrology. Chirologists are concerned with the whole picture presented
by the hand. They study the basic skin pattern with a magnifying glass
to find changes in the texture and rhythm; they look at all the flexure
lines and at the smaller lines that cross them, paying particular
attention to the ways in which these are broken or intersect; they feel
the underlying muscles and tendons and take note of the mounds and
ridges these produce; they study the thickness and form of the palm,
the relative lengths of fingers and thumb, the flexibility and shape of
the joints, and the color and texture of the nails and skin. Only after
making all these observations will a serious chirologist attempt to
draw the threads together and make some assessment of the subject's
physical and psychological condition.
The basic physiology behind their assumptions seems to be sound. The
brain, the nervous system, and the sense organs are all derived from
the ectoderm of the embryo at the same time as the skin. Their common
origin means that they maintain very close connections throughout life,
and it is not at all unreasonable to assume that many internal events
will show up externally through the skin. Jaundice, a liver disease,
typically shows up during the early states as a yellow discoloration of
the skin. Rheumatoid arthritis, which attacks the joints of small
bones, may also appear as dry, silvery scales on the skin. These are
obvious, external changes, but a great number of other internal
physical disorders could well produce more subtle effects that can be
recognised only by careful study of sensitive areas of skin such as
those of the hand. There is certainly a very close connection between
most skin diseases and mental states. Dermatitis, urticaria, acne,
warts, and allergic reactions are all skin conditions that are produced
almost entirely by anxiety and other types of emotional stress. So,
theoretically there is no reason why it should not be possible to make
judgments about a person's prevailing mental condition, and therefore
about his personality, from signs appearing in the skin.
Most of these conditions affect only the general pattern and texture of
the skin. The connection between internal physical and mental states
and the crease lines of the palm is more difficult to establish. The
lines do not follow the patterns of skeleton, muscles, tendons, blood
vessels, nerves, or lymph or sweat glands. Anatomists claim that the
creases are entirely random and concerned only with allowing the flesh
of the palm to fold when the hand forms a fist. The characteristic and
basic division of the palm by two roughly horizontal lines (the ones
the palmists call Head and Heart) and two roughly vertical lines (those
of Fate and Life), are almost certainly produced by the resolution of
the various physical forces set up in the hand by flexion and tension.
There does, however, seem to be some other principle, which governs
their exact shape and the continually changing appearance of the
smaller creases. If physical forces alone were responsible, one would
expect the lines to remain stable in the hand of a man whose way of
life and work were relatively constant from day to day, but long-term
studies show that there is a constant fluctuation in the palm patterns.
There is one dramatic record of a house painter who fell from a great
height and suffered such severe concussion that he remained unconscious
for two weeks and had to be intravenously fed. After a week in this
condition, all the creases in his hands vanished as though they had
been wiped off with a sponge - and then, as he regained consciousness,
the lines gradually reappeared. (158)
Death masks are often most unlike the living person. Throughout life,
even in deep sleep, the many fine muscles of the face are in states of
variable tension produced by constant stimulation from the brain. The
total effect of these waves of activity is to produce a pattern of
expression that gives each face its unique features. (344) It is likely
that a similar supply goes out from the brain to all parts of the body
and constantly reinforces form and function. The exact pattern of the
palm print, like that of the heartbeat or the life field, seems to
depend on the maintenance of these signals, because the lines in the
hand begin to break down when the impulses cease, at the moment of
death.
The signals from the brain also determine how the hand will be used. In
this, the science of body language is paralleled by an older one, in
which the gestures are much more subtle, each one, however, being
recorded at the time of performance in a written code that can be
examined and analysed at leisure.
Graphology
Camillo Baldo in 1622 published the first known book on the subject,
which bore the title Treating of How a Written Message May Reveal the
Nature of Qualities of the Writer. He was followed by Goethe, the
Brownings, Poe, Van Gogh, Mendelssohn, and Freud. Today graphologists,
like the serious chirologists, have quantified their science and lifted
handwriting analysis out of its fairground atmosphere to make it a
useful tool now widely used in psychoanalysis and in educational and
vocational guidance.
There is nothing instinctive in handwriting; nobody is born with the
ability to put pen to paper. It is strictly a learned pattern of
behavior that has to be acquired over years of painstaking effort under
the careful scrutiny of a teacher. So all written records show cultural
and environmental patterns that depend purely on where and when a
person learned to transcribe the traditional symbols. But after years
of practicing the skill it becomes mechanical, and the automatic
actions are influenced more by personal factors. In an adult, the pen
places one letter after another almost unconsciously, while the mind
moves around the sound of the word. Between the thought and the final
result there is ample room for the expression of character, and there
can be very little doubt that the shape of each line in every letter
carries the mark of the author.
There are many examples of animals that show individual differences in
learned patterns of behavior. Young squirrels encountering a
hard-shelled nut for the first time make indiscriminate scraping
patterns on it with their teeth until at last the nut yields and breaks
open. As they gain more experience, they learn how best to apply the
minimum effort for the maximum return by following the fibers in the
shell and not working against the grain. Techniques differ in that some
individuals gnaw a piece out of the apex of the nut, some make furrows
running up to meet at the apex, some circle the apex and lift off the
lid, and some slice the nut neatly and completely in half. (337) Each
squirrel leaves a pattern so distinctive that an expert can go into a
forest and tell, just by looking at the shells, how many animals were
involved. If he happens to be a good game ranger, then he can file
'tooth-prints' of all the squirrels living in the area and not only
keep track of their development and whereabouts but even get an idea of
each individual's state of health.
There is a definite connection between handwriting and health. Some
analysts claim that they can detect specific sicknesses from the
script. It is true that loss of co-ordination due to something like
Parkinson's disease would certainly produce gross deformation in
writing. The American Medical Association reports, 'There are definite
organic diseases that graphodiagnostics can help to diagnose from their
earliest beginnings.' (158) They list anemia, blood poisoning, tumors,
and various bone diseases among these, but add that old age can produce
substantially the same signs. A few skilled geriatricians believe that
it is possible to use handwriting as a sort of X ray to distinguish
between actual mental unbalance and normal senility. The general
disruption of handwriting patterns that occurs in both emotional and
physical disorders is clearly recognisable and almost impossible to
disguise.
Like the serious astrologer or chirologist, a good graphologist is
concerned with details. Before making an assessment, he collects
several samples of script produced at different times, preferably with
different pens, and never works with material specifically written for
analysis. He examines the slant and weight of the writing; looks at
margins, spacing, rhythm, and legibility; watches punctuation and the
way in which t is crossed and i and j are dotted; studies the shape of
loops and the way in which strokes begin and end. With all these
characters, repetition is considered to be important; the more often a
trait is recorded in the script, the stronger it is thought to be. The
relative frequency is also measured, so patterns that indicate
contrasting traits can be reconciled. If only a limited amount of
script is available for analysis, graphologists can get most
information from the signature of the subject. This is something that
is written so often and with such specific reference to self that it
becomes a stylised representation of the writer as unique as a
fingerprint. Hence its use for the purposes of identification.
In the assessment of all behavior patterns, it is necessary to decide
how much is determined purely by functional requirements, and once this
quantity has been subtracted, the rest can be used as an indication of
cultural and personal preferences. An aboriginal tribesman puts on as
much clothing as is necessary to protect him from the sun or the cold,
and whatever is worn over and above this must be there for other
reasons; but great care should be exercised in attributing value to the
extra items. They may be worn for traditional and cultural reasons, for
the sake of convention and modesty, or there may be religious or
magical significance in the garments, or perhaps social values, such as
status or position, may be involved. Only when all these possibilities
have been exhausted can we pick out, say, a necklace of cowrie shells,
and say that these express the individual's personality and that he
must be an outgoing character with a fine appreciation of nature. Then
we discover that cowries are the local form of currency and that he was
just on his way out to buy a new harpoon. This kind of pitfall is
common to the life sciences and applies directly to studies such as
graphology.
In writing, the letters and words are symbols of language and ideas.
They are functional signals that have been dressed up in patterns with
a variety of traditional and cultural nuances. With experience it is
possible to strip away the well-rounded curves; long sloping
up-and-down strokes; and the liberal ornamentation that are
affirmations of national identity and indicate only that the writer
learned to use his pen in France. It should also be possible to
recognise the fact that heavy lines may be caused by nothing more than
the poor quality of the paper in an undeveloped country or the current
fashion for felt-tipped pens in a prosperous one. This kind of
preliminary scrutiny is not always done with the necessary care, but
beneath all the misleading surface details there seem to be a number of
basic patterns in graphology that can be used as a valid scientific
means of assessing individual character.
I believe we all respond to subtle signals in other people's script
even without training, and that a letter from a loved one carries an
unconsciously coded message in every line and flourish that is quite
distinct from the sense of the words involved. Why else should we be
upset by a typewritten letter from a close friend, unless the machine
comes between us and destroys the chance of reading the lines
themselves?
An American psychologist says, 'How long you make your strokes, how
wide your loops, where you put the dot over the i, isn't a matter of
chance. It's governed by the laws of personality; ... the movements you
make while writing are like gestures - they express what you feel.
Anything that moves you, disturbs you or excites you - either
emotionally or physically - shows up in the marks you make with your
pen.' (158) So now General Motors, General Electric, US Steel, and the
Firestone Tire and Rubber Company all employ full-time executives to do
nothing but watch these marks - and they seem to be earning their
salaries.
The hand and its behavior provide one of the most sensitive external
measures of the workings of the brain, but there are other outward
signs of mind.
Physiognomy
Most amoebae multiply in the immortal manner - splitting down the
middle to form two daughter cells and then doing it again and again as
necessary. But there are some species that go in for communal
reproduction, getting together in groups of up to half a million that
form a special sexual organism. Dictyostelium discoideum is normally an
independent single cell that flows around in the usual erratic amoeba
way, but whenever food is in short supply and there are a number of
other amoebae around, the cells get together at central collection
points and build towers that grow until they topple over into a small,
glittering mass. The blob takes on a bullet shape and becomes a slug
with a distinct front and back end, shows a communal sensitivity to
heat and light, and migrates as one purposeful being to the most
favorable environment. There it stands on end, forms a long, thin
stalk, and lifts a spherical mass of cells up into the air like a
balloon on a string. The separate amoebae making up the structure take
on different functions, some forming the supporting stalk and others
becoming spores that will be wafted away to liberate new free-living
amoebae somewhere else.
This joint effort in a single-celled organism is a remarkable
development. John Bonner has discovered that it is made possible by the
fact that all amoebae are not created equal. There are visible
differences between those that are destined to become the stalk and
those that will be spores: the stalk makers are slightly larger than
the others and move more quickly. So even in a society as old as this
slug it is possible to pick out individuals on the basis only of their
appearance and to use this to describe their behavior patterns and to
predict their destinies.
In more complex organisms there are even more clues to work with; whole
branches of science, such as paleontology, are forced to draw
inferences about diet, habitat, and behavior directly from what is
known about the structure of species long since extinct. Collaboration
between engineer George Whitfield and zoologist Cherrie Bramwell at the
University of Reading has produced new deductive information of this
kind about Pteranodon ingens, the largest flying creature ever to
exist. (340) Working from scattered pieces of skeleton, like a team
rebuilding a crashed airliner, they estimate its wingspan at
twenty-three feet and total weight at only thirty-five pounds - and
from this information deduce that it was poor at powered flight, but
was a very efficient glider with an extremely low rate of sink and a
very low flying and stalling speed. These clues, together with a study
of the teeth, suggest that this vulturine gliding reptile lived at sea,
soaring in the rising air where the wind blows over the waves and
diving to snatch fish off the surface. They also suggest that it nested
on cliffs facing the sea and the prevailing wind, and returned to its
home by soaring up the face and flopping down gently on the top.
Putting a fossil head into a wind tunnel, they discovered that the
long, thin, bony blade projecting from the pack of Pteranodon's head
was an aerodynamic fin that balanced the loads on the beak when the
head swung from side to side in its search for prey. And that this
development allowed the animal to economise on the weight of neck
muscles and made it even better suited to the light winds and warm,
shallow seas of the Cretaceous.
Similar feats of scientific detection play a large part in the search
for man's ancestors. Dubois, who discovered the famous fossil man in
Java in 1891, had nothing but a few teeth to start with, but using
these together with the skullcap and a piece of thighbone, he was able
to predict that Java Man was primitive, with a brain midway in size
between man and gorilla, and that he walked erect. Later and more
complete finds showed that this diagnosis was correct. (346)
If reasoning of this kind is capable of producing verifiable results
with fossil forms, there is no reason why it should not apply equally
well to living ones. We know that the physique of many men is directly
related to the climate in which they live. The Dinka people of Africa
are tall and thin, because this gives them the greatest possible
surface area for their body weight and helps them lose heat most
effectively, while the Eskimo are comparatively short and padded with
fat to conserve heat. The faces of Mongol people from northeast Asia
are flat, which reduces frostbite; have fat-lidded eyes, which are thus
protected against glare and snowblindness; and are smooth-skinned,
which reduces the risk of condensation on hair around the mouth.
Equatorial people tend to be dark-skinned, with a pigment that protects
deeper layers from the sun, while Nordic people are very fair and able
to take maximum advantage of occasional sunlight to promote the
formation of vitamin D in their skins. (15) This sort of climatic
engineering makes it possible to look at man's shape and deduce
something about his, or his ancestors', habitat and way of life. To a
certain extent, this knowledge will tell us a little about his
character, but it may be possible to tell quite a lot about personality
types by looking directly at physical appearance alone.
Aristotle and Plato considered the idea, but the first scientific work
on physiognomy - 'knowledge from the body' - was produced by Johann
Lavater, a nineteenth-century Swiss mystic. Charles Darwin included
similar ideas in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
and pointed out that special body structures were evolved to signal
certain emotions and that it would be reasonable to deduce from the
presence of these structures that the relevant emotion played a large
part in that animal's life. In more recent and less scholarly works on
physiognomy, writers have tended to make rather fanciful
generalisations such as 'an indented chin is a certain sign of a warm,
loving disposition', which, if they have any meaning at all, can only
be applied to small, localised groups of people. And yet, if one wades
through the literature on physiognomy, there is a germ of truth that
makes biological sense.
Taking man as a single species, it is possible to see certain basic
patterns of shape and proportion. The height of a man is usually six
times the length of his foot; the face from the top of the forehead to
the point of the chin measures one tenth of the height; the hand from
the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is usually the same as the
face from the hair line to the chin; the distance from the hair to the
eyebrows is the same as that from the eyebrows to the nostrils and from
the nostrils to the chin; and the height is normally equal to the
distance between the fingertips with arms extended sideways. It is
interesting that these world-wide human 'norms' are exactly the
proportions considered most harmonious by the classic Greek sculptors.
There is naturally a tremendous variation over the world, but national,
racial, and cultural averages can be established, and if an individual
varies significantly from these standards, there must be a good
biological reason for the deviation. William Sheldon in 1940 worked out
a system of somatotyping that recognises three extremes of body shape:
The endomorph is essentially rounded, with a round head, a bulbous
stomach, a heavy build, and a lot of fat, but he is not necessarily a
fat man and does not change to another category when he loses weight -
he just becomes a thin endomorph. The mesomorph is the classic
sculptors' model, with a large head, broad shoulders, a lot of muscle
and bone, not much fat, and relatively narrow hips. And the ectomorph
is all sharp corners and angles, with spindly limbs, narrow shoulders
and hips, and little muscle, so that even when fattened up he does not
become an endomorph. (306) Everyone has a little of all three in his
makeup, and a random group of people, say those called up for jury duty
or traveling in the same train, will show all possible combinations,
but a group chosen for particular physical prowess will favor certain
shapes. Olympic athletes are seldom endomorphic. There does not,
however, seem to be any correlation between shape and intelligence - a
group of university graduates show a completely random pattern of
combinations.
Phrenology
Franz Gall, an anatomist working in Vienna at the end of the eighteenth
century, made a special study of neurology and decided that the brain
was responsible for producing the phenomena of mind. For this heresy he
was expelled from Catholic Austria. He continued with his work in exile
and decided that not only were emotions produced in the head, but that
different ones arose in different parts of the brain. (226) This was an
astute and revolutionary idea at a time when the orthodox view was that
the brain, whatever it did, worked as a whole. Up to this point Gall
was absolutely right, but then he went off at a tangent and began to
ascribe functions to parts of the brain on the flimsiest evidence. He
remembered that two of his school friends with good memories also
happened to have bulging eyes, and concluded from this that the faculty
of memory must be located in the frontal lobes of the brain, just
behind the eyes. He chose sites in the cerebral hemispheres for the
functions of language and calculation on similarly vague grounds and
published all his theories in a book that, much later, gave rise to the
craze of phrenology. European society discovered it with delight, and
'bumps on the head' became a fashionable parlor pastime in London and
Paris. Life-size, bald, china heads were produced as guides, suitably
inscribed with a patchwork labeled 'sublimity', 'ideality',
'benevolence', and that splendid Victorian substitute for sex -
'philoprogenitiveness'. The subject quickly fell into disrepute, and
serious anatomists ignored it altogether, which was a pity, because it
embodies a useful idea that was lost for 150 years.
The phrenologists made two basic mistakes. They assumed that, if a
faculty was particularly well developed in someone, then that part of
the brain in which it was thought to be located would also be large and
well developed; and they thought that these bulges in the brain
produced corresponding bumps and indentations on the surface of the
skull. Today we know that the volume of the brain has little to do with
its effectiveness (Byron had a very small brain) and that bumps on the
head are produced by thickening on the outside of the skull. There is
no similarity between the ripples on the inside of the brain case and
the bulges outside. But the phrenologists were right about functions
being localised in certain areas of the brain - there is a center of
language and another that controls sexual activity. It was not until
1939, when experiments were done on monkeys with parts of their brains
removed, that science really grasped the fact that character and
personality were localised in specific areas. In one operation,
alterations were made to only one side of the brain, so that, with the
left eye open, the monkey was violent and aggressive, and looking only
through its right eye, it became indifferent and docile. Which,
incidentally, provides an anatomical basis for the old belief that
witches have one 'evil eye', whose powers differ markedly from the
other one.
While there may not be bumps of aggression on the head, the brain areas
responsible for initiating aggressive behavior do set up patterns of
muscle action that usually follow the same paths. A baboon has a
repertoire of three basic facial expressions that accompany attack,
aggressive-threat, and scared-threat behavior. In all these
expressions, the eyes are open wide, and, depending on the level of
aggression, the eyebrows move from a lowered frown up into a raised
position. Constant repetition of these patterns by an individual in an
insecure hierarchical position leaves its mark on his face. Vertical
and horizontal lines begin to appear permanently on the forehead and
produce a visible, external sign of a prevailing emotional state.
Physiognomy works to the extent that it is possible to look at such an
animal or man and predict that he will probably be more than ordinarily
aggressive.
In apes and man a state of pleasure is indicated by a relaxation of the
eyes and, at a high level, by an automatic inflation of small pouches
on the lower eyelid. This response cannot be faked; it appears only in
genuine happiness, and if it takes place often, leaves the pouch in a
permanent state of partial inflation. This character has only recently
been recorded by physiologists and ethologists, but it is well
described in all the works on physiognomy.
The connection between other internal states and external appearance is
less obvious. Physiognomists traditionally equate the round-faced,
endomorphic type with a personality involving good humor and
adaptability; the mesomorphic face, with the strong bone and muscle
structure, is said to indicate an energetic and forceful character; and
the slender, pear-shaped, ectomorphic face is supposed to show
imagination and sensitivity. Broadly speaking, most psychologists agree
with this assessment as applied to the extreme examples of the three
types, but it is a generalisation of little real value. Another
criterion often used is the position of the ear: the farther back on
the head it lies, the greater the intellect is said to be.
Embryonically its position is determined by that of the auditory nerve,
which will sometimes be displaced if the cortical area of the brain is
well developed - so there may be something in this belief. The
unsubstantiated idea of a strong, hooked nose being the sign of a
leader probably originated in Roman times, when people with such noses
did lead, but it would be fruitless to look for a nose of this shape
among the very capable Asian and African leaders of the present. Many
other physiognomic characters, such as red hair, brown eyes, and thick
lips are similarly associated with racial stereotypes and mean nothing.
Birds of prey kill for a living, and so we associate hooked beaks with
violent and aggressive behavior, and we contrast this with the
stereotype of the soft-billed, gentle dove. Nothing could be further
from the truth. The social life of most birds of prey is quiet and well
ordered, whereas there are few things more bloody and destructive than
the battle between rival male doves. We tend to make the same sort of
mistake in our estimation of human character and behavior.
The small strengths of physiognomy lie partly in physiology and partly
in behavior. There are medical conditions, such as hyperthyroidism,
that result in an excess of the thyroid hormone and produce
over-activity and excitability - and one of the classic symptoms of the
disorder is bulging eyes. There are external characters that can be
acquired by the constant repetition of a muscular act that is directly
connected to a particular mental state. These correlations are probably
statistically significant, in that a large number of people who have a
certain appearance will also behave in a predictable way, but
comparisons should be made with care.
There are several offshoots of physiognomy - one of the most fanciful
being 'moleosophy' - the interpretation of moles on the body, the
theory being that the shape and color of the mole and its position are
indications of character. These marks on the skin are often congenital
and hereditary, often occurring in exactly the same place on a child as
in one of its parents, so their position is not determined by chance,
but there is nothing to support the idea that a mole on the ankle
indicates 'a fearful nature' or that one on the ear will bring 'riches
far beyond expectations'.
So much of our character is determined by learning and experience that
any system of interpretation that relies on permanent physical features
is likely to be inaccurate. People change, and transient patterns are
far more effective indications of mood, because the best signals are
those that, like the flashing light, produce a sudden and dramatic
change. Blushing is one of these. Basically it is a reddening of the
skin produced by dilation of the blood vessels and is most common in
young females, but it seems to occur in all humans no matter what their
sex or color and can almost be considered as a biological character of
our species. Records show that girls who blushed freely fetched the
highest prices in old slave markets, so there seem to be both sexual
and submissive factors involved in the signal. Desmond Morris suggests
that it is a powerful invitation to intimacy. As such, it probably
serves the same function as breeding plumage in many male birds, which
appears only at certain times and, when it does, it indicates a
willingness and intention to breed.
All in all, it seems that there are limits to what one can learn about
an individual's mental state, from observation only of the external
signs of mind. Sensitive equipment such as electroencephalographs and
life-field detectors give a closer view of the outward parts of
internal processes, but even these are measuring only the fringes of
the phenomenon. In order to really appreciate the potentials of the
brain, it is necessary to learn new techniques of self-control and
contact with others. A few of these keys to Supernature have already
been discovered.
SEVEN
TRANSCENDENCE
Take a toad. Hold it flat between the palms of your hands; turn it over
on its back and keep it there for a moment. Now remove your upper hand
carefully and the toad will lie quite still with its webbed feet in the
air.
This 'experimentum mirabile' was demonstrated in 1646 by a Jesuit
priest as an example of man's dominion over the animal world, but in
fact it illustrated a far more fundamental principle - the domination
of the rest of the body by the brain. Many species react in the same
way. A crayfish that is made to stand on its head with claws on the
ground and tail up in the air, stays in that position of supplication
until disturbed. A hare held tightly upside down adopts a similar sort
of waxlike pliability, and its limbs can be arranged in any weird
posture. The snake charmer's grip on the back of a cobra's neck reduces
it to instant and sometimes rigid immobility, suggesting that Moses was
perhaps a better biologist than we give him credit for. Many zoos use
this principle of immobilisation for keeping small mammals and birds
quiet while they are being weighed. In all cases, constriction seems to
play an important role in producing the response, which may account for
the comparative stillness of babies tightly wrapped in swaddling
clothes.
Sudden immobility can be induced by a high level of fear. The Swiss
psychiatrist Greppin tells of a campaign to eliminate the sparrows in
his hospital grounds that ended after ten weeks in mass paralytic
hysteria, with the birds dropping like stones into the bushes and then
freezing into rigid postures as soon as they saw a man with a gun.
(128) This sounds remarkably like the catatonic state that fear can
produce in man. The explorer David Livingstone was once attacked by a
lion at Mabotsa, in southern Africa, and described his reaction to
being grabbed by the shoulder and mauled. 'The shock produced a stupor
similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake
of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess in which there was no sense
of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was
happening. It was like what patients partially under the influence of
chloroform describe, who see all the operation, but feel not the knife.
The singular condition was not the result of any mental process. The
shake annihilated fear and allowed no sense of horror in looking round
at the beast.' (201) When the lion let go for a moment, Livingstone
recovered and managed to get away.
There can be little doubt that under certain circumstances immobility
has high survival value. Many animals escape from predators in exactly
this way. Some, like the bittern Botaurus stellaris, enhance the effect
of their leaflike feather pattern by adopting an elongated pose and
swaying in time with the reeds around them. When a predator gets too
close they fly away, but others, such as the stick insect, rely so
completely on their immobility that they can be dismembered before they
will move. Some vertebrates use this same kind of self-induced
catatonia in emergencies.
The Cameroon toad Bufo superciliaris and the hognosed snake Heterodon
platyrhinos both sham dead, turning over and lying on their backs with
their tongues hanging out when threatened. But the mechanism is not
perfectly developed in them yet, because they make the hilarious
mistake when put the right way up or moved in any way, of immediately
turning upside down again. The most accomplished death feigner of all
is certainly the American opossum Didelphis virginiana, which has a
superb fixed-action pattern to call on. In normal sleep the opossum
keeps its mouth and eyes closed and its feet out of sight, but when
attacked it collapses with eyes open, lying on its side with the feet
visible and claws grasping the ground. The fact that the animal is
still wide awake has been demonstrated in tests that show that it
responds to loud noises by twitching its ears and by retracting its
lips when prodded. There is no difference in body temperature, oxygen
consumption, or blood chemistry, and EEG records show brain waves that
are identical to those of a normal, highly alert animal. (107) 'Playing
possum' appears as a complete behavior pattern in isolated young
animals at an age of 120 days, which is when they would normally be
weaned and begin to wander off on their own. (230) So this species has
developed a stereotyped, instinctive way of coping with attack that
just imitates the automatic paralysis that some other species have to
rely on to avoid death. In all of them, immobility clearly works well,
inhibiting further attack by a predator and perhaps giving them a
chance to escape later comparatively unharmed.
Immobilisation can also be induced by disorientation. (122) At the
Freiburg zoo they have built a mechanical device to supplement the
effects of constriction. An animal is strapped tightly to the inside of
the lid of a box, with its feet just touching the floor, and then the
lid is spun on a swivel to bring the captive quickly up and onto its
back, where it lies without struggling. The great French naturalist
Fabre reported that most birds could be immobilised simply by swinging
them to and fro or by tucking the head under a wing. (305) The degree
of control varies with the amount of disorientation. Falcons are not
paralysed but are certainly made more amenable by hooding, and blinkers
serve the same function on a horse.
Some birds do not respond just to being held or disorientated, but
require a different kind of stimulus. They can be treated like toads
and placed flat on the ground with their necks stretched out in front,
but to get them to 'freeze' effectively it is usually necessary to draw
a sand pattern of long, steady lines radiating out from the beak. When
released in this position, they lie there with eyes focused on the
lines until they gradually recover or a puff of wind rouses them and
sends them flying away. This concentration on a rhythmic pattern seems
to be the basis of 'fascination' techniques used by some reptiles. Many
zoologists scoff at the idea of snakes fixing their prey with some sort
of visual display, but it happens. (145) The African tree snake
Theletornis kirtlandii has a vivid red tongue with a black forked tip
that protrudes several inches out of the snake's mouth and makes
extraordinary rhythmic movements. These not only attract the interest
of small birds, but seem to put them into a bemused state that makes
them easy prey. Two species of Langaha snakes in Madagascar do the same
thing with a nose leaf and a comb on top of their head, and in Ceylon
the pit viper Ancistrodon hypnale uses the colored tip of its tail to
fascinate passing prey. The truly fascinating thing about all these
displays is that the organs used by the snakes all move in the same
way, vibrating at a regular three beats per second. Little is known of
the brain waves of birds and small mammals, but this could be the
frequency that is their equivalent of the alpha waves that occur during
relaxed meditation in our brains. Vibrations of six or seven cycles a
second make us irritable, but ten we find soothing. These are examples
of immobilisation being produced across the species line, but there is
at least one example of the technique being used by members of the same
species on each other. In certain spiders there is such a huge
difference in size between the sexes that the male runs the risk of
being mistaken for prey and attacked and eaten by his mate, so he
approaches her only under the cover of a reassuring semaphore display
that involves a sustained rhythmic movement of his palpi.
Immobilisation can therefore be induced by constriction,
disorientation, fear, a fixed behavior pattern, or rhythmic
stimulation. In man all these techniques have been used, but in 1843
the Scots physician James Braid showed that a trance state could also
be induced by suggestion, and he called the process hypnosis, from the
Greek for sleep. (37)
Hypnosis
The process of animal hypnosis has been called catatonia, catalepsy,
thanatosis, akinesis, and action inhibition; in man it has been known
as mesmerism, animal magnetism, somnambulism, reverie, and druidic
sleep. In neither case is there any evidence that hypnosis has anything
at all to do with normal sleep, but there is widespread disagreement
about exactly what hypnosis is.
Léon Chertok, Director of the Paris Institute of Psychiatry, believes
that it is a fourth organismic state, which can be added to waking,
sleeping, and dreaming. (72) It certainly differs in several respects
from each of these three states of being, but the difficulty is that
although hypnosis is held to be a genuine condition, nobody has yet
come up with a satisfactory definition of it. Ivan Pavlov, the
celebrated Soviet psychologist, thought that it was a defense mechanism
that is similar in many ways to sleep. (241) He induced it in dogs by
delaying the presentation of food for a long time after the sounding of
the signal that the animals had come to associate with food. The dogs'
tense expectation often led to catatonic states so severe that they
could not move even when food was finally presented. Anatol Milechnin,
a Uruguayan physician, uses this and other evidence to support his
theory that hypnosis is an emotional reaction that can be produced
either by shock techniques, such as the sudden firing of a gun, or by
tranquilising stimuli, such as stroking or soft singing. (211) The
British psychiatrist Stephen Black combines both these ideas into the
notion that hypnosis could be a reflex conditioned in very early life.
(26) He suggests that during development in the egg or the uterus an
animal is physically restricted and must remain relatively immobile,
and that forcible restriction in later life produces a return to this
condition of inaction. It is certainly true that most animals, when put
into a trance state or feigning death, do adopt a fetal posture. This
theory could also explain why rhythmic stimuli produce hypnosis. The
dominant sound and sensation throughout an embryo's life is the
continuous rhythmic beat of its mother's heart, and after birth it is
most easily tranquilised either by being held close to its mother's
left breast, where it can hear the heart, or by a metronome or a cradle
that moves at seventy-two cycles per minute - the same rate as the
pulse. (218) The hypnotic effect of solid-beat music and the trancelike
state of some dancers can be explained in the same way.
In this climate of uncertainty the best way to examine hypnosis is to
look at what little is known about the physiology of the condition.
Hypnosis-like states occur in people that are clearly awake. A person
lost in thought may read page after page of a book without any
comprehension and listen to a whole conversation without hearing any of
it; or an injured boxer may complete a bout without any realisation of
having done so. This narrowing of attention is very characteristic of
the hypnotic state. Sleeping and dreaming can both be differentiated
from waking by the differences of the patterns that show up on an EEG,
but the brain waves of a hypnotised person are identical with the
waking state. (81) A subject wired to an EEG machine shows, when
resting with eyes closed, exactly the same pattern of waves as when
hypnotised a moment later by means of a code word. (93) There seems to
be no change either in cortical potential, pulse rate, skin resistance,
or palmar electric potentials. (187) There is a slight rise in body
temperature brought about by vasodilation during the trance state, and
there seem to be small changes in the voltage of the life field. (265)
But both these measurements are very subtle, and changes of this kind
can also be recorded as a response to purely emotional reactions, so we
are left with no known physiological indication of hypnosis.
The only way one can tell if someone is hypnotised is if he either
responds to test suggestions or actually says afterward that he entered
a hypnotic state. This is obviously very unsatisfactory and leads to
the suspicion that a large part of the hypnotic phenomenon is
self-determined, like the behavior adopted by a frightened opossum.
Seymour Fisher, in an ingenious experiment, suggested to deeply
hypnotised subjects that every time they heard the word 'psychology'
they would scratch their right ear. (101) After waking them, he tested
the suggestion by using the word, and all of them dutifully scratched
their ear. At this point one of his associates came into the room and
they carried on a prearranged, apparently informal discussion about
everyday topics in which the word 'psychology' came up several times,
but the subjects failed to respond to it. After some minutes of
conversation, the associate left and Fisher turned back to his class,
and when he next used the key word, all of them again produced the
appropriate response. It seems that some hypnotic suggestions work only
because the subjects do what they think is expected of them. When, by
implication, the experiment was abandoned during the casual
conversation, the suggestion was ignored as well.
Similar results are recorded for an experiment on pain in which all
subjects were given exactly the same stimulus but showed a marked
difference in their response. (195) Those who were being paid most to
take part in the research also suffered the greatest amount of pain,
apparently because they felt that they ought to suffer more. There is
some reason to believe that hypnosis is governed in this way by
psychological controls, but whatever causes the hypnotic state, there
is absolutely no doubt about its effects.
One of the characteristics of pain is that it produces an increase in
blood pressure. At Stanford University they compared the responses of
hypnotised subjects, who had been told that they would feel no pain,
with non-hypnotised subjects, who were asked to pretend that they were
feeling no pain. (149) Observers could not tell the difference between
the two groups by watching their reactions, but the blood pressure of
all those feeling pain soared while that of the hypnotised subjects
remained steady. Hypnotism seems to be a real painkiller and is now
being used as the sole anesthetic in childbirth, dental work, and some
major surgery. A chemical anesthetic works by blocking painful nerve
impulses before they reach the brain, but hypnosis apparently acts by
getting the brain to ignore the impulses. (314) In several surgical
reports of hypnoanesthesia, the patients showed no overt signs of pain,
but their pulse rate and blood pressure fluctuated considerably during
the operations. They were feeling something. It looks as though the
mind, under the influence of suggestion, is exerting considerable
control over the body. Part of the explanation may be that many of the
reactions to pain are produced by anxiety, and if there is no worry
regarding the source of the pain, we can tolerate surprisingly large
amounts of discomfort. Injuries that would ordinarily be painful often
escape notice altogether during important occasions, when our attention
is fixed elsewhere. Afterward we notice the bruise and wonder where it
came from.
There seems to be almost no limit to the things that we can make our
body do if we put our mind to it. Stephen Black gave subjects under
hypnosis a direct suggestion that they would not be able to hear a tone
with the particular frequency of 575 cycles per second, and in
subsequent testing they showed no physiological startle reactions to
the tone when it was suddenly played very loudly. They were also unable
to feel the vibration of a tuning fork of the same frequency when it
was placed against their ankle bones. (28) Several attempts have been
made to induce color blindness or even total blindness by suggestion,
and in one subject it was found that the brain no longer reacted
normally to a bright light. (202) This is a sort of negative
hallucination - not seeing something that was there - but positive
hallucination of bright colors had also occurred complete with
afterimages in the appropriate complementary colors. (97)
Of all skin diseases, warts seem to be most closely associated with
psychological factors. Wart 'charmers' ply their trade, apparently
successfully, in most countries of the world, so it is not surprising
to find that hypnosis work equally well. In one well-controlled study,
fourteen patients with long-standing warts all over their bodies were
given suggestions that those on only one side of the body would
disappear. (305) In five weeks they did. Allergies seem to be similarly
responsive to suggestion. An elegant test in Japan involved blindfolded
subjects, all of whom were known to be allergic to a certain tree.
(159) When the leaves of chestnut were placed on their left arms and
they were told that these were from the allergy tree, all developed the
usual dermatitis; but when the real leaves were placed on their right
arms and said to be harmless, no reaction took place. All allergic
reaction is produced by a foreign substance, such as pollen, that
enters the body and combines with a protein to form a specific antibody
that sometimes produces distressing side effects or allergic reactions.
It is a relatively straightforward biochemical reaction that apparently
has nothing to do with the brain, but there is now a wealth of evidence
to show beyond doubt that the whole process is governed by mental
factors. The classic test for tuberculosis, a bacterial infection, is
the Mantoux skin test, which produces red allergic weal on the skin if
the patient has TB antibodies in his blood, but it has been shown that
a hypnotic suggestion not to react can produce a negative response to
the test even in someone riddled with TB. (27) This nicely demonstrates
the dominance of emotion over the wasting disease, which has long
associations with depression and unrequited lovers 'alone and palely
loitering'.
Other physiological mechanisms are also amenable to suggestion. (26) In
deep hypnosis even the tendon reflex that makes a leg jump when tapped
on the knee can be eliminated. (13) The heart can be speeded up or
slowed down and the amount of blood circulating in any one limb can be
increased. (298) Nearsighted people can be made to change the shape of
their eyeballs and improve their distance vision for short periods.
(173) And perhaps most impressive of all, the contractions of the
stomach due to great hunger can be eliminated altogether by nothing
more than the suggestion of eating a large meal. (196)
Many of these studies have been strongly criticised, most effectively
by Theodore Barber, who hates the whole idea of hypnosis. (14) In some
instances the criticism is justified - the effects listed might not
have been produced by hypnosis; but the arguments are rather pointless
and tend to conceal something very important. Whether produced by what
is called 'hypnosis' or by what others prefer to see as simple
'suggestion', the fact remains that all these bodily functions, which
are normally operated by the autonomic nervous system, over which we
have no conscious control, are amenable to outside influence. Whatever
the process may be, it has enormous biological significance and gives
us our first direct contact with the elusive unconscious.
Autosuggestion
The whole problem of consciousness is full of pitfalls, many of them
purely semantic, and it is a long way from satisfactory solution, but
for our purposes it is enough to say that man has something the amoeba
does not have. We have an individuality that seems to be based on our
experience. The brain of a newborn child is in effect a blank sheet,
which quickly becomes covered by records of experiences that have been
useful to him. At first the child depends completely on others, and his
most urgent need is therefore to get these others to do what he wants.
Right from the very beginning, he starts to build up a system of
communication based on information he slowly collects. This is stored
in what amounts to a theoretical model of the world as he sees it. Our
brains continue to build this structure throughout life, modifying and
adding to it as necessary, but always comparing the input of daily
events with the record of past experience of events of the same kind.
At the highest levels, the brain calls on stored information to make
judgments about things even in the absence of the normal stimuli - it
can 'think' for itself.
This ability is roughly what is meant by consciousness. We know that we
have it, and we can recognise it in many other mammals and birds that
seem to respond to us or to each other in the same way. We have reason
to doubt its existence in reptiles, amphibians, and fish, and arguments
go on continually about the possibility of consciousness, perhaps a
sort of collective version, in the social insects. Few people think
that worms or jellyfish have it, and it would be hard to find anyone
who believed in conscious sponges or seaweed. It is very difficult to
know where to draw the line and quite unnecessary to even try; all we
need do is recognise the fact that the possibility of consciousness
gets more and more remote as we look back along the line of
evolutionary development. It is a comparatively new thing and best
developed in the more advanced organisms.
Those processes we recognise as conscious are governed almost entirely
by the central nervous system - the brain and the spinal cord - and
these, too, are relatively new developments. So the remainder of the
nerve network, the autonomic system supplying the gut, blood vessels,
and glands, must be more primitive. This system governs the processes
we call unconscious; its origins seem to lie a very long way back in
organic history. Going all the way back to a time before the
development of any kind of nervous system, early protoplasm must have
been faced with one major problem - that of keeping itself intact in
the struggle against disruption from outside. To do this it would at
least have to be able to distinguish 'self' from 'non-self'; it would
have to be able to recognise foreign matter and reject it if necessary.
Immune and allergic reactions do exactly this by recognising the shapes
of intruding substances, and the fact that these reactions respond to
unconscious suggestion could mean that the unconscious is a process
common to all life no matter how simple it may be.
This could go a long way to explaining patterns of behavior and response that now seem supernatural.
The discovery of the double-helix shape of the DNA molecule highlighted
the importance of form at a molecular level. We now know that an enzyme
depends almost entirely on its form, and the ability of an organism to
recognise an antigen is based solely on the shape of the foreign body.
(5) Even the sense of smell is a product of shape: round molecules
smell like camphor, disks smell like flowers, and wedges smell like
peppermint. So the ability to distinguish between apparently similar
smells can be explained quite simply by the fact that they probably
have quite distinct shapes, and telling these apart is something even a
blood cell can do. This makes responses of animals such as the
parasitic wasps look a lot less uncanny.
The large American species Mergarhyssa lunator runs up and down tree
trunks until it locates the larva of the horntail moth hidden three
inches below the bark. It does this partly with 'ear' cells in each of
its feet that are sensitive to vibration and can listen to the sound of
the larva chewing, but the larva keeps dead still as soon as it hears
movement on the bark. (143) And yet the wasps manage not only to locate
the larva precisely, but to tell by the smell through three inches of
tree whether it is the right species of larva and whether any other
wasp has already laid her eggs on it. This highly sophisticated
response to a subtle stimulus is made possible by reliance on an old
and basically simple ability to recognise shape.
The ability of salmon to return across thousands of miles of ocean to
the same rivers and streams in which they hatched, has now been shown
to be due to sensitivity to the smell of that body of water as distinct
from all others. (139) Eels are able to recognise a thimbleful of rose
scent diluted in a lake covering fourteen thousand square miles. (317)
Male moths can detect the presence of a female of their species as much
as thirty miles away by the presence of only one molecule of her
specific scent in the air. (186) This kind of sensitivity is completely
foreign to us, who have such a poor sense of smell, but we can get some
idea of the implications from a new mechanical nose invented by Andrew
Dravniek of Chicago. This is capable of detecting the traces of smell
left behind in a room by a burglar some hours previously and of
matching these up with samples from suspects. As people who are related
by blood have similar smells, it can also be used to assist blood-group
analysis in proving paternity, and because the invasion of pathological
organisms produces changes in the chemical balance of the body, it can
detect disease long before the symptoms become apparent. (90) The
machine performs these functions by the purely mechanical process of
comparing chemical properties that depend on physical shapes. The man
working the machine has to make decisions based on the information it
gives him; he is the conscious mind controlling the unconscious
mechanism. In this case the human is supplemented by a machine, but it
is a reasonable model of the sort of relationship we enjoy with our own
unconscious. We are only now just beginning to realise how much direct
influence one has on the other.
At the Harvard Medical School, David Shapiro has just completed an
experiment in which he trained a number of students to alter their own
blood pressure. (304) They were wired up to a sensitive gauge, and
every time the pressure showed a momentary fall, the men were rewarded
by being shown an enlargement of a nude pinup from the center pages of
Playboy magazine. They had no idea what the experiment was about, but
the fact that their conscious attention was attracted at the same time
as an unconscious process was going on, forged a link between them and
made it possible for the men to control the usually random fluctuations
of blood pressure at will. In another, similar experiment, business
executives with dangerously high blood pressure were taught the same
useful skill. (71)
It has long been known that individuals with vivid visual imagination
have few alpha rhythms in their brain waves, whereas non-visuals, who
prefer to verbalise things, have persistent alpha activity. These
characteristic rhythms are apparently partly hereditary, but they
depend also on environmental factors and experience. Identical twins
start life with identical EEG records, but these differ later to show
even slight variations in character that would normally be noticeable
only by close friends. In most people alpha rhythms appear best when
the eyes are closed and the person is relaxed and thinking about
nothing in particular. If they persist strongly when the eyes are open,
this is usually a sign of mental illness of the sort that produces
isolation from reality. Such complete dissociation can be harmful, but
alpha is so relaxing that it performs a valuable biological function
and it would be useful if we were able to summon it up at will. An
inexpensive machine is being marketed to do just this. This
'alphaphone' is a simple instrument that monitors the brain waves and,
by lighting a bulb or ringing a bell, lets a user know exactly when he
is producing the alpha rhythms. This simple reinforcement acts in the
same way as nudes on blood pressure, and after a few hours of use
anyone can learn to exert conscious control over alpha and produce it
on demand - a sort of instant version of the meditation techniques that
normally take years of practice and self-denial to learn.
At Boston City Hospital the physiology of true meditation is being
investigated with a number of adepts skilled in the transcendental
techniques of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. All show a sharp increase in alpha
rhythm, a decrease in the breathing rate and oxygen consumption, a
decrease in heart rate and blood pressure, and an increase in the
electrical resistance of the skin. (22) There is also a dramatic drop
in the level of lactate in the blood, which persists for some time
after the end of meditation. High lactate levels are associated with
stress, so the total effect of the self-induced changes is a sudden and
significant release from tension. Those who practice these techniques
report that they find them an effective and often preferable substitute
for drug-induced experiences.
In Japan some fascinating work has been done on the patterns that occur
during Zen contemplation. (172) The priests produce sensory deprivation
by sitting in the 'lotus position' for long periods of time with their
eyes wide open and fixed on some object. At the beginning there is no
alpha activity, but soon alpha rhythms appear and become very strong,
diffusing all over the scalp. In the Zen masters, the waves may persist
for half an hour or more without change. In normal people, alpha seldom
lasts more than a minute or two. (6) Similar work on yoga meditation
shows that there is prolonged alpha activity, but in one study made on
a Bengali sect, the alpha broke down when the adepts entered the state
of ecstasy they call 'samadhi'. (83)
The conscious control of involuntary functions is commonplace in yoga,
Zen, and some African cults. Pulse rate, breathing, digestion, sexual
function, metabolism, and kidney activity can all be influenced by and
at will. Skilled practitioners, after years spent perfecting what
amounts to a system of conditioned reflexes, can slow the heartbeat
almost to the vanishing point, reduce the body temperature to what
would normally be lethal levels, and reduce their respiration to no
more than one breath every few minutes. In this state the whole
organism is reduced to a condition similar to that of a hibernating
animal and can be buried alive for days without ill effects. (335) The
reflexes that normally make us shy away from intense pain can be
diverted so that nails are driven through the limbs and spikes through
the cheeks or tongue. And while this is being done, the sympathetic
nervous system can be locally suppressed or stimulated so that bleeding
is prevented or encouraged. The pupils, which normally respond to light
and emotion, can similarly be controlled. There is nothing supernatural
about any of these talents; many of them have been objectively studied
and imitated in the laboratory. It takes time and practice to cultivate
the right paths of control, but physiologists have succeeded in doing
such unlikely things as making their hair stand on end or their
pancreas secrete more than the normal amount of insulin.
Some of these skills are developed purely as a means of livelihood, but
in many instances they are simply by-products of the process of
self-realisation. In parts of the world where life is difficult they
may also serve some very practical function. The art of lung-gom in
Tibet produces the ability to travel very rapidly across some of the
inhospitable upland wastes of that country. The training consists of
living in complete darkness and seclusion for thirty-nine months of
deep-breathing exercises. Alexandra David-Neel tells of seeing a monk,
from the monastery in Tsang renowned for training in swiftness, in full
flight. 'I could clearly see his perfectly calm impasssive face and
wide open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far distant
object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He
seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked
as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball and rebounded
each time his feet touched the ground.' (84) It is said that one of
these skilled walkers covered a distance of over three hundred miles in
about thirty hours - between sunrise on one day and midday of the next.
That is an average of about ten miles an hour across all kinds of
country by day and by night. Marathon runners, by comparison, travel at
an average of twelve miles an hour, but only for just over two hours at
a time on good roads.
Another useful Tibetan custom is tumo. This accomplishment is aimed at
combating cold, and in a country that is almost entirely above ten
thousand feet altitude, it is a talent greatly respected. Initiates
learn a complex set of breathing and meditational exercises and retire
to a remote area to train. Each day they bathe in icy streams and sit
naked in the snow thinking of internal fires. When the training is
complete, a test is made on a windy winter night by wrapping the
student in a sheet that has been dipped into the river through a hole
in the ice and has to be completely dried just by body heat at least
three times during the night. After qualification, the adept never
again wears anything more than a single cotton garment in all seasons
and at any height. Several Everest expeditions have even reported
seeing completely naked hermits living well up among the permanent
snows.
The insistence of both Tibetan and Indian cults of mind and body on the
importance of breathing is an interesting one. Ancient yoga texts
proclaim that 'Life is in the breath' and that the body absorbs 'life
force' or 'prana' from the air. (152) Deep breathing, of course, causes
hyperventilation and can produce hallucination and even
unconsciousness, but there is more to it than that. The biologists
working at the Kazakh State University on the Kirlian process have
discovered that the flares in the skin glow more brightly when the
lungs of the subject are filled with pure oxygen - and the effect is
even more impressive with ionised air. (233) So it looks as though
surplus electrons from oxygen may actually provide fuel for the energy
in the life field.
If it is possible to exert conscious control over unconscious
processes, then the reverse is also bound to occur. It shows up in fact
in all the psychosomatic disorders that surround us. At least half of
all the ills of mankind can be diagnosed as originating in the mind.
Witch doctors always treat all diseases by magic as well as by herbal
cures, and their success rate with skin complaints, blood-pressure
difficulties, peptic ulcer, incipient coronary thrombosis, and
hysterical blindness is as high as, if not higher than, that of
specially trained and magnificently equipped Harley Street surgeons.
Even 'accidental' injuries such as broken limbs can often be attributed
to psychological causes. Recent research shows that the statements 'It
happened by accident' and 'It happened by chance' are not synonymous,
and that some people at certain times really are accident prone. (212)
Personality traits, psychological conditions, and even physiological
patterns can be identified in individuals who are nothing more than
'accidents looking for a place to happen'.
Taken to its limit, autosuggestion can even kill. Every year thousands
of people die simply because they believe that it is inevitable.
Witchcraft may have powers that are truly supernatural, but it does not
need them while people are capable of wishing themselves to death. It
is not even necessary to consciously believe in forces of evil; the
unconscious can manage very well on its own. There are vivid and
graphic descriptions of otherwise rational people in New York and
London wasting away when they have been told that someone is abusing a
doll constructed in their image - and of these same people making rapid
and complete recoveries when they knew, or even thought, that the doll
had been destroyed. (302)
Witches and witch doctors often depend upon crowd reactions to work
their magic, because if a number of people are involved they reinforce
each other's suggestibility by a process of social facilitation. All
farmers know that a solitary pig never gets fat and that several pigs
together each eat far more than they would alone. The same is true of
many aspects of behavior. The emotional tension of a magic session or a
political meeting or a revivalist gathering quickly communicates itself
to all present and allows a leader to put across ideas that
individually and under normal circumstances few of the audience would
accept. Much has been written about 'mass hypnotism' and the ability of
certain people to create widespread hysteria or common hallucinations.
While it is entirely possible to hypnotise a small group of carefully
selected suggestible subjects simultaneously, only about one in twenty
people fall into this category, and the odds against a crowd being
composed entirely of such people are overwhelming. So there has never
been an authenticated demonstration of the Indian rope trick in public.
(69) But the fact remains that in the infectious frenzy that can be
produced by facilitation in a large crowd, the barriers of reason and
conscious free will are lowered and simple ideas spread rapidly and
take root wherever they fall. Contagious activity of this kind is
equally common in other species. The adoption of a ritual posture by
one bird in a dense colony of gulls often spreads in ripples throughout
the entire area. If one penguin on a beach raises its beak, stiffens up
in an 'ecstasy display', and gives the rallying call of its species,
the whole seething mass all the way around the bay take up the cry.
The spacing of individual fish in a shoal is determined by the vortexes
that each fish sets up in the water around him and that are appreciated
by the lateral-line sense organs of his immediate neighbors. (39) Part
of the communication of intentions is certainly carried out through
these organs as well, but the cohesion within a school is too good for
this to be the only explanation. It may be that all dynamic groups of
this kind, including wheeling flocks of starlings and vast floods of
lemmings, are in a state of mild hysteria that enables them to act
almost as a single organism. In a sense, all instinctive social
communication is similar to hypnosis in that it depends on an
unconscious response being made to a special stimulus. When the system
was being set up, the stimulus must have been repeated insistently,
like the light flashes or the repeated instructions of the hypnotist,
before the appropriate response became almost automatic. Familiarity
with this kind of conditioning may well account for the predisposition
of all animals to immobilisation techniques and for man's
susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion.
In man the unconscious has become very much more than that part of the
brain which looks after mundane domestic physiology. The greater part
of all Western psychiatry is based on the existence of the
'unconscious' of the Freudians or the 'collective unconscious' of Jung.
From being only a control mechanism intent on recognising shape, it has
become a real alternative to conscious thought processes, with its own
special capabilities. There is evidence that much real creativity is
based on the unconscious and that many writers, artists, and composers
gain access to it by self-induced hypnosis. Goethe said that many of
his best poems were written in a condition that bordered on
somnambulism. Coleridge is supposed to have composed Kubla Khan in his
sleep, and Mozart described his musical inspirations as rising like
dreams, quite independent of his will. Newton even resorted to solving
his most troublesome mathematical problems by sleeping on them.
Dreams
Since all life depends in one way or another on the energy of the sun,
the most insistent beat in the metabolism of every species is the
circadian rhythm - the alternation of light and dark. At first, when
the early life forms were directly dependent not only on the energy but
also on the heat of the sun, activity must have been confined to the
hours of light. This is certainly true of land-living animals, and even
today most cold-blooded species become inactive during the cool of the
night, when their body temperature falls almost as fast as the
temperature of the air. Birds and mammals have developed a vital
independence from this system by controlling their internal
temperature, so that many of them can be active in the dark, but even
these emancipated species still take a break during part of each
24-hour period.
Invertebrate animals, with the possible exception of octopus and squid,
simply seem to become inactive: they just stop moving; but, for most
warm-blooded animals, sleep is an active process. Niko Tinbergen points
out that sleep is a true instinctive pattern, because it is preceded by
appetitive, or preliminary behavior such as looking for or traveling to
a special place, and involves the assumption of a particular posture.
(321) Some fish, such as the carp Cyprinus carpio, lie flat on the
bottom of their pools after dark, and the giant golden sunfish Mola
mola floats on its side like a huge disk on the surface of the sea.
They seem to be sleeping and can even be captured if cautiously
approached. Birds certainly sleep, most of them with their eyes closed
and their head tucked underneath a wing. Those which sleep on perches
cannot afford to relax completely, and those which sleep on water often
make continuous paddling movements with one leg so as not to drift in
to shore, within range of predators. Aquatic mammals have to develop
the same kind of reflex, floating up to the surface every now and then
to breathe. Dolphins appear to sleep with first one eye open and then
the other, changing every few hours. Cows and many other ruminants
sleep with both eyes wide open and carry on chewing their cuds
regardless. The peculiar arrangement of their digestive system relies
on gravity, so they have to keep their heads up, too. Even those
animals such as elephants and giraffes that are traditionally supposed
never to sleep, do in fact do so, often even lying out flat on the
ground to sleep.
So sleep is widespread among higher animals, many of which spend one
third of their lives doing it, but despite its prevalence we still know
very little about the process. In man we can describe it reasonably
accurately as a condition in which the eyelids close, the pupils become
very small, the secretion of digestive juice and urine and saliva all
fall sharply, the flow of air into the lungs diminishes, the heart
slows down, and the brain waves change with loss of consciousness. As
we fall asleep, the alpha waves gradually disappear as the rhythm slows
down to the long, quiet delta waves, at one to three cycles per second,
that are characteristic of deep sleep. Brief bursts of faster waves, or
'spindles', are usually mixed in with the slower ones.
All these patterns can be artificially induced by electrical
stimulation of certain areas of the brain; in one study a shock in the
upper part of the brain stem induced a cat to groom itself, curl up,
and settle down to sleep. (148) But most evidence points to the fact
that there are areas of 'wakefulness' in the brain and that it is when
these cease to be stimulated that we feel sleepy. The area primarily
responsible for keeping us awake is the reticular formation, a sort of
master control at the base of the brain for activating the entire
central nervous system. Chemical anesthetics inhibit this area and
produce sleep for as long as the effect of the drug lasts, but any
mechanical interference with the reticular activating system abolishes
wakefulness altogether and produces prolonged coma and death.
Consciousness is lost during sleep, but it does not alway return with
wakening. (108) Animals from which the whole cortex of the brain has
been removed still sleep and wake and move around, eating and
excreting, but without the vital gray matter they can never learn or
show any of the awareness of true consciousness. Sleepwalkers are not
so much asleep as unconscious. They move around with their eyes open
and perform quite complex acts before eventually returning to bed, but
remember nothing of it in the morning. It is quite possible that the
dreaded 'zombies' of the Caribbean, who are said to have returned from
the grave, are people with congenitally or accidentally damaged cortex
areas, or people whose brains have been affected by drugs so that they
seem to be walking dead - awake but still unconscious.
It is very difficult to keep a normal person awake for long periods,
but many experiments have been done to study the effect of sleep
deprivation. After several days without sleep, the grip is still as
strong as ever, so muscle action has not been impaired; subjects can
still perform complex arithmetical problems, so the conscious
activities of the brain have not been affected; they can still respond
immediately to a light flash by pressing a buzzer, so reaction time is
apparently not prolonged. But the sleepless people cannot sustain long
periods of concentration; they make numerous errors and have to keep on
going back to correct them. (341) After longer periods without sleep,
these small lapses into momentary unconsciousness grow until the
subjects begin to see things that are not there: they begin to dream
with their eyes wide open.
Proper dreaming occurs during sleep, but it is not just a part of
ordinary sleep. Orthodox sleep alternates several times during the
night with periods of a very different, almost paradoxical, kind of
sleep. It is during these times that dreams take place. In orthodox
sleep the brain produces big, slow waves of delta rhythm, the eyes are
still, and the heartbeat is regular, but some of the muscles, and
particularly those of the throat, are still tense. In paradoxical sleep
the brain produces more rapid waves, almost like those of wakefulness,
the eyes move rapidly to and fro, and the heartbeat becomes irregular,
but despite all this mental activity going on, the muscles of the body,
including those of the throat, are more relaxed and the sleeper is much
more difficult to wake (235) The relaxation of the muscles amounts
almost to paralysis, with even reflex twitches being eliminated, so the
nightmares in which we struggle to escape but are unable to move are a
true reflection of our physical condition.
When we first fall asleep, most of us start with the orthodox variety
and only change to paradoxical sleep after about two hours. If an
experimenter monitors a subject constantly and wakes him every time he
start to show rapid eye movements, then a state of deprivation builds
up and the subject tends to start right away with paradoxical sleep as
though determined to make good the deficit. It seems that both kinds of
sleep are equally important, but for different reasons.
We tend to think of bodies as relatively permanent structures, but
individual cells have a very short life and are continually being
replaced, not just on the skin and in the gut lining, where they are
rubbed away by friction, but even in the bones. Friends may look
unchanged to you after long absences, but if several years have elapsed
there will not be a single cell present that was there last time you
met. Regeneration and replacement depend on the synthesis of new
protein, and most of this seems to take place during sleep. In orthodox
sleep it seems that the body tissues are most affected; after strenuous
athletic days, people spend more than the usual amount of time in
orthodox sleep. Human growth hormones are manufactured during this
time, and the rate of cell division increases soon after falling
asleep. The tissues of the brain differ from those of the rest of the
body in that they stop growing after a certain age and concentrate
largely on repair and maintenance. Most of brain growth occurs during
the two months just before birth and the month after it. In this time
the cortex of gray matter is produced, and the baby not only sleeps
twice as long each day as the normal adult, but it also spends
proportionally twice as much time in paradoxical sleep. It seems that,
while the body is repaired in orthodox sleep, the brain receives
attention in the alternate periods, when more blood flows to the head
and more heat is generated there.
As soon as it was discovered that the rapid eye movements of
paradoxical sleep were a sign of dreaming, the idea grew that there
might be some correspondence between these and body movements and the
content of the dream. (234) Active dreams seem to involve more
movement, but it is unlikely that the eyes are actually moving to look
at dream pictures, because men who have been blind from birth show
exactly the same behavior in their dreams. Recordings of heart and
breathing rate, body temperature, pulse wave, and skin potential show
that these vary directly with the emotional content of the dream, so it
is nevertheless a very real experience.
Analysis of dream content shows that they do not necessarily form a
continuing story that runs in episodes throughout the night, but they
do tend to start off with a subject related to the experiences of the
previous day before shifting to earlier periods of life. This has given
rise to the theory that dreams help a person assimilate the events of
the day by rerunning some of them and comparing them with previous
experience before filing the lot away in the memory banks. It fits in
with the fact of dream debt building up, presumably because of the
pressure of unsorted experience accumulating in the cortex. There is in
fact strong electrical activity during paradoxical sleep in the very
area just below the cortex that is thought to be the site of the memory.
The symbols in dreams seem to be the direct action of the unconscious,
censoring and shaping images to suit its own purpose. Freud based his
system of psychoanalysis largely on dreams. His interpretations were
sometimes a little simplistic and are not followed rigidly today, but
he seems to have been right in assuming that the unconscious was not
amenable to direct investigation and could only be examined at second
hand by inference. His emphasis on the sex drive is sometimes
criticised as an exaggeration based on the minds of the frustrated
young women of nineteenth-century Vienna, but it has been vindicated
somewhat by Calvin Hall in a recent study. (234) Hall made lists of all
the dream objects that psychoanalysts took to be symbolic of the male
sex organ and came up with 102 symbols for penis, including stick, gun,
pen, rod, dirk, etc. Then he went through Partridge's Dictionary of
Slang and found that all of these, plus another ninety-eight the
analysts had never thought of, had been in use as coarse English
descriptions of the phallus for hundreds of years.
There is constant argument about whether animals dream. Many of them go
through movements that look like patterns of hunting and feeding while
they sleep, but these usually take place during orthodox sleep even in
those animals that also have paradoxical periods. Cats, dogs, chimps,
and horses all have alternating periods of both kinds of sleep, but it
will probably never be possible to say for certain whether they
actually dream in one or the other. It seems likely, though, that the
two sleep patterns serve the same restorative functions for these
species as they do in man.
In cats paradoxical sleep occurs throughout life, but in many
apparently less intelligent animals it can be found only in very young
individuals. Sheep and cows show signs of both states of sleep before
weaning, when their brains are still growing, but later the paradoxical
patterns disappear altogether. In species such as raccoons and monkeys,
which are much more inventive and aware, there are strong indications
of paradoxical, rapid-eye-movement sleep at all ages. There seems to be
a direct correlation between this kind of sleep, which is closely
associated with dreaming, and a high level of consciousness. A survey
of the animal kingdom therefore shows a gradation of awareness. At the
lowest levels organisms are either active or inactive, but in more
advanced species and particularly among birds and mammals, the period
of inactivity takes on special active functions of its own. In the most
complex animals it is even divided into two different kinds of sleep,
associated with separate physiological and psychological processes. And
now, in man, it seems that there is an extra step, one that has given
rise to a new kind of awareness.
This new development is highlighted by chemicals that produce changes
in behavior. Drugs can be divided into several broad categories on the
basis of the kind of change they make. The first group are those, such
as the amphetamines, cocaine, and caffeine, which stimulate metabolism;
in biological terms we must consider these as being similar in action
to the reticular system of the brain, which produces wakefulness. The
second group have the opposite effect; these are the barbiturates and
tranquilisers, which act as sedatives and are biologically equivalent
to the process producing sleepiness, but the interesting thing is that
they result only in orthodox sleep. After a long period on sleeping
pills, people show symptoms similar to those which occur in subjects
that have been deprived of paradoxical sleep and the chance to dream.
When taken off these drugs, all experience a tremendous rebound of
paradoxical sleep, which looks as though it is trying to make up for
lost time. Some dream sleep occurs under the influence of the opiates,
heroin and morphine, which of course also produce delirium and euphoria
and act as painkillers. Biologically their action is much like strong
autosuggestion or hypnosis, which produces the same kind of
dissociation and anesthesia. But beyond these three categories, which
simulate the basic life states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming, is
one more group of chemicals: the hallucinogens.
Hallucination
Hallucinogenic drugs and practices reveal something that seems to be
peculiar to man. They illuminate the fringes of an expanse of mind and
experience so vast that it is difficult to comprehend. Sidney Cohen,
Director of the Institute of Mental Health, in Maryland, describes the
brain as 'an underpowered self-scrutinising symbol factory whose main
job is body management. Its side line consists of reflecting on what it
is, where it is going and what it all means. Its unique capacities for
wonder and self-awareness are quite unnecessary for purposes of
physical survival.' (76) The glimpses we are beginning to get of the
scope of the brain do indeed raise some unprecedented evolutionary
questions. No biologist would say that the brain's extracurricular
activities were unnecessary for survival: the brain is part of us and
we are as much a part of the ecology as every other species. What we
have done to our environment is as natural as thunder or lightning. Our
brains have made us a major evolutionary force, and it is going to take
a great deal of imagination and creativity on their part to think us
out of present dilemmas. But I must agree with Cohen that the extent of
man's potential is awe-inspiring; we seem to have acquired abilities so
far beyond even our present dramatic needs that we look top-heavy.
Nature seldom does things without good reasons, and yet she has gone to
some trouble over the past ten million years - a very short time by her
usual standards - to equip us with an enormous cerebral cortex of
seemingly unlimited capacity. We have acquired this incredible organ at
the expense of several others, and yet we use only a minute part of it.
What was the hurry? Why have we raced along this line of development so
fast? We could certainly have got by with much less. At the moment, we
are like a small family of squatters who have taken over a vast palace
but find no need to move beyond the comfortable, serviced apartment in
one corner of the basement.
An almost subliminal awareness of the rest of the structure has always
tantalised us. Brief glimpses into other rooms have led a few
adventurous individuals to make more determined efforts to explore, but
traditional methods have been only partially successful. Some have
tried rhythmic techniques, such as Christian chants or the swaying
movements of Hindu prayer or the whirling dances of the dervishes, to
induce a trance state that would get them across the barrier. Some have
tried altering their body chemistry by deep breathing or fasting or
going without sleep. Some have sought dissociation in physical pain by
self-flagellation or mutilation or hanging from the ceiling. The Sioux
Indians used heat and thirst in their sun ritual to produce a sort of
crude delirium; the Egyptians tried social isolation in their temple
rituals. The one thing all these methods have in common is that they
cut down on the usual flow of information with which the environment
threatens to swamp us; they either eliminate the sensory input or make
it monotonous and meaningless. When this is done, some of the doors in
the mind open up a little.
The technique of sensory deprivation has been refined in several recent
investigations. At McGill University subjects were confined to a small
soundproof room and wore goggles that admitted only diffuse light. At
Princeton they were kept in a tiny, lightproof, soundproof,
constant-temperature cubicle. And at Oklahoma and Utah they were
immersed in a dark tank of water kept at blood temperature so that they
received no light, sound, or touch sensations from their environment.
The immediate response in all studies was to retreat from this monotony
into sleep, but once this avenue of escape was closed and they could
sleep no longer, the volunteers began to experience other difficulties.
All subjects lost track of time and underestimated its passing; some
slept for more than twenty-four hours and claimed that it was only an
hour or two. Disorientation and lack of feedback from the environment
made it difficult for them to think seriously and to make normal
judgments. Dreams began to appear more frequently, sometimes with
frightening intensity, and sooner or later the total unreality of the
situation led most of the subjects to the experience of hallucinations.
These were not just simply sensory 'ghosts' such as flashes of light or
the sound of bells, but fully fledged happenings, complex and entirely
convincing. (329) What seems to take place is that in normal
circumstances the vast amount of information we receive is monitored by
the reticular formation, which sorts it out and passes along only what
we need and can handle at any one time. Under conditions of sensory
deprivation very little is coming in, so each small piece of
information receives far more than the usual amount of attention and
becomes enormously magnified. Our vision is restricted, so we blow up
what we can perceive to fill the whole screen, like a film taken
through a microscope. So part of the hallucination is simply an
improved close-up view of reality, but there is more to it than that.
Left without its normal barrage of stimuli, the brain embellishes and
elaborates on reality, drawing on its store of unconscious
paraphernalia to fill the time and space available. And yet not even
this goes far enough, for there are some qualities to hallucination
that seem to lie outside both the conscious and the unconscious
capabilities of the brain.
Almost every subculture has at some time sought out a root, herb, or
berry to further the process of dissociation. The Persians had a potion
called soma, which, according to the Sanskrit chronicle, 'made one like
a God'. Helen of Troy had nepenthe. In India and Egypt they have always
had hashish or marijuana. In Europe and Asia there was the beautiful
crimson-spotted mushroom Amanita, which killed flies but only drove
Norsemen berserk. Mexico is favored with the morning glory, the peyote
cactus, and several 'divine mushrooms'. All these plants contain
chemicals that produce transcendent states, and most have been used as
adjuncts to religious and magical ceremonies, but the most shattering
and significant of all psychedelic substances does not occur naturally
in the wild, and had to be extracted from ergot fungus, which grows on
grain. This is lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.
LSD has been tested on a wide variety of animals, but it seems to have
little effect on any of them except perhaps the spider, who builds a
rather more fancy web. It seems to be specific in its action on the
highest levels of thought, and even a minute amount, about one
three-hundred-thousandth of an ounce, produces profound effects on man.
Depending on how it is taken, these begin within about half an hour,
reach a peak after an hour and a half, and end six or even twelve hours
later. Most of the action on the brain seems to be confined to the
reticular system and to the limbic system, which modulates emotional
experiences. So it is working directly on those areas responsible for
filtering and comparing sensory information and on those which
determine an individual's feelings about this material. Speech, walking
ability, and most physical activities are completely unaffected. Blood
pressure and pulse are normal, reflexes are acute, and there are no
unpleasant side effects. It seems that LSD acts only on the area of
higher consciousness in the human brain - on the area that we believe
controls our personality.
The most noticeable psychological effect is, as in sensory deprivation,
one of the slowing down of time: second hands on clocks seem hardly to
move. This sort of 'eternal present' is very much like a prolonged
version of the way time can stand still in moments of great personal
danger. We have in our own physiology the capacity for producing this
effect in emergencies, and LSD seems to carry that on a stage further,
but it is no longer concerned with personal survival. The separation
between self and non-self, the old, primeval haunt of the unconscious,
very soon disappears, and ego boundaries dissolve. Cohen says, 'The
thin overlay of reason gives way to reverie, identity is submerged by
oceanic feelings of unity, and seeing loses the conventional meanings
imposed upon the object seen.' (76)
It is important in this respect to realise that we normally perceive
only what we can conceive. We fit sensations into our own view of the
way things ought to be. The classic experiment of fitting people with
glasses that invert everything proves this conclusively. Within a day
or two the brain makes corrections to the visual field and these people
see everything the 'right' way up again, but when the glasses are
removed, the whole world is once again inverted. Thus the world is seen
not as it is but as it ought to be. Part of the problem is that we
receive so many sensations, that we are forced to pick and choose and
soon end up with a carefully selected and very narrow view of reality.
LSD has the capacity to take the blinkers off and allow us to see
things afresh, as though it were for the first time. In this condition
we can begin to reappreciate the sounds of colors, the scent of music,
and the texture of mood. Bees and bats and deep-sea squid, without our
range of competing sensitivities and interests, do these things all the
time.
Children commonly see things with enormous clarity. It is possible that
what we call hallucinations are a normal part of every child's psychic
experience (their paintings seem to show this), but as we grow older
our visions are dimmed and eventually suppressed altogether, because
they come to have a negative social value. Each society lays down
certain guidelines of what constitutes sanity, and by a combination of
these cultural pressures and our own needs for acceptance and
conformity, most of us end up inside these prescribed limits. A few
break out and are classified insane and deprived of their freedom on
the ground that they need to be taken care of, but in fact their
confinement is designed far more to protect society than to save these
individuals from themselves. The Soviet Union makes no bones about this
and regularly certifies troublesome dissenters on the grounds that they
must be mad if they don't agree with the State. A few individuals
manage to shake off the restrictions of sanity and get away with it,
because they do so within the sphere of a religion in which such
revolutionary activities are permissible because they have been labeled
'divinely inspired'. Far from being confined, many of the people who
have had this kind of transcendental experience return to society with
a new view of things and proceed to change their way of life and ours -
not always for the best.
Some saints and prophets have undoubtedly been truly mad, but it makes
no sense to classify all of them as insane. Their experiences are not
unique. Almost everyone, at some time in his life, has a moment of
rapture, bliss, or ecstasy brought on by a flash of beauty, love,
sexual experience, or insight. These momentary visions of perfection
and aesthetic delight are glimpses of a state that Christians known as
'divine love', Zen Buddhists as 'satori', the Hindus as 'moksha', and
the Vedanta as 'samadhi'. Such experiences are so little understood
that they have come to be shrouded in mysticism and regarded as
supernatural. In the sense that they do not fit into the formula of
cultural 'sanity', these states are 'insane', but it helps a little to
understand them if we avoid such a loaded label and refer to them
instead as states of unsanity.
There is nothing supernatural about them, and the importance of
chemicals such as LSD is that they show this very clearly and simply by
peeling away the artificial layers of 'sanity' and letting us once
again be natural. One of the most common effects of psychedelic
substances is that they heighten suggestibility and enable us to pick
up environmental cues with exquisite sensitivity. In laboratory test
situations the LSD subjects often seem to be reading the experimenter's
mind, but it is clear from analysis that they are simply responding, in
the way that most animals do, to the most minute changes in tone,
facial expression, and posture. We are capable all the time of this
kind of subliminal perception, which is indeed supernatural when
compared to our normal levels of response, but in the broader
biological arena these talents are commonplace and altogether very
natural.
Our usual waking 'sane' state is one of inhibition. Part of this is
necessary to prevent overloading with incoming sensations, but the
barriers erected by the reticular system also deprive us of so much
that is full of magic and inspiration. This is absurd when we have now
grown a brain that is for the first time capable of appreciating these
wonders. I am not making a plea for mass dissociation and a world-wide
escape into these areas of unsanity. Blake, Van Gogh, Verlaine,
Coleridge, and Baudelaire all lived and worked a lot of the time in a
state of transcendental awareness, and they suffered terribly in their
efforts to break back through the barriers of reason and reality. Now,
perhaps more than at any other time in our evolution, we need to be
clear and aware of the problems that beset us, but our endeavors become
pointless unless we appreciate that we have become masters of our own
destiny. We need to know where we are going and how we are going to get
there. Already we have begun to make use of our conscious talents, but
we have completely neglected those available on the other side of the
mind. Nature has given us all the necessary equipment for our task in
the space between our ears, and the techniques of hypnosis,
autosuggestion, dreaming, and hallucination give us some idea of the
powers we possess. All that remains is for us to use them wisely.
EIGHT
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 co-ordinate 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 non-random 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 fly-trap 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
co-ordination 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,
soundproof 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
opthalmologists 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, Parus 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: the milk-bottle craze has spread at a rate
that alarms the dairies, 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 non-existent, 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.
PART FOUR
TIME
'If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.'
ALBERT EINSTEIN, in New Statesman, 16 April 1965.
Time is a rhythm. It comes and goes like the crackle of electricity in
the brain or the gush of blood through the heart or the flood of the
tide up the beach. All these things are governed by cosmic clocks, and
our measurements are nothing but bookkeeping conveniences. Seconds and
minutes have nothing to do with nature. Every organism interprets the
universal rhythms in its own way. A cattle tic may sit on the end of a
twig for months waiting for a passing mammal; a larval cicada lives for
years in the ground at the base of a tree waiting for conditions that
will be exactly right for its one day of life as an adult. For them
these periods pass as a single moment, of no more consequence in their
lives than the interval between two of our heartbeats.
Manipulations of time can give us some idea of how little we understand
these differences. A time-lapse film of bean shoots growing in the
dark, with one frame exposed each hour, shows a scene of unbridled
ferocity as each of the plants thrashes and claws at its neighbors in
an attempt to get to the light. Slow-motion films of moths in flight
show them picking up the sonar signal of an approaching bat,
calculating its strength and source, and taking the appropriate
avoiding action, all in the space of one tenth of a second. Each
species lives in its own way and its own time, seeing only one section
of the environment through the narrow slit of its own sense system.
Real space and time exist outside of individual awareness.
In this section I want to relate some of the phenomena in our
experience to the flow of time and to put the evolution of nature and
Supemature into temporal perspective.
NINE
NEW DIMENSIONS
Three hundred years ago scientists thought they knew what weight was,
that it had some fixed and absolute meaning. Then Isaac Newton showed
that things weigh less on the top of a mountain and that weight is
affected by gravity. Today any child who has seen an astronaut waltzing
ponderously on the moon knows that despite all his equipment the man
weighs less there than he does on earth. After Newton, science turned
to mass as its anchor, but then came Albert Einstein, who showed that
mass is also variable; he demonstrated that the faster a thing moves,
the more its mass increases. His findings prompted scientists to
wonder: if speed is more important than mass, could time be used as a
dependable basis of measurement?
The answer came, again, from Einstein. No, he said, time has no
absolute meaning and will also be affected by gravity. He was right.
When you travel very fast, time slows down, so the moon walkers have
aged a fraction of a second less than we. But even those of us who
stayed behind were not standing still; we are all moving rapidly
through space and growing old less quickly than we would be if the
earth were standing still. Everything is relative, and the basis of the
theory of relativity is that space and time are inextricably tangled
together.
Nothing is what it seems. We see two things happen and we say that one
took place before the other; we can even measure the time interval
between the two with one of our artificial timekeepers, but this may
not be what took place at all. If the two events were sufficiently
distant from us and from each other, information about them would come
to us at different times. Someone watching from another vantage point
might see them taking place simultaneously, and for a third person, in
yet another position, the order of events could be completely reversed.
So even when we are concerned with a single sense, based on the
perception of visible light, the information carried by the medium can
be distorted. The problem becomes even more complex when more than one
sense is involved. When watching a man chopping wood in the distance,
we see the ax raised again before we hear the sound of its last impact
with the log. If we knew nothing about the process or were ignorant of
the relative speeds of sound and light, we might very easily assume
that axes were instruments that made loud sounds when held up above the
head.
I feel sure that many of the apparently supernatural events in our
experience are due to misinterpretation of this kind, and that at the
root of all the problems lies the paradox of time.
Time
Time has very little to do with sundials, sandglasses, pendulum clocks,
and spring watches. Even atoms of cesium in atomic timepieces are
nothing more than devices for measuring time. Perhaps the best
definition is, 'Time is a function of the occurrence of events.' (62)
Between any two events that do not happen at the same time, there is a
lapse, an interval, that can be measured. All the instruments of
measurement are based on one assumption: implicit in their pinpointing
the moment of 'now' is the notion that the rest of time may be divided
into 'before' and 'after' this moment. Like the concepts of weight and
mass, this one is now open to question.
The old distinction between space and time is based on the fact that
space seems to be presented to us in one piece, whereas time comes to
us bit by bit. The future seems to be hidden, the past is dimly visible
through memory and its aids, and only the present is revealed directly.
It is as though we sat in a railway carriage looking out sideways at
the present as time flows by. But as it becomes possible to measure the
passage of time in smaller units, it becomes increasingly difficult to
decide just what the present is and when it starts and stops. No matter
how fast the train is going, we can see at a single glance everything
outlined by the window. The fellow in the seat opposite us has his
blind partly drawn and sees less. But at the same instant, someone in a
carriage nearer the engine looks out his window and sees a slightly
different view. While, riding illegally up on the roof, is someone
else, whose vision is not at all restricted by the size of the carriage
windows and, while looking out sideways in the same way as all the
paying passengers, he sees a much wider field including the line a
little way ahead. Which person is seeing the present? The answer seems
to be that all are and that the differences in their views of it are
imposed only by the limitations of their viewpoint. The rider on the
roof is not looking into the future; he just has a better view of the
present and is using his sense system more fully.
Hindu philosophy has always included the idea of an ever-moving
present, and modern physics is now coming to accept this pattern. In
the realms of subatomic mathematics it even considers the possibility
of the train traveling in the opposite direction, reversing the passage
of time. Everything else in the universe is undirectional; it becomes
increasingly difficult to accept, and impossible to prove, that time
should be the sole exception. Biologists have hardly begun to think
about it. The notion of time as an arrow, as a long straight line, is a
part of all evolutionary thinking. Palaeontologists draw charts to show
the linear descent of the modern horse from a little marsh-living
mini-horse with more than one digit on the end of every leg.
Geneticists trace more complex but still linear patterns of inheritance
from generation to generation, all neatly numbered in sequence.
Embryologists follow the development of a complex organism through
every division from a single fertilised egg. Only ecologists and
ethologists work with substantially different shapes, because they
cannot help but notice that life is basically cyclical.
The freshwater eel Anguilla anguilla spends most of its life in the
rivers of western Europe, but it is not born there. Young elvers
suddenly appear in the coastal waters each year, and their origin was a
complete mystery until Johann Schmidt made his classic study in the
1930s. (276) He compiled data on the size of eel larvae found at
different places in the Atlantic and, plotting these on a map, traced
their point of origin to a spot where the smallest ones most often
occurred. This proved to be the Sargasso Sea, midway between the
Caribbean and the bulge of equatorial Africa, three thousand miles from
Europe. It seems that eels spawn at a great depth in these waters in
the spring, and the tiny, transparent, leaflike larvae float up nearer
to the surface in the summer. They are wafted away by the North
Equatorial Current and into the Gulf Stream, in which they spend three
years slowly drifting toward Europe and growing until they are about
three inches in length. As soon as they reach coastal waters, the leaf
larvae undergo a remarkable transformation into little, pearly-white,
cylindrical elvers that avoid salt water and invade the river
estuaries. They make their way relentlessly inland, wriggling up
waterfalls, slithering across meadows on rainy nights, and even
climbing up to the mountain streams ten thousand feet high in the Alps.
In chosen backwaters and pools they settle down to a quiet life that
may last until the males are fourteen and the females over twenty years
old. Then, suddenly they are struck by an urgent need to return to salt
water; their whole hormonal system undergoes a tremendous change and
they become fat and silvery, with mucus on their skin. These powerful
silver eels abandon their lakes and pools, often striking out over land
in the dark, resting up in damp holes during the day, where they
breathe through the water retained in their gill chambers until it is
possible to continue their compulsive flight to the sea. When they
reach the ocean, they disappear.
Schmidt assumed that they travel deep under water in a countercurrent,
swimming in the dark for a year on their epic journey back to the
spawning grounds in the Sargasso. But Denys Tucker has discovered that
the moment the eels enter salt water, their anuses close up and they
are therefore unable to feed and must live entirely on their internal
stores of fat. (324) These resources are not enough for the vast effort
needed to swim three thousand miles, so Tucker believes that they die
without ever breeding. He calls the European eel 'only a useless waste
product of the American eel', which was once assumed to be a different
species, Anguilla rostrata, but could be just a variation of the same
form produced by a different environment. Both American and European
forms come from the Sargasso Sea as larvae, and it could be true that
only the American adults are close enough to the breeding grounds to be
able to return and lay new eggs.
It has been suggested that the Sargasso Sea was once the site of an
island sea on the lost continent of Atlantis and that the eels are
simply trying to return to their ancestral breeding ground. It is
certain that the eels are intent on breeding when they leave the
European rivers; their gonads are fully developed, but no adult has yet
been found in the deep Atlantic, and no eel marked in Europe has ever
been recovered from the Sargasso Sea. A more likely explanation is that
the journey was once much shorter, but the continents have drifted
apart and the European adults are now just a 'waste product' and
destined to die of exhaustion in their impossible attempt to return to
the place where they hatched. There is no biological reason why they
should not stop and breed somewhere closer, perhaps in the waters off
the Azores, but the response to a situation that existed millions of
years ago still persists and drives them to destruction.
We are seeing in the behavior of each generation of living eels the
shadow of something that happened a long time ago. It is like looking
out at a star that we can see exploding, knowing that it actually
happened a billion years ago and that we are looking at something that
long ago ceased to exist. We witness, in both eel and star, an event of
the remote past taking place in our present. Space and time become
inseparable, and when we cannot think of one without the other, time
ceases to be the old, one-dimensional unit of classical physics, and
the combination space-time becomes a new factor - the four-dimensional
continuum.
The idea of a dimension that no one, not even the mathematician, has
been able to imagine, let alone see, is difficult to grasp. It is
uncomfortable to think of the here-and-now as the past, but it seems to
be true. Space-time is a continuum, and it is impossible to draw
distinctions between past and present and perhaps even future. In
biological terms the fourth dimension represents continuity. A wheat
seed that germinates after four thousand years in the tomb of an
Egyptian pharaoh is no different from the other seeds in that husk that
sprouted the year after they were first grown on the banks of the Nile.
Bacteria normally divide every twenty minutes, but under unfavorable
circumstances they can become resistant spores that are sometimes
entombed in rock and wait for millions of years to be released and
continue multiplying as though nothing had happened. Life conquers time
by suspending it in a way that is almost as good as having a time
machine. It may deal with space in the same way.
The busiest and most bizarre organisms in any drop of pond water are
tiny, transparent, highly sculptured things with crowns or wheels of
cilia that serve them equally well for both gathering food and gaining
momentum. Seventeen hundred species have been described, and all are
included in a distinct phylum of their own - the Rotifera, meaning the
'wheel-bearers' - but no two biologists can agree about where this
group belongs on our evolutionary tree. Rotifers are so peculiar in
almost every aspect of their structure and behavior, that suspicions
are beginning to grow that they do not belong in our system at all.
Geography means nothing to rotifers; similar pools of fresh water in
Mongolia or Monrovia or Massachusetts all have the same species of
rotifer in them. And changes in environmental conditions simply send
them into a wrinkled, desiccated state that looks like a minute speck
of dust, which can survive prolonged drying, freezing, or almost
anything else that can happen. For instant rotifers, just add water.
These encapsulated specks have even been recovered from the air at
fifty thousand feet, and there is no reason why they should not be
found at even greater heights, perhaps even propelled by freak
atmospheric events out of the atmosphere and into orbit or on into
space. In laboratory experiments dormant rotifers have survived in
space vacuum conditions, and it has been suggested that they might
leave earth in this way and wait indefinitely for other sources of
water. It is even possible that they could have arrived here from
somewhere else, extending the normal gap between generations from days
to light-years, turning time into space and becoming part of the
space-time system.
Space is everywhere all at once, and if the mathematics of space-time
are correct, then time may have the same properties. In this view, time
is not propagated like light waves but appears immediately everywhere
and links everything. If it is indeed continuous, then any alteration
in its properties anywhere will be instantly noticeable everywhere,
phenomena such as telepathy or any other communication that seems to be
independent of distance will be much easier to understand. At the
principal observatory of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Nikolai
Kozyrev is doing experiments that seem to manipulate time.
Kozyrev is Russia's most respected astrophysicist, a man who predicted
gas emissions on the moon ten years before the Americans discovered
them. He has recently invented a complex assembly of precision
gyroscopes, asymmetrical pendulums, and torsion balances that he uses
to measure something he thinks may be time. In one, simple experiment
he stretches a long elastic with a machine that consists of a fixed
point, or effect, and a moving part, or cause. His instruments show
that something is taking place in the vicinity of the elastic and that,
whatever it is, it is greater at the effect end than at the cause end.
This gradation is detectable even when the instruments are masked from
all normal force fields and shielded by a wall one yard thick. Kozyrev
believes that time itself is being altered and 'that time is thin
around the cause and dense around the effect'. (233)
He is also intrigued by the fact that all life is basically
asymmetrical. He has found that an organic substance made of molecules
that turn to the left, such as turpentine, produces a stronger response
on his equipment when placed near the stretched elastic, and that the
presence of a right-handed molecule, such as sugar, produces a lesser
response. In his view, our planet is a left-handed system and therefore
adds energy to the galaxy. Kozyrev came to these conclusions following
an intensive study of double stars, which, though separated from each
other by considerable distances in space, gradually come to be very
much alike. He found that resemblance in brightness, radius, and
spectral type was so great that it could not be produced by the action
of force fields alone. He compares the communion between two stars with
the telepathic contact between two people and suggests, 'It is possible
that all the processes in the material systems of the universe are the
sources, feeding the general current of time, which in its turn can
influence the material system.' (183)
Kozyrev is not alone in this mystic view of the energy of time. Charles
Muses, one of the leading theoretical physicists in the United States,
agrees that time may have its own pattern of energy. He says, 'We shall
eventually see that time may be defined as the ultimate casual pattern
of all energy release,' and he even predicts that the energy put out by
time will be found to be oscillating. (220)
Cosmological theories seldom have any direct relevance for life here on
earth, but this is one that could affect us profoundly. The idea that
time affects matter is familiar to everyone who has ever seen a field
in erosion or watched himself grow older, but the possibility that
there might be a reciprocal action, in which matter affects time, is
revolutionary. It means that nothing happens without effect and that,
whatever happens, all of us are touched by it, because we live in the
continuum of space-time. John Donne said, 'any man's death diminishes
me,' (89) and he could have been right not because he knew or cared
about the man, but because he and the man were part of the same
ecological system - part of Supernature.
Precognition
Every conditioned reflex is a sort of travel in time. When the bell
rang, Pavlov's dogs salivated, because they were reliving the last time
when the bell rang and it was followed immediately by food. Many
animals learn to function in this way, because their lives are
specialised and confined within limits where the one kind of stimulus
is invariably followed by the other. The reflex has survival value for
many species, but in man the picture changes. We are exploratory and
constantly running into new situations, where old responses would be
inappropriate. We are confronted with uncertainty and sometimes respond
to it with superstitions based on similar experiences in which we came
to no harm. Soldiers often jealously guard a certain item of clothing
or equipment that is closely associated with past experience of escape
from danger. But most often we respond to uncertainty with some pattern
of behavior that seems to lessen the doubt by making the future known
to us. We set up some system of prophecy or divination. These systems
take many forms and, surprisingly, some of them work.
An American anthropologist with the magnificent name of Omar Khayyam
Moore examined divination techniques used by the Indians in Labrador.
These people are hunters, and failure to find food means hunger and
possible death, so when meat is short they consult an oracle to
determine in which direction they should hunt. They hold the shoulder
bone of a caribou over hot coals, and the cracks and spots caused by
the heat are then interpreted like a map. The directions indicated by
this oracle are random, but the system continues to be used, because it
works. Moore reasons that, if they did not use the bone oracle, the
Indians would return to where they had last hunted with success or
where cover was good or water plentiful. This could lead to overhunting
of certain areas, but the use of the oracle means that their forays are
randomised; the regular pattern is broken up, and they make a better
and more balanced use of the land, which means in the end that they are
more successful. Some kinds of magic work. The very fact that they
continue to be used in communities whose existence depends on them
shows that divination of this kind works often enough to have survival
value. As Moore says, 'Some practices which have been classified as
magic may well be directly efficacious as techniques for attaining the
ends envisaged by their practitioners.' (216)
We survive by controlling our environment, and control is made possible
by information. So lack of information quickly breeds insecurity and a
situation in which any information is regarded as better than none.
Even white rats seem to feel this way about it. An elegant experiment
was set up in which the inevitable maze, leading to food in one of two
boxes, was modified so that on one path the rat was provided with
information about whether there would be food in the box at the end or
not. (259) The chances of food being in either box were even, but after
some days of training, all the rats developed a distinct preference for
the side where they obtained advance information, even though the food
rewards were no greater. Humans show the same sort of preference for
knowledge about an uncertain but unavoidable outcome. Time and again we
show that, regardless of the nature of the news and in spite of the
fact that we get no advantage from it other than learning what was
going to happen in any case, we would prefer to know and thereby reduce
our insecurity. This anxiety about the future can be so great that bad
news is preferable to an absence of information; it may even come as a
relief, because it frees us to adjust to a situation. (162) Studies on
prisoners have shown that those with the possibility of parole are
under considerably greater strain than those who are reconciled to the
fact that they have a life sentence to serve. There can hardly be a
maxim more inaccurate than the one that claims, 'No news is good news.'
And yet we do not demand a state of complete certainty. A good part of
our success as a species is based on our ability to cope with
environmental variation and our tendency to seek out new sources of
stimulation. The popularity of risky pastimes such as mountaineering
and motor racing is evidence of man's need for a certain amount of
uncertainty and risk, a certain quantity of adrenalin in the system.
But this can be too high, and in threatening situations anxiety is very
intense and there is a strong desire for both information and some
means of control. Any activity that involves some feeling of
participation in the turn of events is welcome, and this need to know
what is in store helps to account for the current tremendous popularity
of do-it-yourself systems of divination and prophecy.
Precognition means 'knowing in advance', and systems of knowing cover
just about every possible source of variation. They include aeromancy
(divination by cloud shapes), alectryomancy (in which a bird is allowed
to peck grains of corn from letters of the alphabet), apantomancy
(chance meetings with animals), capnomancy (the patterns of smoke
rising from a fire), causimomancy (the study of objects placed in the
fire), cromniomancy (finding significance in onion sprouts), hippomancy
(based on the stamping of horses), onychomancy (the patterns of
fingernails in sunlight), phyllorhodomancy (consisting of the sounds
made by slapping rose petals against the hand), and tiromancy (a system
of divination involving cheese). None of these need be taken seriously,
because the phenomena all involve events that can only be random and in
no way reflect any kind of biological principle, though I must admit to
a certain weakness for the charming system involving rose petals, which
we owe to those magnificent ancient Greeks.
Some of the more complex systems of divination are not as easily
dismissed. Certainly the most impressive is the Book of Changes, or I
Ching. This began as a series of oracles written more than three
thousand years ago, which has been expanded and annotated so that,
complete with commentaries, it now constitutes a formidable body of
material. But the value of the I Ching lies in its simplicity. It is
basically a binary system built up on a series of simple alternatives.
To form each of the traditional patterns, the person consulting the
oracle divides a number of yarrow stalks or tosses coins to get what
amounts to a yes or a no answer. This is done six times in succession,
so that the final result is a hexagram, or pattern composed of six
horizontal lines, which are either intact or broken, according to the
results of the draw. There are sixty-four possible combinations of the
two types of line, and each of these hexagrams has a name and a
traditional interpretation. In casting the stalks or the coins, the
character of each line is determined on a majority basis, but if all
the stalks or all the coins indicate the same choice, then this line in
the hexagram is given special significance and opens the way for
further possibilities of interpretation.
As with all methods of divination, a great deal depends on the person
who interprets the results. In most systems success is possible only
due to the intuition and psychological awareness of the 'seer', who
literally sees what people need or want to know by observing them very
carefully. But the I Ching has a character of its own, a sort of inner
consistency that almost defies description. Carl Jung noticed this and,
I think, put his finger right on the answer. He was at that time
interested in his idea of synchronicity and the theory of coincidences,
and suspected that the unconscious might have something to do with the
way the patterns came out. I feel certain that he was right and that
the power of psychokinesis has a great deal to do with the weird
accuracy of the I Ching.
All commentaries on the Book of Changes say something like, 'The more
familiar one becomes with the personality of the I Ching, the more one
understands what this wise gentle-stern friend is trying to say to
you.' (327) And this is absolutely true. As soon as one becomes
familiar with each of the hexagrams and comes to know that a solid line
in a certain position has special significance, then the patterns begin
to come out right and give the kind of advice one consciously or
unconsciously expects to hear. Colin Wilson describes this relationship
well: 'We know, theoretically, that we possess a subconscious mind, yet
as I sit here, in this room on a sunny morning, I am not in any way
aware of it; I can't see it or feel it. It is like an arm upon which I
have been lying in my sleep, and which has become completely dead and
feelingless. The real purpose of works such as the I Ching ... is to
restore circulation to these areas of the mind.' (342) Consulting the
Book of Changes at a time of personal crisis amounts almost to a
session with your favorite psychoanalyst. There is nothing in the fall
of the coins or in the text of the book that is not already in you; all
the I Ching does with its beautifully organised patterns is to draw the
necessary information and decisions out and to absolve the conscious
mind of the burden of responsibility for these decisions.
Symbols have a great appeal for the unconscious mind. It uses them to
squeeze its ideas past the censor of the conscious in the I Ching, in
dreams, and in the somewhat less benign system of divination that
involves the tarot. (260) The tarot pack consists of seventy-eight
cards, most of which are similar to ordinary playing cards, but
twenty-two carry colorful symbols that were popular in the Middle Ages.
There are emperors, popes, hermits, jugglers, fools, and devils - all
characters with a high emotional content for someone who lived at that
time. They still provide a sort of alphabet by means of which the
'seer' can work out his interpretation or the questioner can
cross-examine his unconscious, but they lack the elegant precision of
the I Ching. And it is more difficult to see how the unconscious can
organise the order of the cards in a shuffle than it is to assume that
mind offers something to the momentum of a falling coin. With its
ominous symbols and its emphasis on violence, the tarot undoubtedly
crashes into unconscious areas, but it looks like a coarse bludgeon in
comparison to the subtle probe of the I Ching.
So even the most popular systems of divination are largely concerned
with expanding present potential and seem to have very little to do
with actually forecasting the future. Mechanical systems such as these
are often manipulated by professionals on behalf of their clients, or
they may be abandoned in favor of purely mental prophecies that are
given with or without props such as crystal balls. But no matter how
the divination takes place, the method of operation is the same.
Symbols are used to open up the present or the past in such a way that
one seems to get a glimpse of the future. A client is drawn into
providing information about himself that ends up looking as though it
came from the seer. No hypnosis need be involved, but the technique is
very similar. The subject is induced to do things to himself under the
impression that someone else is responsible and must therefore be
exercising supernatural powers. Even the best-known prophets show up in
a poor light when stripped of these subjective impressions. Mental
sleight of hand, usually practiced by ourselves on ourselves, conceals
the limited success most performers really enjoy.
Oracular double talk is as old as Delphi. If anyone were really able to
predict the future with any accuracy, he would need only a year or two
to become absolute ruler of the world. I have looked as carefully as
one can at the case histories of some of the world's most wealthy and
influential people and can find there no evidence of supernatural
abilities. They achieve their success through application and some
luck, but all make mistakes, often very elementary ones, and none have
taken gambles that were not based largely on experience. Full
precognition seems to be non-existent, but there is some evidence that
some people sometimes have access to snippets of information that
cannot be explained in any other way.
William Cox, an American mathematician, has recently completed an
interesting survey in an attempt to discover whether people really do
avoid traveling on trains that were going to be involved in an
accident. Cox collected information on the total number of people on
each train at the time of the accident and compared these with the
number of passengers who traveled on the same train during each of the
preceding seven days and on the fourteenth, twenty-first and
twenty-eighth day before the accident. (309) His results, which cover
several years of operation with the same equipment at the same station,
show that people did in fact avoid accident-bound trains. There were
always fewer passengers in the damaged and derailed coaches than would
have been expected for that train at that time. The difference between
expected and actual number of passengers was so great that the odds
against its occurring by chance were over a hundred to one.
It would be fascinating to make further investigations of this kind. So
much of the material dealing with prophecy and prediction is anecdotal
and impossible to analyse or view objectively, but statistical surveys
could show that some of the other 'hunches' so popular in folklore are
indeed mathematical realities and that there is some kind of collective
awareness of things to come. Survival in a biological sense depends
almost entirely on avoiding disaster by being able to see it coming. An
antelope turns away from the water hole where a lion is lying in wait,
because it catches a trace of smell on the wind or hears a bird making
sounds that show it is disturbed. An otter flees from its stream
because a minute change in vibration warned it of an approaching flash
flood. In assessing examples of apparent precognition, we need to be
aware of life's receptivity to very subtle stimuli that tell us that
the future has already started. They enable living organisms to
anticipate the future by expanding the present. In the unconscious
areas that respond to subliminal signals from the environment, the
future already exists. We cannot change it; if we could, it wouldn't be
the future, but we can alter the extent to which we will be involved in
it. In a very real sense this is tampering with time, but it is made
possible by entirely natural extensions of our normal senses, which
give up a more than usually acute view of distant things.
In biological terms precognition therefore means knowing not what will happen but what could happen if ...
Ghosts
At the University of Colorado, Nicholas Seeds has taken mouse brains
and teased them apart into their component cells. (303) These he put
into a culture solution in a test tube and shook gently for several
days. At the end of this time the separate cells reaggregated and
formed pieces of brain in which cells were connected by normal
synapses, showed the usual biochemical reactions, and grew a natural
myelin protective sheath. Somehow cells are capable of recreating past
patterns; they have a molecular memory which is passed on from one cell
to another so that a new one can reproduce the behavior of its parents.
If a change, or mutation, occurs, this, too, is faithfully duplicated
by the descendants. The dead live again in defiance of time.
The cyclical patterns of life mean that matter is never destroyed but
goes back into the system to re-emerge sometime later. Living organic
matter rises again in the same form with the same behavior patterns in
a process of reincarnation. Each new generation is a reincarnation of
the species, but this does not mean that individuals reappear. The
Greeks believed in metempsychosis - the transmigration of the soul into
a new body - and similar ideas are so widespread among all cultures
that they can be considered almost universal. But despite some
sensational stories, there is little real evidence that anything of the
sort occurs. It is difficult enough to prove that we have souls in the
first place. While apparent knowledge of other times and places can be
attributed to telepathic contact with someone still alive, it seems
unnecessary to assume that the phenomena are produced by an eternal
spirit.
Souls or spirits that occur without benefit of body are a separate kind
of phenomenon, but can be considered in much the same way. For the sake
of argument, it is worth considering the possibility that man can
produce an 'astral projection', or part of himself that can exist
without his normal physical body and perhaps even survive his death.
These spirits are said to wander at will, and there are countless
records of their having been seen, in whole or in part, in a great
variety of situations. In England, one person in six believes in ghosts
and one person in fourteen thinks that he has actually seen one. (123)
These are enormous numbers of people, and I have no intention of
suggesting that they must all have been mistaken, but to me there is
one very strange and significant thing in all their sightings. All the
ghosts of which I have ever heard, wore clothes. While I am prepared in
principle to concede the possible existence of an astral body, I cannot
bring myself to believe in astral shoes and shirts and hats. The fact
that people see ghosts as they or somebody else remembers them, fully
dressed in period costume, seems to indicate that the visions are part
of a mental rather than a supernatural process. In those cases in which
several people see the same apparition, it could be broadcast
telepathically by one of them. And where a similar ghost is seen by
separate people on separate occasions, I assume that the mental picture
is held by someone associated with the site.
George Owen, a Cambridge biologist who has done pioneer work in
scientific parapsychology, says, 'The assumption of an actual astral
body present in the vicinity of the percipient is, however, somewhat
gratuitious and unnecessary if we are prepared to accept an explanation
in terms of telepathy.' (238) As another biologist I say, 'Hear, hear!'
The explanation of an unknown in terms of another phenomenon still in
dispute might seem labored and torturous, but it is good science and
better logic to settle for the more plausible of two explanations.
Colin Wilson picked out another aspect of hauntings that fits his
mental hypothesis. (342) He suggests that the chief characteristic of
ghosts appears to be a certain stupidity, 'since a tendency to hang
around places they know in life would appear to be the spirit-world's
equivalent of feeble-mindedness; ... one feels that they ought to have
something better to do.' Wilson thinks that the state of mind of ghosts
may be similar to that of someone with a high fever or delirium,
someone unable to distinguish between reality and dreams. This
description can apply equally well to the state of mind of someone
seeing the ghost. Delirium is not necessary, but a certain amount of
dissociation brought about by conflict between conscious and
unconscious states, perhaps as a result of receiving a powerful
telepathic communication, could be present.
Communications with the dead are similarly suspect. I cannot help
wondering why, out of the billions who once walked the earth, it should
always be Napoleon, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Chopin, Cleopatra, Robert
Browning, and Alexander the Great who just happen to be on hand when a
spirit medium summons up someone from the past. Rhine sums up the
problem by saying, 'The outcome of the scientific investigation of
mediumship is best described as a draw.' (309) In seventy-five years of
research no incontestable proof of survival has been found, but neither
has it been possible to prove that some sort of survival after death
could not occur.
The most interesting evidence ever gathered in this respect has been
published recently by Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian psychologist now
living in Germany. Raudive has discovered that tapes made by speaking
directly into a microphone, by recording from a radio turned to random
'white noise' interference, or by connecting the recorder to a crystal
diode set with a very short aerial, all include soft extraneous voices.
The voices speak with a strange rhythm in many languages, sometimes so
softly that it is necessary to amplify them by electronic means.
Raudive says, 'The sentence construction obeys rules that differ
radically from those of ordinary speech and, although the voices seem
to speak in the same way as we do, the anatomy of their speech
apparatus must be different from our own.' The strangest thing about
these recorded voices is that they seem to respond to questions put by
Raudive and his collaborators by producing more of their
Esperanto-style comments that often look like direct answers.
In the past six years Raudive has recorded more than seventy thousand
conversations of this kind. (263) The speech content of the recordings
is exhaustively recounted and analysed in a book that includes
testimonials from very well-known and reputable scientists who were
either present when the tapes were made or who were able to examine the
equipment involved. There can be no doubt about the reality of the
sounds; they are on the tapes and can be broken down into phonemes and
analysed by voice-print machinery, but their source is open to
question. Raudive believes that man 'carries within himself the ability
to contact his friends on earth when he has passed through the
transition of death'. In other words he is certain that the voices are
those of the dead, and he confidently identifies some of them as
Goethe, Mayakovsky, Hitler, and his own mother. It is difficult to
argue with this, because rigidly controlled experiments have been
unable to account for the presence of the voices by any normal method.
On 24 March 1971 a test was made at the studios of a major recording
company in England. Engineers used their own equipment and installed
instruments to exclude freak pickups from radio stations and both high-
and low-frequency transmitters. Raudive was not allowed to handle any
of the equipment at any time, and a separate, synchronised recording
was made of every sound taking place in the studio. During the
eighteen-minute recording, both tapes were monitored constantly and
nothing untoward could be heard, but on playback it was discovered that
there were more than two hundred voices on the experimental tape and
that some were so clear that they could be heard by everyone present.
(264)
I am struck by the similarity between this phenomenon and the thought
pictures of Ted Serios. In both cases recording apparatus is picking up
a signal that appears not to originate in the immediate environment,
but both pictures and sounds are produced only in the presence of a
particular person. The voices on Raudive's tapes speak only in the
seven languages familiar to him. In neither case could the signals be
detected or blocked by physical apparatus - Raudive has worked inside a
Faraday cage - but the testimony of witnesses of the highest possible
caliber makes it impossible to doubt that the results are obtained
without conscious fraud. Like the Raudive voices, the Serios pictures
were at first attributed to spirit sources, but the connection between
their content and the psychology of the man involved is in both cases
too great to ignore. I think that both phenomena will be found to be
produced in the same means and that it will originate in the mind of
the living man and have nothing whatsoever to do with the dead.
It is possible that the voices have a perfectly normal physical
explanation. We still know so little about things around us that it
might not be long before we can build machines that will recapture the
sights and sounds of the past. Film and recordings do just that, for
our immediate past anyway. Now there is a suggestion that there could
be similar records that we have just overlooked. A pot revolving on a
wheel with a pointer just touching the clay could be a primitive sort
of phonograph. All we need to do is rotate the pot again at the same
speed, find the appropriate stylus, and we may be able to recapture the
sounds being made in the pottery on the day the clay was thrown. Work
already in progress on unvarnished pottery from the Middle East has
produced some results that are encouraging.
Exobiology
In this look at other worlds around us, I cannot exclude the
possibility that a part may be played by beings from other worlds
altogether. Biology has lately given rise to a new discipline:
exobiology, the study of extraterrestrial life. Ever since 1959, when
analysis of a piece of meteor substance showed traces of organic
compounds, a controversy has raged as to whether these compounds came
into the atmosphere with the meteorite or whether they originate on
earth. The dispute has never been satisfactorily resolved, and
discussions about life elsewhere have had to continue to be based on
inference and conjecture. Astronomical calculations based on the
fraction of stars with planets, the number of these planets suitable
for life, the fraction of such suitable planets on which life actually
appears, and the number of these on which life reaches consciousness
and the desire to communicate - arrive at the conclusion that perhaps
one in one hundred thousand stars has an advanced society in orbit
around it. That means that there could be as many as a million
intelligent life forms in our galaxy alone. But our success in
establishing contact with any of them depends also on the longevity of
each of us. It is possible that the acquisition of nuclear technology
is a consequence that no species can control for long, and that all the
beings that do manage to get this far only succeed in destroying
themselves with it rather quickly.
Assuming that they do not succumb, the chances seem to be quite high
that sooner or later we will meet one or more of them. Erich von
Daniken things that we are one of them. (333) He has collected a
scrapbook of loose ends in archaeology and anthropology, such as the
map found in Istanbul that shows the continents as they would look from
space, distorted by the curvature of the globe; an iron pillar in India
that does not rust; patterns on the plains of Peru that can be
appreciated only from the air; descriptions in sacred manuscripts of
gods coming down to earth in chariots with wheels of fire; and ancient
paintings and etchings that portray figures wearing what look like
space helmets. From all this he deduces that God was an astronaut and
that we are partly the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence. It
is a provocative idea, but as a biologist with a belief in our own
still largely unexploited ability, I find it unattractive and
unnecessary to give credit for our achievements to some transient
aliens.
Ivan Sanderson has the same idea, but expresses it in biological terms.
He suggests that earth was seeded by an egg of life from somewhere else
and that this eventually hatched and grew into a complex larva that
embodies all life as we know it. He sees us as part of this larva,
reaching the stage where we begin to think of metamorphosis and start
spinning the web of intellect around us, encysting our minds in the
cocoons of machines, the pupae, where they undergo essential changes
and emerge eventually as adult forms to fly off to other worlds and
start the whole process again by laying eggs there. The adult into
which we will ultimately develop is, he suggests, nothing more than a
flying saucer, or UFO. (293)
This bloodcurdling idea makes quite good biology; it could all be true.
It is quite possible that the next step in our evolution is the
development of an electronic intelligence and that the only way this
could be produced from a lifeless planet was through the intermediate
stages of organic life. The first generation of machine minds are
already with us. They are based on printed circuits with electrons
moving about through wires, and they depend on us. But the next step
after that could be into pure energy fields, which would leave us and
live either in space or in those parts of the universe where exploding
stars and novae provide an active environment of the sort of intense
radiation that this superelectronic mind would need to nourish it.
I hope that it is not true. I am impressed by our inefficiency, by our
vast, as yet untapped potential, and by the progress we have already
made using only one small corner of our minds. We are indeed larvae,
eating our way through earth's resources in a mindless, caterpillar
fashion, but I believe that the imago is already beginning to stir
within. When the climate is right, it will break out not as some sort
of supercomputer but as an organic being that will embody all of
Supernature and look back on technology as a childhood toy.
CONCLUSION
Life survives in the chaos of the cosmos by picking order out of the
winds. Death is certain, but life becomes possible by following
patterns that lead like paths of firmer ground through the swamps of
time. Cycles of light and dark, of heat and cold, of magnetism,
radioactivity, and gravity all provide vital guides, and life learns to
respond to even their most subtle signs. The emergence of a fruit fly
is tuned by a spark lasting one thousandth of a second; the breeding of
a bristle worm is co-ordinated on the ocean floor by a glimmer of light
reflected from the moon; the development of the eggs of a quail is
synchronised by a soft conversation between the embryos; conception in
a woman waits for that phase of the moon under which she was born.
Nothing happens in isolation. We breathe and bleed, we laugh and cry,
we crash and die in time with cosmic cues.
Inorganic matter got together in the right way to create a
self-perpetuating organism that started a system of elaboration that
has now produced a pattern with several million pieces. This is
Supernature, and man sits at the center of its web, tugging at the
strands that interest him, following some through to useful conclusions
and snapping others in his impatience. Man is the spearhead of
evolution, vital, creative, and immensely talented, but still young
enough to wreak havoc in his first flush of enthusiasm. Hopefully this
period of awkward adolescence is coming to an end as he begins to
realise that he cannot possibly survive alone, that the web of
Supernature is supported by the combined strength of a vast number of
individually fragile fragments, that life on earth is united into what
amounts to a single superorganism, and that this in turn is only part
of the cosmic community.
A first sight, the process of evolution looks extremely wasteful with
most developments running into the dead ends of extinction, but even in
their failure these contribute something to the few species that do
succeed. It is imperative that there should be a multitude of
participants so that life can move on a broad front, testing all
possibilities in a search for the right ones. Even those that die have
not lived in vain, because news of their failure is broadcast and
becomes part of the inheritance of Supernature. This communion is
possible because life shares a mutual sensitivity to the cosmos, has a
common origin, and speaks the same organic language.
The alphabet is written in chemical symbols shared by all protoplasm.
The most common word is water, which has the property of instability
that makes it a most sensitive, reliable receiver of subtle signals.
Simple formulas in an aqueous solution make it possible for information
to pass from cell to cell as long as there is direct contact between
them. The same information can jump across space provided with an
overlap of electrical fields or where two communicants are sufficiently
alike to resonate in sympathy with each other. And at the highest
levels, messages are carried across gaps in time.
In the vanguard of evolution comes a development that is confined to a
few species and seems to play no part in making them better fitted for
survival in this system. Biology is usually very parsimonious and
entirely utilitarian, but men - and possibly chimpanzees and dolphins -
have acquired a need for things that satisfy none of the normal,
natural hungers. We have developed a taste for the mysterious. We have
become aware of ourselves, of our life, and of the fact that we must
die. We have opened a door on forethought and imagination and
discovered anxiety as well. The fact that even a potted plant responds
to the death of an animal nearby means that life has always been aware
of the phenomenon of death, but with consciousness comes a more
complete awareness of our relation to this state - of the fact that we
can cause it, or prevent it, or in trying to prevent it even bring
about our own death. And with this kind of consciousness comes guilt
and conflict and the development of a mental barrier behind which we
can hide things away from ourselves.
The origin of this new awareness in biological terms is still obscure,
but we are beginning to get some idea of its implications. Cosmic
evolution produced our solar system and this habitable planet;
inorganic evolution put together the right ingredients to produce life;
organic evolution shaped and molded that life into its kaleidoscope of
forms; cultural evolution took just one group and pushed them rapidly
through intelligence and awareness to a position where they could
manipulate the rest of evolution for themselves. So we have arrived at
the moment of control with a new and growing consciousness both of the
enormity of the task and of the breadth of our own ability to cope with
it. In this situation two things stand out above all others: One is
that our greatest strength lies in unity with all of Supernature here
on earth, and the other is that this unity could give us the impetus we
need to transcend the system altogether.
Supernature could become something really supernatural.
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APPENDIX
1. BARBER, T. X. et al (editors). Biofeedback and Self-Control. Aldine Annuals. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971.
A collection of thirty-eight scientific articles drawn mainly from
medical journals dealing with psychosomatic and psychophysiological
research.
2. BURR, H. S. Blueprint for Immortality.
London: Neville Spearman, 1972.
Burr's personal record of his discovery and exploration of the Electrodynamic, or Life, Field. Including full bibliography.
3. FREEDLAND, N. The Occult Explosion.
London: Michael Joseph, 1972.
An up-to-date review of contemporary manifestations of occult interest.
4. KARLINS, M. & ANDREWS, L. M. Biofeedback.
New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1972.
A summary of the latest research into regulation of bodily processes and consciousness. With full bibliography.
INDEX
Acupuncture
Addey, John
Alarm calls and signals, survival value of
Alchemy
Allergies, as responsive to hypnotic suggestion
Alpha activities and rhythms in brain waves and sleep and telepathy
'Alphaphone'
American Federation of Astrologers
American Institute of Mathematical Statistics
American Institute of Medical Climatology
American Society of Geneticists
Amino acids, as units of protein construction
Amoebae: multiplication of pseudopodia of
Andrews, Donald
Andrews, Dr Edson
Animal communication
Animal hypnosis
Animals, cold-blooded, effects of temperature fluctuations on
Animals, dreams of
Animals, higher, sleep habits of
Animals, land; behaviour patterns of immobilization of, how induced,
and survival value of moon's influence on sensitivity of, to water
sleep habits of
Animals, sound vibrations and
Animals, tidal, reaction of, to moon's influence
Animals, warm-blooded, and sleep
Annual cycle, heat and light sensitivity to
Aquatic mammals, and appearance of sleep
Arrhenius, Svante
Astral; bodies projection
Astrological predictions, based on position of planets at time of birth
Astrology, and horoscope construction
Atoms; arrangement of, in a molecule behaviour of water's atoms of life infrared rays generated by
Aura surrounding the body and thermographic technique
Aurora borealis, as related to magnetic storms, sunspots, and other phenomena
Automatic talking and writing
Autosuggestion
see also Hypnotism, mass
Axis of earth, and yearly cycle of changes in circadian rhythm
Baby identification, and palm-printing
Backster, Cleve
Bagnall, Oscar
Baldo, Camillo
Barber, Theodore
Barley seeds, experiments with
Behaviour, patterns of; assessment of, by functional requirements learned patterns of animals and the mind
Beloff, John
Bengali sect, and state of ecstacy
Berger, Hans
Berne, Eric
beta rays
Biochemical systems, and exchange of matter
'Biophysical Effects Method, The'
Birds; heat and light experiments on sleep patterns of
Birth; and position of the planets, giving rise to astrological predictions time of as affecting human height, weight and IQ
Birth control, and lunar rhythm
Black, Stephen
Blind, ability to 'see' by the
Blood pressure, control of, at will
Blushing
Body; dominated by brain language shape and proportion
Book of Changes, see I Ching
Boyle, Robert
Braid, James
Brain; domination of body by and drugs and electrical impulses records
of experience stored by signals from, determining use of hand and sleep
Brain and mind, relationship between
Brain patterns and rhythms
Brain waves alpha rhythms in electrophysiology of a hypnotized subject
and PK effects and telepathic transmission theta rhythms in
Brain waves of birds and small animals
Branwell, Cherrie
British Acoustical Society
British Society of Dowsers
Brown, Frank
Burr, Harold
Camouflage patterns and colour
Cancer, electrical test for
Carbons, element of, and building of compounds
Card guessing; and clairvoyance and ESP
Cards, tarot
Carington, Whately
Carrington, Hereward
Carson, Rachel
Case for Astrology, The, (West and Toonder)
Catatonia
see also Hypnosis
Cavendish, Richard
Cells, co-ordination between, and chemical messengers
see also Organisms, multicellular
Cells, individual, short life and continual replacement of
Cells, multicells organization of
Cells, single, properties and characteristics of
see also Organisms, multicellular
Chemical anaesthetics and sleep
Chemical elements as basis of all living matter
Chemical messengers and co-ordination between cells
Chemical reaction; and energy in visible light influence of PK on
Chemical stimuli and living organisms
Cheops Pyramid Razor Blade Sharpener
Chertok, Léon
Chirology
Chladni, Ernst
Circadian rhythm and the cockroach and the fruit fly and human body temperature and yearly cycle of earth's changes
Circannual rhythm in human bodyweight change
Clairvoyance
Clark, Vernon
Climate related to the physique of many men
Cockroaches; and circadian rhythm effect of light on photo-periodic research on
Cohen, Sidney
Cole, Lamont
Colour and camouflage patterns
Colours, ability to 'see' by the blind
Communication systems of humans and animals
Compass termite
Compounds, building of, and carbon element
Consciousness, problem and meaning of
see also Autosuggestion
Consonants and vowels, production of
Corner, George
Cosmic Clocks, The, (Gauquelin)
Cosmic energy and Roentgen rays
Cosmic forces; changes and fluctuation in cyclical patterns in
Cosmos,
as bedlam of noisy confusion and the compass termite perception of, through man's senses
Counting, and numbers
Cox, William
Cycle, annual, light and heat sensitivity to
Cycle, lunar
see Lunar cycle
Cycle, sun's 11-year, related to disease
Cycle of earth's changes yearly
Cycles of nature; the moon and man as related to rhythm of life of man the sun and man
Cyclical patterns and cosmic forces
Cymatics
Dalton, John
Darwin, Charles
David-Neel, Alexandra
Day and night, roles of, in biology
see also Light and dark
Dead; Communication with the voices from the dead
Dean, Douglas
Dehydration and the pyramids
Democritus and theory of matter
dermatoglyphics
Design for Destiny (Russell)
Dictionary of Slang (Partridge)
disease, epidemics, and plagues related to sunspots
Disease, symptoms of; handwriting and palm prints and as revealed by electrical equipment skin patterns and
Diseases related to magnetic disturbance
Diurnal rhythm
Divination
see also Precognition
Divining Rod, The
DNA molecule and importance of form
Donne, John
Dowsing
Dravniek, Andrew
Drbal, Karel
"Dream laboratory" and telepathy
Dream symbols and psychoanalysis
Dreams of animals and hallucination
see also Hallucinogenic drugs; sleep
Drosophila (fruit flies)
circadian rhythm and eye function and natural rhythms and photoperiodic research on
Drugs, effects of; brain and drugs on sleep or wakefulness
see also Hallucinogenic drugs
Earthquakes, phenomena connected with
Eccles, Sir John
EEG machine; and brain activity and telepathic transmission and brain waves of person under hypnosis
Eels, spawning habits of
Einstein, Albert
Eisenbud, Jule
Electrical fields of body, ovulation as cause of change in
Electrical impulses and the brain
Electrical test for cancer
Electricity, use of, in biological experiments concerning life fields
Electromagnetic radiation
Electromagnetic waves; information supplied by, to living organisms and resonance and spectrum
Electrophysiology and brain waves
Epidemics, plagues and disease related to sunspots
Epilepsy, diagnosis of, through flicker-of-light technique
ESP (extrasensory perception)
see also Card guessing and ESP
Telepathy
"Etheric" bodies
Euglena gracilis
Exobiology
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, The (Darwin)
Eye movement, rapid as sign of dreaming
Eyeless sight
Eyes, pupil size and reaction of, in relation to mental and emotional activity
Fabre, I. M.
Faces, human, types of
Faith healing
Fear and hysteria as cause of immobilization of animals survival value of immobilization
Feel, sense of
Fish; mormyrid, study of, and seeming state of sleep
Fisher, Kenneth
Fisher, Seymour
Flicker-of-light technique in diagnosis of epilepsy and other disorders
Fodor, Nandor
Forwald Haakon
Fossil forms
Freud, Sigmund, and his system of psychoanalysis and hypnosis
Freudian psychiatry
Fruit flies; circadian rhythms and eye function of and genetic research natural rhythms and photo-periodic research on
Fukurai, Tomokichi
Fungi, parasitic, experiments with
Gaikin, Mikhail
Gall, Franz
Galton, Sir Francis
gamma rays
Garrett, Eileen
Gauquelin, Michel
Gavraud, Prof.
Generator of Pavlita and Rejdak
Geomagnetic field, hourly alterations of earth's
Ghosts
Gohed, Amr
Grad, Bernard
Graphology
Gravity, force of effect of, on weight
Greppin, L.
Gulyaiev, Pavel
Gymnarchus niloticus
Halberg, Franz
Hall, Calvin
Hallucination and dreams
Hallucinogenic drugs and practices
Hand, use of, determined by brain signals
see also Palmistry
Handwriting, and disease, and personality
Hardy, Sir Alister
Harker, Janet
Heat and light experiments on animals
Heat and light sensitivity to annual cycle
Hebb, D. O.
Height, as affected by time of birth
Henri, Vicomte de France
Henson, Bob
Herschel, Sir John
Hibernation and experiments on animal life
Horoscopes
Hurkos, Peter
Hydra pirardi and sensitivity to light
Hypnosis animal hypnosis
see also Sleep and hypnosis
Hypnotic suggestion
Hypnotism, mass
see also Auto-suggestion; Hypnosis
I Ching
Ice, structure and crystalline pattern of
Ills and "accidental" injuries originating in the mind
Immobilization of animals, how induced
Indian cults of mind and body
Infrared rays generated by atoms
Infrasounds and vibrations
Intuition
IQ, as affected by time of birth
James, William
Java Man
Jenny, Hans
Jonas, Eugen
Journal of Parapsychology
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
Jung, Carl Gustav and I Ching his notion of collective unconscious
Kalmus, Hans
Kamensky, Yuri
Kammerer, P.
Kilner, Walter
Kinesics
Kingdon-Ward, F.
Kinzel, August
Kirlian, Semyon
Kirlian process and the skin
Kolodny, Lev
Kozyrev, Nikolai
Kuleshova, Rosa
Language; and communication growth of reason and origins of writing, as symbols of
Lavater, Johann
Lie detector
Life cycles of man; and the moon related to cycles of nature and the sun
Life fields, biological experiments concerning
Light, presence or absence of; and effect on all life on earth and effects on cockroaches and effects on fruit flies
Light, visible from the sun; and action on non-living matter chemical reactions and
Light and dark; daily alteration of, and earth's movement effect of, on human behaviour and well-being
Light-flicker technique in diagnosis of epilepsy and other disorders
Light and heat; experiments with, on animals and sensitivity to annual cycle
Light waves, as carriers of energy and information
Lissman, Prof. H. W.
Livingstone, David
Lobban, Mary
Lombroso, Cesare
Lorenz, Konrad
Lowell, Percival
LSD
Lunar cycle; and bleeding, influence of, on human birth and lunacy,
crimes, and alcoholism and marine organisms and menstruation and
rainfall
Lunar rhythms; and birth control and plant growth
Lunar tides and rhythm
Lung-gom, art of, in Tibet
Lüscher Color Test
McCreery, Charles
Magnetic disturbance, diseases related to
Magnetic field, earth's, changes in, according to positions of moon and sun,
Magnetic storms and sunspots, effects of, on aurora borealis on radio and TV reception
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Mammals, heat and light experiments on aquatic mammals and appearance of sleep
Mantoux skin test
Marin, Vadim
Marine organisms and lunar cycle
Mass; concept of and speed
Matter; biochemical systems and exchange of effects of life on as form of energy mind over theory of
Maxwell, James Clerk
Maxwell, Neville
Meditation states
Menaker, Drs. W. and A.
Mess, Eckhard
Metals, transmutation of see Alchemy
Metempsychosis
Mikhailova, Nelya
Milechnin, Anatol
Mind; and abstract thought and brain, relationship between and brain
waves during PK over matter and patterns of behaviour psychosomatic
disorders originating in the signs of Tibetan and Indian cults of mind
and body
see also Autosuggestion
Molecules; action of sunlight on simple combination of DNA molecule
Moon; gravitation of, and effects on the earth influence of, on land
animals influence of, on man position of, at time of child's
conception, and prediction of child's sex weather affected by
see also Lunar cycle; Lunar rhythms; Lunar tides
Moore, Omar Khayyam
Mormyrid fish
Morris, Desmond
Multicells, organization of
Mummification and the pyramids
Muses, Charles
Music; effect of, on animals and plants and sound vibrations
Naumov, Edward
Nelson, John
Nerve Fibers
Nervous system, central; as governor of the unconscious and sleep
Neutrino and anti-neutrino
Newton, Isaac
Nikolaiev, Karl
Novomeisky, A.
Number systems and "seven"
Numbers and counting
Numerical patterns and grand designs of the universe
Organisms, living; dependency of, on three forms of outside information
and selection of programmed information Volvox, simplest of all living
organisms
Organisms, marine and the lunar cycle
Organisms, multicellular; amoebae and development of multicells, organization of
Organisms, unicellular; amoebae and development of properties and characteristics of
Ovulation, as cause of change in body's electrical field
Owen, George
Oysters, experiments with
Pain, reactions to
Palmer, J. D.
Palmistry
Palm-printing and baby identification
Palm-prints and disease
Paramecium, experiments with
Parasites, effects of temperature fluctuations on
Parasitic fungi, experiments with
Pavlita, Robert
Pavlov, Ivan and conditioned reflex of dogs
Pavlova, Lutsia
Pearce, Hubert
Pendulum used as a dowser and for sex detection
Personality and hand writing
Phallic symbols
Philosopher's Stone
Photoperiodism
Phrenology
Physics of the Divining Rod, The
Physiognomy
Physiological mechanisms, as responsive to hypnotic suggestion
Piccardi, Giorgio
Pittendrigh, Colin
PK (psychokinesis); activity and experiments in influence of, on
chemical reaction and sympathetic "magic" and superstition and theta
rhythm in telepathic transmission
Plagues and epidemics related to sun's 11-year cycle
Planets; and astrological predictions influence of, on earth influence on each other position and rhythms of
Plant; growth and lunar rhythms, reaction of plants to stress sensitivity of plants to sound vibration
Plasma, biological, physical reality of
Poltergeist activities
Polygraph (lie detector)
Polyps, sensitivity of, to light
Pope, Alexander
"Popov group" and telepathy
Precognition systems of knowing
see also Divination
Price, Harry
Proteins and amino acids
Psychedelic substances. See Hallucinogenic drugs and practices; LSD
Psychiatry and the "unconscious"
Psychoanalysis and Telepathy (Freud)
Psychoanalysis, Freud's system of, and dream symbols
Psychokinesis. See PK
Psychokinetic phenomena
see also Telepathy
Psychometry
Psychosomatic disorders
Purkinje, Jan
Pyramids and mummification
Radiation; electromagnetic flares of genetic effects of heat radiation and thermographic technique and radiesthesia
Radiesthesia
Radio reception disturbances effected by sunspots and magnetic storms
Rainfall and the lunar cycle
Raudive, Konstantin
Ravitz, Dr. Leonard
Razor-blade crystal structure and phenomenon of sharpness and restoration
RCA and factors affecting radio reception
Rejdak, Zdenek
Resonance
REM (rapid eye movements), as sign of dreaming
Reticular formation
Rhine, J. B.
Rhine tests
Rhythmic brain patterns
see also Alpha activities and rhythms in brain waves; Theta rhythms in brain waves
Rhythms, human body, as related to time of day
Rhythms of life of man, as related to: cycles of nature the moon the sun
Richmond, Nigel
Roentgen rays and cosmic energy
Romain, Jules
Rotifers, structure and behaviour of
Russell, Edward
Rutherford, Lord
Sanderson, Ivan
Sargasso Sea
Sceptical Chymist (Boyle)
Schmidt, Helmut
Schmidt, Johann
Schnelle, F.
Science magazine
Scientific American
Seabrook, William
Seeds, barley, experiments with
Seeds, Nicholas
"Seeing" ability of the blind
Seismic waves and seismographs
Senses, limits of acuity of
Sensory deprivation
Sensory system, as means of creatures' relating to the cosmos
Sergeyev, Genady
Sergeyev Detector
Seriality, law of
Serios, Ted
"Seven" and number systems
Sex of child, prediction of, according to moon's position at time of conception sex detection by radiesthesia
Shackleton, Basil
Shaefer. W.
Shape, influence of, on functions of things or people and proportion in Art
Shape and proportions of man, basic patterns of, 189-90; sense of smell, as a product of shape types of faces
see also physiognomy
Shapiro, David
Sheldon, William
Sight, eyeless
Single-celled organisms development of
Skin diseases associated with psychological factors Mantoux skin test
Skin patterns and revealment of disease Kirlian process and moles and marks on skin
Sleep; and central nervous system and chemical anesthetics and dreams
and drugs and hypnosis orthodox and paradoxical sleep and regeneration
of body cells, in warm-blooded and higher animals see also Dreams
Sleepwalkers
Smell; communication by as practical product of shape sense of and sexual origin spreading of, by palms and foot soles
Soal, Samuel
Sochevanov, Nikolai
Solarflares and radiation
Somatyping and extremes of body shape
Sound vibrations; and music and resonance
Sourcier Moderne, Le
Space and Time
Spaceships and submarines, questioned use of telepathy by
Speech, visible patterns of
Speed and mass
Sponges, cellular and organizational functions of
Stepanek, Pavel
Stone, shaping and use of, by ancient peoples and cultures
Sun; electromagnetic influence of 11-year cycle of, and relation to
disease, plagues and epidemics, influence of, on man properties of, as
affecting life on earth visible light from, and action on non-living
matter weather affected by
Sunlight; action of, on simple molecules effect of, on all life on earth
Sunspot; activity and the great plagues, epidemics and disease activity and weather forecasting cycles
Sunspots, effects of; and Aurora borealis on radio and TV reception on weather
Sverdlovsk Institute
Takata, Maki and the "takata reaction"
Tape recordings and voices from the dead
Tarot cards
Taylor, Richard
Tchijevsky, A. L.
Telekinesis and psychokinesis, experiments in
see also PK, activity and experiments in
Telepathic transmission and brain waves
Telepathy and "dream laboratory"
Television reception disturbances caused by sunspots and magnetic storms
Temperature; fluctuations, effects of, on cold-blooded animals and
parasites human body, changes in, according to time of day and sleep in
warm-blooded animals
Termite, compass
Thermodynamic processes laws of thermodynamics
Thermographic technique and the body aura
Thermoperiodism
Theta rhythms in brainwaves and telepathic transmission
Thought, abstract, and the mind
"Thoughtgraphs"
Tibet, practice of lung-gom and tumo in
Tibetan cults of mind and body
Tidal animals' reaction to influence of the moon
Tidal rhythm
Tides on earth and action of the moon
"Tilt meter" and lunar tides
Time Einstein's theory of energy of manipulations of as a rhythm and space
Time and length of day as related to human body temperature
Time signals and co-ordination between cells
Tinbergen, Niko
"Tobiscope"
Toonder, Jan
Transmutation of metals. see Alchemy
Treating of How a Written Message May Reveal the Nature of Qualities of the Writer
Tromp, Solco
Tucker, Denys
Tumo, custom in Tibet
TV reception disturbances, as affected by sunspots and magnetic storms
Unconscious state
collective unconscious and the nervous system psychiatry and
see also Hypnosis
Van Jaarsveld, Pieter
Varves and sunspot cycles
Vasiliev, Leonid
"Vibrating universe", theory of
Vibration patterns
Vibrations; and infrasounds in music sound and resonance visible patterns of speech sound
Voices from the dead
Voltmeter, scientific and medical uses of
Volvox, simplest of all living organisms
Von Daniken, Erich
Vowels and consonants, production of
Waddington, C. H.
Wakefulness; areas of, in the brain drugs and
Walter, Grey
Warts associated with psychological factors
Water; atoms of divining sensitivity of animals to structure and strange behaviour of as universal trigger substance
Weather; moon's effect on and sunspot activity
Weather patterns produced and affected by: the moon the sun
Weather stations, rainfall data compiled by
Weight; as affected by gravity as affected by time of birth body-weight change and circannual rhythm concept of
West, John
Whitfield, George
Will power, examples of
Wilson, Colin
Witchcraft witch doctors and their "magic"
Writing, as symbols of language
Yoga
"X-ray eyes" of African boy
Zen Buddhists
Zen contemplation
Zener pack of cards and ESP
"Zombies" of the Caribbean
Table of Contents
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Praise
Introduction
Rationale
Part One: Cosmos
Chapter One: Cosmic Law and Order
Chapter Two: Man and the Cosmos
Chapter Three: The Physics of Life
Part Two: Matter
Chapter Four: Mind Over Matter
Chapter Five: Matter and Magic
Part Three: Mind
Chapter Six: Signs of Mind
Chapter Seven: Transcendence
Chapter Eight: The Cosmic Mind
Part Four: Time
Chapter Nine: New Dimensions
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix
Index