EXPERIMENTS, DOMESTIC AND OTHER
There are certain parlour tricks which have an attractive flavour of the
occult and sometimes form an introduction to it. Most of us have seen
children mystified by a thought-reading performance depending upon a
more or less obvious code, but sometimes we are treated to one which is
more genuine.
The procedure is something like this: One person goes out of the room
and the others decide that on his return he shall perform an action such
as unlacing a shoe or pushing on the hands of a clock to a certain hour.
Then he returns and, according to arrangement, may be blindfolded or
not, and one of the party may or may not place a hand upon his shoulder;
the audience next 'concentrate their minds' upon what the performer is
to do, whilst he 'makes his mind a blank'.
Sometimes success follows, and the result is taken as proof of
'thought-reading'.
Now let us examine the process in the light of what we have assumed in
previous chapters. To make the mind a blank, if it means anything, means
to cut off the stream of consciousness, and we straightway have our old
friend a dissociation. The performer is then in a state resembling
hypnosis, and, as we have seen before, in hypnosis the senses may be
abnormally sharpened. This sharpness, together with the receptivity of
the subject, makes him ready to pick up the faintest signs, and in the
case where the hand of a second person, also concentrating his mind on
the desired action and therefore to a certain extent dissociated, is
placed upon his shoulder, there are easily conveyed enough
pressure-signs to indicate when he is going right or wrong.
When there is no actual contact other indications than touch are not
lacking. The passing expressions of pleasure or disappointment on the
faces of the audience, the sigh of relief when a wrong step is retraced,
the glances at the object to be handled, are all picked up by the
dissociated stream whilst the main personality of the subject is for the
time almost obliterated. We must bear in mind that all the audience are
concentrating their minds, that concentration of mind upon an action is
likely to be followed by movements corresponding to the action, and that
no one is watching his neighbour or suspects any such unconscious
indications.
The thought-reading is not performed without prolonged pauses, the
subject making several halting steps before the right one is taken. It
reminds one of the manner in which the medium feels his way to the
thoughts of his victims.
Domestic blindfolding is not very efficient, and may be of use to the
subject by allowing him to look without the direction of his glances
being noticed.
So this thought-reading is reduced to the children's game of 'Hot and
Cold', but instead of fully conscious people producing and receiving
sounds we have a group of 'concentrated' (that is, partly dissociated)
streams sending out indications to be picked up by a hypersensitive
dissociated stream.
The subject is often exhausted by his efforts, and the performance is
not likely to be of benefit to any one who misinterprets it. The human
mind contains enough errors without producing a voluntary dissociation
further to deceive its owner.
There is one well-known experiment the significance of which is
generally missed. If the reader is not familiar with it let him follow
these directions and he will probably find that he is possessed of some
amount of so-called hypnotic power. Having procured a weight fastened to
a short cord (a heavy watch with its chain will serve), direct a friend
to sit in a chair and, resting his elbows upon his knees, to hold the
cord by the fingers of both hands so that the weight is suspended
between his separated knees. Let him keep his eyes upon the weight and
assure him that it will begin to swing from knee to knee. The weight, at
first indecisively wobbling, will soon take on the swing you describe,
which will gradually increase in amplitude. I have heard people ascribe
this motion to 'magnetic power'--blessed words that mean nothing, but
serve to give an appearance of reason to an explanation that should
satisfy no one.
The real cause of the motion is shown if you experiment with a fresh
subject, who must know nothing of the first trial. Ask him to hold the
weight in the same manner but, standing in front of him, tell him the
weight will swing towards you (that is, at right angles to its swing in
the first experiment). If you show sufficient assurance you will
probably succeed in both experiments, but your chance of success is less
than that of the man who has seen the trick and accepts the 'magnetic'
explanation, for his belief in the physical cause of the phenomenon will
give him a natural assurance which is lacking in one who realises that
the weight swings in a certain direction because the agent is made to
believe that it will.
It is plain that your friend swings the weight himself, but he is
unaware of two factors: He knows nothing of his own muscular action and
nothing of his own mental processes which have produced that action;
hence this experiment must be placed among the automatisms like
table-turning and water-divining. One is prepared to find that the trick
has its place among the mechanical adjuncts of spiritualism: it was used
in ancient times as a means of divination, and is used by mediums of
to-day when they tap out spirit revelations with a gold ring suspended
in a glass tumbler.
If intelligent people like your friends can be made to believe that the
weight is moved by some extraneous force, it can be understood that the
trained medium, full of a belief in the supernatural, finds it an easy
task to let the unconscious have possession of his or her muscular
actions and spell out memories and fantasies which one is asked to
accept as evidence of spirit control.
Planchette (described in Chapter IV) finds a place in the family circle,
sometimes with the result that a single hit becomes a tradition after
all the other stuff has faded from memory. A friend, who told me that he
saw Planchette predict truly the month in which the Boer War ended,
admitted that his family had toyed with the instrument night after
night, but he failed to remember any other results. I must add that he
never believed in the thing, but, nevertheless, the one lucky shot was
remembered.
Table-turning is another half-way house between the parlour trick and
the full-blown occult. Several people sit round a light table with their
hands placed upon it, and, after due 'concentration of mind', aided
often by a dim light, the table begins to move and the spirits are at
work. Then a sort of Morse code is invented to communicate with the
spirit entities, and the revelations begin.
Here I will quote from page 219 of _Raymond_, that widely-circulated
book by Sir Oliver Lodge:--
'During the half-hour ... I had felt every now and then a curious
tingling in my hands and fingers, and then a much stronger drawing sort
of feeling through my hands and arms, which caused the table to have a
strange intermittent trembling sort of feeling, though it was not a
movement of the _whole_ table.... Nearly every time I felt these queer
movements Lady Lodge asked, "Did you move, Woodie?" ... Lady Lodge said
it must be due to nerves or muscles, or something of the sort.'
Compare this with the feelings of the water-diviner (Chapter V):--
'The muscles of the arm become contracted when the bodily magnetism is
affected by the presence of water.... I suppose it must have something
to do with the composition of the blood and nerve cells.'
Or with those of a hysteric who, previously relieved from mutism, was
again struck dumb during a thunderstorm: ... 'I felt the electricity
passing all over my body; it made all my muscles quiver and then went
out at my finger-tips.'
No one can deny the reality of these feelings, as feelings, but in the
first instance they are due to spirits, and in the next to water, and
only in the case of the man known to be sick in mind is the real
explanation likely to be accepted by the subject. They are all products
of imagination, suggestion, self-deceit, or dissociation--call it what
you please if you understand that the feelings have their origin in the
mind of the subject and are not due to any external cause.
But in the first two examples they are associated with muscular
movements which, we must believe, are carried out unknown to the doers
and hence have their source in a dissociated stream. As usual, once the
dissociation is established, there is no limit to its manifestations.
Picture three or four Dissociates at work at a table, all bent upon
producing signs of the marvellous, all blind to the mechanism at work,
and with the hypersensitiveness of the dissociated stream ready to draw
on the memories of the unconscious.
Mixed with this is the possibility of more elaborate deceit: when the
hands of all are raised from the table their knees may still be under
it; and if the knees are clear of it a blackened lath concealed up a
sleeve can still work miracles.
This is taking us beyond the purely domestic, but there is no difference
between the after-dinner tilting of the table for amusement and the same
thing done at a seance--the mechanism is the same, but one is treated as
a jest whilst the other is something worse. We see again the typical
series with simple trickery at one end and reason-destroying
dissociation at the other.
Palmistry seems too absurd to be discussed, but it is another half-way
house. That the lines of Life, or Love, or what-not, are to be found on
the palms of dead-born babies and of monkeys should be enough to stop
the cult; but handbooks of palmistry seem to profit their publishers,
and the palmists and clairvoyants flourish. The girl who buys a handbook
and amuses her friends by reading their hands is comparatively harmless,
though even she, becoming shrewd to note when she hits the mark, is
likely to develop an unconscious receptivity and drift into fraud.
Crystal-gazing is a form of mediumism admirably fitted to give play
both to trickery and dissociation. Used by the medium to 'see as in a
glass darkly' and gain time for the help of his or her receptivity, it
also allows of the induction of a self-hypnosis, the memories or fancies
from the unconscious showing themselves as visions in the crystal.
Table-turning is easily first among the ways of giving rein to the
unconscious. It has the advantage of allowing several people to play the
same game at once, and further of allowing one Dissociate to work the
miracle, whilst no one, not even the Dissociate himself, knows who is
doing it. This is illustrated in _The New Revelation_, p. 19, where Sir
Arthur says: 'Some one, then, was moving the table; I thought it was
they. They probably thought that I did it.'
_The Gate of Remembrance_[18] gives an illustration of tapping the
unconscious and producing results that seem astonishing.
[Footnote 18: By F. B. Bond; Blackwell, Oxford.]
Two gentlemen, Mr. F. B. Bond and his friend J. A. I., had devoted years
of study to the archaeology of Glastonbury, exploring every available
source of information in history or tradition and thinking hard and
often about the Edgar Chapel, a part of the Abbey whose site was
undetermined. After this preparatory storing up of memories and thoughts
in the unconscious, they proceeded to tap them. I quote from page 18:--
'What was clear enough was the need of somehow switching off the mere
logical machinery of the brain which is for ever at work combining the
more superficial and obvious things written on the pages of memory, and
by its dominant activity excluding that which a more contemplative
element in the mind would seek to revive from the half-obliterated
traces below.'
Recognising an old friend, we are not surprised to find that automatic
writing was the means employed to switch off the main stream of
consciousness and produce a dissociation.
I find myself more in accord with the writer than reviews had led me to
expect, for he disclaims 'the action of discarnate intelligences from
the outside upon the physical or nervous organisation of the sitters'
(p. 19).
The automatic writing is apparently controlled by Richard Bere,
Johannes, and other influences which would be welcomed by spiritualists
as 'objective entities'; but the writer gives his opinion regarding
Johannes (p. 50) as follows: 'Whether we are dealing with a singularly
vivid imaginative picture or with the personality of a man no one can
really decide.'
Here I must differ and claim to have decided, for myself at least, that
no personality other than that of the actual writer was concerned. The
record of hysterical phenomena contains so many similar 'personalities'
that I find no reason to call in the supernatural to account for this
one. If a natural explanation is available we must not appeal to the
supernatural; I am sure that F. B. B. is not unacquainted with Occam's
razor--miracles must not be unnecessarily multiplied.
Since the writer does not stress the supernatural, and allows me to
credit to his unconscious the poetical imaginings produced in the script
and the 'veridical passages' concerning the discoveries of the Edgar
Chapel, I have no need to criticise them, especially as he is scrupulous
in giving credit to the conscious predictions of others when they hit
the mark.
The book is a record of an experiment--successful from the psychological
point of view--carried out by two Dissociates who _knew what they were
doing_; the dissociated streams were entirely out of their control, and
although I must, from the psychological standpoint, class the experiment
with the other dissociations described in this book, yet it is far from
my purpose to class the experimenters with 'Feda' and others of her
kind.
The earlier chapters of this book were written before I read _The Gate
of Remembrance_, but whoever reads the conclusion in the latter book
will find many opinions in agreement with those in my chapter on the
unconscious.
Table-turning, water-divining, automatic writing, thought-reading, and
the use of the pendulum are examples of a psychological automatism in
which the agent is conscious neither of the muscular movements concerned
nor, what is more important, of the mental processes producing them.
They can be cultivated to provide amazing results in tapping the
memories of the unconscious, and if the agents remain in ignorance of
their true mechanism a systematised delusion is built up and accepted as
proof of the supernatural.