Telepathy: The 'Respectable' Phenomenon

By Sybil Leek

The first guidebook for anyone wishing to explore the fascinating world of mind-to-mind experience--by a leading authority
and long-time practitioner in the field of psychic communication.

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Copyright © 1971 by Sybil Leek

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the Publisher,

The Macmillan Company

866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022
Collier-Macmillan Canada Ltd., Toronto, Ontario

Printed in the United States of America

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Dedicated to my Son Stephen B. Leek

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1 The "Respectable" Phenomenon, 11
2 A Centenary of Recorded Experiments, 18
3 My First Lessons in Thought Transference, 30
4 Messages from Other Worlds? 41
5 You Are a Radio Station, 48
6 The New Power Structure, 54
7 Thought Transference in the Animal World, 69
8 Modern Scientific Experiments, 75
9 Biological Radio Experiments, 89
10 Thoughtography, 101
11 How to Transmit and Receive, 114
12 Relax, Transmit, or Receive, 124
13 Telepathy and Possession... Reality or Fantasy, 135
14 Hypnotism, Another Person's Will, 144

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Chapter 1: The "Respectable" Phenomenon

Of all the various branches of psychic phenomena now riding high on the wave of popularity, telepathy is perhaps the one
most talked about. For telepathy can be discussed in ordinary conversation without being considered as way out as
occultism. Indeed, people who, a few years back, were content to talk about their surgical scars, now love to hold the floor
telling about a telepathic experience. It seems to give status to their intelligence, and the comparison of notes becomes a
new type of entertainment. Almost imperceptibly, this interest in telepathy has gradually brought occultism into focus by
presenting it less painfully than spiritualism or strange Eastern philosophies. A wife can talk about it in front of her family
without a skeptical husband giving her a look telling her to be quiet. In short, there is now a respectable aura to telepathy
that makes it acceptable to the nonpsychic and psychic devotee as well as the scientist. Even avowed skeptics, afraid of
occultism, have been known to give thoughtful consideration to telepathy.

It is not difficult to see why there is this widespread interest in telepathy. The man in the street can take it in stride, perhaps
because he was introduced to it at a party game or by a mentalist's television act. He talks about such an act to his friends,
which evokes other ideas about thought transference on a personal level. It is down to earth--right in Mr. John Q. Public's
own environment--and he does not need mystical music or special conditions in order to experience it. There is a tiny bit of
intellectual snobbery about telepathy in a world that also takes pride in how many visits a family pays to a psychiatrist
(affectionately called "our shrink").

A psychic has long been used to sprinkling her "in" language with the word telepathy. In many cases she still clings, with
some determination, to surrounding it with a veil of mysticism. When the parapsychologist and scientist enter, albeit warily,
on the periphery of occultism, they generally do it by tripping over telepathy. Sometimes they have to plow through a
miasma of ghost-hunting, spiritualism, and psychometry in order to reach it. Once they have contact with it, the
parapsychologist and the scientist find that telepathy can deal them a body blow that cannot be ignored. The blow is a bit
below the belt because telepathy, although mysterious due to its association with forms of occultism, also has a reverse side
to its nature. It presents a challenge to the curious mind of the scientist simply because in its guise of thought transference it
is indeed more closely associated with the minds of men than anything else.

Although science professes to seek tangibles, it may well be that the intangibles of psychic phenomena present the last
frontier in medical investigation. Breaking down this frontier may result in a greater understanding of man as a whole being,
revealing the unique mechanism of his brain and the secrets of the mind, for which to date we have only produced a series
of theories. Telepathy, the communication of one man's mind with another, may help solve the tension-ridden problems of a
world rapidly becoming incapable of communication by tangible means. As man screams loudly about man's inhumanity to
himself, seeing his fellow men as the enemy, he will in time see that most inhumane acts are due to a lack of understanding,
which in turn are due to a lack of communication. As long as he presumes that another person is an enemy, his survival
instincts will come to the surface and he will strike without asking questions. This has happened on numerous occasions in
wartime when lack of communication caused the death of a man who may have only wanted to express friendship or a
desire for peace. Without communication, usually thought of as a form of dialogue, tension may continue to mount unless
something else fills the vacuum. The "something else" will no doubt turn out to be telepathic communication. We know it
best in a pleasant form, such as when two people meet and immediately fall in love, with their eyes and minds transmitting
messages that defy logical explanation but which we accept because we see love as an ultimate in association.

We accept the fact that we have vocal organs, enabling us to speak. We mouth words that are triggered by a mechanism of
the brain, the organ of the mind. Another person stands by and the thought-triggered words of the first enter the ears of the
second. A new force takes over, acting on the mechanism of the second person's mind, and something intangible happens
between the two people. An emotion is generated, sometimes an uplifting one, sometimes not; but the point is that an
intangible force has been created--this time from the tangible obvious mechanism of the vocal chords, tongue, and ears that
are transformed into the intangible force of emotion. The communication may not be enough and very often the voice and
ear have to be bolstered by another tangible force. This is called "touch" and in its turn it adds to or decreases the intangible
force of emotion. This is not a static thing. Something happens. It is called communication with understanding. Most areas of
communication can be explained by medical science and by scientists and most are accepted by people out of habit. Today,
however, we find some of the accepted communication patterns falling apart, including that of man talking to man and of the
sense of touch generating emotion. We are very much a nation of people erecting notices that say "Silence" or "Do Not
Touch" and we are generally conditioned to obey. The art of conversation has dwindled on all levels, disappearing before
the onslaught of new forms of communication specific to our age. This can be seen with the written word and the many
creative art forms that have subtly encroached on whole communities so that the mechanism of the mind and the
consequential emotions are only triggered off by certain central art forms or the written word.

There are thousands of intelligent human beings who have a brain, the organ of the mind, living alone and receiving most of
their communications and emotions vicariously through the written word, the television set, or a visit to the movies. There is
every indication, too, that the numbers are growing of people who are limited to the communications sent out via the
television set. As each mechanical communication force reaches its epitome of perfection it seems that man's natural means
of communication has been reduced. We need to be careful that conversation does not become atrophied. If it is also
subjected to the tensions and frictions of a constant Cain-and-Abel syndrome--begun in many families and then multiplied
on the national scene by racial struggles--we will get the heightened effects of communication being further restricted by the
color of a man's skin rather than by what he thinks, speaks, listens, and feels.

It is because we are now at a danger point, with normal communications about to break down, that the idea of telepathy or
thought transference is attracting attention. In all major wars, one of the most effective strategic weapons was breaking the
communications system of the enemy, thereby demoralizing them. In normal society, now always at war, but unofficially,
and without always knowing who the enemy is, a man's doubts and fears of life are played upon to make him suspicious of
his neighbor. One fear breeds another. Not only is conversation verboten between neighbors, but there is also the rule of not
speaking to strangers, which has been engendered by generations of mistrust. We are very quickly back to a world in which
lack of understanding is the weapon most capable of destroying mankind by alienating him from his fellow man. Man is not a
one-celled organism capable of surviving in a solitary state.

We seem to use words as if they were the most expensive things in the world. We forget that every cause has an effect,
including negative ones (such as noncommunication having the negative effect of breeding violence). The universal law of
cause and effect is just as applicable to the use of words as anything else. We can cause a war with words before striking a
physical blow.

In many thousands of books the word "mind" is frequently used interchangeably with reason, intellect, intelligence,
understanding, consciousness, spirit, or psyche. If we view the word analytically, we know that "mind" is not synonymous
with any of these other words, yet we eagerly go on accepting these words as having the same meaning.

Many occult writers dismiss the mind as a second-rate area of the soul. Some identify the mind with spirit alone, and some
conceive it as a mere part of the soul-spirit or psyche. The cowards retreat, as always, to identify a word through its
dictionary definition. "Mind," says Webster, the cowardly writer's best friend, "is the intellectual power of man, the
understanding of thought and feelings." To the student of telepathy, this definition of the mind is not very helpful, and it leads
to the realm where we find explanations of something we accept and know is there but which are very inadequate. If we
accept his definitions as food for thought, it does no harm to look at what he says about telepathy in his dictionary.

"Telepathy," says Webster succinctly, "is the communication of feelings or impressions between persons at a distance from
each other." I think I can improve on this definition myself. It is "the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind
to another independent of the recognized channels of sense."

Perhaps, as we have come to accept thought, consciousness, and perception as being part of life--without any harm coming
to us from this acceptance--in time, we may come to see that telepathy is a combination of all these areas. Even acceptance
is better than the confusion of dictionary definitions, for how can it define something like telepathy, which has not been
thoroughly investigated? It's like prescribing for an illness without having made a diagnosis. If there is confusion about
thought, perception, and consciousness, we can certainly expect to be in deep water when it comes to considering thought
transference. We cannot go along with a nebulous definition of the mind when the main ingredient needed to establish a
point of reference for telepathy starts with the fact that the brain is the organ of the mind. This tangible organ is the starting
area through which intangible forces work, and it can receive and transmit messages. It is possible that all living things have
a mind. We know that animals and birds have a mind and we also know that the mind of man can affect living organisms
such as plants. Equally so the mind may be able to influence inanimate objects.

We know so much about the human body, we can perform skin grafts, set bones, and transplant organs, but the fact
remains that man is not just a body; he has a mind and spirit as well. Until we can understand every fiber of the brain, we
should not congratulate ourselves on the amazing progress of science and medicine. Only part of the job has been done.
The most difficult part will come as investigation goes on into the realm of the mind. One area of investigation is thought
transference--telepathy.

Although we can rebuild many parts of a man from the broken parts of his body or another person's body, what have we
accomplished if there is no mind to go along with the body? He must still be able to communicate if he is to know the
meaning of being alive. Even with physical defects he must be able to communicate with his own species. If he cannot
understand himself, he must know that someone understands him; and he must try to bridge the gap if he is to be happy.

It may be that telepathy will provide some of the missing answers to the jigsaw of putting together a body, mind, and spirit
and thereby help us to understand the total concept of man and his place in the universe.

Chapter 2: A Century of Recorded Experiments

Telepathy comes from two Greek words, one meaning "far" the other meaning "feeling." So thought transference or
telepathy is the conveyance of thoughts and feelings from mind to mind by other than the ordinary channels of
communication. The word telepathy was first suggested in 1882 by F. W. H. Myers, a psychic investigator. The idea of
thought transference was definitely not a new one. The theory that the transmission of ideas, images, and sensations could
be brought about by other than the normally operative motor and sensory apparatus of the body had arisen long before.
Many writers had tried to explain wraiths appearing at the moment of death, clairvoyance, and the phenomena of
spiritualism with the theory of "brain waves." The founding of the Society for Psychical Research (1882) caused international
attention to be drawn to the hypothesis, and the society's rigid standard of carefully collecting evidence was applauded. The
formation of the society was the breakthrough needed. But the sad thing is that as the years progressed, the very freedom
for research that had led to its formation began to disappear and some of the impact of its work was lost. It has never freed
itself of its Judaic-Christian influences so that it could work on the premise that psychic phenomena knows nothing of race,
creed, or the niceties of society. To my way of thinking the evidence provided by a primitive person is just as valid as that
given by one who goes to an orthodox church regularly.

The earliest recorded systematic experiments in thought transference were made in 1871 by Reverend P. H. and Mrs.
Newnham. They were continued for about eight months with marked success but subsequent experiments showed no
results of an evidential nature. A few years later the attention of the British Society for Psychical Research was called to the
subject by Professor W. F. Barrett. This was a turning point, and from 1882 onward many experiments were made by
members of the Society for Psychical Research and others. Some people called it "the willing game," and there were many
deviations, ranging from pure study to the amusing episodes of mentalists in the fairgrounds and circuses of Europe.
Whether motivated by the desire to investigate, to make money, or just to have fun, the "willing game" was a popular part of
Victorian life, rather on the same status as astrology is today. The "willing game" had its camp followers, its skeptics, and its
critics but it fulfilled one of the basic rules for sustaining popularity. In every walk of life someone was talking about it. The
mentalists were popular money-drawers at the fairgrounds, who gave value for money by way of entertainment and perhaps
a little food for thought after the show was over and the populace returned to their normal way of life. Systematic
investigation was going on in study centers all over Europe that followed two main lines. First there were experiments on
persons who were often in an hypnotic state in which the aim was to transfer selected images and compare the results
against the possibilities of chance. Second there was the collection and examination of the records of phenomena. These
ranged from studying apparitions, generally at the moment of death, to spontaneous cases in which there was a
correspondence between the psychical states of two individuals who were usually geographically remote from each other.

The problems raised by the two types of investigation are enormous and different from each other. In the first type of
investigation, there is rarely any hallucinatory element to sift through, but in the second type a large percentage can be
hallucinatory. The transference of a thought image In the first case is an image that is kept before the mind. This usually
requires a conscious desire to maintain the Image, sustain it, and transmit it. In the case of a dying person, however, this
conscious factor is not always present, yet the projection of an image has been known to happen. The distinguishing
characteristic of the first type of case is that it generally excludes normal methods of perception, while that of the second
eliminates coincidence as an explanation of the facts. It is easier to keep a record of the successes and failures of subjects
of the first case. While in the case of the dying person, the evidence is usually secondhand and therefore subject to
emotional debilitation or exaggeration.

Along with its direct experimentation the Society for Psychical Research collected records of firsthand observations of
apparitions that occurred at death or within twelve hours of the moment of death. These recorded observations and a
discussion of the experimental evidence were published in 1886 under the title of Phantasms of the Living. This book is well
worth the attention of any student of telepathy, if only for the fact that it was the first deliberate attempt to condense and
promote the idea that psychic phenomena could be documentated. For its time it was a mammoth work, and it is a great pity
that similar work has not been as effectively produced in the last twenty-five years. I am again reminded that one of the
greatest needs today is to produce professionally and officially documented evidence rather than simply having the work of
some individuals to filter to the public through bookstores. It is admirable that private individuals do spend their own time and
money on investigation, but the investigation would be more effective if it were done on a state-by-state level and ultimately a
national and then international level.

Not content with the results of Phantasms, a statistical study for the discussion of coincidental apparitions was undertaken
by Mr. Edmund Gurney. He surveyed over five thousand people at a time when communication by mail was anything but
remarkable. There are, of course, defects in both pieces of work. The Phantasms' defect is that it neglected the progressive
deterioration of evidence with age. No narratives were regarded as evidential by the society unless they were written less
than three years after the event or were based on notes made at the time.

A second systematic attempt to collect material and compile statistics based on Gurney's first survey of hallucinations was
initiated at the Congress of Mental Psychology of 1889, and the work was entrusted to Professor Henry Sidgwick. This time
the response itself was a phenomenon that was indicative of the growing interest rather than mere curiosity about the
subject. A total of 17,000 people made returns, of whom 1,684 asserted that they had experienced one or more cases of
hallucination. Analysis of the answers showed that in 350 cases the apparition was recognized. After making allowance for
error, the survey committee found that 30 of the 350 recognized apparitions coincided with death. The probability that any
person will die on a given and named day is roughly one in ten thousand. Therefore, if chance alone operated, one
apparition in ten thousand would coincide with death. In other words, prima facie telepathic cases were four hundred and
forty times more numerous than chance would predict. The committee therefore reported that between deaths and
apparitions of dying persons there exists a connection that cannot be attributed to chance alone. Even today the most usual
type of telepathic communication experienced is that of seeing the death of a relation or friend before it happens. It is
probably the least frightening occurrence and the most acceptable one. Ask your friends and acquaintances if they have
experienced this and you may be surprised by how often the answer will be affirmative. But to talk about such things as a
topic of conversation is one thing, to record it efficiently and make the results known, as the Society for Psychical Research
did, was a remarkable piece of work, way ahead of its time, or perhaps needed by its time.

The experimental evidence for telepathy is partly made up of the results of trials that directed transference of thoughts,
images and sensations, and the success of hypnotism at a distance. Dreams also supply some material, and in a small but
important class of cases (the transition between wraiths and ordinary experimental cases), the agent has caused his
phantasm to appear to the recipient. Today there is a distinct effort among research workers to delve into the realm of
dreams and their telepathic impact, but personally I feel a lot of basic groundwork is still needed before going in for this
highly dramatic study of the dreamworld. Undoubtedly dreams will reveal many things and open up other doors to telepathic
information; but this should be regarded as a form of postgraduate study, and beginners must learn to walk before they run.

Among the chief experimenters several names have come down to the present time with varying degrees of respect and
awe. The most well known are Professor M. Dessoir, Mr. F. Guthrie, Professor Sidgwick, and the redoubtable Sir Oliver
Lodge. In analyzing their work, it seems they all fulfilled specific functions. Dessoir and Sidgwick were very useful in serving
as the guinea pigs of numerous experiments. Guthrie compiled evidence, while Sir Oliver Lodge was a superior public
relations man who was sufficiently sold on his subject to promote the idea of telepathy with all the dignity and self-assurance
of a highly successful person and dedicated advocate. His status as a literary giant and his social attributes made him a
formidable and stalwart champion of the cause. By sheer force of personality he either repelled opposition or made those
opposed listen to what he had to say. For the most part he said everything very well--emphatically and without any ambiguity
as to his reasons for making statements. He made a statement with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, not arrogantly but with a
firm belief that the public was intelligent enough to reach its own verdict. He was committed to presenting facts, and he did a
formidable job of this in essays, private letters, statements, and his marathon works as a popular writer.

Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick conducted numerous experiments in Brighton, Sussex, England. I suppose my father must
have been conversant with all these experiments, for my childhood memories are parallel to the experiments done by Mrs.
Sidgwick. She was noted for her ability to know what was happening; and in 617 trials made with an agent or percipient in
the same room, the number of successes ranged from 10 to 90 successes out of each 100 trials. The probable total, had
chance alone been responsible for success, is estimated at eight per hundred.

In a later series conducted by Mrs. Sidgwick, a similarly high proportion of successes was recorded. When the agent and the
percipient were in different rooms the results dropped to only a little above the odds of chance. Because of this the total
results were subjected to criticism by a Professor Lehmann but were not seriously shaken. It was pointed out with some
logic that the failure of experiments conducted at a distance may have had psychological causes. It was just as reasonable
to assume this as to condemn the experiments and arrive at the remarkable conclusion that the increase of distance
eliminated the possibility of communication by normal means. However, despite many subsequent series of experiments,
the same disappointing results came when the agent and percipient were separated.
Experiments with hypnotized subjects at a distance provided some dramatic results and some of the early conclusive
evidence for thought transference. In 1885 trials were made by Dr. Janet Richet and Professor Richet. Out of twenty-five
experiments, Dr. Richet scored nineteen with complete success, while Professor Richet scored two complete successes and
four partial ones out of nine attempts. The most striking point was that the hypnotic trance always coincided with or followed
at an interval the attempt to hypnotize the patient. This is a feature of great importance in considering the possibility of
coincidence or of autosuggestion and one that I have had some success with myself.

It does not take much thought to realize that it is usually impossible to prove that a dying person has been thinking of the
percipient. It is even harder to show that there was any idea of causing his phantasm to appear. There are numerous
recorded cases of persons being aware that someone is about to die. Often it is someone who has been close to the
percipient, and I would think that this is a case where the subconscious takes over and sends telepathic messages to the
person known to be on the same mental wavelength. There are, fortunately enough, a small number of cases in which
apparitions of the agent or some other person, prima facie telepathic, have been produced experimentally. An especially
interesting instance was recorded by J. Wesermann, who tried the experiment in the early part of the nineteenth century.
Wesermann wished to make the phantasm of a lady appear to a lieutenant who was residing several miles away. At the
time of the experiment the lieutenant was fortunately not alone and his companion saw the apparition also. Eyewitness
accounts of apparitions are great, but it is much better to have two or more people capable of recording the same view.
There were several cases recorded when the figure of the agent was also seen by the percipient. Undoubtedly these
reciprocal cases are evidentially of immense importance; for each of the two people in every case appears to have received
a telepathic impulse from the other, so that each receives information about the other or sees his phantasm.

My son Julian and I have had many double-image views of apparitions almost too numerous to mention. But one was
especially interesting, as we were not in the same place nor even the same country when the double telepathic image
occurred. One night I was in Florida entertaining a well-known Houston interior designer. Two young students were there as
well and we were saying we wished Julian was with us. He had been in England with my mother for three weeks when we
sat after dinner talking about him. We decided to pick up the telepathic image of what he was doing at the time. My interior
designer friend and my female student picked up impressions at the same time that I did. We did not discuss our
impressions but each wrote them down. In due course a letter came from Julian saying that he had been in London at the
same time and was wishing we were with him. His thoughts were transferred to us, and three people received them. The
only one who was completely off the beam was the young boy who was staying with me. He received no impression at all
and was completely annoyed that nothing had happened to him.

I have had the most intense telepathic communications with both my parents including the usual one of being aware that my
father was with me telling me that he would die and urging me to telephone my mother. At this time I was in New York, my
father in the New Forest. I woke up fairly late in the morning and my first conscious thought was that I had to appear on the
Mike Douglas show that day. Normally I would have been thinking about the show, but on this morning I was aware of
messages from my father pounding in my brain. I was not too well fixed for money at the time, waiting for a check that took
weeks to arrive in my mail box, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend money on a long distance call. However, I did
so. My mother answered the phone and beyond the sorrow in her voice there was also a surge of gladness.

"Your father said you would call," she said. She paused for a moment and told me she was giving the phone to my father but
doubted if he could speak any more. I heard him say, "Knew it was you... good-bye," then the phone seemed to be dead. My
mother came back on the line to tell me my father had died after that one sentence to me. She also said he seemed to be
fighting off death, literally insisting with his last breath that I would call. I think it was his last telepathic communication, and it
was as effective as everything else had been since the days of my childhood.

If I accept telepathy completely it is because I have experienced it all my life as a normal way of communicating in my family.
I have also been the guinea pig, as I grew older, for numerous experiments. Theories about telepathy come and go but
always there is the need to examine evidence and never condemn what is not completely understood.

All the theories put forth about telepathy seem to agree about this total lack of definitive experimentation. It is a pity that the
good work started in the days of Sir Oliver Lodge was not carried on consistently right through the twentieth century. Broadly
speaking, the theories can be divided into physical and psychical experiments. Sir William Crookes suggested that
transmission is effected by means of waves of smaller magnitude and greater frequency than those constituting X-ray
waves. Undulations starting from nervous centers are adopted as the explanation by the reputable Professor Fleurney. He
should be better remembered than he is, for he investigated a medium called Helene Smith. Her critics said she produced
everything in "good faith," but that her phenomena trance utterances were produced by her own mind. These presented her
to be the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette and a Hindu princess. The most striking phenomenon of her trance was the so-
called Martian language, eventually shown to be a derivation of French, comparable to the language used by nursery
children but much more elaborate. It is surprising that these phenomena did not become the key to further investigations of
thought transference. There is little evidence to prove that Helene Smith knew anything about the life of a Hindu princess or
of Marie Antoinette and certainly she had no history to account for her new language, even though it was used by children in
a French nursery. The facts are that Helene Smith did have some strange information, and the only explanation seems to be
thought transference and the tuning into a wavelength by picking up a series of vibrations. F. W. H. Myers led a group eager
to present a case against a physical cause as being a complete explanation. The main difficulty is that in the spontaneous
cases the strength of the impulse does not seem to vary with distance, which all physical laws say it should.

A curious phenomenon has been noted in experiments where the percipient gazes at, say, an arrow or a tarot card with its
head turned to the right. There is a disproportionately strong tendency for the arrow or card to be seen reversed. This has
also occurred many times in cases of telepathy between twins. In all probability, however, this fact is more important for the
light that it throws on the mechanism of hallucinations than on that of transmission. Telepathy is often invoked to explain
mediumship or even possession by spirits, but it seems an insufficient explanation unless we assume the medium has a far
greater power of mind reading than experimental evidence has so far shown exists.

In my own life I know the power of mind reading to be possible, but it is certainly not the explanation of my own trance
mediumship. I have come up with too many items at a seance that have had to be researched by people not even present.
In many cases a parapsychologist, often Mr. Hans Holzer, was at a complete loss to make any personal explanation of
descriptions I had given to him and which were recorded on tape and by personal observation by many others. Only when
the transcripts of the tapes and personal notes were sent to other researchers to check out statements could the whole
story be told. So I really doubt if telepathy is used by a medium in a trance. But I am equally certain that people like myself
tune in on telepathic vibrations left in the ether, both seeing and feeling everything connected with these impressions.

If anyone wishes to study the early experiments in telepathy try to get these books: Phantasms of the Living by Edmund
Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore and Thought Transference by N. W. Thomas, published in 1905. Of course,
there are many important articles frequently put out by both the British and American Societies for Psychical Research. The
officials are generally only too eager to help students, and the cost of reproductions of these books and articles is not
expensive. It's much better to own them for future reference purposes if the student can afford to do so, otherwise make use
of your friendly neighborhood librarian. You may even be surprised how interested many librarians are on the whole subject
of telepathy. You may have to listen to some of their own stories and theories about the subject, but it is all so intriguing that
such a conversation may well be regarded as a bonus on the loan of a book.

Chapter 3: My First Lessons in Thought Transference

One of the nicest things about being over forty is the realization that it is a privileged time of life. From this age I can look
back at my life and see many milestones plus all the meaningful areas where I have pointed my nose in the right direction or
fallen flat on my face and learned from mistakes. I do not indulge in many nostalgic daydreams, for to me, tomorrow is the
time to look forward to, but somehow other people remind me of my past. It happened very noticeably when I wrote my
autobiography, Diary of a Witch. Everyone seemed to be interested in my childhood, and I was placed in a position where I
had to reassess it myself. As I did this, some strange things happened. I began to see something of the plan of my whole
life, almost all the vital steps I had taken to bring me to this day and age. Most of all I began to see why certain things that
had happened in my childhood made me receptive to the events of today.

I began to be interested in thought transference at an early age. Born as I was into a remarkable family of occultists, witches,
and astrologers with a dash of actors and musicians thrown in for good measure, the idea of thought transference was just
another thing to be accepted. I never remember anyone using the word telepathy, but I was only five years old when I
started to know thought transference. I doubt if I could have spelled the word and certainly could have not analyzed it. I see
now that everything I thought was fun was really a form of training for the future. It is as if my whole family were in a gigantic
conspiracy designed to bring me up in a certain way that allowed no formal education, but introduced me to some of the
wisdom that half of the world seems to be seeking today. This may be a sweeping statement, but I do not know how else I
can explain that peculiar childhood and its effects on my adult life.

My father was interested in everything: art, music, good living, engineering, and many other things. But he seemed to have a
special respect for the intangibles of the world. His main occupation was exploring areas of the mind in a way that was far
ahead of his time. To this day I have never met a man who has amassed as much knowledge and has had such a complete
acceptance of all the way-out things that I have lived to see accomplished or accepted--landing on the moon, the ability to
move in other dimensions of time and space, reincarnation, and man's ability to communicate and direct many areas of life
by electronics and thought transference.

To accept these things was simple for my father and he passed them on in a simple manner to me. If there was any conflict
in my very happy early family life it came from long arguments between my father and my famous grandmother, who was
involved in occultism with a scientific approach. She was certain that magic practices could rule the world and could be
relied upon to hex any scientist out of her orbit as being unnecessary. In the middle of the arguments was me--the target for
both their love and attention. My father used all his charm to cajole me into helping him with experiments, and my
grandmother claimed me for numerous lessons on ritual and magical practices. I survived as a pupil of both, which is a
tribute to their teaching... and my stamina.

In the end I seem to have absorbed about 50 percent from one and an equal amount from the other. The amazing thing is
that it was no hardship. I enjoyed it. A psychologist tried to prove that I ought to be a very distraught woman because of my
early childhood days. I can only say I never remember a dull moment. As far as I can see, it was a pretty good basic starting
point for a robust, healthy adult life in which I accept science, knowing it for what it is, and magical practices and ritual for
exactly the same reason. There is a place in the world for both, because there is really no difference. They both deal in the
unknown until it becomes known, and when this happens a remarkable thing takes place. Truth is revealed and makes life a
beautiful experience instead of a hassle between cradle and grave.

Although my grandmother and father would argue about many things in a good-humored manner, they both agreed that
thought transference was a fact. Their reasons for accepting this may have been different. My father probably saw the mind
as a series of electrical impulses, while my grandmother was simply content to know that she had a track record of
achieving effects by literally "putting her mind" to a thing. While both expected me to grasp situations quickly and had little
tolerance for slowness of learning, they also knew I was a child and were subtle enough to make their teachings into games.

No one in our enormous household ever sat down and conscientiously gave lessons. What I learned took place as an
everyday occurrence. The sky and the stars were there every day, so astrology was also there. Walks in country lanes were
explorations leading to talks on herbal lore; and first lessons in telepathy were just family games and fun, as some people
play Monopoly, bridge, or Postman's Knock.

I can remember those early days so clearly, even the smells of the house--warm with wood fires, sweetly fragrant with huge
brass pots of potpourri that brought the thought of summer days full of roses before the petals fell. Amazingly enough one of
the most remarkable things was that it was a house where the sound of silence was remembered more than the others,
although the house had several families in it--numerous aunts, uncles, and children. People laughed, children played,
animals were born and died--all with accompanying noises. And there was always a coming and going of people, whom I
now know were famous or infamous. But I remember the silence and especially the quiet times when we played games. The
noises belonged to another world, which I moved into as I grew up.

The first game I remember was when I was about four. My father came from the library into the little sitting room holding an
enormous tray in his hands. The tray was piled up with many items such as anyone would collect when clearing out a chest
or desk. With good psychology, the point was designed to capture the inquisitive attention of a four-year-old child and in no
time at all I was eagerly looking at it while my father still held it. I remember I did not touch it at all. After a few minutes my
father took the tray away, but returned very soon to me. We talked about the contents of the tray and he asked me what I
had seen on it.
"A pen," I said. "Oh, and some hairpins and your penknife."

"Is that all?" he asked, and I could not answer him.

"Come now," he said, "there were lots of things on the tray, and some of them belonged to you."

I could not remember anything else but I realized my father expected me to do so. The playing around with the tray went on
for several days. By now I had grown to expect my father to come in with it loaded with numerous items and we would go
through the ritual. Every day I could remember a few more things but it was my grandmother who really put me wise to the
whole business. We talked about the "game," and she gave me the first of numerous lessons of "instant learning."

"Give him a surprise," she said. "Tonight don't look at the tray and see the things in the middle. You will never remember a
thing. Look at everything around the edges. Your eyes will easily go to the big things and the center, but it is your mind that
has to remember. Everyone looks at the center of anything--like the centerpiece on the dinner table--but we use those little
vases and salt cellars that are at the corners of the table, and they matter too!"

So, the next time we played the tray game I quietly looked around the edge of the tray, my eyes took in some dozen or so
objects in the middle, but I could remember the numerous little things very clearly. I reeled them off to my father, who sat on
the floor incongruously holding a huge teddy bear by one ear while my favorite dog, Roger, tried to rescue it from him.

"Well done," he said. "It was easy, wasn't it?"

That night he told my grandmother I had progressed and could remember up to fifty objects on a tray and what did she think
of that for an experiment? Grandmother's tiny body rippled with laughter and she winked at me and could not resist a sly
remark or two to my father.

"You'll addle the child's brain with your experiments. If you'd leave the teaching to me I could show you results you'd never
believe."

The tray game was the first of dozens of others, but from it I progressed to what I now know to be a form of thought
photography. I know it is fashionable today to talk about psychic photography, and books have been written about it. I
sometimes read them or people tell me about them, and I feel tempted to say that I did things like that before I was ten years
old. By such innocent remarks I earned a reputation for being brash. Nowadays everything is done with huge grants from
foundations and masses of equipment, and on the occasions when I have been used as a guinea pig, I frankly have to say
that there was little fun in it at all. With all of my interest in phenomena, I still have the desire for life to be a series of
experiences that have a few highlights of pleasure in them, such as I had when I was a child. So, psychic photography was
my own special fun game for many years, only I did not know at the time it was one of my father's clever ruses to ultimately
direct my attention to telepathy.

My father would give us a small piece of glass with some yellow stuff on it. I suppose it was an emulsion of some sort
because his usual photography was done with a huge camera and glass plates. The plates he gave me were smaller
editions of the larger ones he put in the camera. The equipment did not interest me at all. The first time I tried this
experiment my father asked me to put the plate on my forehead and hold it there for a few moments while keeping my eyes
closed. Within a few seconds I distinctly remember thinking that there was a fern leaf on the plate and could hardly wait to
remove it from my forehead.

When I took it away, there was a clear impression of a fern on it and my father explained that he would think of something
and it would appear on the plate if I let myself become quite relaxed. I became so good at this that it took all of my
grandmother's time to keep me in order. Being a regular little show-off when the guests came, I always wanted to persuade
them to indulge in this weird photography act. But just as I do today, in those early days I also hated anything to fail, and
sometimes I would fail to get anything on the plate with guests. With my father, however, I could always pick up whatever he
was thinking about and it would register on the plate.

While Grandmother was never pleased when experiments failed, she could never quite bring herself to praise my father and
the gentle feud between them went on. I was certainly not a buffer or a football between them, but rather it did seem that
whatever they wanted to teach me supplanted what the other had already started. The tray game was a good idea but it was
my grandmother who gave me the key to it. As I grew older we extended this and also extended the number of people
playing the game. In this undergraduate version of the Tray Play, either my mother or grandmother would stay in one room
with me, while my father would be in his room with my mother or vice versa. The idea was that I would write down the items
on the tray as my father put them on. Whenever I could draw anything I would do so, otherwise I would make a shaky
attempt at spelling. Mother would make a list of the things on the tray from her vantage point with my father and my
grandmother would check them over. There was not the slightest bit of drudgery in this. I loved every minute of it and
gradually became very proficient.

As I grew older my father and I had a remarkable degree of thought transference established between us; but, of course, we
had a close rapport all our lives. Telepathy based on rapport between two people is easily accepted, although I know now
that thought transference is possible without one of the people knowing it is happening. When it reaches this stage we have
to consider whether or not telepathy has overstepped its advantage of being a form of pleasurable communication to
become one of mental dictatorship. But thoughts like this came much later in my life. I had a long way to go, numerous
lessons to learn, and many more youthful experiments to do. I saw life as a wonderful series of experiments, and thought
transference was important but just one facet of living.

Recently my Siamese cat produced six kittens. I remembered again those far-off days of my childhood when it seemed that I
was never without animals around me. Where other children had lots of toys bought from shops, I had masses of animals. I
learned to walk by hanging onto the mane of a docile lion called Nellie. Swans and Muscovy ducks attracted me to the pond
to swim, a series of ravens and jackdaws taught me that living things can indeed move into another dimension. Of course
there was the usual collection of cats and dogs that any large European family had around their estate. We bred pedigreed
stock, horses, dogs, cows, and goats, and whatever there was on the farm, I always had one special representative of each
breed given to me and I had to look after it myself. I know that visitors would shiver at the sight of small me rolling around
with gentle Nellie the lion or galloping along with large dogs or horses, but also I know that this was part of the lesson to
teach me that fear is the one thing that can spoil any relationship, whether it is with beast, bird, or man.

My favorite animal was a huge springer spaniel called Roger. He was born the day I came into the world and constantly lived
with me until I was eighteen. Where I went, Roger went, both of us as free as the wind in that strange country way of life. I
like to think of Roger as a pleasing pet, but he was more than that. He, too, was part of the experiments I had to go through
in my youth.

In my youth electricity was something I could not even begin to understand, although we had a radio set and miraculously
had lighting in the mansion when most of the village had only oil lamps and candles. Now, knowing about electrical impulses
and the wonderful things remote control can achieve, I find the whole idea of telepathy remarkably simple but at ten it was
very difficult. Perhaps this is why I had to learn through games and the living animals we had around us.

My father explained that Roger did not understand words but responded to the vibrations of sound that I sent out. His mind
caught up the vibration and translated it into a thought form.

"Roger will come to you even if you do not speak to him," said my father. "You have to concentrate on him so that your little
mind becomes a sending-out station. You have to think Roger to you."

One of the first principles to understand and accept in telepathy is that if there is a life force in anything it stands a chance of
responding to thought transference. Roger certainly had plenty of life rippling in him. One day I was proudly telling some
admiring guest who liked Roger that the dog understood every word I said to him. In the distance I could see my father
frowning and shaking his head but I thought it was because one of his beloved plants had not matured as he expected. After
the visitor had left the garden, my father gave me the toughest lesson I could learn.

Roger, he informed me, did not understand every word I said. In fact, if I did not say a word to the dog he would still
understand and come to me. My father was patient, explaining carefully that before a word is spoken there is thought going
on in the mind and that thought triggers off action just as clicking on a switch starts off an electrical force to give light. It was
a long lecture from my father and the gist of that talk has been the substance of so much of my interest in telepathy.
Thought has two aspects: the sending out of a vibration and the formation of a thought form. The first works with great
precision, like electrical impulses that sound converts to when broadcast from a radio station. These impulses are then
reconverted into sound again when they contact a radio receiving set tuned to the same wave band as the one they are
traveling on. In the same manner a thought vibration is inclined to reproduce itself when it contacts a suitable receiving
station. The person whose mind is functioning along a similar wave length to the mind of the person starting the thought
vibration in effect becomes a human radio. So we are back to the original idea that telepathy is involved with two minds, one
to act as a transmitter and the other as a receiver. In contrast, E.S.P. does not need this transmitter-receiver situation, but is
a spontaneous vibration sent out from an unknown station and caught up by one mind.

It did not seem possible to me, but while I pondered I suddenly was aware of the feeling that I had to go to see what my
grandmother was doing. I had a definite compulsion to go directly to the linen closet on the second floor where my
grandmother was waiting. She spoke to me without turning around, slapping fat towels into place so that the doors of the
closet would close.

"I didn't want to go downstairs and into the garden to call you but I want you to get dressed and come with me to Mrs.
Cartledge's house."

It was only as I was dressing that I remembered what my father had said about thinking the dog to come to me and I quite
rightly related it to the compulsion I had felt to go to the linen closet to find my grandmother. She "thought" me right to the
place where I was needed.

For all their arguments my little Irish grandmother and my elegant Russian papa had their own strange rapport and could
provide just about all the education any girl could want.

I looked at Roger pretending to be a shaggy rug and thought how much I loved that big, rough dog. As if he knew what I was
thinking he wagged his stumpy tail to make appreciative drumming noises on the parquet floor and rolled over to have his
stomach rubbed.

There it was again, an extension to my lessons ("as if he knew what I was thinking"). I guess he caught the beam of a love
vibration.

Chapter 4: Messages from Other Worlds

When astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon's surface in 1969, he achieved what had been thought to be
impossible. Many people were disappointed that no sign of life was found on the most romantic of all bodies in the celestial
heavens. But such people rallied and cheerfully turned their hopes to other planets, such as Mars. Some of them must be
inhabited, if not with recognizable life forms, then perhaps with some of the strange thought forms so well written about in
suspenseful, spine-chilling stories by science fiction writers. Linked with the idea that other planets may be inhabited are
many stories of unidentified flying objects. I have never had much interest in such things myself, although I have seen things
that could be called unidentified objects flying through the sky under unique circumstances.

In 1968 I was traveling from New Jersey to Florida with an engineer friend of mine, a very down-to-earth character who had
no thoughts one way or the other about psychic phenomena and even less about UFO's (unidentified flying objects). We
were in South Carolina at two-forty in the afternoon on a long, lonely road with the Dead Canal running at one side of it. The
car, a red Karmann Ghia, swerved, and we seemed to be pulled onto the side of the road. It was difficult to say how long this
was but during the period of being pulled, as if by a magnet, to the side of the road, an ovoid shape hovered on the road
ahead, then took off and disappeared. My friend used some very lurid naval language, angry that the car had been pulled to
the side of the road and yet bewildered that he had seen something he could not account for.

It was not until we reached Florida and began to make inquiries that I learned that other people had also seen UFO's in this
particular area, miles away from a legitimate airport. I had seen similar things many years ago off the coast of France but
then there was little talk about UFO's. It was in America that I learned more about them. Since that Florida trip I have met
many people--sane, normal people without axes to grind and with nothing to gain from passing on misinformation--who have
told me stories of their own experiences in sighting UFO's in different parts of the country. I listen but do not bother too
much about them, partly because I have quite enough to contend with in my life and I do not particularly want to get involved
with UFO's. Perhaps there is a bit of envy, too, in my make-up, for I would love to have a communication from someone on
another planet. After all, I have a reputation for being able to communicate with just about everyone, so never having heard
from a little man from Mars almost makes me feel like a forgotten personality. I have often said I leave myself wide open for
communications but, to date, nothing has happened by direct communication. Yet, in a strange way, the idea of UFO's has
infiltrated more and more into my life. Rarely a week goes by when someone does not call or write to me about their
experiences. As a writer, I have always regretted that I was unable to write the story of the two people who made history
when a book called The Exeter Affair was published and who had come to me first with their story. Not a single editor of my
own acquaintance had any interest in it, yet the story had a lot to commend it and could not be put down to the imagination
of the two people. Since meeting those people, who spent a lot of their own money in order to undergo hypnosis in an effort
to discover whether or not they had really seen a UFO, I have become more interested in the whole subject.

Now I seem fated to build up a pile of data relative to UFO sightings, but the side issues are of more interest to me than
anyone saying they saw something strange in the sky in Mexico. I recently had a report from England about a man called
Bernard Byron. He is a mild-mannered, fifty-year-old "slater and tiler" from Denver, Norfolk, England, and he claims to be a
space linguist. When he was six years old, he began to speak Martian and Venusian. He says they just came naturally but
he upset his father, who was a corporal in the Irish Guards.

The latest report about Mr. Byron comes from the London Sunday Times, published in London, England, on February 8,
1970, in which Mr. Byron says he speaks and writes the languages of seven planets and, by thought transference, acts as a
mouthpiece for Very Important Martians and other interstellar visitors. He claims that a race of people which he calls Krxyzcs
are coming and describes them as having giraffelike necks, great gorilla nostrils, and burning eye sockets. They are actually
"beautiful people" from the Planet Kruger 60.B, and they will help to "save us from ourselves." Very way-out stuff but I
always respect the London Sunday Times. When they say spring is here, then it is indeed here. By the same token, if they
say the Martians are coming, maybe they are.

A reporter from the Sunday Times says Mr. Byron demonstrated several planetary languages for him. He described the
Krxyzcs sound as being like an inflamed Chinaman revving up at 100 r.p.m. Martians are hissy while Venusians make
sounds like drunken Serbo-Croats (the descriptions are those of the Sunday Times, not mine). It may sound wild but UFO
people take Byron seriously. He has also chatted with Patrick Moore, a noted European scientist and astronomer.

Tape recordings made by Byron are being studied at Cambridge University, England, and well-known UFO writer Arthur
Shuttlewood often confers with him.

To add to the complications, Byron is a typically reticent Norfolk type, a county not noted for exaggerations or gullibility.
Somewhat dourly Byron puts it all down to the fact that his great-great-grandmother was a Sioux Indian. The Sioux are a
mystical people, he says, who have been in contact with other planets since Venusians first landed in the lost City of the
Amazon. Today, says Byron, beings from twenty-nine planets are buzzing round the earth. Byron talks freely, though, about
the thought transferences he says he gets from these beings and it seems that there is a realm of mutual trust between
them.

"It's the Krxyzcs I am in contact with mostly," he goes on to say. "They keep telling me about a terrible disaster and massive
earthquakes. There is a deep fracture in the earth running from Mexico right up to the North Pole. It could cause havoc
through the whole solar system, as a nuclear explosion could split the earth. All the planets are very worried. Some of them
do not like us at all; they think we should be taught a severe lesson. But we are very lucky--Venus, Pluto, and Kruger 60.B
and Volcania are all on our side, holding the others off, hoping to use gentle persuasion on us. They want us to love each
other."

As an earthling, I think it is fine that someone from outer space can use thought transference with the hope that it will do us
good and if there are space things somewhere about, it is likely they can and will communicate through the mind. But we are
not all able to understand such a simple language as French, much less Venusian.
I find it difficult to understand why a Norfolk slater and tiler should be chosen as the emissary to "take the space-lings to our
leader" as he says they want him to do. The interview with Byron ends on a grim note, as befits such a serious subject as
the earth running out of time. Byron says he wants to lead his thought-friends to someone in authority, "even Harold Wilson,
the present prime minister, would do if his motives are pure."

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, people are also considering the idea that there are communications in the ether and
messages come from another planet. When I lived in California, I met two scientists who had a laboratory way out in the
Mohave Desert. For several years they have been picking up strange vibrations and, by using a series of aluminum
canisters set up in the laboratory, they are finding that the pitch that comes from these vibrations as well as certain
frequencies causes the canisters to vibrate. They have kept tapes on the vibrations for years. Now a key seems to have
been found to the tapes, which indicates that they are a language and not a series of disassociated sounds haphazardly
picked up. I have in my possession a tape made of many of these experiments and expect that before 1971 has ended we
shall have some startling news from the Mohave Desert scientists. I regret that I have promised to keep their names secret
for the moment, but I can produce the rare tape if anyone is interested. The scientists are well known in a more ordinary
frame of reference, especially for their work on high frequencies. Personally, they take an interest in telepathy and accept it
as a fact. Now they want to know why certain minds can transmit and receive while other minds cannot.

Neither Mr. Byron nor my two scientist friends have anything to gain from their studies and, indeed, in all cases would seem
to have a lot to lose. Yet, weekend after weekend, they steadfastly go on with their research in a dreary little laboratory,
forever recording sounds and frequencies and comparing patterns. Even small laboratories cost money to run and my
scientist friends finance it out of their personal incomes without counting the endless hours spent in the desert.

All this seems way out but no more so than the idea that a man would walk on the moon did twenty-five years ago. Every
invention, every scientific advance has been thought ridiculous when it was first talked about but in time that which seems
improbable becomes possible and then emerges as a reality.

We can no longer afford to neglect reports such as the one from Mr. Byron or forget the men in the desert. History shows us
that most prophets go through a period of crying in the wilderness. Perhaps we should give more time to listening to the
cries instead of hearing their echoes later on.

While it may take many more years to decide if there is any scientific evidence to give credence to the idea of planetary
communications, another line of research is progressing along satisfactory lines. This is in the area of learning the language
of dolphins, and Dr. John C. Lilly is well on the way to establishing that these beautiful sea creatures do have a language
that is recognizable and, in time, key points will be translated. Dolphins, more commonly called porpoises, are found in
abundance in all seas while some species are inhabitants of large rivers such as the Amazon. When I lived in Florida on the
banks of the Indian River, I had two dolphins who regularly came almost to the front door of the house to be fed. Their sense
of timing was fantastic and for months they would arrive promptly at six in the evening, always ready to put on a great
informal show of activity for visitors. Dolphins are gregarious, and large herds often follow ships, and sometimes leap so
high out of the water that they land on the decks of boats. Their gambols and apparent love of human beings have attracted
the attention of sailors of many ages and have given rise to many fabulous stories about them.

The trained dolphins of Disneyland are world famous and man does, indeed, seem to have an affinity with these strangely
beautiful, obviously intelligent sea creatures.

Dr. Lilly believes that he can produce a kind of dolphin alphabet, but everyone who trains dolphins or has met them
frequently, as I have done, knows that telepathic communication is easier with these creatures than with many domestic
animals. Occultists hold the theory that when dolphin language is properly researched, it may hold the key to some of the
mysteries connected with the lost continent of Atlantis and that dolphins are a link between Atlantis and man on earth today.

Farfetched though these theories may be, ranging from thought transference from space to telepathic communications from
the oceans, we cannot afford to ignore their potential. At worst, someone's time has been lost in wasted research and he
may have to suffer derisive remarks from people who joke about things they cannot understand. At best, man, almost dying
from his own inability to communicate with his own kind, living on a planet polluted by his own mistakes, may yet find
salvation in the possible ability to communicate with creatures from other elements. This is probably why, in the second part
of the twentieth century, we have to face up to studying every facet of thought transference and stop trying to prove that it
exists. Let us just go on from the premise that it does.

Chapter 5: You Are a Radio Station

There is a theory that telepathy is a series of electrical impulses shooting out from one mind to another, and this seems a
more logical theory about an illogical process than thinking all communications from mind to mind are initiated by some
divine spirit, named or unnamed.

Suppose we work from the premise that every living cell steadfastly produces positive electrical forces which then must be
balanced by the negative electrical forces from the atmosphere and the earth or discharged into the atmosphere or earth.
Engineers will know the Coulomb law, named after a French physicist, in which he established that two electric charges
either attract or repulse each other. If the charges emitted are the same, the forces repel each other; if the charges differ,
then the forces are attracted to each other.

The human cerebral cortex, called the gray matter, practically the outer shell of the brain, seems to have deliberately
evolved to furnish fine conducting filaments identical to those of the early crystal radio sets. Except, of course, that the brain
was the prototype for the set, not vice versa. The gray matter has countless neurons, minute cells that are the basis of nerve
tissue. There are also billions of fine, treelike bodies called dendrites that make the brain a huge network of antennas that
points in every possible direction. It is the human version of directional radio. If you have a radio or radio-television set with
an enclosed aerial, do a little experimenting by moving the aerial from its accustomed position. The quality and intensity of
the signal will be changed although you can be sure the transmitting station is still on the same beam and your receiving set
is obviously in the same position. A small aerial can make so much difference.

In the days of early radio, antennas were run up at exact right angles to the direction of the station transmitting. Although the
transmitter and the receiving point must be in good condition, the tiny antenna is very important for perfect reception, and so
it is within our minds. Unless we can tune in all the dendrites to direction and to receptivity, the messages received will be
distorted and our own emotional translation of them will be incorrect. The alignment between the conscious and the
subconscious again becomes important, as good alignment enables the rhythms and vibrations to come through in a more
acceptable and less distorted manner.

The extreme end of a lightning conductor is susceptible to all electrical charges near it and does not discriminate. This is
where the brain and the mind have an advantage over the lightning conductor, for if the positive potential of the cortex is
kept alert and bristling at the tips of the motile fibers and there is a volume of positive potential behind it, the unit of charge
needs only the launching push of a minute impulse to send it on its way. The impulse needed is formulated thought.

So everything is nicely set up for a human transmitting and receiving station, and one cannot avoid concluding that there is a
continual interchange of electrical charges from body to body and with our earthly surroundings. The positive charge is
within our brains, making the brain one of our best facilities if we can get to the point where we even have a vestige of
control over this organ. Yet without this, the process of transmitting and receiving goes on. While the brain has the highest
positive charging area, the liver has the lowest negative point.

It is the neatest setup to explain telepathy logically. Those fifty billion neurons and dendrites present a computer service of
unimaginable amounts of computations. Why should it not be possible, therefore, to formulate every thought and event the
human race has ever known and through this be able to move into another dimension of time and space whereby events of
the past can be picked up and registered by a human being in the twentieth century with the same force that we now see an
image on TV; or look into the future and see forthcoming events simply by manipulating the antenna of the brain until they
are tuned in to the event; or even more simply to send a vibration from one mind to be picked up by another and call it
telepathy?

The brain is the powerhouse of positive electricity for every thought impulse. Every thought cannot be stored in the brain, so
it has billions of filaments that act as ideal radio antennas and cannot help sending out and taking in currents. Thoughts are
sent out into the atmosphere of negative electricity and have a compulsion to meet. It is an irresistible force of attraction.

Thoughts radiate out into the atmosphere all the time; and that just about means all thoughts. When some of our thoughts
become vibrations and wavelengths, they are harmonious and interpretable, others are inharmonious and in such a state of
jangles and chaotic confusion that they are not easy or are even possible to interpret.

In a world geared to logical thoughts and training courses, it is remarkable for us to read of news stories of people who
receive radio programs by the apparently incredible means of the metal filling of their teeth. About 1950 there was a news
story of a man in Rahway, New Jersey, who said he could not turn off the radio programs that kept coming into his head. As
he was being interviewed he said he heard Bing Crosby singing a specific song. Later this was checked to see if it was true
and it was found that such a song was indeed sung by the inimitable Crosby and was being broadcast at the time of the
interview. Somehow the man had gotten his telepathic waves tuned in to a specific air wave but had no means of tuning out.

When I was a child, a man who lived on my aunt and uncle's estate in Norfolk, England, without a radio set in his little
thatched cottage, would tell me that he was listening to music. He always gave me the name of the tune and said whether it
was an orchestra or a song. My father generally checked all his reports, and they were always correct. My father fiercely
protected the old man from the usual remarks thrown at anyone who is different. In my part of the country no one called
someone else kookie, but they had a charming adjective that described a man as a "cracked pot." Within this framework
there was always the gentle tolerance that the person was not mad but only slightly different from so-called normal people.
Our friend in Norfolk then was a "cracked pot" but his statements about the music checked out, and that placed him in the
category of merely being different, not mad.

I remember old Joseph very well. He was a kind old countryman, and he looked after the huge walled garden belonging to
my relatives. I learned a lot about horticulture from him; that fig trees, no matter how much care a gardener gave them, could
not be expected to yield a huge crop year after year. Trees needed to rest and plants were living things not very different
from ourselves except that they were not as stupid and did not make as much noise. He taught me that plants grew best if
they were happy. It was easy to do experiments so that some plants were loved, coaxed, and even sung to while others
were not. It was awesome to record that the plants receiving the loving attention, which had nothing to do with such prosaic
things as fertilizers, grew and prospered more than the others.

No one told me it was supernatural; rather, it was simply natural to use firm positive thoughts directed to the good of the
plants' growth. Years later I read stories in American newspapers about huge scientific experiments whereby plants and
even farm livestock were subjected to the same treatment that my "cracked pot" friend in Norfolk had achieved in the days of
my youth.

As a sideline to working in the garden, old Joseph kept dozens of rabbits and helped my aunt to start one of the first
professional Angora rabbit farms in Great Britain. Because we spent a lot of time in the Norfolk house, all the children were
also given rabbits. I followed Joseph's advice about feeding and grooming, but we also had a built-in secret between us. My
aunt exhibited rabbits, won world renown for her Angora wool, and loved the kudos that went with this unique type of
farming. But when it came to any special rabbit wool yielding the most consistent staple, Joseph and I were the leading
lights on the farm. This could not be passed off as mere coincidence because we would sometimes take a rabbit known to
be poor in producing quantity and one that did not meet the requirements of the staple cuts. We could always get it into
condition and increase the staples by 25 percent. My aunt was not slow in questioning me about this, wondering if Joseph
had some secret that he was withholding from her.

Not at all. All Joseph did was talk to the animals and think good thoughts about the staple and the quality of the wool. When
I was around, it was usual for him to talk in a soft coaxing tone to a delinquent wool-breeder.

"Come now, just another half inch of pretty wool. Look at what Euphoria has done... every cut a right good one... You can do
the same. Come now, give us wool like Euphoria."

The monstrous rabbits with glowing red eyes would just look at their bowls of food and nibble their way through life, blinking
in the pale golden sunlight of the Norfolk spring days right through the summer; and then it was clipping time. Joseph would
take the visiting rabbit, the big shears, and snip the first clipping of wool away from the body, to measure it against the
wooden gauge used to decide the standard staple. I never remember an occasion when it did not match and I would know
that Joseph had brainwashed his charges again.

Whether he was a "cracked pot" or not, he knew how to make figs grow and Angora rabbits yield more wool per animal than
any others in the country. Perhaps it may help to know that he had come from Transylvania long, long ago.

Chapter 6: The New Power Structure

Although my interest in telepathy started with games, my father was not the sort of man to think that life was just simply a
matter of being amused. The value of those early lessons has had a profound effect on me because they enabled me to see
that thought transference was nothing to be frightened of and could be a very ordinary occurrence in life. I had to grow up
and live with the idea though before I began to see the amazing possibilities of thought transference and to know that
telepathy is the secret voice of the mind and its subtle means of communication. It seems to me that not a single year has
gone by without showing me another facet of thought transference. It was like building a pyramid, a slow process but one in
which each year's results could be clearly seen. The fun-and-games period went on for a long time, but in the end the
simple idea of using thought transference to register one idea onto a film plate led me to the realm of thought forms
materializing and being photographed. The experiments with Roger, the old springer spaniel, started me on the road to
understanding animals, to prowling around the circus grounds of the world. I learned why the gypsies have a flair with
horses and why the best jockeys and handlers of the world have a flair with animals that is not based on affection alone.
Thought transference led me to study psychic healing in the New Forest of England where telepathic communications were
used to convey to a sick person that the body could be made healthy by vibrations coming from one mind to another. The
result was the awesome possibility that telepathy might be used as a weapon of war. My awareness of this possibility was
increased by the knowledge of experiments going on in the U.S.S.R. and that were far ahead of anything we in the United
States could imagine.

I met astronauts and scientists in our space program who also believed in the power of the mind, seeing it capable of
moving objects to span time and space, to cut down on the cumbersome engineering necessary to launch astronauts
toward the moon. There was a possibility that the power of thought transference could be applied to the practice of
medicine; politically, it might be used to brainwash huge masses of people.

The reasons why telepathy is important are impressive and I am always impatient because things I see so clearly are not
seen by people who are in a position to use it and make it work. True, it is heartening today, as we move toward the great
Age of Aquarius, to know that telepathy is not thought of as way out and impossible as it was considered to be in my
childhood; but we still have a long way to go. Before we can really make any progress in the study of telepathy there are
whole areas of prejudice that have to be wiped out; new forms of philosophy must be started. We should no longer see
telepathy as a childish game or declare its supporters sick or kookie. The name of the game becomes facing reality now, and
the stakes are man's survival in a world that is rapidly disintegrating around him, especially when viewed from the old
teachings geared to the material blessings that we are supposed to have.

All around us we see that intangibles are being used, sometimes imperceptibly, as in the case of psychiatric treatment, or
consciously, as with creative people such as sculptors, light artists, and even musicians. The intangibles--the things we
cannot touch--may still produce feelings and we respond to these feelings. Four boys play guitars and sing; and something
happens between the four youngsters and several thousand people. Few of the great brains of the world can explain it, yet
the miracle of communication has happened. Four minds send out thoughts as much as they send out music and words and
those thoughts are vibrations that thousands of other minds catch because the music and the words have helped them to
tune in. Four pudgy-faced boys, not very good-looking, logically should not be able to influence the minds of thousands of
others. From the standpoint of reason, we cannot accept this as possible; and when we are faced with the impossible
happening, the tragedy is that we refuse to acknowledge it and behave like ostriches trying to pretend that it has not
happened,

A few people drag their heads out of the sand and know they have witnessed the miracle of telepathy; one mind, or four,
sending out vibrations to influence the masses. What can be done for pleasure can also be done for other reasons. As
always, the motivations are to be examined as much as the effects. Along with the recognition of telepathy's existence
comes the acknowledgment that in the future real power will be among the people who accept the fact that the mind is the
most powerful organ that has ever been known. The truly powerful people of the world will be those who use the mind, by
directing its vibrations to specific purposes. Love has tried to rule the world, but it has become a debilitated force. Money has
ruled the world but has become meaningless to a generation that despises the wealth accumulated by its parents and that
views bank notes with no more regard than a string of beads. Patriarchs have tried to rule the world on the basis that
because they believed in a thing, it had to be the law for others. In America we have seen the rise of a matriarchal society.
The woman has gained power by emasculating the male, wearing the pants, enjoying the production of male children, and
then rejecting her offspring in a wild belief that the female must always seek the fountain of youth in order to retain power.
We have also lived through times when religious forces have been powerful, when masses of people have been controlled
by fear of hell fire and damnation. We are now on the brink of saying good-bye to the old power structures as the Aquarian
Age approaches, yet we acknowledge that power is necessary in the world.

All that is left in a world that has exploited the bodies and prostituted the spirit of man is that intangible part of man himself,
the mind. In the understanding and use of his mind may lie man's salvation. Instincts for survival override all else in times of
emergency. Man is already aware that he cannot afford to neglect any areas that may help him, and if his training in
orthodox affairs, his terms of environment and mannerisms come between him and his last bastion of defense, then he will
reject traditions and education. We are already seeing examples of total rejection, but unfortunately it has happened quickly
and there is a greater gap than the so-called generation gap as man tries to live in the between stage of rejected old values
and new ones not yet proved.

It is in the between state, the limbo land of man's existence, that the parapsychologist can be helpful and must play his part
in future life. Science has made mistakes by not explaining the full impact of such things as splitting the atom, the atom
bomb, the use of nuclear energy in its positive as well as its negative phases, and the true value of sending men hurtling
through space to set foot on the surface of the moon. Parapsychologists should profit by the mistakes made by scientists
and begin to explain in simple language all that is involved in such things as "ghost-hunting," "trance mediumship," and most
important of all, thought transference or telepathy.

Telepathy is intriguing more people than ever before, and this popular appeal makes the need for well-directed research all
the more important. A gun can be a weapon of protection or it can be a lethal instrument. It is not the gun that changes,
causing this distinction, but rather the motivations of the person using the gun and in some cases the circumstances in
which it is used. So it is with telepathy used as a means of communication between men. We need to be sure that behind
the communication is the desire for men to live side by side with other men in a harmonious existence. Telepathy
understood and used by megalomaniacs, however, could leave a blot on the pages of future history books as ignoble as the
work of Adolf Hitler. The unfortunate thing is that many people interested in personal power alone are also well aware of the
advantages of understanding telepathy. The only way to counteract this is to establish centers throughout the world where a
scientific study of telepathy could be performed at all levels and the results of this evaluation be made known. Pools of
learning have been established before for medicine and for interplanetary travel so why not for telepathy?

Many years ago I made a statement to the press that the U.S.S.R. was twenty-five years ahead of the United States in
terms of awareness of the values of telepathy. Nothing has happened to change this view in spite of the fact that I know that
more people than ever before are interested in the subject; there is little drive or leadership to get down to the basics of
"why" and "how." We may be marking time, never taking a step until the day we wake up and find some other nation has the
whole answer: what telepathy is, why it works, and how it can be used in the game of power structuring of the brave new
world.

The area of thought itself needs to be explored, for, despite the immense strides made in research, no one can really define
thought. There are thought forms and many variations on them. Many teachers have projected the idea that positive thought
must be good for mankind; yet the universal laws are geared to polarity, the use of the positive and negative merging to
produce results. The answer probably is that no thought should be entirely positive or entirely negative as this makes for an
imbalance.

We come then to an area that is often neglected. While conscious thought can be directed in a positive or negative manner,
the way the subconscious works is lost in a morass of theories and fantasies. Conscious thought that does not impress itself
upon the subconscious is of little importance, mere beatings of thin air. Its forms are mental pasteboards, its vibrations
nothing more than flutterings in the astral atmosphere. This is one of the reasons why telepathic messages are beyond the
recognition of many people. Most people have the power to talk, but they do not say very much that is meaningful; and so it
is with thoughts that are only aligned with the conscious, and do not have a target on the subconscious. Without the link of
the conscious to the subconscious no telepathic communication is possible.

If deep sincerity accompanies a thought, the subconscious mind takes it within itself; it can lie dormant, like a seed in the
earth waiting for the right elements to warm it into life and enable it to mature. A form and vibration of great power and far-
reaching effect is then brought into being. Various things can now happen to the thought. It can be killed by opposition,
another thought form and vibration being sent out either deliberately to kill it or to be put in its way impeding it. It can also die
of neglect. If, however, the thought is strengthened and reinforced at intervals by faith and philosophy it becomes a bright-
winged messenger of Mercury, able to fly on its way and to be transmitted to another mind. Just as polarity is a universal
rule and singleness is not a blessed state, so a thought can grow; and from it many other thoughts with corresponding forms
and vibrations can evolve. These show themselves to be resourceful inasmuch as they can hit the target of another person's
mind and start off a chain of actions and reactions or they can attract people and things toward them.

Within the knowledge of thought in all its many phases--as forms, vibrations, or influences--lies the secret of anima mundi.
Certain men and women have sought this with a passionate dedication, sometimes wrapped in romanticism, as in the
stories of the search for the Holy Grail or Jason and the Golden Fleece. Some people will still barter all their material
possessions to go along the path so few dare to tread. They seek to make tangible, understood forms from a mass of
intangibles to present to a world nurtured on logic but at the same time demanding blind faith in its religions, which are
based on hopelessly illogical ideologies.

In ancient times those who had the secret knowledge, who could line up the conscious with the subconscious and then use
the vibrations to influence events and people, were called witches or were members of now defunct priesthood cults. The
ancients knew the value of telepathy but they also knew that the anima mundi, while available at all times for men of
sincerity, could not hope to reach all men so long as they were involved in a race for material possessions and were forced
to live with distorted man-enforced values. So truth, like a virgin, appeared for a little while, was despoiled by men who
wanted to know it better but could not appreciate its essence, and disappeared. Truth could not die because ancient wisdom
is indestructible and the why and how of telepathy belongs to the lost areas of truth. Just as the planets Uranus, Neptune,
and Pluto were discovered at specific times and greeted by the waiting world as if they were new, so telepathy now lurks
waiting to be rediscovered by mankind, who needs to know that the conscious and the subconscious can be in tune with
each other.

While many psychics turn away from science, seeing it as the enemy of all they uphold or think they have obtained, I
welcome the highly scientific age in which we live. A vast area of research lies open to challenge the scientists who have
achieved so much and can now probe persistently into the virgin wilderness of the mind.

We may be at a time in history when telepathy as part of the anima mundi need never again be considered the special
province of secret societies or the power of priesthood. It could be within the grasp of every human being who can
compromise with nature and pay the price of sincerity and tolerance. Above all, man may have to make a statement to
himself and the world that unseen powers exist and can be used by man.

Telepathy already intrigues scientists, for although they are used to dealing with nebulous qualities and quantities and with
the unknowns, most investigations start with a premise that the scientists go on to try to prove. The one for telepathy could
well be: if two men have two brains, there are these two brains that are the organs of two minds. For if there is an organ--
that is a tangible object to begin with--it is logical to assume that the organ is capable of something, just as an ear is capable
of hearing and an eye is capable of seeing. Therefore what is the brain capable of beyond being a storehouse and a
generator? The brain can be felt, examined, operated upon and seen. What it does as the organ of the mind, the creator of
thought, which in turn becomes a vibration and then creates an action, is a gigantic enigma.

It is fashionable in some circles today to see man as a naked ape. In a way we have to accept this; but it is only a partial
explanation, for man is really an animal capable of reasoning and learning. His brain enables him to store and transmit
knowledge. Today a schoolboy can explain space science in a reasonable manner, but nine hundred years ago a wise old
man could not do so. Yet in terms of moral knowledge, the kind that makes the will turn toward good, we seem no further
advanced than men were at the beginning of time. What Jesus Christ and Buddha taught is often beyond our grasp. We
may accept it as a principle but reject or repudiate it as a fact.

Man develops unevenly, and does not always conform standardly to education. The average man knows more about his car
than his own body, and he knows hardly anything about his mind. The average woman may be a walking encyclopedia of
clothes and beauty shop treatments and still not know the functions of her own body and mind. We have made unbelievable
strides in science and have within us the power to know, do, and appreciate all, with the exception of the mind. In all areas
that man has not been able to comprehend, experts have generally arrived in each generation to take charge and produce
answers. Yet we are backward in examining why the intellectual mind is separated from the moral one.

A simple explanation could be that within each human being two types of intelligence, two minds, function. One directs the
body in all its conscious activities in relation to its environment and the outside world. This is the objective mind. Yet other
things go on in the body, unconscious activities that man is not thinking about all day long. There is a world within man
where such things as the timing of heartbeats, the digestion and assimilation of food, and the rebuilding of used cells go on
and this is part of the work of the subjective mind. If the average human being can begin to accept the two-fold character of
the intelligence in the human body, then he will be able to adjust to the logical development of the scientific qualities of the
mind. He may even get around to accepting that since thought is the means by which the creative power functions, man
therefore creates his own world, the inner and outer conditions of his life, simply by the power of thought.

The power of thought, first upon yourself then on other people, must be the way to a new idea of life. By thoughts, words,
and mental attitudes, you can form the style, character, and size of the matrix into which the universal law pours the
substance of your experiences and way of life. When you understand your own mind you may not like what you are or what
you have. You can then use the power of the mind to make a new pattern and plan a new life for yourself; then you have
touched on mental science.

The power of thought is not only used for ourselves. It is when we think of its power on others that we must be sure of our
own motivations for using this power. If it works on our own life, enabling us to change a life pattern for a newer one or even
to influence another person's life, as often happens when two people fall in love, how wonderful or how dangerous this
power of the mind can be if directed toward evil or a mass of people.

We can see the power of the mind, a form of subtle telepathy, in the voodoo doll. Sticking pins into a doll means nothing; but
if the power of the mind is directed against the doll, actually a substitute for a person, with the resulting thought forms and
vibrations in the ether until they meet the mind of the victim, it now becomes logical to see that evil thoughts can indeed
change the life of another person. This can be done toward whole masses of people when evil thoughts or ideas of
destruction are telepathically sent out.

Today we speak of "brainwashing" and somehow we are being steeped in the idea that it is always "the other fellow" who is
doing the brainwashing. Actually, in a world unsure of telepathy and perhaps fearing it, we are constantly being subjected to
telepathic forces in a gigantic, subtle brainwashing. We call it advertising, and that just about brings telepathy, the power of
one mind transmitting thoughts to many other minds, right into our own living rooms. Instead of telepathy now being one
brain transmitting to another brain, as a receiving station, we have the synthetic product, the television set, and we enjoy,
actually enjoy, our minds being subjected to a great confidence trick devised by the new school of high priests, who have
their gilded temples on Madison Avenue.

No, telepathy is no longer a game to play in childhood. It's a wake for the death of the organ of the brain, the original
transmitting and receiving station of man. Somewhere the conscious and the subconscious are not encouraged to unite.
The more telepathy is tainted with an aura of mysticism, the more deadly will be the thought forms sent out to destroy the
minds of the masses and build up an imbalance of power. It's your inner world being winnowed away at with the
thoroughness of termites destroying a building.

In the euphoric state created by material possessions, the thought forms and vibrations of telepathic advertising have
remodeled a whole generation. Man is a logical animal and cannot really believe that a certain toothpaste will make him
more sexually desirable or that a few platefuls of cereal will stoke him up for an energetic day or that a wig will make a
woman youthful. You think this cannot happen? Yet it does, and the many people who are encouraged to scoff at psychic
phenomena and telepathy really believe the messages pumped out through the media every day.

There is certainly more foundation for believing and accepting telepathy as a fact, valid in today's life, than there is in
accepting toothpaste as the key to opening the door to a great sexual experience.

Years ago science fiction writers terrified readers with hair-raising stories of a generation of zombies or robots, all obeying a
power-hungry master. He pressed a button and his world of workers performed for him, presumably making his own life
more pleasurable. Today we have electronic machines that are like a new form of magic; not quite as simple as pressing a
single button, but basically the same principle of one man being in control of the destiny of thousands of figures and
numbers, almost to the point where he may forget they are people.

Remember that the computer has its counterpart in the human brain and it is just as possible for a human being or several of
them to control masses of people without the encumbrances of electronic controls. In every generation there have been
exceptional people who could use the powerful generating force of their brains to create thought forms and forces. They
survived because the mass of people did not have the opportunity to learn the secrets of the mind and how it works. That
reason is no longer valid today but we have seen the rise of dictators in our lifetime and perhaps met lesser ones in our
home or professional life. The answer lies in coming to grips with the mind, your own to begin with, and using telepathic
powers to enhance your life. When a man fights with a gun he has the advantage over the man who does not have one. So
the defeat of dictators and hope for the oppressed may lie in using the very weapons by which the dictators gained power--
their ability to transmit powerful thoughts that find their target in the minds of others and by these thought forms to influence
events and people.

Even if it is a terrifying thought, we must still face it. We must see that our salvation as the human race, in which the
individual retains his importance as a unit within a greater unit, rests with knowing more about the mind as a whole and
about telepathy in particular.

Certainly there is a movement in the world toward group study of telepathy but there is a lack of coordination among these
groups in assessing their studies. As always, with so-called supernatural subjects, there is a lack of organization despite an
increase of enthusiasm and a willingness to get small study groups together. Without a cohesive force to link the work of the
groups together and the right people at the head of the evaluation studies, telepathy will remain years behind the scientific
times. I have always had difficulty in using the word "supernatural" because everything generally seems so clear and natural
to me. So when I use the word, it is because it is in common use today. It is the gigantic centerpiece of a wheel. From it
many spokes cascade out, each with its own function and characteristics such as telekinesis, clairvoyance, and telepathy.
While all such things must, in the end, fuse together as they do in the center of a wheel, the hub, each one is justifiably
capable of being judged on its own until we reach the day when the word "supernatural" has its real meaning conveyed to
us. It is simply an extension of everything that is natural. To many people, already interested in studying telepathy, the
supernatural is the night sky of the mind, the shadowy side of our mental "daylight" of reason and hard fact. If we can only
think in terms of black and white (literally) or daylight and nighttime, then at least let us understand that the supernatural
contains as many causes of pleasure and wonder as the daylight. Within the shadowy side, many people find mystery,
beauty, and enchantment, sometimes fear and horror. Today the main thing that is found by everyone is a powerful
attraction, so that one way or another, we are all involved in something we do not understand but have to admit is there.

We may be skeptical, or even down to earth, talking about this modern age as a time for materialism, reason, technical and
scientific advances, but the supernatural plays a vitally important part in the world we live in. We have to rid ourselves of
some old images, however, and if we feel the mind has its shadowy side where old terrors mingle with old truths, let us face
them with the courage we have shown in the past in conquering diseases and achieving the things in life that have been
thought impossible, such as the space program. Let us start by eliminating the fear of the word supernatural, knowing it to be
simply a convenient term for a huge area of human speculation about things believed to exist beyond the threshold of our
ordinary day-by-day existence. We accept the word love although it deals with an intangible haphazard force and is not
always at the same level. The supernatural is all around us; the miracles of the Bible, by some standards, could be
considered supernatural but they were natural to Jesus Christ, who performed them. The famous St. Joseph of Copertino,
living in the seventeenth century, gained a supernatural reputation for shooting up in the air, thus demonstrating levitation to
the embarrassment of himself and his ecclesiastical superiors. Lightning has been around for a long while but there was a
time when it was thought to be supernatural. Lightning, at first, was thought to be the anger of the gods; telepathy is thought
to be something magical.

Even a hundred years ago, people who observed the existence of the strange power of the human mind that we call
telepathy often thought they had discovered something supernatural. Except for an enthusiastic interest, we have not
progressed too much in the last hundred years in increasing what we know about telepathy.

Our enthusiasm now has to be directed toward the same straightforward assessment that every other phenomenon has in
turn been subjected to. We now have an adequate explanation of lightning; there could be a similar one forthcoming about
telepathy.

Somewhere, through the investigations and studies of private groups and the few professionals in countries carrying on
research, we shall find an answer to the questions that puzzle us about the area that we now call the supernatural for want
of something better.

Chapter 7: Thought Transference in the Animal World

The idea of telepathic communication between man and animal is not new, but it is surprising when it is dealt with by the
press. Androcles and the lion is probably the first story we hear showing that when fear is cast out, a man can communicate
with a wild animal and not be torn to pieces. I believe one of the reasons why I had so many animals as pets when I was
young instead of the usual toys was because my father knew so much about telepathic communication and saw that fear
could be one of its greatest blocks. So Nellie, our fugitive lion from a circus, and I got along well together because I did not
know that lions were supposed to tear little girls to bits. Most attacks by animals are due to reflex actions generated by fear
and the instinct for survival. Snakes, often so dreaded by humans, have never, to my knowledge, hunted man; but a man's
natural reaction upon seeing a snake, even if it is harmlessly sunning itself, is to kill it or at least attack it. So, if you are
foolish and crude enough to step on a rattlesnake, very likely in its territory, so that you are the alien, it is not surprising that
it will react by striking. There is an immediate recognition of man as the enemy, and we ourselves are trained by more
contrived means to take care of ourselves today. When our lives are threatened we forget such things as turning the other
cheek, even though we may be pillars of the church and firm believers in the Sermon on the Mount.

Fear neutralizes respect, love, education, and the finer emotions. Nothing can pick up the telepathic communication of fear
as quickly as an animal because there is no consciousness to act as a reasoning factor or a deterrent to the basic thought
vibrations sent out by the mind experiencing the fear. The study of fear is intriguing and I have always wondered just how
many cowards at heart have become heroes decorated for their bravery? This can easily be so since fear can be a
conditioned force, brainwashed out of existence, as in the case of all well-disciplined soldiers who are put through cleverly
designed patterns of training that deliberately blot out the essences of emotion.

The training of the armed forces in Britain is a classic example of conditioning on a large scale, with the whole thing
rationalized on the basis that it is necessary for survival. I have no knowledge of such training in the United States but there
is no reason to assume that it would be much different since the instinct to live at any cost is conditioned out of most people
by education, social standards, and environment. Something has to incite the desire to kill that has been weakened by
artificial living conditions. So when men are taken from normal surroundings this survival instinct has to be artificially
fostered by rigid training in which routines, habit, and accepted emotions have to be broken down by the training of one
man's mind under the control of several dozen other men. Wild animals do not subject themselves to this conditioning, but
the behavior of pet animals is often the result of telepathic communications between the owner and pet. The dog or cat does
not understand every word but the dendrites are waving around in its brain and it receives impressions to which it responds.

The artistry of a horseman riding his favorite mount is the essence of a great mental rapport between animal and man.
Some exceptional circus animal trainers have this ability. Unfortunately some also resort to inhumane training tricks to avoid
investing the time needed for mind to meet mind, to recognize each other's message. One of the quickest ways to train
dogs is to give sharp commands: the words themselves don't matter but the formation of the thought in a concise manner
certainly does. In just the same way, when invocations are performed in withcraft or even in black magic, the thought is
direct and to the point... the point literally being the lightning rod conductor in the other person's mind.

Cartoonists often get laughs with their sketches of little old ladies who are fond of their pet dogs or cats. Generally the little
old lady and the pet have a great relationship for a simple reason. The old lady is no longer reasoning that she is superior to
her dog. Therefore, since her conscious mind does not put up barriers between her and her dog there is a direct line of
communication between the two. Naturally there is a rapport and an easy relationship and again we have a lesson in
telepathic communications. The same message comes out in all experiments I have ever done. Concentrate on the
message, reduce it to a simple denomination, and do not allow anything contrived by man's education to clutter up the
transmitting point from which the message is sent out to be caught up in the antenna of another person's mind.

The best mediums in the world are those who at the point of going into a trance do not doubt that a trance is possible or
wonder what is going to happen to them. So the subconscious part of them remains alert, with the conscious for once
subdued, and the mind of the medium can receive and transmit messages with greater ease than other people. One of the
things I dislike about trying to "teach" people mediumship is that too many courses begin on a level that is too advanced for
the person to take advantage of them. Before there is even a semblance of a trance session the medium has to understand
her own mind and accept it as a transmitter or receiver, just like a radio station. She has to know about the conscious and
subconscious; and if she is the sort of medium who settles down in a chair and then asks if her hair looks all right, she will
never let go of her consciousness, long enough to go into the deep trance that can bring out meaningful messages. The
best mediums literally throw away their own personalities at the point of entrance into a trance, leaving only the brain as the
organ for the mind to receive its impressions.

For students who are interested in telepathic communication, it is best to start with the uncomplicated life forms of animals
and birds before trying thought transference with human beings. In so many experiments with humans, they can
mischievously deliberately block receiving or reception just for the sheer hell of it. This unnecessary hindrance does not
occur with animals and birds. If you have a pet, try "thinking" it to come to you, but make the thought direct and simple
without such things as "I want Bonzo to come to me so that I can pat his head or give him his dinner." Your first thought
should be "I want Bonzo to come to me," a direct vibration uncluttered by anything else. Within a week you should be able to
do this. One of the secrets of the great understanding I had with "Mr. Hotfoot Jackson," my beloved pet jackdaw--a small
member of the raven family--was that we had a fantastic telepathic communication potential between us. We demonstrated
this many times on television and I have no doubt everyone thought it was a supernatural relationship. Actually it was
because I could unclutter my mind to send out a positive thought and he was in the habit of receiving it. So when I "thought"
him down from a tree or a rooftop, there was no more magic to it than there would be in sending out any ordinary electric
impulse. It took a little time to get to the state of rapport for which we became famous in newspapers throughout the world,
but after about a year, my "thinking" toward Hotfoot Jackson was right on the target. And that target was the receptive
antenna of his brain. In short, vibrations from my mind hit the lightning rod and resulted in action.

Of course animal stories are great. Photographers love them; and the newspapers, especially at holiday times, thrive on
putting out stories about animal-human relationships. It is a pity they do not cover the inner story of why there is a
relationship and take it from the telepathic communication angle based on electrical currents.

A man who hit the headlines about seven or eight years ago was Fred Kimball of California. He became known as the man
who could read the minds of animals. Of course he faced the usual nonsense of a press that can rarely get the gist of even a
straightforward story much less a highly complicated one with its roots in science. So there were people who laughed at
Fred, and others who thought he was perhaps a "cracked pot" like my childhood friend Joseph. Few papers got down to the
nitty-gritty; maybe Fred Kimball had hit on something that had been lost since Androcles took the thorn out of the lion's foot.
It is beyond me why we are amazed to suddenly discover that animals think. Of course we have to accept that their
reasoning power is of a different degree simply because they survive in natural conditions and are alerted to being
conscious of survival needs before anything else. Yet, if there is a brain there is also a mind. The questions of how the mind
functions and what is achieved relative to other conditioning forces are just as applicable to animals and birds as to human
beings.

The rapport between Fred Kimball and his animals was remarkable, even though the animals could not back up his
statements when he claimed to read their minds. But what he started now seems to have become fashionable. I have heard
many people who have pets telling me in all seriousness that their special pet does not know it is a cat or dog, but thinks it is
a person. I do not see that this is any different from Fred Kimball's attitude toward his friendly four-footed animals, which he
saw as people.

The thing that throws interviewers into chaos is that Kimball's information about dogs and other pets is very often too
accurate to be regarded as accidental. People would bring their motley assortment of pets to his public meetings and Fred
would give a pet's view of the world, including a description of its ailments. According to Fred, dogs are more like human
beings than cats in that they love to make a conversation piece out of their operations.

It was not unusual for Kimball to disclose that a pet might have its own bank account and state how much was in the
account; this would be confirmed by the animal's owner. But, did he pick this up telepathically from the mind of the owner or
from the dog by an association of ideas? I feel it more probable that it came directly from the owner, as I am doubtful that a
dog could reason out that a journey to the bank was anything more than a journey to any other building. I think Kimball was
more likely to be telepathically communicating with the pet when he talked about the operations a dog had had or certain
idiosyncrasies only known to dog or owner.

Chapter 8: Modern Scientific Experiments

In 1929 Hans Berger devised a brain wave recorder in Germany. It was a prototype for the electroencephalo-graph, the
instrument used to record the brain waves under varying conditions and circumstances, Hans Berger was more interested in
his EEG being used as a means of possibly revealing the source of psychic energy responsible for telepathy. Several
modern research workers in telepathy do not agree with Berger's theory because they do not believe that telepathy needs
the psychic force and that even if it did, the energy force could not be measured by standard methods. They do think that the
"frame of mind" associated with the alpha rhythm is somehow conducive to extrasensory perception, with telepathy as a by-
product. The alpha rhythm is the name that brain researchers have given to the brain wave pattern that is characteristic of a
person who is sitting down with his eyes closed, his mind relaxed but not drowsy. Brain researchers have known for some
time that the brain gives off patterns of electrical activity that vary depending on what the subject is doing. Sleeping,
dreaming, alertness, and drowsiness all have their own characteristic pattern of brain waves. A few mediums have had
EEG's taken while in trance, but little has been published about the results or at least not enough subjects have been used
as guinea pigs so that a yardstick of reference could be obtained. It seems likely that if the dream cycles produce specific
patterns then a trance should produce its own pattern, which could be identified for future use—perhaps with subjects who
are now forced to have treatment for unidentified mental ailments. I emphasize that mediums are only in this classification
because of their mental activity when in trance and my remarks should not be construed as a reflection on any possible
association with mental illness on the part of the medium. Most mediums I know are very sane, alert, well-informed people,
but they definitely have a different mentality from other people and for this reason their brain wave patterns logically should
be different.

The telepathic communication between twins has bewildered, fascinated, intrigued, and sometimes appalled people of every
generation. We often have the classic example of two minds acting with but a single thought, and it is only now we have
begun to study it with any degree of seriousness. The oneness of twins is well known not only in the fact that identical twins
look alike but in that their behavior patterns are often the same and they often go through life doing the same thing at the
same time. It is a fact, but no one to date, with all the cleverness of science, has come up with an adequate answer to why
this happens. The most logical explanation seems to be that identical twins are showing a nearly perfect example of
telepathic communication and at a level no experiment has yet been able to achieve. The best thing about twins acting as
one is that it is not contrived. Nature, generally concerned with pointing a way to us when problems exist, seems to have
devised a prototype of perfect biological radio communication, human beings who walk around, function, talk, and speak in a
world that ignores or chooses not to acknowledge the possibility of thought transference.

While many of us personally know of cases of identical behavior by twins and we all have read fantastic stories about others,
in this world oriented toward logic and scientific thoughts, it is when we read of experiments that the facts are brought home
to us and become undeniable witnesses to the truth of telepathy.
An experiment performed within the last three years has attracted a lot of attention. The experiment was conducted in
Philadelphia by Dr. T. D. Duane and Dr. Thomas Behrendt, both of the Jefferson Medical College. They seated identical
twins about fifteen feet apart in separate rooms and each twin was fitted with electrodes to pick up his brain waves. One twin
was asked to close his eyes in order to produce the alpha rhythm characteristic of this activity. In two out of fifteen pairs of
twins, the researchers reported in the journal Science the alpha rhythm appeared in the other twin's electronic recording
although these twins had not received an order to close their eyes. The doctors called this an extrasensory induction of brain
waves between two individuals who were separated. When the same experiment was done with unrelated people in no case
did the alpha rhythm evoked, in the first subject occur in the other. More research is needed with more twin subjects, and I
have no doubt the proportion of successes will show evidence of a subconscious telepathic relationship.

In my own family twins are not uncommon. One reckless cousin in a moment of enthusiasm produced quadruplets, who
actually turned out to be two sets of identical twins; so I have had the opportunity to make some personal observations on
my own family. I suppose the first time I noticed anything remarkable was when I was about ten years old. My two twin girl
cousins were due to stay with us but at the last minute there was a change of plans. My aunt and one child arrived and my
uncle and the other girl were due to travel to us by car in about three days. We played a very rough game of tennis one
afternoon and my cousin was hit above the left temple with a tennis ball. She screamed as if she were badly injured but
since we always considered her a baby, we took little notice except, in a fit of remorse, we picked dock leaves from the
garden and put them on her bruised temple. By that time there was a lump the size of an egg on her head and it would
certainly take a lot of explaining to my mother and aunt. That evening we received a distressed call from my uncle, several
hundred miles away in North Wales. Gloria, the twin with him, had been at home and for "no accountable reason" was now
in bed crying that she had a bad headache and an equally "unaccountable bruise the size of her hand on her left temple."

This state of affairs went on all through the cousins lives. One would be hurt and the other would scream; one would decide
to buy a totally different dress and arrive home to find the sister had bought the same. My aunt did not believe in dressing
the twins alike and always talked about them having different identities, but as they grew older, it was said with more hope
than reality. It was always the same when the twins parted. They never wanted to live together but the relationship was
never broken whether they were in the same house or not. In their early twenties one called me to say it was a great secret
but she was in love with a very famous sportsman. Next the other twin called to say she was in love with a very famous
sportsman and so it went on until the day one cousin produced twin girls. On that day something went wrong. The other
cousin, who was also pregnant, lost her babies. Fate also played another cruel trick on the family. Gloria died suddenly and
her sister adopted the twin daughters. They are growing up in much the same manner. Recently one called me to say she
was buying a boxer dog as a present for her sister and the other sister called to say she had bought a boxer dog for her
sister. Presumably they just changed dogs and everyone was happy. I know they both breed dogs and do very well at
canine shows.

Another cousin, the one who produced the quads, then gave birth to a set of twins, and these were capable of being a life
study for anyone interested in telepathy. The twins were favored with the most robust ideas of mischievousness and had
healthy dispositions to go with them, making just about everything possible. The girl was soon discovered to be a more
dominant character than her brother and this difference became more pronounced as they grew up. The boy was always in
trouble, despite his much more gentle approach to life, and when questioned about misdemeanors would always give the
same reply, "Marian told me to do it." Often he was scolded because someone would point out that he had not seen Marian
for many hours, as they went to different schools and certainly had different ideas about recreation. But he never varied in
asserting that Marian was responsible.

I decided to test this out for myself and asked Marian very quietly if she would ask her brother to do something quite out of
context with his normal way of life. Only I wanted her to "think" the request to him, not just ask him, and not choose any
special time to do it. The request was that her brother should go to the pens of the show rabbits (relations of the Angoras
already established as part of the family entourage). I wanted him to clean one special rabbit cage even though it did not
need cleaning. Early in the morning I went to this cage, number eleven, and cleaned it out myself, leaving all the others in
the row as they were, obviously not looking fresh and clean with fresh litter underneath the trays.

I followed my little cousin around all day and at about 11 a.m. he went toward the barn housing the Angora rabbits. Without
any hesitation he went to the clean pen and began to clean it out. When Marian returned I told her what had happened. She
was not surprised, in fact she was somewhat arrogantly contemptuous of the whole experiment. "It's easy," she said. "Why I
do things like that all the time with him." So her brother's explanation of "Marian told me to do it" was a fact and not just a
fiction of the boy's mind.

I always wonder how Marian went on. I hear only fleeting bits of conversation about her, but from my own knowledge of her
in the first twenty years of her life, Marian had more than a dash of the Rasputin instincts in her and a distorted sense of
humor. Sometimes her tricks on her brother would misfire or perhaps nature began to compensate. On the day the boy fell
from a high tree and broke his left leg, for "no apparent reason" Marian came downstairs at the farmhouse crying that her
leg hurt. There was no reason why it should, but as long as the boy had his leg in a cast, Marian hobbled along with him.
Friends thought she was mocking her brother and chided her for it, but she knew what it was all about. After that she was
not so mischievous in "thinking" her brother into doing strange things.

The last time I saw Marian she was persistent in questioning me about hypnosis, telling me she could do anything and then
demonstrating it. She did not need to do so, her telepathic powers were incredible. I am hopeful that she may have grown
out of her too robust practical jokes and the instinct to make her brother do a lot of work for her. This is what I hope, but I
have grave doubts about it; and perhaps her mischievousness brought some of our strange family idiosyncrasies too near
home for comfort. I can remember all too well that I enjoyed playing telepathic tricks on unsuspecting people when I was
young, and even with my own children I never had the heart to be firm with them when they indulged in the family pranks.

Julian, my youngest son, is excellent for telepathic experiments both as a transmitter and a receiver, but it is only as he has
gotten older that he understands the seriousness of having this ability. When he was a child he was a soul brother of Marian
and could often outwit her in sheer ingenuity of thought transference. Fortunately he now knows the serious value of thought
transference and the need to concentrate on a higher level of telepathy than the games he played as a child, although, as he
pointed out to me quite recently, "It was all good practice."

Only a few weeks ago, a good friend of mine who lives in Houston, was insistent that we have a seance, and against my
usual disinclination for such things I agreed to do it. When there is a special reason for a seance I am happy to be helpful,
but I never like such things as party games or amusement. In this case a seance was justified in the light of certain
information we both had. We planned the date and it was to include Julian, who was very interested in the half-story we had
already obtained and was enthusiastic about obtaining the rest. At the last minute he was unable to be with us because of a
photographic assignment he had to go on. He called to tell us this and asked us to put off the date. I told him we would go on
without him and he just laughed. "If you do, I'll send enough thoughts along to block everything." At the appointed time,
some seven people sat down in our dining room, with enough psychic power among us to communicate with anything in any
world. It was a dismal failure. The only thing we could get was a series of pictures in our minds of what Julian was doing and
finally a call to all of us that he would telephone at 9:40 p.m. to see how we were. Identical images were coming to two and
three people at the same time and we all wrote down our impressions so that we could analyze them later on. At nine-forty
the phone call came with a cheerful voice informing us that he considered himself to be the best blocking agent, guaranteed
to break up any seance.

He had certainly succeeded with us; and although we laughed and joked with each other about the seance that did not take
place, we realized we had witnessed an example of thought waves being used as blocks. Fortunately, in the interests of
future research workers, we always keep notes on every experiment and often work with several people who are
independently interested and who are not always acceptors of psychic phenomena in any of its many forms. Like the
Russian scientists who conduct experiments, we are all too busy and interested in living to play games, and all our personal
experiments are designed to be helpful and to produce evidence to prove the validity of telepathic communication.

Personal reminiscences of telepathy can go on forever, not only in my own family but in other people's. It is not unusual for
someone to send thought transferences to a husband at work, reminding him to pick something up on the way home, and
for this thought to get through. Maybe we put too much emphasis on laboratory-induced experiments when we have so
many evidences of thought transference all around us. But it would be better if we could get a happy marriage between the
classification of personal spontaneous telepathy and the scientific experiments. To encourage this double interest is my
main line of thought today. We need the evidence of Mrs. John Doe in Brooklyn as well as the solid technical and erudite
papers of university professors. Most of all we need equal publicity to be given to the remarkable scientific experiments
going on throughout the world instead of only reading about telepathy as if it were some just-discovered weirdo game. The
scientists are much too reticent about letting people know what is going on, perhaps because the scientist in his own sphere
is as much of an egotist as the actor. He cannot bear to be wrong and prefers to deliver the complete results of an
experiment when all of it has been done.

I think the public needs information and enjoys being involved. Most of all people like to know what is happening in the
world; and when it comes to the affairs of the mind, there has to be an interest on a personal level, for in the end it's people's
lives we are dealing with. I want to know if I am going to be subjected to the "master mind" techniques, which may be the
total result of experiments in Russia, or if there is an alternative whereby I can use biological radio communication to send
messages that will be adequately received by friends who are far away. If my mind is likely to be used in subconscious
experiments I want to know about it and, if necessary, put in my own dime's worth for or against it; and there must be
thousands more like me who have the same interest. At least we want to observe what is happening. We have a classic
example in the NASA program. No one ever bothered to explain to the man in the street what the space program was all
about. So is it strange that some sections of the community look bitterly at their lack of food and wonder why millions are
spent in sending men and equipment into space? It all goes back to the advances made in sophisticated civilization whereby
great things can happen but no one has time to communicate on any level whatsoever. It should not happen though in the
areas of psychic phenomena and especially in the communication of minds. Let us know the facts as to who is working
where and what he is doing and there is more than a chance that someone in each community will understand enough to
explain and discuss whatever is happening with other members of the community.

Occasionally something spectacular hits the newspapers, but rarely does it make the headlines; it is amazing, however, how
many professional papers carry a full report on scientifically conducted experiments. The availability to the public, though, is
limited and getting to read these reports is a hit-and-miss technique unless one is fortunate enough to have a news clipping
service--an expensive luxury. I venture to predict that in the next few years we shall be able to read more and more about
telepathy, but we shall also still need someone around to explain it in everyday terms.

Experiments in telepathic communication during sleep can produce some interesting reading matter. Two New York
researchers, Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner of Maimonides Hospital, were responsible for some serious research
on telepathy and dreams. In their experiment one person was allowed to sleep while another spent the night in a room four
hundred feet away studying a reproduction of a famous painting. The sleeping person was awakened each time he
appeared to be dreaming and asked to relate what he could remember of his dream. In a significant number of cases, it was
possible to see a close connection between the nature of the painting and the contents of the dream the researchers
reported.

I also tried some experiments in telepathic dreaming at the time when I lived in the household of Professor Eugene
Lundholm, who is greatly interested in all forms of phenomena as well as having other interests such as music and literature.
Gene Lundholm is now in charge of a research library of Wisconsin University and the library is situated in Superior. He and
I probably have the best telepathic rapport since the days when I did numerous experiments with my father. In very few
experiments could we say we failed, whether these experiments were deliberately thinking him into collecting something
quite impossible on his way home from work to communication in times of trouble or experiments designed to research the
many facets of phenomena. One night we decided to see if we could communicate telepathically in a dream. I was to be the
transmitter for the first experiment and he was to act as a receiver. Gene was known to go to bed, put his head on the
pillow, and sleep very effortlessly until it was time to get up. He was not the type to waste any time in anything he did. When
he was home he was always doing something and since bedtime was a practical time for sleep he believed in doing it
efficiently.

I went to bed thinking about my old home in the New Forest and dreamed about it; I felt as if I were showing Gene around it
and pointing out certain architectural features. At some point I decided to "change houses" and went into a dream sequence
describing the house where I spent my childhood with my parents and grandmother. The situation of the house was remote
but had distinguishing features about its geographical location that I had never bothered to describe to anyone because I
simply accepted them as a fact.

When Gene woke up he began to write down his dream immediately, indicating that he had been shown around a large
house in the country by me and that there was a splendid view from one aspect of the house. He described trees, people
around the house, and its link with a manufacturing plant. He did not mention the first house I had dreamed of but
concentrated exclusively on the house of my childhood. In every detail he was right and I had never discussed this house
with him. I had shown him photographs of the newer house in the New Forest but I always have had a very secretive attitude
toward the first house I can remember. It is only recently, since we did this experiment, that I have ever described it or even
written about it.

The next night we decided to make the experiment difficult and try dreaming in sequence. I was to act as the transmitter in
the first part, then Gene, and in the third phase we would go back to myself being the transmitter. I decided to thought
transfer an image to him again connected with my childhood home and concerning my old spaniel. When he wanted to be
deliberately lost, he could always be found in a certain part of the large garden. And he had the habit of carrying large lumps
of coal with him when he went into this voluntary exile--I was thinking this to Gene when the whole thing changed and I was
compelled to get up and go into the garden and pick up one large grapefruit lying on the ground. I did this, came back, got
into the bed, and began to dream again about the old dog, Roger, only this time he was scratching himself in front of the big
fire. This is a natural enough thing for any country dog to do but one unnatural thing was that in my youth I had a pet rabbit
called Horatio Nelson and the dog became its friend. As Roger was trained for gun work he could carry a fresh egg in his
mouth and never break it but Roger preferred to carry Horatio Nelson around and loved to smuggle him into the house.

When we woke up in the morning, Gene had written down details of the house, I had a large grapefruit on the night table,
and Gene had drawn a very good picture of a large spaniel with a cute Easter bunny between its paws.

At the same time as I lived in Los Angeles, a Mrs. Thelma Moss, an undergraduate psychology student, was experimenting
at U.C.L.A., providing evidence that something like telepathy can exist between two people under strangely difficult
circumstances.

To create this situation Mrs. Moss isolated a transmitter and a receiver subject in separate rooms so that they could neither
see nor hear each other. The person who was to transmit was then exposed to a wild variety of stimuli calculated to evoke a
varying series of strong emotions. Meanwhile the receiver was in a room where the surroundings personified tranquility, with
everything quiet and undisturbed. The emotional states were evoked by showing the transmitter pictures of the Hawaiian
Islands while dreamy music played or by requiring him to put his feet in icy water for half a minute. One of the most dramatic
episodes was a film of the last moments leading to the assassination of President Kennedy. After each of these episodes
the transmitter was asked to state his emotional reactions to what he saw and heard. The receiver was asked to say what
was on his mind at this time although he could not see or hear anything of what was happening in the other room. There
were thirty such experimental teams. In addition there were ten subjects who acted as a control. Each of the controls was
told to relax in a quiet room and give his impressions of what the transmitter might be experiencing "in the next room."
Actually, the next room was empty; naturally this fact was not revealed to anyone in the control group nor their attendants
until after the experiment. Sensations of cold and discomfort were experienced by 56 percent of the genuine receivers but
not a single subject in the control group experienced anything. Descriptions of ocean water and waves were reported by 83
percent of the true receivers but they did not refer to Hawaii by name. It was a simple recording of impressions of water.
Only 33 percent of the controls received any impressions varying from a feeling of wetness to an actual impression or two
about waves. Most impressive of all said Mrs. Moss, was that five of the different receivers referred to President Kennedy by
name but no one in the control group had any impression about the name or any name at all or any dramatic event.

No experiment, to date, can ever be called conclusive and can only be considered as a steppingstone toward a complete
study of the mind. I guess we are just about in the kindergarten stage as far as thought transference is concerned. Every
person conducting an experiment on his own or officially is worth considering, and again I have to reiterate that the best way
to receive answers to questions would be to have a number of central receiving areas where experiments could be
assessed. Science is now geared to trying to find explanations of the workings of the mind and it is impossible to exclude
telepathy from any complete study. All the mind probers in their quest to learn the mechanisms of memory, the physiology of
dreams, and the meaning of the many forms of mental illness are being increasingly confronted with uncanny situations
defying logic and drawing the scientists into the realm of telepathy and sometimes into its association with extrasensory
perception. Like the desert oasis that turns out to be a mirage, telepathy will turn out to have a conventional physical
explanation, but always there is the fear that the psychic quality will be there as well and that would upset age-old religions
and philosophies. Much is present in proving that telepathy exists. We have the evidence all around us. How much better to
go along for once following the pattern set by the Russian scientists and take the next step to seeing what telepathy can do,
if it can be harnessed, and ultimately what it is.
People such as Dr. Joseph B. Rhine are receiving increased requests for publications on parapsychology and telepathic
experiments, which is an indication of the increasing interest of scientists in telepathy. While some scientists work on the
idea that telepathy "has no right to be, so it cannot be," others are getting around to thinking it "may be" and a rare few want
to explore anything that may lead to the better understanding of mankind in his environment. Man's body may soon be
trapped and earth-bound, just as a ghost is trapped; but if the mind and spirit remain free to communicate, there is still hope
for man's eternal life and the regenerative forces leading to spiritual freedom.

Chapter 9: Biological Radio Experiments

A great deal has been written about the mind, mostly from the point of view that it is the gateway to the past and the many
doors leading to this are really openings into escape routes called memory or nostalgia. We seem to take a great pride in
remembering, particularly niceties. Sometimes the catalyst to memory functioning is not conscious. A blue flower can be the
key to a whole romantic story of a love affair in which someone gave a friend a blue flower. Through the flower an entire
sequence of events can be built up so that in the end the subject has lived through a life pattern of a specific behavior form.
The simplest explanation is that the subject was once again caught up with the telepathic vibrations already in the air and
tuned in just as he would to a radio show. For some people there is a screening facility in this type of recall whereby
unpleasant things are nullified or not faced. Others with a different temperament may only concentrate on recalling
difficulties and experiencing masochistic feelings. The point is that events that have taken place belong to the past and are
irretrievable by any logical method, but the mind is not logical. It has some quirk in it that defies logic and goes wheeling
along doing whatever it wishes to do, sometimes by direction sometimes by the illogical key of a blue flower switching onto a
specific wave length.

What can be done with the past can be done with the future, the only difference being that for future telepathic events, the
subject and those wishing to analyze the experiment must live long enough for the future event to take place. Among other
things the trance medium is really a great exponent of telepathy, except that she is often tuning in toward the future rather
than the past, and because she has a communication about the future she can earn a name for herself as a prophet. Joan of
Arc had her voices and through telepathic communications she could see the path of destiny for France and her beloved
Dauphin. She was the receiving end of telepathic communication, and most modern experiments show that it is much easier
to be the transmitter and leave the harder work to the partner. I accept thoughts as indestructible; but some become like
bees encased in amber, always there but needing the consciousness of others to recognize them and break through the
encasement. Joan of Arc, hearing her voices, broke through the thought barrier, obeyed them, continued to listen, and
earned a place for herself in history.

Thought forms can be picked up more easily than the actual hearing of telepathic messages through voices. The gateway of
the mind opens out onto a million vistas. It does not need to be a dream or a memory for you to stand for the first time in a
cinnamon-colored street in Rome and see the street signs carved in marble. It is not far from this to see phantom pictures of
lions rearing across the floor of the Colosseum where the Christians were sacrificed. You were not there at the time, unless
you believe in reincarnation. Possibly, you may have read about the Colosseum festivities, but suppose you had not and still
saw the whole scene enacted before you? You may not even ask why; but if you do, then the answer must surely lie in the
realm of thought transference, images picked up from imprints on the ether. All the yesterdays that ever were are in the
tunnel of the mind and you have the mechanism within you, called the brain, with which to explore the past and future. How
to be in control of the mechanism is the secret we are all looking for.

People who accept psychic awareness seem more likely to explore the mind tunnels with a strange time machine. In
primitive countries, where science has not added to the confusion, they achieve success because of more acceptance.
There must always be someone to ask questions and then seek answers, starting with theories, then finding reality. These
people may well be the parapsychologists if they are untouched by motivations of personal pride and are not content to
follow illusions. Most of all they must record the good and the bad; and even more vitally they should have the professional
status and financial freedom to do an honest job of investigating, preferably with a central body that can act as a storage
house. At first the accent would have to be on amassing and storing cases and facts from all over the world, enough so that
there could be an archive from which people could draw information. Everything in nature seems to repeat itself, and this is
what we would be doing if the investigation of thought transference were placed on an ideal basis. The minds of people add
to the universal storehouse of knowledge, and succeeding generations can draw on it, then give something back of their
combined knowledge.

I believe that many child geniuses are really subjects who have been able to tune in telepathically to the universal
storehouse. In the case of young children such as Mozart, playing the piano at the early age of four, it is doubtful if there is
any conscious desire to tune in; such a child is born with the wave bands in place. I have had the experience of obtaining
telepathic information useful to my work and it has come to me both consciously, because I set out to obtain it, and
unconsciously, when the information was needed but without my desire to gain the knowledge. It is the harnessing of man's
will and desire to his needs that is going to be the most difficult part of research in future telepathic adventures.

Two electrochemists, Douglas Dean, age fifty-three, and Professor John Mihalasky, age thirty, of the Newark College of
Engineering, are now doing experiments to prove that telepathy triggers changes in the human body. The two scientists,
who began their work in 1962, use an electronic apparatus called a plethysmograph, which is so sensitive that it is able to
measure the movement of blood through the body. The plethysmograph was built by the two partners based on the designs
of a Czech physiologist, Dr. Stephen Figar.

Professor Mihalasky, who is associate professor of management engineering, believes that he is working on the first
electronically measured proof that thoughts can be picked up telepathically by certain tuned-in people even when they are
not aware of it.

There have been thousands of telepathic experiments, such as the ones conducted at Duke University under the auspices
of Dr. Joseph Rhine, where the subject used cards and other things as test cases for transmitting and receiving. Dr.
Mihalasky does not believe, with some justification, that the use of cards provides enough conclusive evidence, because
some subjects can guess very well and others not so well, getting well below average with cards but experiencing telepathic
communications in everyday life. So the two scientists decided to test for unconscious reaction and in 1970 were beginning
to be excited about the results. Briefly, these experiments take this form. They seat two people in different rooms, one to
transmit thoughts, the other to receive them. They have found that when a familiar name is "beamed" through at some
subjects it causes blood to rush to their heads and unusual mental activity. An unfamiliar name has no noticeable effect as
yet. In some experiments the subjects are not even aware that they are being used as receiving sets for messages, yet the
messages are picked up and the right thoughts trigger off an unconscious response in their bodies.

Their guinea pigs have included hundreds of subjects, including students, housewives, and businessmen but the best
results have always been when they did the experiments themselves. It seems to point again to the idea that rapport, such
as I had with my father, is a lift upward to successful experiments.

When they use themselves as guinea pigs, Professor Mihalasky gives Douglas Dean the names of five people he knows
well or feels strongly about. Dean then takes five other names at random from the telephone book and writes down all ten
on cards. He then adds five more cards; these are blanks. He now has fifteen cards in all. Professor Mihalasky then plugs
himself into the plethysmograph. This is done by putting a finger into a socket-type attachment and it is so designed that the
movement of blood is measured electronically. When a person becomes startled or has some specific mental reaction,
blood moves from the extremities to the brain and the machine records this movement

When Mihalasky is plugged into the plethysmograph, Dean goes into another room and begins to beam his thoughts from
the cards at about twenty second intervals. Mihalasky does not know when the thought transference starts but says the
results are astounding. When Dean transfers the thought about a name he is familiar with, the machine shows that
Mihalasky has an unconscious reaction. So far they have achieved 80 percent success, and the odds against this happening
by chance are astronomical.

There is a less consistent pattern of success with strangers, probably because most people are not able to relax under test
conditions. Obviously any overexcitement of the mind would throw the subject into a less responsive state. I suppose it is
very like trying to teach people to meditate. It is quite impossible if a woman has worries about her children or husband on
her mind. Mundane affairs and fears are the main blocks against success at times of official tests. I emphasize this because
telepathy has been known to work in everyday life even when one subject has been under strain--the message has still
come through. In wartime, there are many incidents of soldiers and their families receiving messages. The fault, therefore,
must lie in making the tests too clinical. I have always been convinced that the work at Duke university would have been
more productive if it had been done under more natural conditions. Field tests, that is telepathy studied in relationship to its
appearance in everyday life, seems more likely to provide the answers, although we should not be too hard on people who
believe that laboratory tests are valuable. They are, but they are not going to give the total answer to the workings of
thought transference.

Professor Mihalasky says that after the assassination of President Kennedy, he had to stop experiments for several weeks.
Everyone was so emotionally involved that the machine reflected their overall disturbed state of mind, and the room-to-room
tests were overridden by the higher octave of emotion. Like everyone else engaged in telepathic research work, the two
scientists bemoan the fact that it is all privately done.

In July 1969 Mr. Dean said, "If we can get other scientists to take up similar work and get some money allocated for
research, then we will be very happy." The prospects, if we can control thought beaming, are fantastic; and already
experiments show that distance does not affect some subjects and percipients. Until we have facilities available for studying
the subject from A to Z, we can expect to lag behind other parts of the world where the potential of telepathy as a convenient
form of communication on a national scale is already seen and accepted.

In 1965, under the direction of I. M. Kogan, the U.S.S.R. set up a Section of Bioinformation as an affiliate of the Scientific-
Technical Society for Radiotechnique and Electrocommunication. Since its inception branches have been set up in other
cities of the U.S.S.R. which include Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Odessa, Zaporozhye and Taganrog. I understand from a
member of the U.S.S.R. Embassy in New York that no one is interested in proving that telepathy exists but an increasing
amount of research starts from the premise of accepting the phenomena.

The Ukrainian Academy of Sciences frequently puts out books and papers dealing with extrasensory perception and
telepathy. Oleg Gusev of the Rabochaya Gazeta is a reporter who recently questioned Alexei Gubko of the Ukrainian
Institute of Psychology about telepathy. Mr. Gubko is a parapsychologist of international repute. He stated in his interview
with Gusev that for hundreds of years scientists have considered the core of extrasensory perception to be telepathy. He
explained telepathy as the phenomenon of psychophysical influence of some living organisms on others at a distance, or
"biological radio communication" as it is called in the U.S.S.R. Among supporters of ESP and telepathy are many Russian
scientists, including Alexander Butlerov, Vladimir Bakhterev, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, A. N. Leontiev, and Elie Metchnikoff.
They all see this as a fascinating branch of science that has developed from the first experiments in the late nineteenth
century to the elaborate investigations carried on today at special research institutes. The elaborate research, remember, is
being carried on in the U.S.S.R. and not in the United States. Perhaps there is a message here for us, and hopefully a few
universities in time will be alerted that we may need our own biological radio communication stations throughout this country
and Europe.

Gusev asked Gubko if we should regard as accidental the frequent instances of remarkable coincidence, of thought reading
at a distance. He replied, "This is unlikely in view of the great frequency and astounding accuracy of such coincidences."
The Rabochaya Gazeta, July 1968, reported a story about the Russian actor Mikhail Kuni. In his youth Kuni lived in Moscow
but his mother lived in Vitebsk in Belorussiya. One night Kuni dreamed that a rat had bitten his mother and she developed
gangrene of the foot. The young man woke up in great agitation, but friends told him not to be foolish and that it was "all a
dream." The same day the postman delivered a telegram to Kuni saying his mother was ill, and the young man left Moscow
for Vitebsk. There he found his mother suffering from gangrene of the foot as a result of a bite from a rat.

Oleg Gusev, like some American reporters, has a flair for writing about phenomena and seems to have a personal interest in
it beyond the realms of his official duties as a writer. After the interview with Gubko in 1968 he decided it was important to
experience telepathy himself. He visited Vladimir Durov, a noted animal trainer, who advocates telepathy as part of the
training process of iris circus animals. Gusev asked Durov to induce some motor action in him to see what it would feel like.
"It's easy," said Durov, "just sit still." He then took a pencil and quickly wrote something on a sheet of paper. He placed it
face down on the table, covering it with his palm. Gusev was looking at Durov and says he felt an urgent desire to scratch
his ear and that the fingers of his right hand touched the skin behind his ear. As he lowered his arm, Durov quickly handed
the paper to him. On it he had written, "Scratch your right ear." Naturally Gusev's curiosity was aroused and he begged
Durov for an explanation. "It's quite easy," said Durov. "I began to imagine that the skin behind my right ear badly needed
scratching and I had to lift my hand to scratch it. I concentrated on this thought form and you picked it up and put the whole
thing into action. Remember, I was only thinking of scratching an ear, not doing it, but what I thought, you performed."

The implications of this could be enormous. Durov is obviously a skilled agent for thought transference, which is probably
due to his working with animals in which he uses his will to create a thought form for the circus animals to perform. No
wonder he felt and looked triumphant when he viewed the surprised and somewhat mystified journalist.

The remarkable thing is that Gusev made the movement that had been conceived in the brain of Durov as if he had followed
his own association of ideas and movements. Just as if he had indeed acted on orders from his own brain and the orders of
a dual nature. He felt the effect of skin irritation behind his ear and then his hand made the movement to scratch the ear.
Also he scratched the ear Durov wanted him to scratch. He had explicitly obeyed every thought command coming from
Durov. It does not take a science fiction writer to describe how this technique could be used by any nation with enough
resources to relay commands. Durov can control several animals at once, and there is no reason to suppose he could not
control several human beings at the same time.

Of course experiments dealing with ear scratching are harmless until the enormous number of possible uses is thought
about. We have read stories of groups of people being reduced to a zombie-like existence, who are capable of performing
duties by following the thought transference from what the science fiction writers call "the master mind." In books it makes
spine-tingling reading and there is safety in knowing the book can be put aside and that the reader can escape to a world of
nonzombies.

Mind control could happen, and it is foolish to think that people in other countries are not well aware that nations may one
day be controlled by a real "master mind." We are all in training for it, being slowly conditioned by the brainwashing of certain
forms of education and by the solid phalanxes of advertising. Every year the conditioning starts a little earlier. Talk to any
American child who is just able to talk and walk and he is already alerted to following instructions bleated out to him all the
hours of his day from radio and television. The impact of the brainwashing increases as he gets older and can extend his
attention to newspapers and reading and learns to follow with sheeplike bleakness the instructions "turn left," "look right,"
"Keep off the Grass," and "Do not touch." Whether we believe in telepathy or not, the time is ripe for us to face the future as
a nation of human robots unless we begin to know that thoughts are meaningful things not to be wasted and that the mind
must be conditioned so that the human being is in control of it. We learn body conditioning, muscle control, but we do
nothing about the mind and we take pride in saying we are the masters of our own souls. It would be more to the point if we
were sure that in the future we were likely to be masters of our own minds or face the alternative of a master-mind type
being in control of whole states.

In Moscow, the Polytechnical Museum is the headquarters of "Znaniye" or "Knowledge Society." As reported by Boris
Yakovliev in his book Vechevnyaya Moskva, Yuri Kamensky, a biologist, lectured to a huge audience there about a
telepathic session between Moscow and Novosibirsk in Siberia. It was an important session for Kamensky, for he acted as
the inductor or transmitting medium. He was in Moscow and the intention was to transmit thought messages thousands of
miles away to the Siberian town. Kamensky's messages were received at the Academy of Sciences settlement near
Novosibirsk by Karl Nikolayev. This man has an outstanding reputation for his ability to receive biological signals. His
behavior during the whole session was observed by a group of scientists of the Siberian branch of the U.S.S.R. Academy of
Sciences.

Karl Nicolayev began being receptive at exactly midnight according to local time. His task was to describe objects shown to
him mentally by Yuri Kamensky in Moscow some two thousand miles away. At 8 p.m. in Moscow, members of a specially
appointed commission gave Kamensky the first object, a steel spring. Fifteen minutes later he was given a coffeepot;
altogether six objects were handed to him. The objects were chosen at random, unknown to Kamensky, by members of the
special commission. Meanwhile in Novosibirsk, Nikolayev began correctly describing the objects, and the interesting thing is
that a timetable was kept as to the exact minute an object was held up. The time lag between Kamensky sending the
message and Nikolayev receiving it was negligible.

Most of the Russian scientists, including Kamensky himself, believe that any person is capable of transmitting and receiving
messages, but as with anything else, practice makes perfect. It has to be developed by training and presumably it is being
developed in Russia. No one expects everyone in training to achieve the same results in the same training time, but the
point is, U.S.S.R. scientists know and accept that it can be done and are going on from this point.
Now I hardly think we would expect a serious-minded nation such as Russia to allow much time and public money to be
spent on people playing games, so behind all the experiments there must be a plan. The research papers are published and
assessed by committees of scientists, who never make the headlines, with the same degree of interest or publicity as the
space scientists do. But, quietly, there seems to be a well-developed plan going ahead in the U.S.S.R. of sifting through
evidence and searching for links and facts through the whole mass of ESP and telepathy in particular. What they will do with
the combined knowledge of dozens of scientists and thousands of human guinea pigs, one can only guess at. When I begin
to guess, I find I am almost writing my own version of what seems like science fiction and I do not especially care for what I
am writing.

Think about this experiment too. Suppose an agent were in the Science Academy in Moscow and decided to begin thought
transference designed to affect people in a public park one hundred miles from the city. Suppose it were a simple
experiment to make a whole group of people in the park react in a simple way... such as everyone standing still for one
minute. The scene would be frightening.

Of course there is no harm in a man thought-commanding a few hundred people miles away to stand still for sixty seconds...
or is there? At least think about the idea and remember this is not science fiction we are dealing with; these are serious
scientists, not playing games, getting on with their own work in their own way. You ought to know about such things because
you may well be walking in a park yourself one day and wonder what happened to sixty seconds of your life.

Chapter 10: Thoughtography

In 1955 a strange partnership was formed between Ted Serios, an elevator operator at the Hilton Hotel in Chicago, and the
ghost of Jean Lafitte, a nineteenth-century pirate who once terrorized the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

Like all partnerships and friendships, it is better to be formally introduced and this necessitates a third person. George
Johannes, a fellow employee of Serios, dabbled in hypnotism and found Ted to be an excellent subject. Johannes had the
idea that Jean Lafitte should be summoned to appear before them in his ghostly form and through Serios lead them to the
dream of many men: to find any treasure the pirate may have buried. (The legends about Lafitte's buried treasure sites are
numerous.)

Unfortunately the ghost of Lafitte was no more cooperative about sharing his gold and jewels than he had been in life and
the two men abandoned their experiments, but only to give themselves time to think of something else. What the something
else was is now part of the amazing documented facts of occult history. Johannes suggested that Serios should try to
photograph any vision that came to him about the site of buried treasure by holding a Polaroid camera to his forehead. True
to the accepted tradition of treasure-seeking, Johannes was not going to give up his idea of cashing in on a treasure. Ted
Serios was not so dedicated; it had all started as fun and he wanted to please his friend. To his alarm he often found pictures
of remote buildings and places appearing on the film and he could never explain how they got there. Eventually he
discovered he did not need to be hypnotized in order to produce pictures and he collected a mass of strange photos varying
from churches in Rome, cars, street scenes, and oddities such as a Russian Vostok spacecraft floating in a black void.

In 1963, Dr. Me Eisenbud, a successful psychoanalyst and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of
Colorado Medical School, was sent an article about Serios. This was based on a paper given to the Illinois Society for
Psychic Research by a Pauline sister. Serios had subjected himself to a series of tests by the society and under close
observation had projected pictures onto film simply by staring at the lens of a Polaroid camera. A vice-president of the
Polaroid Company stated in writing that he saw no possibility of fraud under the conditions prevailing. Reluctantly, and after
a lot of skeptical correspondence, Eisenbud agreed to meet Serios; from this meeting grew an improbable and extended
collaboration on a book that has become a classic of psychological research literature and a help to students of telepathy.

The first meeting of the learned doctor and the subject must have been incongruous. Serios is a small resilient combative
man with a remarkable capacity for alcohol and more than an expert roving eye for girls, whom he refers to with typical
Chicago candor as "broads." His history is unremarkable; he was a dropout with little ambition to do anything and with very
little liking for work. If there was one thing he knew about it was psychic phenomena. Eisen-bud's first session at the Palmer
House Hotel in Chicago was only memorable because Ted put away an enormous amount of Scotch, took his clothes off in
the middle of the interview, and disappeared into the shower. Some telepathic communication possibly occurred between
the two, despite the lack of normal understanding, for in the end Eisenbud persuaded Ted to be his guinea pig; and despite
the numerous times that the doctor had to be as much a nursemaid as a research worker, the end product was a book
based on the strange world of "thoughtography."

Eisenbud seems to have had a good relationship with Ted for a long time and displayed patience and tolerance with him, no
doubt contributing to the building up of better thoughtography sessions. At first few pictures were legible but gradually there
was a high incidence of pictures that could be identified. Eisenbud also called people in the Chicago area to find out if
anyone else had studied Serios. A professor of psychology in a large nearby university said he had tested Serios but had
become disappointed. He had asked Ted to produce a picture of a particular hospital in Miami but instead Ted produced
another building. In time Eisenbud got Serios to come to Denver. He arrived on the plane, glassy-eyed and roaring mad; a
combination of excessive alcohol and temper. A medical checkup showed him to be in good health despite his determination
to go on binges.

For his first experiment Eisenbud had invited some of his colleagues to be present; these included a physicist, an electrical
engineer, and a biologist.

The first experiments again were not impressive and now Dr. Eisenbud came up against a barrier of academic hostility. Not
only did he have a delinquent and often uncooperative subject to work with, he also had to contend with such things as Ted's
temper and his ability to get into brawls in downtown bars. At one trying session Ted was attempting to "shoot" while hitched
to an electroencephalograph with wires attached to his scalp. A doctor witnessing the test made disparaging remarks and
enraged the subject He tore off the wires, complete with tufts of hair, and stormed out of the room. Later he was found
asleep in a garbage can in the basement! Other EEG sessions showed that Ted produced no noticeable difference on the
graphs when he obtained pictures or when he did not. Not a single unusual tremor registered on radiation counters,
detectors of heat, X-rays, ultraviolet light, or even light meters.

Sometimes Ted would come up with remarkable photos of buildings and types of transport and he was able to obtain
pictures inside a Faraday cage, which screens off all magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiations and even through
quarter-inch lead-impregnated glass in an X-ray room; a picture also appeared when another person held the camera and
Ted "thought" a picture onto the film. Ted also shot pictures onto video tape at the television studios of KOA in Denver on
one part of the film, and his own eyeball was superimposed on another picture. A local professor of medicine refused to
discuss this with a reporter from the Denver Post.

Eisenbud produced a controversial book from a controversial subject. Of course there are always people who do not want to
believe anything, but no one is asking or begging them to believe in Ted Serios or Dr. Eisenbud. The doctor very cleverly
issues an open invitation to any skeptical reader to dismiss it all if he wants to and then disarmingly publishes many, many
photos produced by Ted Serios without once clicking a camera and adds documented evidence of the conditions under
which it all took place with names, dates, and places.

Of course there is always the possibility that there is a fraud being perpetrated, but Eisenbud had little to gain by writing this
book. He was already successful in his own medical sphere and he would have had to be a masochist to take all the pain
and insults inflicted on him by Serios in his roaring-lion alcoholic moods, with little concern for ethics or manners. Without
wishing to be too hard on Ted Serios, I cannot believe he himself invented the whole thing for I have found from experience
that any great and successful "con" artist needs a shrewder mind than Ted appears to possess. Also, there was little enough
in it for the man, and his philosophy was such that a few Scotches and a date with a "broad" spelled out happiness. Why
would he want to be subjected to experiments quite out of keeping with his ability to understand them?

If it were possible to have a mass experiment of Tedlike agents, all trying to do thoughtography either from subjects imposed
on their minds by agents or picking them up from the impressions on the ether, then we could make a better assessment of
the validity of this type of photography. I am interested in it because it relates to the "games" I played as a child when I had
no knowledge of what telepathy was or what an experiment was, but was simply a little girl capable of producing a fern on a
piece of glass because her father was sending out a thought form about a fern. Certainly the subject of thoughtography is
worth more than one book on the subject.

Had Dr. Eisenbud received more cooperation from his colleagues we could have had many more recorded experiments and
any taint of charlatanism would have been killed before it arose. It is very rare that any group of academic professors can
form a conspiracy to deceive the public, for in truth they can rarely agree, even to disagree. A whole group of experts with a
number of thoughtography guinea pigs and a supply of cameras supplied by a firm such as Polaroid could earn recognition
for everyone.

Although Dr. Joseph B. Rhine is the best-known academic man studying psychic phenomena, Oliver Reiser, of Pittsburgh
University, and Ernest Hunter Wright, of Columbia University, have done a lot of work in collecting amazing clinical data on
telepathy in the last twenty years. I regard as unimpeachable all their evidence that human and animal minds send and
receive messages to and from other minds and to and from inanimate things and events in the past, present, and future
time.

While everyone has not had the chance to examine the effects of a "master mind" on a mass of humanity, there are many
people who have had the chance to see that some minds can command actions to be carried out by other minds and also by
lifeless inorganic matter such as a pair of dice. It is this sort of thing that is often put down to "magic" and treated with some
indulgent talk, because as everyone knows (questionably) magic is a fun thing not to be taken too seriously, perhaps
because there is a tiny fearful part of us that hates to think that something we do not understand could be serious. We lump
it all with magic and try to treat it lightly or forget about it and talk about Houdini and tricks of lighting and sleight of hand. We
go to great lengths to supply reasons why a thing should not be but cannot bear to work up reasons why it should be so.

In 1951, Dr. Robert Thouless of Cambridge University reported to the society about his experiments with rolling dice. The
aim had been to beat the law of chance by using telepathy to control the fall of the dice. He wanted to command seven as
the total score on the face of two cubes whose sides were numbered one to six. Chance would have brought seven once in
every six throws and the professor got it once above the normal average in 136 throws. This could have been disheartening
but he noticed that when he was tired or disturbed his throws got worse. The slightest tension interferes with the mind under
normal circumstances and must certainly do so on special occasions when a specific result is desired. We have seen this
with students who know everything about their subject until they have to do an examination paper. We put it down to nerves
of course, but the trouble is the same as that which is involved in mind over matter experiments. An overanxious gambler,
even with a known psychic quota, can rarely win when he is desperate to do so. When he is relaxed he has what he calls his
"lucky days." The same thing applies to dice. Dr. Thouless won 4,027 times out of 23,144 throws whereas chance alone
would have brought only 3,857 wins. His conclusion, after allowing for the fact that he must have grown to hate those dice,
was that his best results came when he was not anxious and that by applying telepathy, a mind-over-matter force, any
gambler could expect to do better than shrugging his shoulders and taking chances.

Again, this was a conscious experiment but in Haiti many people know the story of the compulsive gambler who earned a
big reputation for always winning. The Big Boy fell sick and decided he could cash in on this by letting it be known that he
would not come to the gambling joint if everyone would contribute something to his finances. The terms of how much vary
with who is telling the story; but generally it seems as if the Big Boy wanted a dollar from each person, and that was quite a
piece from the average wage of three dollars a week. Angrily he dragged himself to the site of the gambling but was almost
too sick to sit up and take notice. He asked some of the boys to roll for him and they were eager to do so thinking it would be
their chance to get even with the Big Boy, who had been taking their money for weeks. But as the game went on they began
to see that no matter how poor a man's luck could be when he rolled for himself, he always won when he rolled for the sick
man, who informed them that he was "willing" the dice to fall right for him.

Dr. Alexis Carrel had a theory that psychic ability and especially a talent for telepathy was passed on in families through
certain genes, and according to this theory it seems likely that many people have a telepathic ability. Practically everyone
who cares to keep a record of instances where something has appeared to be a "coincidence" may well discover that these
coincidences could just as logically be the result of telepathy. The mathematics of the laws of chance are not very elastic
and after a few "coincidences" people may get the message that there is some other cause at work. It is too easy to
pigeonhole it as "luck" and is about as illogical as believing everyone gets married for love. Dr. Carrel believed that every
living thing was tuned in to a greater or lesser degree to the mass mind of its species. The marvel is not when telepathy is
occasionally demonstrated but that men demonstrate it so seldom.
Most researchers agree that to use the mind to command an inanimate article to do something beyond the norm requires a
calm mind on the part of the operator. The president of the London Society for Psychical Research, Dr. S. G. Soal, said in
Collier's magazine on August 18, 1951, that he believed the rarity of really psychic people today was due to worldwide
nervous tensions making it difficult for psychic forces to get through and that this certainly did not help in terms of clinical
laboratory tests. He said the power of psychic awareness and its capability to make demonstrations would be considered
normal if mankind were living in the tranquility of ancient times. He said we can expect the power of psychic awareness to
return when the tensions of life are no longer aggravated by the fears associated with present living conditions.

It was Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, who invented the phrase "mental telegraphy," and all his life he
was conscious of what he also called "psychic evidence." Fortunately Mark Twain liked details and rarely failed to make
notes on the interest he had in psychic phenomena. Few of his biographers, however, have to date caught the essence of
Mark Twain's discussions of this or the letters he left explaining his interest. Either they felt it might detract from the image of
the man who is such a great part of American history or perhaps they did not take it seriously. One biographer who touched
very lightly on Twain's interest, was very much out of touch with his subject.

Van Wyck Brooks in his influential Ordeal of Mark Twain disposed of his hero's interest in psychic phenomena by saying that
any examples were "that bodiless comic impudence of Mark Twain," who had a "childlike self-magnification, combined with
an instinctive trust in luck." His official biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, however, notes that "Psychic theories and
phenomena always attracted Mark Twain. In thought transference especially he had a frank interest, an interest awakened
and kept alive by certain phenomena, psychic manifestations we call them. In his association with Mrs. Clemens it not
infrequently happened that one spoke the other's thoughts or perhaps a long-procrastinated letter to a friend would bring an
answer as quickly as mailed. But these things are familiar to us all."

As early as 1878, Twain had written about "mental telegraphy" intending it to appear in A Tramp Abroad, but he cut it out
fearing that something he had written in seriousness would be misunderstood by the public. But he never gave up
considering "mental telegraphy" as something important enough to write about and every year received convincing
corroboration that messages could be sent and received by the brain.

It is not generally known even by Americans that Mark Twain was a member of the Society for Psychical Research from
1885-1903 and as the society was formed in 1882 he must have been one of the first overseas members. He wrote from
Hartford, Connecticut, in October 1884 to accept membership in this pioneer society. This letter can be found in Volume I,
1884-1885 of the Journal for the Society for Psychical Research.

Mental Telegraphy is the same thing around the outer edges of which the Psychical Society of England began to group and
play with four or five years ago and which they called 'Mental Telepathy.'

Within two or three years they have penetrated towards the heart of the matter however and have found out that the mind
can act upon mind in a quite detached and elaborate way over vast stretches of land and water. And they have succeeded
in doing, by their great credit and influence, what I could never have done. They have convinced the world that mental
telegraphy is not a jest but a fact and it is a thing not rare but exceedingly common. They have done our age a service and a
very great service I think.

In two literary papers, "Mental Telegraphy" and "Mental Telegraphy Again," written over a period of seventeen years, Mark
Twain gives an impressive survey of evidence for the case of telepathy, which seems to prove that he never let go of the
original idea that there could be communication from one mind to another.
The most interesting thing in researching all the Mark Twain data on mental telegraphy is that an entire story unfolds of how
he was able to use telepathy in his everyday life. He wrote, "when I get tired of waiting upon a man whom I very much want
to hear from, I sit down and compel him to write whether he wants to or not. That is to say, I sit down and write to him, then I
tear my letter up, satisfied that my act has forced him to write me at the same moment. I do not need to mail the letter, the
writing is the essential thing." There are numerous examples cited in which Mark Twain did this and then received letters
that he opened in the presence of other people telling them exactly what was in the letter.

The most outstanding example of his thought communication was the case of William H. Wright, a journalist from Virginia
City, Nevada. He wrote under the name Don de Quille. Twain knew the time was right for a book on the Nevada silver mines
and the Great Bonanza was in the news. He drafted a letter to Mr. Wright, even outlining the book and suggesting that his
journalist friend write it. Then he put the letter away in his desk instead of mailing it and instead sent a letter to his publisher,
Mr. Bliss, asking him to name the time for a business consultation to discuss a new project. Bliss was out of town and there
was no immediate answer to his letter. Then several letters arrived. One was from William Wright, and Twain remarked to a
visiting relation that this letter would contain a suggestion from the journalist that he would like to write a book on the Nevada
silver mines and asking for his advice. Wright gave an outline for his book with a special remark that the chief feature of the
book would be the history of the Great Bonanza.

The letter was opened and contained almost everything that had been written in Twain's own letter, which he had not
mailed. Twain stated that "Mr. Wright's mind and mine had been in close crystal clear communication with each other over
three thousand miles of desert and mountains on this special morning in March. I did not consider that both minds originated
that succession of ideas but that one mind originated it and simply telegraphed it to the other. I was curious to know which
brain was the telegrapher and which the receiver."

Subsequently Twain wrote to Wright and asked when he conceived the idea of the book and it appears that Wright had done
the originating and telegraphing and Mark Twain had written down in his letter all the thoughts of William Wright. The result
was the publication by Bliss of The Big Bonanza.

Once Mark Twain had completely accepted the fact that one mind could communicate accurately with another, he began to
wonder if there could be an invention that would facilitate mental telegraphy. The result was an invention called the
phrenophone, "a method whereby the communicating of the mind with mind may be brought under command and reduced
to certainty and system... doubtless the something that conveys our thoughts through the air from brain to brain is a finer
and subtler form of electricity and all we need do is to find out how to capture it and how to force it to do its work, as we have
had to do in the case of the electric currents."

In principle the idea was right but nothing came of the invention; if necessity is indeed the mother of invention, it was
probably well before the time when it is needed. The necessity is more likely to occur in our own age.

Mark Twain had great confidence in his personal discovery of "mental telegraphy" and having the normal ego and vanity of a
writer, it is natural that he should boast a little. After he had published a paper on the subject, he wrote: "Now see how the
world has moved since then. These small experiences of mine were too formidable at that time for admission to a grave
magazine. If the magazine must allow them to appear as something above and beyond 'accidents' and 'coincidences,' they
are trifling and commonplace now, since the flood of light recently cast upon mental telegraphy by the intelligent labors of
the Psychical Research [London]. But I think they are worth publishing just to show what harmless and ordinary matters
were considered dangerous and incredible eight or ten years ago."

The world now seems to have caught up with the remarkable genius of Mark Twain, who, like most geniuses, could see and
understand phenomena and had the opportunity to see the future. Today Mark Twain's observations and investigations into
the area of psychic phenomena, and telepathy in particular, are rated as one of his many remarkable achievements. It is
only right that we should honor him as a pioneer in telepathy as well as an outstanding figure on the American literary scene.
In this way we can get the essence of Mark Twain as the complete man aware of his environment, knowing his place in it,
but always looking toward the future. It is a pity his biographers failed to see the potential of the Mark Twain who was wise
enough to know that his own experiences of what he called "mental telegraphy" were not isolated incidents in his personal
life.
I like his down-to-earth, matter-of-fact manner in recording all his experiences; a tremendous honesty emerges that is only
possible when a man is not looking for ways to impress readers. He had his writer's eye always open to record what he saw
and never closed his mind to things he could not completely understand at first, prepared to observe and record until the
many pieces of the jigsaw of his psychic life were in place.

He recorded his life and times for everyone to read, not just as a riverboat pilot but as someone who knew quite a bit about
charting his way through life. His writings on "Mental Telegraphy" may be guidelines to a whole new generation of
youngsters who may well see Huckleberry Finn as a fantasy figure, a character way out from their own life and times. But
they will also see Mark Twain in a different light, perhaps as a visionary as well as a great American writer.

Chapter 11: How to Transmit and Receive

I am not sure whether a scientist would allow these instructions to be part of his teaching program but I am including them
for the simple reason that they work. I have found that in the dividing up of pairs in the experiments dealing with transmitting
and receiving, it helps for the subjects to exchange "telepathic tokens," so I ask for some personal object to be exchanged
and ask the subjects to hold the object either in the hand or against the forehead. Most people choose the forehead and
perhaps this is indeed the best place since it is nearer than the hand to the area of the brain. I have found that this helps
both subjects, possibly because it establishes the rapport normally so useful in everyday telepathy. In a class everyone is
not going to know each other at the beginning and the total rapport of any class must vary with the changing scene of the
people in it. The "telepathic tokens" forge a link between two parties even if they do not know each other very well. While
some experiments can be done with the pupils choosing each other, there must always be a format in the experimental
sessions when the teacher makes the decisions as to who shall pair up. It is helpful to the pupils in the end and is a
safeguard against the possibility of one person knowing too much about the other one's normal way of life.

When the subjects are in position for the "psychic recording session," either in the same room or separated, be sure to have
one other person in each room. Each subject needs an attendant, if only to record the happening. He should, however, be
taught that his job is to concentrate on recording, for there have been cases when a receiving subject picked up thoughts of
the attendant; this is valid enough for research purposes but it can complicate recordings in the early lessons. Each subject
will have learned to relax and it is a matter of choice whether the attendant reminds him to do this. If the teacher has done
his work well in the preliminary lessons, the pupils will automatically relax.

The transmitter should convey the idea of the message to his attendant so that it can be recorded and then concentrate by
focusing his attention on the receiver's brain. Try to visualize his head as if he were sitting opposite you. Sometimes, when
pupils sit facing each other, there is a noticeable compulsion to stretch out and touch the other one on the forehead. Most
pupils feel a tingling sensation and all sensations should be recorded to see how often such similar sensations occur. I have
found that it is only with beginners that any mention of sensation is made. The aura of heat will probably be felt as well and
may be followed by some feelings of irritation at this point.

Settling down to the session should be done in a way whereby the subjects feel most at ease, and whatever gives the
subjects confidence should be adhered to. I do not like the regimental-type enforcement of a teacher saying "sit here" or "go
there." Some pupils feel better sitting in a straight chair, on the floor, or lying down. If the person pronounces himself to be
comfortable then, that is it. In time you will notice that each person finds his own type of routine and automatically adheres to
it.

As the transmitting subject is now literally pounding the other subject's mind with thought, the receiver will either make a
statement to the attendant or write or draw whatever he feels is the right thought transference.

Of course card sessions are useful but beware of pupils becoming bored with them. If you really feel you want to use cards,
you can ask your pupils to invent their own type. I once had a group of swinging youngsters interested in telepathy and they
invented some fabulously interesting psychedelic cards. Random thought-sending is much more difficult than two parties
knowing there are five or more cards to be matched up. Telepathy is perception by the sixth sense and when a receiver is
conscious that he has grasped the image or words after a few sessions he is rather hesitant in saying them or indicating he
knows what has been transmitted. It is up to the attendant not to give second chances, for the results should be
spontaneous if they are to be effective in research. All sensations and emotions should be recorded and no judgments made
until several sessions of the telepathy classes have been conducted. The person transmitting should be encouraged to be
very positive and direct in sending the thought or image. A good receiver will pick up any changes of the thought halfway
and this can happen. I once tried receiving a message from a skeptical newspaperman who must have had some special
secret for surviving even in the newspaper world for he was the most indecisive person I ever knew. Even making an
appointment was a panic of starting from "noon" (maybe), to "one" (I think I have something to do), to "perhaps two will be
fine but I'd better check," and so on through many hours of the day, generally getting back to the original idea of a twelve-
noon interview. On this occasion I picked up the idea that he was transmitting something rectangular that changed to a
square, then a circle, and back to the rectangle. It turned out that he originally thought of a long rectangular pillow but then
saw a square one and then a tiny round scatter cushion. It was like tuning into a very bad, old, practically useless radio set.
A well-orientated person makes a better transmitter, and possibly receiver, than one who is a neurotic mass of indecisions. If
the newspaperman had been able to take some lessons in relaxation he would have benefited from them. The truly
desperate cases who could benefit from such exercises are generally the ones who condemn it out of hand. I suppose it is
part of their personal karmic pattern.

Whether a person believes in telepathy or not, the lessons leading to understanding it have a double purpose. They
inevitably improve the state of mind and consequently the health, and very often the temper, since tolerance and patience
are pointed out as being necessary for results. The development of a strong faith in oneself is also an important factor. It is
always important for the transmitting person to see everything with great intensity and clarity so that the thought can go out
with the utmost force.

The receiving telepathist at first may feel sensations of drowsiness and it may take up to six sessions to make him feel really
alert and ready to catch on to the message or image. It is easier to keep the eyes closed when receiving and to keep the
"telepathic token" in the hand through the session. Give your impressions to the attendant as quickly as they come to you
without trying to rationalize them. At this stage it is very important not to try to interpret, and there is no need to mull over a
point before deciding to tell the attendant.

If you try to do this at home, it may be that there is no one to take notes so you have to do this yourself. It can be confusing if
images come through rapidly and some of the relaxed and passive attitude may be lost in an effort to write. A simplified
method of writing can be done, however, if you want to do homework without an attendant. Try jotting down simple key
words relating to your impressions and then translate the key words later on. Keep all records, or arrange to have records
kept, in a methodical manner, giving names of people concerned, transmitter, receiver, attendants, and any other witnesses.
Also record the date, place, and time. In the later analysis of records sometimes a cycle can be perceived showing that a
student is consistently better at certain times of the month than he is at others. The simplest way would be to use a tape
recorder.

Aim to work with several people in rotation and gradually eliminate those with whom you do not feel a telepathic rapport, but
do not make this a personal judgment. Use your records to check results and if one person and yourself get consistently bad
results then there is some gap between you and you are wasting a lot of energy for little results. I will not say for nothing
because everything has a value, even thoughts drifting out into the ether. In time you can extend activities toward people
whom you do not know well and perhaps do not know at all, but while you are in a teaching course, it is not the time to be
adventurous. Have confidence in your teacher, or find another who suits you better, but nothing is worse than starting on a
course and spending energy doing wayward experiments before you have reached the halfway mark. Ask questions of your
teacher and do not preface the remarks by excusing yourself for the fact that the questions may seem strange. You are
dealing with a strange subject and one thing the teacher has had to learn is patience. There are really no stupid questions,
simply badly phrased ones, and the inadequacy of phrasing indicates to the teacher that the student is blundering in a blind
spot. It is up to her to help the student to see. Keep notes of questions and answers; they may be useful in helping someone
else, or you may be able, through your own future experiences, to add something to the original answers.

In conscious transmissions, designed as part of the teaching course, I have always found that certain pupils do better at
certain parts of the day. One of the most difficult things for me to arrange has been for courses where there could be a
different tuning element as the course proceeded. Ideally, the pupil should be subjected to experiments in the early morning,
midday, late afternoon, early evening, and very late at night; and this is hard to arrange except over a long period of time.
My best results have always been with pupils who have lived in my own house, but I can no longer do this ultrapersonalized
teaching. I aim, however, to have a large house that can be a school on a very personal basis, such as some orthodox
boarding schools in Europe have achieved. Every day I project my thoughts toward this and now have the design, the
situation, and environment very clearly in my mind. Somewhere, someone else will pick up this image and the thought form
will give way to the action of the reality. The power of direct thinking is very much a bonus of understanding telepathy.

If you become a good pupil your teacher should warn you that you have gained a new form of power and you should try to
align your philosophy and way of life so that this power is not used destructively. It certainly can be, as in such things as
voodoo, where telepathy plays a large part. Be careful not to involve other people in uncomplimentary thoughts, as they can
pick this up if you are in a strange transmitting mood. Of course you may want people to know what you think about them,
but I have found that society today is not exactly oriented toward this. Sometimes we may not really like a person, but the
needs of financial security dictate that we must work with them or have some contact with them. Beware also of showing off
your ability to friends or rather acquaintances, who are generally quick to spot the power element in what you have learned.
It is not unusual for an acquaintance to try to pass off some of his own hatred of a person to you and imply you should do
something about it. Beware of being the chief recipient of other people's venom. It is not a good policy to go through life
shooting the bullets made by other people. If there is dirty work to be done, I suggest you let the person concerned do it
himself and do not prostitute the power you have gained by being a party to destructive issues. The more potent a
transmitter you are, the more dangerous your acquaintances can be, unless you start with, some of the firmness you have
been taught in your lessons.

There is a long track history of telepathy being used for evil purposes, and not all of it has been the figment of an author's
over-active imagination. There are few people who have not been repelled by and attracted to stories of cursings,
bewitchings, hexings, and so on, through the power of one mind over others. The Polynesian death prayers work, so does
black magic and voodoo, and I do not see that the world needs any kind of psychic Mafia adding to its present troubles. The
sad thing is that all lessons in psychic phenomena, especially telepathy, reach a point when the student has to be quite sure
of his motivations for, like the atom bomb, all power can be used for good or evil, for constructive or destructive purposes.
The power itself is not evil, neither is it good; it is neutral. You become the vessel wherein the decisions are made to use the
power according to that overrated but much-treasured possession of man, "free will." This is probably why the whole world
is not yet ready to understand completely psychic phenomena and telepathy, for we may need to learn a new set of
standards involving a new philosophy for living in which killing for gain, or seeking to get the better of a neighbor, may have
no part. The competitive spirit today is a substitute for the old days when man struggled to survive and had to battle against
the vagaries of nature, his environment, and predatory animals. Now the predatory animals are not always the four-legged
ones stalking their prey in the wilderness, but are two-legged ones who already have food and a roof over their heads; but
they are raised in a society that never knows when it has enough of the material things and screams "I want" or "more" from
the time the infant is conscious of speech.

I certainly do not advocate being ostriches and not examining the history of misplaced power used through psychic
phenomena because it is always better to know what the causes and effects are. I know a man in Houston who I almost
made a friend of, but who could not give up his ideas of black magic. When I asked him why he felt compelled to choose this
path of power, his answer was simple enough: "It gets results quickly." That is the exact reason why so many people are
interested in misplaced power. Life and its values have become so dreary they feel the need for anything of an instant
nature, just as the drug addict must have his shot of instant happiness even if it is labeled "heroin." The main thing for him is
that it gets results quickly and lifts him from the dismal depths of misery to a short glimpse of whatever is his idea of heaven.
I have a lot of personal proof about hexings, death prayers, and thought transference used for destruction and can only give
a warning not to play around with dynamite; however, the power should not be condemned out and out. The fault is in the
operators and their motivations. It is this potential misuse of power that also makes me hope that the United States will one
day have adequate facilities for studying telepathy from every angle. Then if another country makes good use of its
advanced knowledge and acceptance of telepathy, at least there will be people in this country trained to combat the power
or to block them. When danger threatens from any source, it is too late to indulge in laughter or derision. The Trojan Horse
was thought to be a fun piece of engineering but it actually provided the surprise element necessary in warfare tactics.

It is just as big a mistake to think that man will immediately change in the early part of the coming Aquarian Age and become
a sweet, love-his-neighbor type who never has a bad thought in his head and that everyone will go along like a flower child,
leading simple, uncomplicated lives. Man is still going to be involved in many of the same things he is involved in now; and
there will be thieves, soldiers, war makers, and loan sharks well into the Aquarian Age. The only noticeable thing as far as
change is concerned is that there will be greater tolerance--but not always greater understanding--of psychic phenomena,
and people who are developed enough will be able to practice more freely in their own world.

The development of entire natures fully aware of the potential of psychic phenomena is a long way in the future. Just as
today though we supposedly live in an age of plenty, large areas of the world are undernourished to the point of starvation.
In time we shall have numerous people awakened to the potential of such things as telepathy, but there will also be others
who are spiritually and mentally undernourished. Power and motivation go hand in hand through every culture and
generation, but the power is not always bad. For instance, medical men today have great power in the United States, yet the
medical man has everything around him that he could use to make himself into a new-style charlatan or even a murderer.
The very tools of a surgeon, the training of the medical man, could be geared to the act of taking life, of committing murder,
so great is the power invested in those who ply the profession of medicine. The saving grace is in the sincerity and integrity
of most doctors, and fortunately only a few doctors fall by the wayside; but when a doctor is involved in a murder case you
can always see that it involves a power cycle in which he takes advantage of his professional training.

We have to be very sure that in the new power structure--where wisdom and the ability to communicate through telepathy
are in the hands of a few people--that these people do not misuse the power any more than doctors misuse it. We may have
to have the starting point of something similar to the Hippocratic Oath so that the new power people are constantly reminded
of the need to help mankind as a whole.

The Svengalis and Rasputins of the past still have their parallels today. They sometimes wield power over single families or
through music hall acts influencing people just for the sake of getting a vicarious kick out of life through their power over
other human beings. The possessive husband or lover, the domineering wife and mother, know the power of their minds can
affect other human beings' lives and they exult in this. How much worse it can be if this power is lifted from the domestic front
to different stratas of society and finally to a national level.

Think, and be sure the thoughts you are projecting are constructive ones. Thought transference and the power of thinking
can sometimes have a backlash like a boomerang returning to its original launching point.

****
THINK!
****

Chapter 12: Relax, Transmit, or Receive

Although I cannot, with any conscience, say that ESP or telepathy can be taught unless it exists somewhat in the person to
begin with, I know from experience that there are many exercises that will help create the general conditions necessary to
do simple experiments. I used to teach music, and there were many pupils who could absorb much about music but never
make it to the concert platform; but they would know enough after a few years of lessons to be able to entertain themselves
and enjoy music as an extra bonus of life. The conditions and results of teaching telepathy have been much the same.
Some pupils seem to have a certain spark within them that sends them swinging along out of the kindergarten class straight
into high school graduation. These are the ones Dr. Carrel would think had a hereditary background for telepathy. Other
pupils would work hard and get some success and despite my conscientious teaching, trying to help the sluggardly ones
along, in the end everyone proceeded at the rate he was destined to go. In a telepathy class of about thirty pupils, five could
be the star pupils, capable of receiving and transmitting with regular success, ten would be spectacular on certain days and
only reasonably good on other days, ten were so enthusiastic that they wanted to learn but developed an anxiety state that
defeated the purpose. For these the only thing that helped was a constant "talking to," so that they understood the
mechanics of telepathy, and I had to aim to get them to experiment in an unemotional state or be prepared to see them go
through the disappointment of failure. The other five were generally people who had been brought along by a friend, beau, or
relation and could not have cared less about the experiments, but they were very useful in setting up experimental rooms,
making drinks, or seeing that fair play was always maintained. I never found a single pupil who was interested in cheating;
true it would have been hard, but there was within them all a passionate determination to try to understand what telepathy
was all about and how to use it to the best advantage.

Most teachers are permitted to express their own opinions and theories while still remaining within the framework of the
more usual standards required for teaching. I would always explain from the beginning that my own theory is related to the
idea that the mind sends out a few thousand electrical impulses, causing vibrations on the ether, and that thought
transference could occur with a direct message or an image seen. Looking at a TV set, we may see a man and woman
making love on the little screen, but we are getting the picture secondhand. If we were in the studio, we could see the man
and woman in the flesh. The same principles apply to the image coming to us telepathically; and sometimes the image is
distorted by our own thoughts, something else getting in the way, or by not being completely tuned in.

I also like to explain that the full answers will probably come when there is more research on electric currents and fields of
an infinitesimal order. Most of all no student should be disappointed to find that the images and messages she receives or
has received can ultimately be explained in a physical sense and are not direct pipelines from a divinity. Almost everyone
wants the magical explanation, which I suppose is like reading a menu in France. Tripe a la Nicoise seems much more
interesting than eating the lining of a cow's stomach! Sometimes calling a spade a spade is offensive, just as rat catchers no
longer like to go by this name but indulge in more romantic ones such as pest exterminators. One day, though, we are all
going to have to face reality when it comes to the great revelation about psychic phenomena, and if God is not sending
messages of divine potency to a few chosen people there is nothing to be ashamed of in realizing the brain is really the
prototype of the computer and capable of a personalized service.

I have always maintained that mixing with successful people has a bit of sympathetic magic about it and mixing with people
who have had successful experiments and experiences can also help less forward pupils. I would often pair a successful
person with a very unsuccessful one or pair two successful ones, but I would never allow two unsuccessful ones to operate
with each other or be in much contact with each other. Tact has to be shown in breaking up couples who come together and
may both be unsuccessful, but it can be done; and the one who then gains a little success can go back and be helpful to the
one not so successful. The universal slogan for arts and sports is "practice," so why not adopt this as the slogan for
telepathic training?

The first important step toward success is to do away with anxiety; aim to have a class that knows how to relax. The teacher
must also know how to relax, otherwise she should not be teaching any psychic subject, even telepathy. A calm mind free
from inharmonious thoughts and emotions or outside distractions, is best. Time becomes an enemy, and all classes should
be undertaken at times when no one has to rush or keep a close eye on the clock. Although telepathic messages will come
to some pupils at times of stress, it is not good to try to do experiments and start with abnormal conditions. So the first few
lessons may be spent on salvaging the sabotaged minds and bodies and helping to recondition them for the future. There is
a lot to be said for teachers as well as mystics retiring from the distracting world of economic fears and social attitudes, but
this is a privilege everyone cannot expect to have. We have to function as human beings, mothering children, looking after
families, and working; the rest has to be extra. Usually, after a few sessions there comes the time when the subjects can
relax and consequently they can also cope with their normal lives much more easily.

There are a few books coming onto the market now about relaxing, although there is still a greater proportion dealing with
how to be energetic. One of my most profound observations about the comparison between European life and American life
concerns relaxation. When Americans have leisure time they seem to have a compulsion to be frightfully energetic. Mow the
lawn, play golf, or drive three hundred miles to make a campfire and pretend it is a gorgeous weekend of leisure and
relaxation. In Europe the weekend is a great art of slowed-down living and is almost sacred in that nothing energetic
interferes with it. Of course the American way of life is creeping over the Atlantic today, but I remember when Friday night
heralded two whole days of leisure at its best and no one had a guilt complex about doing nothing. Americans always like a
definite reason for doing anything. Take a boat out and fish and then you have something to show for the relaxation. In
Europe it is possible to take a punt out and let it drift along while the people in it do nothing but think beautiful thoughts, and
no one has to explain anything to anyone else about why you went out in a punt.

Relaxation is not just being lazy physically. It is really a state of mind. Study any feline, see how it stretches, blinks, and then
relaxes completely; yet when a message is received by it the feline will jump up with all its senses alerted.
Apart from classes, any student needs to continue relaxation practices at home; and this is done by using every part of the
body at different times, starting with the smaller areas of the body, such as an arm or a leg. Progress gradually through all
the parts. You will know you have mastered the first trick of relaxing when you can relax a limb to any position and have it
fall like a bag of sand the instant you decide to relax. Begin your exercises by seeing the particular limb limp and relaxed; in
short you are first thinking it, then seeing it, and finally it happens. Children seem to be able to relax, curling up limply in a
matter of seconds, and a few adults have it. I can always sleep under any circumstances simply by relaxing myself limb by
limb, but in this case I also think and then visualize the sleeping position. In relaxation designed to help telepathic
experiments, we do not want you to go to sleep--at least not in the early exercises. When you have learned to relax from the
neck downward, you can sustain this relaxed attitude of the body for as long as you like. Within a few weeks I guarantee you
will feel better healthwise, for no medicine or tranquilizers will ever tone up a person as much as learning the art of total
relaxation.

Now you have mastered body relaxation, but there is still the toning up and tuning in of the mind. This is done by eliminating
disturbing pictures, even if life is distasteful. Substitute images of harmony, such as warm sand and its sensations, music
creeping up on you, or swimming un-energetically so that you feel the sensation of the water making the body buoyant. All
these images will be helpful in making the mind relax. There can be no set rule for everyone in this. While the relaxation of
the body can be used for all pupils, I have found it better to discuss ways and means of mind relaxation and it has always
varied. Once a good pattern has been found, and a student may have to try several, then it can be used again and again.
When relaxation of the body and mind is complete, there will not be any fleeting thoughts. Undoubtedly, at this time, the
subconscious begins to function at a better level than when it is interfered with by the turmoil of thought, whether it is waking
or sleeping. Now the subconscious can make itself felt in varying degrees of inspiration and vision. It is this degree of
relaxation that many psychics achieve and it could possibly be the state experienced by mystics; it is one of the best aids to
psychic healing I have ever known.

I firmly believe that sleeping during times of illness works as much of a cure as medicine. Of course it is not easy to sleep
when there is pain, but even this can be kept down by learning to relax before becoming ill. It is a case of prevention being
better than a cure. There was a lot of homely common sense in the idea that problems could be worked out better "if slept
upon."

Learn, also, to relax the eyes and this means the muscles as well as the eyeballs. The eyes, even when closed, can betray
electrical currents that fluctuate as if the eyes were actually following visual images. You will soon learn the trick of directing
your attention to every tiny part of your body and instructing it to relax. When a fly lands on the tip of your nose you are
especially aware of the tip of the nose. Make yourself feel also this awareness in your thumbs, an elbow, even an ear. This
deep state of relaxation is the state in which nature can heal fast because the tissues are free of nervous tension. It is also
the time when because of the absence of ordinary sensations, whole areas of the body and mind are ready to receive and
register new sensations. When relaxation is complete, the mind remains clear but slowed down. This state is well known and
is used by mediums. I suppose it is about the only thing I really know how to do, for great scientific talks about trance
conditions always leave me in a state of wonderment at the eruditeness of the speaker but not the slightest bit clearer as to
what he thinks happens to a medium. It is truly only like a watch spring running down or a stretched-out piece of elastic
returning to a smaller more compact limp shape. This type of relaxation can be used for such things as visiting a dentist and
having a tooth out, but in this case the dentist should be informed so that he will be freed from the fear of hurting his patient.

Directing thought to or away from any part of the body and mind at will lays the firm foundation for successful telepathic
sessions. It is sometimes difficult to teach in my own very painstaking way, for it is really a process of building up to the
dramatic climax when experiments take place; all the real work is in the first preliminary lessons. The rest is easy, but many
people want an instant miracle, otherwise they do not feel they are getting their money's worth. If only the same patience
could be extended to studying telepathy that some women have for prolonged beauty treatment, ranging from facial makeup
to cosmetic surgery, then we would have many more wonderful, bright-eyed pupils, glowing with health and success.

In the first instance of sending a message several pupils have told me there is a distinct sensation. In extreme cases the
scalp becomes warmer even to becoming very hot and the head feels as if it is surrounded by heat. This condition is most
noticeable in the first experiments. I wish I could remember my own first sensations but I cannot. Sometimes I think the back
of my scalp and upper part of my neck tingle when I am about to receive a message and it is a bit like seeing a person come
up the garden path and being alerted to hearing the bell ring at the door. In short I feel alert and expectant, but I wish I could
think of a way to measure the areas of heat some pupils feel. In trance mediumship there is always a sensation of coldness,
so telepathy seems to put the whole thing in reverse but in time we should definitely get around to finding out if the aura of
heat is indeed there. Perhaps there could be some method of suspending particles of oil in the air, photographing them in
suspension, and then seeing if the heat dispersed them; the whole idea of scientifically establishing that this heat does exist
is very intriguing.

In mass classes, experiments have to be done so that everyone is involved, generally in pairs; and the usual simple routines
of one party having cards and the other listing them as they appear is a good image raiser. Also I find it good to let pupils
devise experiments for themselves as this helps initiative and starts them on the way to trying to figure out why a thing
should happen. The only rule when this is done is to get the pupil to write the whole session down, have his statement
witnessed, and appoint someone as a control or an overseer so that the necessary conditions are observed by both
participants. Work at home should also be encouraged, and it should be suggested that a pupil try thought transference first
of all with someone with whom he already feels a good rapport. Again, all experiments should be documented with
witnesses if possible. The quiet hours of night are generally the best for homework and simple telepathic communications,
and then the pupil can expand from the home and try transmitting and receiving messages at spontaneous moments when
the other person is not at home.

While some people are better at receiving than others, all pupils should be deliberately placed in situations where they can
experiment with transmitting and receiving, first with people they know and like, then with spontaneous ideas and subjects.
The result is generally that distance makes no difference except in the early stages with new pupils. They like to see
someone in the room with them. I suppose all guinea pigs have their moments of loneliness; and pupils who want to be in
the same room should still continue with experiments, not being forced into anything until they feel ready to do so. A good
teacher must also take care that the promising pupils do not rush madly ahead and then come to a full stop. The secret of
good teaching is that it is done within the framework of a general developing theme, always being sure that the pupils
understand everything that is happening. Sometimes words are not necessary. I went through a period myself when I had to
draw all images passed to me, but I think this was due to some outside force who could see that this would be dramatic
when I was being interviewed. I know I used this thought-catching method very often when I was interviewed by the press.
Once a Cincinnati reporter visited the house of some people who were kind enough to have me as their house guest. I was
placed in a room on my own while the reporter sat with the gentleman of the house. His thought transference concerned the
wife of President Lyndon Johnson, and I drew an enormous and clear ladybird to show my catching of the transference.

Undoubtedly if you become good at telepathy you will be the target for press interviews; at first you will believe that you are
contributing something to the understanding of the subject, but what you say, passionately feel, and relate honestly may
have no bearing on the story when it appears in the paper. I myself try to tape interviews these days and will stand by what I
say on tape. Without that, most interviews about me are figments of the prolific imaginations of the reporters. Once I read a
report with quotes by a reporter who had never interviewed me. Maybe he picked it all up telepathically? I often wonder if
that's true about me. Do not think of an interview as something glamorous that is related to some wonderful appreciation for
your own sweet self. It rarely is. And the reporter would probably interview you if you had three heads or had tangoed with a
baby rhino. Even to the height of your small moment of fame it is best to remember you are expendable and are only as
useful as the needs of the next edition. Sometimes, too, after your mind, body, and soul have been given to a story, plus
your time and sometimes your hospitality, there are editors lurking in the wings who will kill stories, and it can quite likely be
yours. You can be the world's greatest pupil of telepathy but a lost dog story can beat you out of the columns.

Beware of a press interview, for while the victim is never allowed to cheat or do anything "nasty," the press seems to think it
can be absolved from the usual rules of playing any game. If they insist on a control with you, then you insist on one with
them. It is not unknown for gentlemen of the press to send out one thought form and then change it at the last minute and
then deny it. If they have been forced to make their statement to someone else, then you can also make your statement to
another person.

Always remember that the ladies and gentlemen of the press are more interested in presenting a sensational story to their
readers than in providing any contribution to scientific or telepathic research and knowledge. What is serious to you is just
another day's work to them, and they will treat a telepathic subject with very little respect and often little courtesy. I had one
delightful reporter who walked into my house and said, "Well, you are supposed to be wonderful, let's see you perform; I'm in
a hurry."
Many reporters want a free night club act with you being put through your paces like a performing dog. The only difference
between you and the dog is that he generally gets a reward for his performance. You will get precisely nothing except an
occasional curt "thank you," but even that is something.

You see why relaxation and tension-reducing exercises are necessary? It is a period of life most pupils have to go through
and if they have registered all points about relaxation they can get through it without blood, sweat, and tears.

Your real success is when you can sweetly telegraph everything you want the reporter to know and realize he will never
understand that he has been subjected to a special bit of telepathic treatment.

Chapter 13: Telepathy and Possession ...Reality or Fantasy

The medium in a trance who is able to communicate in strange languages while completely detached from her own
personality has long been a controversial phenomenon. Skeptics who want to explain it away easily do so by saying the
medium picks up the thoughts of someone near to her or reads another person's mind. In this easy way out, there is some
semblance of truth except that there is also an exception to the rule. Suppose the medium brings out information no one
else in the room knows, that this information has to be checked out by independent research workers and is then found
correct? How then can the thought-reading account for the phenomenon? The only explanation can be that the medium
picks up some thought transference that went out into the ether long ago and that she has an especially sensitive
mechanism within her to get on the same wave length.

I myself have no doubt that possession can be accounted for by thought transference of a more obvious type. There is a link
among the entranced medium, the speaker of tongues, the mystic in ecstasy, the enraptured art lover, and the person
possessed by a spirit. They are all in touch with a reality beyond the normal world; and what seems to be a fantasy, when
measured by the yardstick of logic, may be only another feature of telepathic communication or thought transference.

A dictionary defines a trance as "a state of morbid sleep differing from natural repose in duration, in profound sensitivity, the
concomitant or symptom of disease in the nervous system, particularly hysteria, catalepsy." The definition seems to be
ambiguous and not especially indicative of the many forms of trance states. It is well known that trance states can occur as
a result of a blow or be induced by drugs, and in some cases tumors and brain injuries produce this state; there are also the
hallucinations that occur through pain and fear. But there are also trances that are not induced by a sudden blow, shock, or
disease, and this genuine trance state is now the subject of great interest among parapsychologists. The trance states occur
in the ecstasies of mystics, when the mind is concentrated on a powerful image, even a godlike image. At a certain point the
link between the intangible mind and the tangible world snaps.

There is also a phenomenon called possession, in which a spirit, either good or bad, is thought to take possession of the
human being. This spirit can speak through the human mouth, act through its limbs. The person may be in some form of
trance, or possession may occur during sleep, or through hypnosis; and the duration of possession can vary from a short
period to several days. Possession should not always be construed as an evil thing, for in numerous religions there are
teachings devised to forge a link between man and his god and the high priest or priestess of the religion demonstrates this
as proof of his or her own high spiritual involvement. Should the tenets of the religion acknowledge the existence of a deity
that possesses the high priest's body, the amount of power in the high priest is immeasurable. In his possessed state he
ceases to be the high priest, he is the god; and so any word or action to his audience carries considerable weight.

Therefore all over the world, the trance or possessed state, has served to inculcate or fortify a variety of beliefs. In Tibet
before the invasion of Communists, the Dalai Lama only gave decisions and adopted a specific policy after he had consulted
a young man who went into a trance, speaking strange words that were interpreted by the priests. The question arises: were
the priests capable of using thought transference to project their own wishes to the young man and use him in order to
mislead people. In the ancient days when the rulership of the priests was autocratic, when things went wrong there was no
one to blame but the priest, and one who made mistakes paid for them with his life. It is possible that as one priest cult died
another one came into being in which there was a new rule, so that they were able to pass on the responsibility to someone
else and so keep their own status. Should mistakes occur, the buck would be passed to the young man acting as the oracle
and so the priests would be absolved. One thing that history and the study of primitive societies has taught me is that the
priests of any community never give up their power and are adept at reconstructing areas of life in which the power is
maintained in the priesthood but the responsibility of action is passed to someone else. Even in Ireland we find this...
mistakes can be blamed on the "little people." The use of the oracle dates from early times, the most famous perhaps being
the oracle of the Temple of Apollo where the high priestess went into a trance. Although the answers were famous for being
riddles, many Greek politicians consulted the oracle and followed the advice. It could be that the high priestess picked up
what was in their minds and simply reiterated it, thus giving them the security to follow with action what was already
formulated in their thoughts.

The phenomenon of mass trance conditions is always interesting to watch, and in this thought transference must surely play
a large part. The Dance of the Dervishes in North Africa is related to the frenzied trances that were part of the religious
experiences of ancient Greece. There are several famous amphoras in museums dating from about 500 B.C. that show the
worshipers of Dionysus in ecstasy, dancing to the music of the satyr. In mass trance conditions there is generally an end
product of some sensational type such as a mass orgy or a ceremony involving a forgiving of mortal sins. Sexual activity is
very common in mass trances and it is generally the male in primitive communities who expects to be satisfied, the female
being of little importance. As the priest can be absolved for his prognostications, so the serious members of any community
can be absolved from ideas of sinfulness if actions are committed in a trance.

How did the idea of mass dancing in this trancelike condition occur? Did it emanate from the mind of one person who
wanted to control people around him? The idea of it all must have started somewhere. There has to be a beginning of the
thought that makes the idea that conveys the idea so that it becomes an activity. I truly believe that mass trance activity is
dominated by the thought transference from a master of ceremonies, mentally dictating the route of the dance as well as the
reason for it. Certainly we shall know more about these strange trances as we learn more about the human brain and its use
as the organ of the mind. The fact remains that man can be elevated or degraded just as easily through his subconscious as
by his conscious, and it is likely that telepathy is the power used.

In voodoo, there is no doubt that the telepathic powers of the operator account for results. No one in his right mind can
believe that sticking pins in a doll actually causes sickness and distress. It becomes much more serious when one realizes
that a great deal of concentrated thought is used in voodoo ceremonies. The operator performing the ceremony has no
thought in his mind other than the one he wishes to project, so it goes out with great intensity and is zeroed into the exact
area where he wishes the effect to be felt. It is unfortunate that voodoo is associated with so much that is bad and evil and
its destructive powers are emphasized, because it is almost an everyday example of the power of the mind over matter.
However, it is always evil that makes news, and a man being "sung to death" in Australia seems to be much more important
than relating the news that the power of some person's mind has conquered the evil of sickness.

Voodoo requires tremendous concentration and is not a process that can be done lightly. It is ridiculous to think that the
power of curses and voodoo are used for some slight mistake on the part of a person who upset someone else, who then
fear that the upsets in his life are caused by voodoo.

The priests and priestesses who are capable of conveying the power of voodoo through mind transference are very
dedicated people who, in their terms, have a job to do and must do it according to ritualistic practices.

Voodoo is practiced in Africa but not always with the drastic effects we know in America, for in African tribes it is a religion,
and the power of the priest is used for the good of the tribe and not to satisfy any personal petty squabbling.

In Australia there are many cases of a person being sung to death. The aborigines have a great command of mind magic
and never hesitate to use it when they feel there is a justifiable reason. Again it is generally because of a deep wrong done
to the tribe that justifies a man being sung to death. Many people make the mistake of thinking that there is a psychological
effect whereby a man who knows he is cursed will begin to make mistakes. In Australia, the doomed man does not always
know he is doomed but will succumb as a victim of the singers. The process is almost too extraordinary to be believable, but
there is little sense of drama in the occasion. The witch doctor or his assistants, having decided that a man has committed a
crime against the tribe, decide by vote if he must die. There is a simple ceremony in which the witch doctor, with or without
his assistants, begins to chant very softly. I am told some chants start almost as one would expect a lullaby to start. The
participants in the death song are relaxed but gradually go into a trance state. The rhythm and vibrations of the death song
may vary according to the crime and the person involved.

There is an increasing intensity and the chant can go on for hours, always with tremendous dedication and direction. There
can never be a better example of "it is the thought that matters." That the end product of the singing is the demise of an
individual who may be thousands of miles away has been testified to by several people who have no ax to grind and,
indeed, in many cases are openly skeptical of any kind of phenomenon. No one really likes to talk about the singing death of
the aborigines. Of course there is no seemingly logical reason, although a few people will say that there is a psychological
reason for a man dying if he knows his enemies wish him dead; but how can we account for the cases when the man does
not know his enemies are singing him to death? The only explanation can be thought transference, with the human mind
putting out all the intensity of the equivalent of many thousands of kilowatts, such as a normal radio station would put out.

For thousands of years curses have been talked about with varying degrees of bated breath. The interesting thing about old
curses is that in this part of the twentieth century we are able to review the situation in retrospect and see whether or not
they have come true. The unfortunate thing is that many ancient curses have indeed come to pass, leaving no doubt as to
their efficiency. It is one thing to say, "I curse you, you may never know the warmth of another human being, may your
eldest son always die," and quite another thing for it to be true. Many European families have been cursed, and succeeding
generations have succumbed to the original ideas of the curse despite sophisticated civilized ways of living. It does not
seem to matter if the subject of the curse believes that his ancestors were indeed put under a spell. When the time comes,
he too may be the subject of the curse, and nothing of civilized life seems to stop it. The point of the curse is that it is
delivered with intensity so that at the time of making the pronouncement, starting with the thought, there is complete hatred
and nothing else in the world exists except the specific thought behind the curse. Recently I talked to Hans Holzer, the
author and parapsychologist; we talked about a visit we hoped to make to Vienna. A mutual friend, a member of an old
Viennese family, knew that there was a curse on his family so that each male member died at a specified age. Our friend
was almost at this age limit but he was the product of a highly sophisticated society and did not expect to experience any
nonsense about the "myth of the family curse." If anyone desired to defeat the curse it was our friend. He was in fine health
when Hans visited him in the summer of 1967. His special birthday was coming up in 1969, the year we were due to visit
him. We never made the trip to Vienna, our friend was in the family crypt before we could leave.

I suppose no one in the world has more accounts of curses than I have, for if there is anyone who can break a curse it is
someone who is involved in witchcraft, particularly if she comes from an ancient family renowned for its strength. One
especially interesting curse was recently reviewed on a television program in Britain. In 1800, in the little southern Ireland
village of Doneraile, there resided the master of the Great House, Viscount Doneraile. In Ireland, villages often have the
same name as the local ruling family. Doneraile had an affair with a witch and unfortunately deserted her. Well, no witch of
upright standing can bear to be deserted and she cursed him. The story goes that she railed at him like a woman but cursed
him as a witch. She announced that he would die like the dog she had discovered he was, that he would gasp and pant his
life away, and there would be no male heir to his family for seven generations. In southern Ireland it was generally a part of
most curses that no one would come along to maintain the family line; this in itself was a dreadful thing, for traditionally the
family line has much meaning in southern Irish families. Well, Viscount Doneraile did indeed die like a dog, panting his life
away in as horrible a case of rabies as has ever been recorded. Two years ago, the current Viscount Doneraile died. I
believe he inherited his title as an offshoot of the family, a cousin probably. He was childless and the trustees of his will
advertised in the world press for relations. As is the custom of many southern Irish families, although known as Viscount
Doneraile, there were many subsidiary titles as well as a family name. One of these was a very famous name, that of St.
Leger. There is a famous classic horse race run in Great Britain called the St. Leger, a most difficult grueling course, and the
race was inaugurated by the old Viscount Doneraile. One of the claimants to the inheritance now appears to be Dick St.
Leger of Los Angeles, California, a truck driver. He recently arrived at Doneraile with five children and astounded the natives
of the small village with his Americanism. From there on the ancient curse seems to have been lifted in typical Irish comedy
fashion, for Dick's wife is a tightrope walker with a circus.

Just about everything the old viscount hated is personified in the American family that has arrived on the scene to claim the
inheritance. It looks as if the effect of the curse has run out, the original male died of rabies, there was no first son or male
heirs for generations, and now there is a Catholic family with five children all lined up to inherit.

For the most part witches play fair when making curses; they do at least put a time limit on the deal and when it runs out,
justice is considered to have been done. Also, we do not bear malice once a thing is finished. I hate to admit that a member
of my family was responsible for the original curse but I can assure Dick St. Leger from Los Angeles that I have no animosity
at all toward his family. It's a good thing it is all over, but never let anyone tell me that curses do not work. The thoughts and
words that go out into the air are as meaningful and can be as menacing as any more drastic and harmful action.

After all, to be logical and probably repetitive, "It is the thought that counts." Isn't it? This basic rule applies to more things
than giving presents or sending birthday cards and the moral probably is: Don't get on the wrong side of a witch if you want
an unbroken line of sons inheriting the estate. There are more ways of destroying an old family than the logical world
dreams of, and one of them is by the thought transference of a curse that knows no time and age but must go on from
generation to generation until its full force is debilitated by the deadline set by the witch.

It's a thought-provoking idea, is it not?

Chapter 14: Hypnotism, Another Person's Will

It is quite right that hypnotism should no longer be classified with the occult sciences, for throughout the years it has gained
a definite scientific status and slowly and surely has become integrated into the realms of medicine. Hypnotism is a sleeplike
condition that is generally induced by another person; although self-hypnotism is not unknown. The most remarkable cases
are of people who in a sleeplike state perform and act in a way contrary to their usual habit. It is generally supposed that
hypnotism does not get through to the subject so deeply that he will do anything that is morally wrong or against his normal
instincts in his waking senses.

I think this is a wrong premise, no doubt fostered by those who wish to use hypnosis and have its subjects lulled into the
secure belief that it "can do no harm." I do not subscribe to this belief. There are times when hypnosis certainly does no
harm but injudiciously used by amateurs, it can do untold harm. In primitive countries hypnosis is indeed used, and I have
personal knowledge that certain subjects are capable of doing strange deeds that are not in keeping with their normal way of
life. I see hypnosis in two lights; It can be effective and useful when the motivations of the subject and operator are honest
and sincere, but it is one of the most dangerous weapons known to man if wrongly used. It is an unfortunate thing that we
are not yet fully aware of the fast impact hypnosis can have when it is used as a power motive. At its best it can heal
sickness, enable a weak person to have more courage; but, as in all major stages of mind over matter, it can be of the
utmost good or the utmost danger. We are apt to minimize the danger because we do not like to face facts that are related
to mysterious happenings beyond the normal and away from logical understanding.

The power of one mind can influence several others; and if one person becomes the sole receiver of the thought forms of
another mind, it will influence it to a point where that mind, being less powerful, is completely dominated by the master
control mind of the operator. If everyone were motivated by the highest ideals this would not matter so much; but, alas, man,
in the last analysis, is often a poor, hungry person and will use whatever is available to make a show of power. For some it is
the power of a charming personality, for others, the power of wealth, others, the power of the mind dictating and demanding
that another human must function in such a manner.

We are all aware of the vicarious kicks and thrills of the sadist and masochist, but they are nothing compared with the thrill
of controlling another human being through the mind. For hundreds of years, men who are supposedly endowed with
imagination have written stories of young girls dominated by vampirelike creatures compelled to haunt graveyards.

While few people profess to believe in Count Dracula, werewolves, vampires, or maidens who are controlled by evil forces,
the fact remains that even today we have many unexplained mysteries constantly revealed before our very eyes. One of the
most remarkable is the case of Lee Oswald, accused of the death of President John Kennedy. There are still many people in
the world who do not think he was of the caliber that adds up to the making of an assassin, for within an assassin there must
always be strong motivation, such as a great cause, a sense of guilt, a need to be recognized. In the light of evidence, to
some Lee Oswald does not measure up to the usual conception of an assassin. His past history was not so marked with
signposts that he was convinced he must save mankind from some supposed evil, yet he fired a gun that killed a well-loved
President, and then in a strange series of incidents he himself was killed. No one was brought to trial for the assassination of
the President but many people died in a series of singularly unlikely ways, so that in time no one was really left to bear
witness to a death that paralyzed a world, leaving it too numb and bewildered to think clearly--to think that there could be an
alternative to a strange, little, unknown man, planning the death of the President. The motivation could have been inspired
by thought transference, a telepathic, hypnotic communication by someone who truly had a grudge against the ill-fated John
Kennedy, a master mind who planned a perfect crime, got away with it, and sits somewhere in the world, knowing the ego-
inflating feeling of power. For the ultimate accolade of power is surely that of being in a position to decide life and death.

Many writers have recorded ideas about men who have been reduced to zombies, working and functioning like men but with
one part of their mind under the control of a master, just as one man can control a horde of computers and make them spill
out information at his will. It is always easy to laugh such a thing off, especially if one sits in a sedate home with the
amenities of civilization around, a radio or a television set blaring out the news, food in the refrigerator, and perhaps a pet
cat or dog snuggling down on the rug. In reality, life is not like this and there are forces only dreamed of in science fiction
that are taking their toll of people who also think they are free men in quiet homes. Yet hypnotic forces are all around who
recognize the vulnerable areas of their fellow men's minds.

The main difference in mass hypnotism in a primitive society and a civilized one is that in the latter, the operator offers his
subject some temptation in exchange for what he wants from him. In the case of advertising by hypnotic suggestion, the
subject is tempted by material things guaranteed to appeal to his vanity and in return he gives his money for things way
beyond his real needs and desires. In the primitive society the operator is much more straightforward. He knows what he
wants from his hypnotized subjects, generally a service he cannot or dare not perform.

Hypnotism is perhaps the most complete control of the mind and goes on throughout the world. Generally we try to put down
stories of trancelike men and women functioning at the will of a mastermind as clever, imaginative inventions of a fertile
literary mind. There are many true words spoken in jest. In certain tribes in East Africa it is not unusual for members of a
village to be in a trancelike state, completely at the command of the witch doctor. It also happens to be a good system for
getting work done in areas where there is an unwillingness to work under normal circumstances. Many people associate
zombies with the "Baron Samedi," ritualistic practices in which corpses are taken from graves and brought back to life by the
voodoo practitioner. I was told by one African that this is indeed a practice but with one variation. People selected for the
zombiefying were given a drug to make them look dead, then put in a grave to be dug up, and again given a drug to plunge
them into a low state of imbecility. At this point the voodoo mastermind, by hypnotism and thought transference, instructs
them that they must function in this or that way, according to his whims. About fifteen years ago secret societies were
increasing in Africa and many settlers lost their lives in the ritualized killings that made headlines in all the newspapers of the
world. The Kikiyu, known to be a peaceful tribe for years, suddenly became engaged in a stream of events so macabre and
violent that they rivaled the torture of the Jews in Germany during the Second World War. There seems to be no doubt, to
me, that mass thought transference engineered the outbreak of violence to suit the political needs of one or two men who
hated the white settlers in Africa.

When the worst of the outrages had subsided Kikiyu houseboys who had been in family service for twenty years frequently
said they did not know why they had become involved with the atrocities. Many would say "he" told me to do it, but the "he"
was never defined or identified as a human being. Sometimes "he" was called a "Hungan," a priest of voodoo, and they were
the "Hunsi-Bonsal," meaning "A Child of Wisdom." The "Child of Wisdom" expected the high priest to give him ideas about
the way he should live, and so thought transference plays a part in the relationship of the "Hungan" and his "Children of
Wisdom." What they have to go through to prove themselves worth going to the next grade, the Hunsikanzo or initiate, we
can only imagine from the deeds done by the Kikiyu in obedience to their dominating masters. The use of magic in any of its
many forms is considered a power in most of the communities of the world. Africa is no exception; the promise of being
initiated into magical practices would mean more power to the Kikiyu and this was the carrot dangled before them as the
Hungan transmitted his message of hate, leading to the killing of white people who had lived in peace for years in Africa.

The result of the atrocities was a completely different power structure in many parts of Africa that had called for "liberation"
from the whites. Freedom from the whites came but it is doubtful if liberation is there. The political cry that "where there is a
will there is a way" is a cliche that no one spares time to consider deeply; behind it is the truth leading to the conjecture that
where there is a way (to other men's minds) then there must be a mastermind and a means of success.

Hypnotism has existed throughout the ages, for in every generation in every century there have been a few rare people who
could tune in to other minds. Sometimes it was the high priests of long-forgotten religions, speaking not as a man to other
men but as the voice of the deity. Today we call hypnotism of the masses "charisma" and use it as a compliment to
politicians who can impress masses of voters with their charm more than anything else. The causes for hypnotism may
change through the years but not the effects. Hypnotism uses one person's mind to transmit messages to other minds. The
messages transmitted are only as good as the integrity of the transmitter. In light of hypnotic states, the transmitter may be
doing nothing more desperate than sending mind messages that the subject must not smoke. What can be done in a small
way at this stage can be done for other things.

Svengali, an intriguing character invented by George Du Maurier in the Victorian Age, impressed the world with his complete
control of another human being. All his thoughts, ambitions, and energy were transmitted to a woman called Trilby and
through a complete domination of his mind over hers, he brought her to the pinnacle of perfection as an opera stager who
took Parisian society by storm. The strength of Trilby as a great novel lies in the fact that before the reader has gone very far
in the book, the whole story becomes believable and he feels that same hypnotic spell going over him as Svengali exerted
over Trilby. It shows power in its ultimate condition.

No one laughed too much about Trilby when it was published, and it has remained a favorite piece of literature in Europe
until today; but now we see even more the cleverness of the character of Svengali. He now comes out as an archetypal
figure, the forerunner of thousands of agent managers who have had complete control of one person in the entertainment
world and, by domination, these people have been brought to stardom. Remove the Svengali-type of the present age and
how many stars have remained to twinkle in the Hollywood firmament? A good business-manager agent seems to give his
client more than ideas about grooming. I have frequently seen one famous agent going through every word and movement
as his star performed and at the end was in a debilitated state. Willpower and thought transference from the wings has
pulled many a star through a performance just as Svengali used his mind dominance over Trilby.

Thought transference through hypnotism causes a peculiar state of cerebral dissociation distinguished by certain, marked
symptoms, the most prominent and invariable of which is the highly increased susceptibility of the subject. The hypnotic
state can be induced in individuals or many people, especially normal human beings. It is a great mistake for anyone to say
that "no one can hypnotize me," for these are the very people who can be hypnotized without their knowing it. What they
mean is they are not prepared to sit down and face the operator because all their conscious instincts are to fight the idea of
anyone having control of them. A little more study by people might reveal some frightening thoughts. Thought transference is
possible through the unconscious as much as through the willing desire for the consciousness to slip away. The person who
really wants to make something of mind domination is generally clever enough to know the vulnerable area of a person who
is resisting hypnotic suggestion. He is like a professional hunter who has studied anatomy before he aims a gun at his
victim. The hypnotic state has an affinity with normal sleep and confuses the issue by also being concerned with abnormal
conditions such as sleep-walking, ecstasy, and the trances of Hindu fakirs and medicine men. In one or another of these
forms, hypnotism has been known for thousands of years throughout the world. It is no longer classed as anything occult
and this is a step in the right direction as it has a place in science and legitimate medicine. The thought transference about
this subject to those areas must have been like an armed bastille, and is a major demonstration of one mind over other
minds. Despite the status hypnosis has reached, it is absolutely, inextricably woven into occultism and degrees of
phenomena. The best thing that ever happened to hypnotism, and I hope to see it followed by extrasensory perception, was
when it infiltrated into scientific and medical areas.

Way back in the sixteenth century, the phenomena of hypnotism were constantly observed and studied by men of science.
From the phenomena of hypnotism were evolved the many areas of psychic healing which to me seem the ultimate use of
power for the good of man as he exerts mind over matter. The "laying on of hands" in healing is symbolic, but it is also the
idea on which I based some of my teaching practice for aiding transmission and reception. A rapport can be developed by
touch and this makes the task for the healer much easier. The secret of his success is not in the "magical incantations" or
even the prayers; but it starts at a point where his mind is active, long before the mind triggers words into action. A psychic
healer visualizes the area of sickness and then concentrates on seeing this area as a whole beautiful healthy thing. He
transmits the ideas of new tissues, better well-being, and general conditioning to the subject, who may not be able to
receive them at first. Pain is one of the great blocks between the psychic healer and the subject; and when pain is intense, a
reverse process of transmission can be set up. The healer begins to take on the pain of the subject himself, especially if he
has become psychically debilitated, perhaps by working too hard or being pressured by materialistic interests to forget his
own needed periods for recharging his batteries by meditation.
It is certain that the ancients were acquainted with this artificial (or should it be natural?) means of treating sickness and fully
realized the potential of the mind as a transmitter of the good image of a sound body. Among others, Agrippa von
Nattesheim, a medieval achemist and astrologer-philosopher, speaks plainly of this when he says in his Occulta Philosophia,
"There is a science known but to a very few of illuminating and instructing the mind, so that at one step it is raised from the
darkness of ignorance to the light of wisdom. This is produced principally by a species of artificial sleep, in which a man
forgets the present and, as it were, perceives the future through divine inspiration. Unbelieving wicked persons can also be
deprived of this power by secret means."

The healing of the sick, establishing first the rapport of the laying on of hands followed by thought transference, is always
found among primitive people, but we can trace its history into the past through the Indian and Egyptian civilizations in
particular. It is also found in the history of the Jews as recorded in the Old Testament where cases of psychic healing are
almost too numerous to mention. In Egypt sculptures have been found where one hand of the operator is placed on the
stomach and the other on the back of the subject, and there are accounts of early missionaries in China who experienced
unorthodox methods of healing.

Recently I went to the Yucatan Peninsula in search of a man I had met years ago, a witch doctor. I have always been eager
to record incidents of witchcraft as they occur in the second half of the twentieth century. We had made a film of the events
that led to visiting the witch doctor's straw hut several miles from Noona, a Mayan Indian village well off the beaten track of
tourists, who think that Merida is typical of life in the Yucatan. We talked to many of the townspeople and learned that the
witch doctor was held in high respect for his work, mainly in the realms of healing. I spent a lot of time talking to him and
discussing herbs. He told me he used nothing but his mind and herbs in healing and indicated that he visualized the sick
person as whole, then spent hours communicating this thought to the sick person. The testimony of the townspeople was
that their witch doctor was "strong in mind" and they agreed that the percentage of his cures was satisfactory, which was
good because there was no other medical aid and the town was so poor no one could have paid normal medical fees. I
asked how much the witch doctor was paid and was told that everyone gave him food. Everyone I met said with pride that
the witch doctor could "stop bleeding," a feat well known and used by many primitive people, including the gypsies of the
New Forest. When questioned as to how this was done, there was rarely any difference in the replies from a dozen people.
"He does it with his mind," they said, in complete acceptance of his powers.

History is full of credits for psychic healing and it is definitely not the prerogative of primitive people. Royal houses of
England were supposed to have the power, but it is doubtful if stories of curing the "King's Evil" are as authentic as cases of
healing by simple countryfolk. Curing of the "King's Evil" took place at a time when all known powers were the ruling,
monarch's, who, of course, ruled by divine power and therefore had divinity vested in him.

Many popes and others leading a restricted and spiritual life also had the power of healing, using prayer as the means of
their thought transference.

Dr. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who lived from 1802-66, became well known for his powers of mental healing. He was the
first to make use of the phrases "Christian Science" and "mind healing." He was the son of a New Hampshire blacksmith
and had little formal education before he became apprenticed to a clockmaker. When he was thirty-six he attended a lecture
on Mesmerism and decided to practice it himself. He obtained help from a young clairvoyant man and together they gained a
reputation for curing ailments. The interesting thing is that he came to the conclusion that the patient passed telepathic
messages to his clairvoyant friend, who then stated his own diagnosis by reading the patient's thoughts. Personally, I feel
this was putting the cart before the horse, but Dr. Quimby was a pioneer in modern mind-healing. All pioneers are entitled to
make mistakes, and it is almost always left for others to follow and add their own innovations to the original idea. Dr. Quimby
started the trend toward Christian Science but it was left to one of his pupils to bring it to the notice of the world. Among his
many pupils was Mary Baker Eddy and she carried on with the original premise that the mind could transmit its messages to
a sick person and through its own positive thoughts sickness could be eliminated.

The greatest modern exponent of the power of the mind over sickness was Mary Baker Eddy, the mother of the Christian
Science religion, in which all credit is given to the mind being able to conquer illness and completely overcome it. This
religion has been subjected to much criticism, certainly not always justified, but I suppose necessary in a world that must
always condemn what it cannot understand. Most Christian Scientists will not have a doctor at all and it is always this angle
that is criticized and mentioned. Personally I know that the faith of the true Christian Scientists is enormous and the essence
of faith is that it can take care of everything. Certainly far too many people rush to doctors with minor ailments that could be
cured by relaxation or faith in another person's ability to use his powers of mind over matter.

There is another religion called "New Thought" that is akin to Christian Science, except it does not entirely do without drugs
and the setting of bones. Neither does it give undue emphasis to any cure being due to the "imagination of the patient." It
strikes a happy point midway between the two. It gives considerable promise to the mind as a healing agent. The mind is
considered a highly refined piece of matter and therefore a "mind" cure is also a material cure. It is clear that the New
Thought religion has its roots in the mesmerism of long ago, but there is a spiritual influence in New Thought that is missing
from the exhibitionisms of Mesmer. The health teachings are directed to elevating the spirit to a higher plane before the
body becomes sick, and trying to live in tune with the infinite. One devotee to New Thought, Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine, says the
teaching, is aimed at recognition of our own divinity and our intimate relation to the universe, and to attach the belt of our
machinery to the powerhouse of the universe. The mind becomes the all important means of performing this operation.
Members of the New Thought movement have done a great deal of healing from a distance; results are obtained by
directing good vibrations to the sick person rather like directing a laser beam in more orthodox medicine. The powerful mind
of the psychic healer is really a human laser beam and both can be dangerous if misused by the operator.

Stories of miraculous unorthodox healings still permeate the newspapers of the world but in most cases the people
practicing mental healing prefer to believe that it is a divine gift from God. This worries me because it seems that so many of
these practitioners do not understand the basic principles behind mind-healing; the mind, to send out vibrations, must have
behind it, using, the brain as its organ, an electrical impulse. There is little that is religious behind a vibration, anymore than
there is behind a radio or television station. Of course the motivations behind the healing are the personal concern of the
healer, and it may well be that he is a deeply religious person. Spiritual values, therefore, must play a part in his life,
probably making him into the sort of person who is indeed concerned with the welfare of his fellow men. I cannot personally
believe that God Himself directs the vibrations; they are simply a part of a power structure to be used and how they are
used may be influenced by whatever religious order the healer follows.

In the United States, mass meetings with a religious flavor are part of the contemporary scene of the mind healer. Again
miraculous cures can be checked, and they are increasing in number despite efforts to discredit them. The yearly trek of
Roman Catholic pilgrims to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes is acceptable, so why not the idea of healing entirely by good
vibrations emanating from a mind that has nothing to gain by dedicating itself to this type of work? Mass healings sometimes
worry me, perhaps because I cannot personally visualize them. In my own life, thought transference for illness has played a
large part, but for me it demands a lot of time and masses of contemplation. I admire those who can perform mass healing,
but it is quite beyond me.

Whether one is for or against mental healing, it is not a subject that should be ignored. If there are sick people in the world,
they have to be helped and whether the means are orthodox or not should not prevent a person with faith going to her
mental healer as openly as others go to doctors. I know that everything is open to misrepresentation and charlatanism but
the medical profession itself has known these things within its own ranks. Why condemn a barrel of apples as being
unsound because one damaged fruit is found? To my own way of thinking, good health is indeed a matter of the mind with a
deteriorated state of health often due to the way a person lives. That some minds can transmit vibrations that are equivalent
to healing rays should not be surprising. Many intangibles affect the life of man, faith can help him move mountains, love
can make him feel like a hero; both have to start with a thought and then move into action. When hate is present in a human
being it can eat into the core of the being, causing sickness, or it can be sent out as a vibration to cause destruction in
another, just as love can be sent out to be felt by someone a long way off.

Anything that is possible through tangible means has its counterpart in the intangible. As a piece of wood occupies its place
in space so the space around it is equally important if we know how to use it. The answer to using the mind to its best
advantage is not to see it as a means of personal power but as a means of infiltrating the philosophy and way of life of
others so that their minds are elevated to a point where there is rapport, not conflict. Perfect love makes the sex act a
sacrament, and this is love in its highest octave. A perfect meeting of minds could be a fusion creating yet another vibration
to go out into the ether, another ray going into the storeroom of the eternal mind where it can be caught up at some future
date by a mind needing its additional helpful powers to create or act upon a mind of the future.
Today we are inclined to call such things magic. This plucking out of thoughts from the ether and spilling them out as words,
sometimes in the form of predictions, magic? As we approach the Aquarian Age, it will only be a commonplace thing.

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