Beyond the Occult (13 page)

The writer once knew an artist who had the power to enter the subjective condition at will; and in this state he could cause his visions to be projected upon the canvas before him.
He declared that his mental pictures thus formed were perfect in detail and colour, and that all that he had to do to fix them was to paint the corresponding colours over the subjective picture.
He too thought his fancies real; he believed that spirits projected the pictures upon the canvas.

All this sounds remarkably close to Eileen Garrett’s description of how she ‘shifts her point of view’.
‘What happens to us at these times is that, as we withdraw from the environing world, we relegate the activities of the five senses to the field of the subconscious, and seek to focus
awareness
… in the field of the superconscious — the timeless, spaceless field of the as-yet-unknown.’
But this makes it clear that we are already passing beyond the simple — and basically scientific — observations of Thomson Jay Hudson on the ‘two minds’ to something much more controversial and complex: the notion of ‘timeless and spaceless fields’ that give access
to ‘paranormal information’.
And this, of course, is also the point at which most scientists would dig in their heels.
They can accept a Bergsonian notion of ‘two minds’ — rational and intuitive — but they would insist that the powers of the intuitive mind are the quite ordinary powers that we associate with intuition — sudden flashes of insight, and suchlike.
But how can intuition tell us what is happening a thousand miles away or — worse still — what is going to happen tomorrow?

Hudson himself soon passed beyond psychological observations to the field of the paranormal.
His studies in hypnosis convinced him that telepathy is a reality.
He had undoubtedly heard of the researches of the Marquis de Puységur, the disciple of Mesmer who in the year 1780 had accidentally discovered hypnotism.
Mesmer believed that there is some strange vital force — called ‘animal magnetism’ — which can be used to cure illness.
Under Mesmer’s instructions Puységur had ‘magnetized’ a lime tree in his park and had tied to the tree a young peasant called Victor Race.
While the Marquis was making passes over the patient’s head with a magnet — to increase the flow of ‘magnetic fluid’ — Victor Race went into a trance.
When ordered to untie himself he did so, with his eyes still closed.
And the Marquis soon discovered, to his amazement, that Race could read his mind when the youth was in a trance.
Puysegur could address a question to him mentally, and Race would answer aloud.
If they were in a room with a third person, the Marquis could direct Race’s conversation by giving him mental orders and telling him what to say.
It would be another century before Frederick Myers invented the word telepathy, but by 1780 science had established that it was a reality.

Hudson was also impressed by a series of experiments conducted in 1819 by a certain Councillor H.
M.
Wesermann of Dusseldorf.
Wesermann made a mental effort to make telepathic contact with a friend whom he had not seen in thirteen years, and chose the middle of the night for his attempt.
The next day he went to call on the friend, who told him with amazement that he had dreamt of him the previous
night.
After this success Wesermann made an old man dream of the funeral of someone they both knew, and a woman dream about some secret conversation involving Wesermann and two other people.
When a doctor friend expressed scepticism about all this Wesermann convinced him by making him dream of a street brawl.

Hudson devotes several pages to one of the most famous of all cases of this type — the Verity case.
A young student named Beard was engaged to a girl, Miss L.
S.
Verity.
‘On a certain Sunday evening in November 1881, having been reading of the great power which the human will is capable of exercising, I determined, with the whole force of my being, that I would be present in spirit in the front bedroom on the second floor of a house situated at 22 Hogarth Road, Kensington.’
He made the effort at one o’clock in the morning.
At that moment Miss Verity woke up, and saw her fiancé standing by her bedside.
She screamed and woke her eleven-year-old sister, who also saw Beard.
At that point Beard vanished.

In the following year Beard was involved in an even more remarkable experiment.
In December 1882 he decided to try and ‘appear’ in the house in Kew to which Miss Verity and her sister had moved.
He sat in a fireside chair and tried to fix his mind on the house.
Suddenly he became aware that he could not move his limbs — his own theory was that he had fallen into a ‘mesmeric sleep’.
And when, some time later, he regained his normal state by an effort of will, he recorded that he had been in a ‘trance’ state from about nine-thirty until ten.
At midnight he made another attempt at ‘transmission’.
The following evening he went to call at the house at Kew and discovered that his fiancee’s elder sister was also staying with her — he calls her Mrs L.
Mrs L.
told him that she had seen him the previous evening at nine-thirty going from one room to another.
At midnight she saw him yet again as he walked into the bedroom, walked to her bed and took her long hair in his hand.
After this the ‘apparition’ had taken hold of her hand and looked at the palm, at which Mrs L.
remarked, ‘You need not look at the lines, for I have never
had any trouble.’
When Beard had disappeared again Mrs L.
woke her sister, who was in the same bed, and told her what had happened.

Mrs L.
volunteered this information without any questioning from Beard, and when she had told him her story Beard took from his pocket his own notes, made the previous evening, in which he recorded going into a ‘trance’ at nine-thirty and making another effort to ‘appear’ in the bedroom in Kew at midnight.
The interesting part of this second experiment is that the ‘apparition’ was solid enough to hold Mrs L.’s hair and take her hand — presumably under the impression that she was Miss Verity.
Beard himself had no recollection of any of this.

Beard also made this interesting comment about his first experiment:

Besides exercising my power of volition very strongly,
I put forth an effort which I cannot find words to describe
.
[My italics.] I was conscious of a mysterious influence of some sort permeating my body, and had a distinct impression that I was exercising some force with which I had been hitherto unacquainted, but which I can now at certain times set in motion at will.

This seems to demonstrate two things: that Beard used not only his conscious will, but also some other kind of will — the power of the subjective mind — and that once he had learned the trick he could sometimes repeat it.
In fact he repeated it once more in 1884, when he again appeared to Miss Verity and stroked her hair.
(It seems to have been a long engagement.)

This case was thoroughly investigated and recorded by the newly-formed Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882), and probably inspired Frederick Myers to embark upon his immense compilation
Phantasms of the Living
(co-authored by Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore), the first and most impressive study of this strange ability of some people to ‘project’ their ‘astral doubles’ (or
doppelgängers
) to distant places.

Hudson thought that the Verity case was an example of telepathy, which to some extent it undoubtedly was; but there was obviously rather more to it than that.
(In fact, Hudson preferred to ignore this other aspect — ‘astral projection’ — for reasons we shall consider later.) But his chief concern now was to try to prove, to his own satisfaction, the hidden powers of the subjective mind.
And like Lawrence LeShan almost a century later, Hudson decided that the best way of proving his theory would be through an attempt at healing.
Why healing, rather than telepathy, or ‘astral projection’, or experiments in clairvoyance?
Because Hudson’s basic theory is that the subjective mind is so powerful because it is
in harmony
with nature and the universe, and that illness is due to loss of contact with this fundamental harmony.
So if one subjective mind can reach out to another, it ought to be able to place it once more in contact with the fundamental harmony.
In fact Lawrence LeShan follows much the same line of reasoning, writing, ‘It is interesting to note that nearly all the great sensitives had a very unusual amount of
joie de vivre
and
élan vital
, and that typically the person who follows the mystical path and disciplines finds joy, serenity and a non-destructive life of peace and fulfilment of purpose.’
^*

Bearing in mind that Councillor Wesermann had been successful in transmitting telepathic messages to people who were asleep — a state that is, after all, akin to hypnosis — Hudson decided that the best time to attempt his experiment was when the healer was himself on the verge of sleep, that is when his objective mind was totally relaxed.
Hudson’s first experiment was with an ageing relative who suffered from agonising rheumatism which was so severe that one leg had become two inches shorter than the other and he was hardly able to walk.
Hudson began the ‘healing’ treatment on 15 May 1890, telling two friends about his intention so that he had witnesses.
The method was for Hudson to think about the relative, who lived a thousand miles away, just as he was on the point of sleep, and to send out healing suggestions.
A
few months later one of the two ‘witnesses’ met the subject of the experiment and was startled to see that he now seemed to be in good health.
She asked when the improvement had begun and the man replied, ‘In the middle of May.’

It could, of course, have been coincidence.
So Hudson persisted with other sick acquaintances.
Unfortuantely he offers no further details of the hundred experiments he claims to have carried out; but he reports that with two exceptions, they were all successful.
In the case of the two exceptions, Hudson deliberately broke his usual rule and told his ‘patients’ that he intended to try to cure them.
The result, he believed, was that their objective minds inhibited the natural healing powers of the subjective mind — like the schoolteacher peering over the schoolboy’s shoulder.

Hudson’s list of cures is impressive: neuralgia, dyspepsia, bowel complaints, sick headaches, torpidity of the liver, chronic bronchitis, partial paralysis, pen paralysis (presumably an acute form of writer’s cramp), and even strabismus (squint).
He admits that the last case was not treated by himself but by the aunt of the ten-year-old girl concerned, who had been cross-eyed from birth.
Hudson remarks that he himself would probably have lacked the confidence to attempt such a case, but the aunt completely cured her niece in three months.

A case that occurred sixty years later provides interesting confirmation of Hudson’s observations about confidence.
In May 1950 a sixteen-year-old boy was admitted to the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, suffering from an exceptionally unpleasant complaint known as fish-skin disease: the whole of his body was covered with black warts, while his hands were covered in a horny skin that was as hard as his fingernails.
A skin transplant was a failure.
At this point the anaesthetist, Dr Albert A.
Mason, decided that he would try hypnosis.
He had often cured warts by hypnosis and saw no reason why multiple warts should be any more difficult than single ones.
The boy was placed in a trance and told that the warts on his left arm would go away.
A few days later the horny skin softened and fell off, revealing normal skin.
Dr Mason communicated his success to the surgeon, who looked at him with incredulity and told him to go and look up ichthyosiform erythrodermia — the medical name for fish-skin disease — in the library.
He did, and made the upsetting discovery that his patient’s skin had no oil-forming glands and that therefore the disease was incurable; the ‘hypnotic cure’ was literally an impossibility.

Nevertheless, hypnosis had worked.
So Mason went on to hypnotize the patient and suggest that his right arm should clear up.
The right arm was 95 per cent cleared of warts.
On the legs and feet, about 50 per cent of the warts disappeared.
More important, the boy’s state of mind improved enormously, and he got himself a job as an electrician’s assistant.
However three years later Mason decided to try and renew the treatment: on this occasion his former patient turned out to be completely un-hypnotizable.

Between 1953 and 1961 Mason tried curing another eight cases of fish-skin disease by hypnosis: all were total failures.
He reached the reluctant conclusion that the fault lay in himself: now he
knew
that ichthyosis could not be cured by hypnosis, he was somehow communicating his doubt to the patients.
In the case of the sixteen-year-old boy, neither of them had known the disease was incurable when Hudson first attempted hypnosis and the result was a 100 per cent cure of the left arm.
By the time he moved on to the right arm, Mason’s confidence had been shaken by the discovery that the disease was ‘incurable’, but the patient still had every reason to believe him.
Result: a partial cure.
But by the time Mason decided to try again, the patient himself had become worried and nervous, and could no longer be hypnotized.
Hudson would say that his objective mind was now inhibiting the healing power of the subjective mind.