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consciousness, without any sense of strain, a single idea, such as the petal of a flower. Association
trains must not be allowed to develop, and, above all, no thinking about the idea must take place. A
completely relaxed state of body and mind must be achieved.
It is difficult to measure the success of such tests with drawings, because often an idea associated with
the drawing would come across rather than the actual sketch. In the Sinclair experiments of 290
drawings, 65 were judged successes, 155 partial successes, and 70 were failures.
Professor William McDougall said of the Sinclairs' experiments with their "mental radio," "The
degree of success and the conditions of experiment were such that we can reject them as conclusive
evidence of some mode of communication not at present explicable in accepted scientific terms, only
by assuming that Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair either are grossly stupid, incompetent, and careless persons, or
have deliberately entered upon a conspiracy to deceive the public."
My wife and I had an interesting experience with the spontaneous operation of our own "mental
radios."
One morning I lay abed lightly dozing while my wife arose for a few minutes of peaceful
contemplation before the children awakened. Being an avid follower of basketball, she picked up the
sports pages and began to scan the results of a recent game. At the same moment, I had a visual image
of sports copy as if the lines were coming across on some sort of teletype. Next, my "inner eye" swept
a picture of action on the basketball court, then read the cutline beneath the photo. This was doubly
strange to me, because while I sometimes glance at the results of an occasional football game, I follow
only the progress of our local college basketball team.
When I got out of bed, I entered the living room and saw my wife curled up on the davenport reading
the newspapers. I turned my back at once and asked her to turn to the sports section. When she
assured me that she had, I then told her that I would "read" the story in the upper left-hand column. I
recited as much of the sports copy as I could recall, then skipped to the picture and described the
action in great detail. The cutline was especially vivid in my mind, and I proceeded to repeat it and as
many of the other headlines scattered about the page as I could remember.
When I asked my wife to substantiate my recitation, she told me that my "reading" had been
substantially correct. I had not, of course, repeated the story word for word, but my description of the
photo was exact, even to the jersey numbers of the basketball players. My reading of the cutline had
been almost letter perfect.
While we have not been able to effect such a dramatic transmission of information via the mental
radio since that accidental broadcast, I should stress the point that the conditions on that particular
morning were ideal. I lay in bed, not in a deep sleep, but in that completely relaxed moment before
one truly awakens and begins a new day. This is the time when I find that the door to the deeper levels
of my subconscious swings on well-oiled hinges - when I am in this almost somnambulistic state.
Subsequent experimentations have been marred by too much conscious effort and physical
distractions.
In 1924, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, a prominent "psi" researcher, described a series of experiments
conducted between 1910 and 1915 by Professor Gilbert Murray, of Oxford, and his daughter, Mrs.
Arnold Toynbee, as "the most important ever brought to the notice of the Society for Psychical
Research, both on account of their frequently brilliant success and on account of the eminence of the
experimenter."
The procedure followed by Professor Murray is another that anyone interested in testing his own
powers of telepathy can follow quite easily. Murray would leave the room and go out of earshot.
Someone in the room - generally the Professor's eldest daughter, Mrs. Toynbee - would think of some
scene or incident (or anything actually that came to her mind) and say it aloud so that the others in the
room might hear it. The "thought" would be written down and Professor Murray would be summoned.
Upon returning to the room, Professor Murray would take hold of his daughter's hand and then
proceed to describe in detail what had been described. "Psi" researchers have often noticed that a
percipient's mind will respond much better to one agent than another and will also respond better in
pleasant and warm surroundings. The Oxford professor was no exception to the general rule that a
person gifted with ESP will perform more effectively when there is no hostility or skepticism present
among the witnesses. Murray told the Society:
"The least disturbance of our customary method, change of time or place, presence of strangers,
controversy and especially noise, is apt to make things go wrong. I become myself somewhat over-
sensitive and irritable ...
"When I am getting at the thing which I wish to discover, the only effort I make is a sort of effort of
attention of a quite general kind. The thing may come through practically any sense channel, or it may
discover a road of its own, a chain of reasoning or of association, which, as far as I remember, never
coincides with any similar chain in the mind of anyone present, but is invented, for the purpose of the
moment."
Let us witness a few examples from one series of experiments conducted by Professor Murray on a
particular evening.
After he has left the room, Mrs. Toynbee rises to act as agent. She tells the group that she is thinking
of her infant son, Tony, and of Helena Cornford's infant daughter and that both children are grown up
and walking beside the river at Cambridge. Certainly this "thought" deals with concepts decidedly
more difficult than a "bright red ball," or "a nest with eggs in it."
Professor Murray is brought back into the room. His daughter tells him that she is the agent, and he
takes her by the hand.
"This is not a book," he says after a moment. "It's got a sort of Cambridge feel in it. It's the Cornfords
somehow. No, it's a girl walking beside the river, but it isn't Mrs. Cornford. Oh! It's baby Cornford
grown up!"
"Who is she with?" his daughter prods.
"No," Murray shakes his head, "I don't get who she is with. No, I should only be guessing."
"Go on!" insist the assembled friends in the room.
"No," Murray smiles. "I should only think of another baby grown up - Tony."
In another experiment, Mrs. Toynbee announced that she was thinking of a real friend, Rupert
Brooke, meeting the fictional character Natascha, heroine of Tolstoy's novel, War and Peace, and that
Natascha was running through a wood and wearing a yellow dress.
As soon as Professor Murray grasped his daughter's hand, he said: "Well, I thought when I came into
the room it was about Rupert. Yes, it's fantastic. He's meeting somebody out of a book. He's meeting
Natascha in War and Peace. I don't know what he is saying - perhaps 'Will you run away with me?' "
"Can't you get the scene?"
"I should say it was in a wood."
"What color is Natascha's dress?"
"No, I can't get it."
Critics of Professor Murray's tests protested that hyper-acute hearing could account for his astonishing
success at "reading" the thoughts of the various agents. Although Murray was escorted to a room far
enough removed from the test room to convince all but the most dogged skeptics that he could not
possibly have overheard any of the announced thoughts, "psi" researchers admitted the possibility of
Murray passing into a state of hyperaesthesia that may have allowed him to catch the rhythm of a
sentence, but not the complete idea. Granted that in some cases Murray (whose ordinary hearing was
judged to be normal) might have developed, some super-sonic hearing, hyperaesthesia can hardly be
accepted as a general explanation of Murray's high rate of success in the experiments. There were, for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]