In Search Of, page 18
The technical/economic magazine Nation's Business of April 1971 states: "Dollars May Flow from the Sixth Sense. Is there a link between business success and extrasensory perception? We think the role of precognition deserves special consideration in sales forecasting. Wittingly or unwittingly, it is probably already used there. Much more research needs to be done on the presence and use of precognition among executives, but the evidence we have obtained indicates that such research will be well worthwhile"
The Russians have delved fully into the subject of ESP phenomena: at this time there are at least eight major universities in the Soviet Union with full-time, fully staffed research centers in parapsychology. What is more, there are no restrictions placed upon those working in this field, and they are free to publish anything they like, whether or not it conforms to dialectical Marxism. In the United States, bickering between those who accept and those who categorically reject the reality of ESP phenomena still hampers funding.
It is not the job of the parapsychologist to find a so-called normal, logical explanation for phenomena that we know exist. It is his job to find the truth, whatever it may be, and whatever it requires of us in the way of adjusting our thinking. Having ESP, or being psychic, is not a gift of God to a few chosen individuals. It is a natural part of human personality. Those who do not have any ESP are lacking it because they have either disregarded or suppressed this natural, human ability. ESP is in conflict with the conventional views of the limitations of time and space and of cause and effect. In a work titled A-Causal Synchronicity, or The Law of Meaningful Coincidence, Carl Jung explains the new laws.
Briefly, it means this. Let us assume you wake up in the morning and think of your uncle Charlie, whom you haven't seen in five years. You don't know where he is or what he's doing at the present time. An hour later the telephone rings; it is someone who asks you whether you have heard anything about your uncle Charlie lately. Then you go to your job. And on your way home there is Uncle Charlie crossing the street. This is not just coincidence, according to Professor Jung, but a meaningful coincidence, and he shows us that there are scientifically valid connections between your impression of your uncle Charlie on arising, the questions of your caller, and the fact that you ran into your uncle Charlie shortly thereafter. This may be '"illogical," but it is also quite common.
Perhaps more difficult to comprehend and more far-reaching in its consequences is the question of time and space and how the facts, as we find them in parapsychology, defy the conventional rules.
The majority of precognitive experiences occur spontaneously and unsought. Precognition is the ability to foretell, to have accurate information about events, situations, and people before the time that we become consciously aware of them. Some people may have a hint that a precognitive situation is about to occur: they may feel odd, experience giddiness or a sensation of tingling in various parts of the body, or simply have a vague foreboding that a psychic experience is about to take place.
Long before Jeane Dixon came into the limelight, she startled Washington friends with uncanny predictions that, often unfortunately, came true. On the morning after the assassination of President Kennedy, the New York Journal-American carried a brief account of Mrs. Dixon's role in the great tragedy:
The tragic death of President John F. Kennedy was forecast in 1956 and reiterated twice in the past week by Jeane Dixon, a Washington, D.C., socialite and seer.
For years she has electrified Capitol Hill with a succession of eerie and accurate predictions of things to come.
"As for the 1960 election, it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office, not necessarily in his first term.''
In 1934 Thomas Menes, a Spanish seer known for his frequently accurate prophecies, announced that Chancellor Dollfuss of Austria would die violently within three months. The date was May 23.
During the summer, when the Nazis tried to seize power in Austria, a group of them came upon Dollfuss in a cabinet meeting and assassinated him. This was on July 25, only two months and two days after the Madrid prophet's prediction was made. Thomas Menes became famous overnight.
Nostradamus, a sixteenth-century French physician, spoke of "a government of England from America" that would exist in the future, after another disastrous war. At that time the word America did not exist. Amerigo Vespucci had not yet made his voyage. Nostradamus also clearly described the murder of the French king Henry II. He named the man who would commit the murder, a schoolteacher, and the location of the deed. This was sixty-five years before the event—in fact, before the murderer had been born, and before the king in question had come to the throne.
A related experience is premonition, usually feelings about events to come, rather than sharp flashes of actual scenes. Premonitions occur more frequently than the more complex forms of precognitive experiences. In an article titled "Can Some People See into the Future?" published in Family Weekly, Theodore Irwin reported on a London piano teacher's strong premonition concerning the fate of Senator Robert Kennedy. Nine months before his assassination, Mrs. Loma Middleton felt a strong premonition that he would be murdered. On March 15 of the year in which Kennedy died, she actually saw the assassination take place, and felt that it would happen while the senator was on tour in the West. This impression was followed by another one, on April 5, and again on April 11, when she had a foreboding of death connected with the Kennedy family. The actual murder took place on June 5.
As a result of people's premonitions frequently reported in the press, psychiatrist R. D. Barker set up a Central Premonitions Registry where people could register their feelings, toward the day when their impressions might become reality.
Telepathy refers to communication from mind to mind without the use of sensory perception. For all practical purposes, we can say that telepathy is an instant transmission of thoughts. It works best in times of stress and when the usual means of communication aren't functioning. It is particularly strong between people who have an emotional bond. The instances of mothers feeling the distress of their children, at a distance, of course, are numerous; cases where someone just has got to get through to another person, and uses his mind to send forth a message, are equally numerous and well attested to in the files of most reputable psychical research bodies, such as the American Society for Psychical Research. To a degree, telepathy can be induced experimentally. In experimental telepathy, sender and receiver should know each other in order to make the contact more possible.
Explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins and psychic Harold Sherman conducted some classic experiments in telepathy. It was agreed that Sir Hubert would mentally transmit information about himself daily from the North Pole, while Sherman was taking down whatever he received so that the material could be compared after Sir Hubert came back to New York. A team of researchers stood by Sherman in his New York hotel room, and, under test conditions, recorded the telepathic messages he received. One time, Harold Sherman insisted that he telepathically saw Sir Hubert Wilkins dancing in his evening clothes. This seemed improbable, because at the time the explorer was on an Arctic expedition. When Sir Hubert returned to New York, he was able to confirm the following: En route north, his plane had been forced to land at Calgary, Alberta, Canada, during a snowstorm. The lieutenant governor of the province happened to be in town for a ball being given in honor of a new governor general in Ottawa. He invited Sir Hubert to attend, but the explorer lacked evening clothes. Under the circumstances, the lieutenant governor loaned him a suit of tails—so what Harold Sherman had seen telepathically was indeed correct.
Psychometry is the ability to touch an object and derive from it information about its owner. This is possible because emotional experiences leave an imprint upon the outer layer of the aura, or the electromagnetic field constituting the human personality. This imprint is permanent. If a "sensitive" person touches it, he will then re-create or tune in on whatever happened to the owner of the object. He will get flashes of the past, present, and even future of that person. Psychometry, or "measuring psychically," is probably the most common form of mental mediumship.
On the whole, the press has been, and still is, hostile to the very notion of ESP. Occasionally there are exceptions, when an individual editor or writer knows how to overcome editorial policies, which are usually against the subject.
However, some well-documented accounts of ESP studies have been published in some magazines and weeklies. It is interesting to note that "alternate explanations" are offered in such articles, but at least the facts are fully presented.
According to Martin Ebon, well-known editor and researcher, belief and skepticism rival each other in the lives of many outstanding men who have recorded psychic experiences or shown unusual fascination with the so-called occult. Experiences such as telepathic impressions or prophetic dreams seem to be part of everyday life. Although they happen to just about everybody, most of us do not remember them; our culture has conditioned us to ignore the uncanny as unhealthy or fear-inspiring, although it seems to permeate the civilization of our day just as much as it did earlier cultures. Some psychic events are unique in their dramatic impact. They may change a man's whole outlook on life; they may frighten him into retreat from everything that is inexplicable; or they may arouse his curiosity toward deeper understanding of his extrasensory capacities.
18
Spiritual Survival and Reincarnation
The desire to communicate with the dead is as old as man himself. As soon as primitive man realized that death could separate him from a loved one and that he could not prevent that person's departure, he tried to find a way to contact the dead person.
Let us assume for a moment that the dead do exist, that they live on in a world beyond our physical world. It would then be of the greatest interest to learn all about the nature of that other world and the laws that govern it. It would be important also to come to a better understanding of the nature of this transition called death, to understand the "art of dying" as the medieval esoterics called it.
Having postulated that a nonphysical world populated by the dead does exist, we next examine the contacts between the two worlds. We find there are two kinds of communication between them: those initiated by the living, and those initiated by the dead. There is, it would appear, two-way traffic between the two worlds. Observation of so-called spontaneous phenomena that have occurred unexpectedly to actual people are just as important as induced experiments or attempts at contact. In all this we must keep an eye open for misinterpretation, deceit, or self-delusion.
It seems farfetched, however, to take for granted that thousands of people in all sorts of circumstances and under varying conditions hallucinate communications with the dead. It is more logical to assume that an extraordinary ESP experience docs indeed occur to these people, even if this is contrary to orthodox scientific belief at the time.
Why does a dead person want his family or friends to know that death is not the end, and that he or she is in fact very much alive in another dimension? There are two strong and compelling reasons: one is the continuing ego-consciousness of the dead person. He wants to let those closest to him know that he continues to exist as an entity and consequently that he wishes to be considered a continuing factor in their lives. This is for his own sake. The second reason for this need to let the living know that life after death exists is for their sake. They too will eventually die. Why not give them the benefit of the dead person's experience? Why not do them the favor of letting them in on the world's greatest and most important secret: that man does not end at the grave?
Rosemary Brown is an English lady who claims to be the continuing channel of expression for some of the recent past's greatest composers. The evidence is substantial and worthy of further study. Stewart Robb, the investigator of the Brown case, is not only a qualified psychic researcher but an expert musicologist. This combination of talents makes him a particularly qualified man in this instance. Why Brahms, Liszt, and others should choose a middle-class English housewife to continue writing their music for them is not as much a puzzle as one might think at first. Rosemary Brown's lack of musical training might render her a more convincing medium. Conversely, the music of great composers such as Beethoven is openly available and the mere fact that an untutored person can write in their style is not sufficiently convincing. What is lacking, perhaps, are the intimate personal details of the composers' lives, transmitted by them to Rosemary Brown and checked out independently. If some of these personal data were unpublished but could subsequently be corroborated by a researcher through letters or other existing but inaccessible documents, we would then have a near-foolproof case for the contact between the composers and Rosemary Brown. Until this happens, the case remains open.
A particularly impressive case of after-death communication was experienced in Pennsylvania. Sandra R. lives with her family in a small town southwest of Pittsburgh. Her brother, Neal, twenty-two, had been working as a bank teller for three years. Neal often said that he had a feeling that if he went into the Army he'd be killed. Consequently, his mother and sister, to whom Neal was quite close, persuaded him to join the National Guard for a six-month tour of duty. Since he was of age and would probably be drafted, he might thus shorten his length of service. Neal finally agreed that this was the best thing to do under the circumstances. He quit his position at the bank, joined the National Guard, and tried to make the best of the situation. In April 1963 he got his orders to report to basic training a week from the following Monday. Several times during those last days at home, he mentioned the fact that he was to leave at 5:00 a.m. Sunday, as if this was something important and final. On the Monday preceding his departure, he visited friends to say goodbye. When he left home, he had the usual kiss on the cheek for his mother, and he gaily said, "I'll see you," and went out. He never returned. Early the following morning, the family was notified that he had been found dead in his parked car on a lonely country road about two miles away from his home. He had committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide. The family was shocked. At first they could not believe the news, for they were sure he would leave some sort of note for them. But nothing was ever found, even though they searched the house from top to bottom. All of Neal's affairs were in order. He had left no debts or commitments, but also no message of any kind for anyone. He was buried in his home town, and the family tried to adjust to their great loss. His sister, Sandra, was three years younger, but the two had been close enough to have had many telepathic experiences in which they would read each other's thoughts. She could not understand why her brother had not confided in her before taking his life.
In the house, both Sandra's room and Neal's were upstairs. After the young man's death, Sandra could not think of sleeping so near to her late brother's room, so she slept on the roll-out divan in the living room. Friday was the day of the funeral, and it seemed to Sandra that it would never pass. Finally, after a restless, almost sleepless night, Saturday dawned. All day long she felt uneasy, and there was a tension in the air that she found almost unbearable. When night came, Sandra asked that her mother share the couch with her. Neither woman had taken any tranquilizers or sleeping pills. Again they discussed the suicide from all angles, and again failed to arrive at any conclusions. Finally, they fell asleep.
Suddenly Sandra was awakened from deep sleep by a clicking sound. It sounded exactly as if someone had snapped his fingers above her head. As Sandra became fully awake, she heard her mother stir next to her.
"Did you hear that?" her mother asked. She had also heard the strange snapping sound. Both women were now fully awake.
They both felt a tingling sensation from head to toe, as if they were plugged into an electrical socket! Some sort of current was running through them, and they were quite unable to move even a limb.
The living room was situated in the front part of the house. All the window blinds were closed, and there was no light shining through them. The only light in the room came from a doorway behind them, a doorway that led into the hall. Suddenly they noticed a light to their left. It had the brightness of an electric bulb when they first saw it. It appeared about two feet from the couch on the mother's side and was getting brighter and brighter as it moved closer to them. "What is it?" they called to each other, and then Sandra noticed that the light had a form. There was a head and shoulders encased in the light!
They were terrified. Suddenly Sandra heard herself cry out: "It's Neal!" At the moment she called out her late brother's name, the light blew up to its brightest glare. With that, a feeling of great peace and relief came over the two women.
Mrs. R., still unable to move her body, asked, "What do you want? Why did you do it?"
Then she started to cry. At that moment, waves of light in the form of fingers appeared inside the bright light, as if someone was waving goodbye. Then the light gradually dimmed, until it vanished completely.
At that instant, a rush of cold air moved across the room. A moment later they clearly heard someone walking up the stairs. They were alone in the house, so they knew it could not be a flesh-and-blood person. When the footsteps reached the top stair, it squeaked as it always had when Sandra's brother walked up the stairs. Over the years, Sandra had heard this noise time and again. There wasn't a sound in the house, except those footsteps upstairs. The two women were lying quite still on the couch, unable to move even if they had wanted to. The steps continued through the hallway, and then went into Neal's room, which was directly over the living room. Next they heard the sound of someone sitting down on the bed, and they clearly made out the noise of bedsprings giving from the weight of a person! Since the bed was almost directly over their heads down in the living room, there was no mistaking these sounds. At this moment their bodies suddenly returned to normal. The tension was broken and Sandra jumped up, turned on the light, and looked at the clock next to the couch. The time was five o'clock Sunday morning—the exact moment Neal had been scheduled to leave, had he not committed suicide!
