Supernatural (14 page)

One ‘split-brain’ patient tried to hit his wife with one hand while the other defended her.
Another tried to unzip his flies with one hand while the other tried to do them up.
A patient who was given some wooden blocks to arrange into a pattern tried to do it with his right hand, and the left hand continually tried to interrupt him; finally, he had to sit on his left hand to make it behave.

The implications are clearly staggering.
The person you call ‘you’
lives in the left cerebral hemisphere.
This is the half of the cerebrum that deals with language and logic.
It could be regarded as a scientist.
The right half seems to work in terms of patterns and insights; it is basically an artist.
And it seems to be a ‘second self’.
It was natural for the patient to try to solve the wooden block pattern with his right hand (connected to the left brain), because the doctor had asked
him
to do the puzzle, and the conscious, everyday self lives in the left brain.
If he had not been a split-brain patient, the right brain would have quietly helped him to solve the puzzle by ‘putting ideas into his head’, and he would not even have been aware of it.

So what is it like to be a split-brain patient?
The unexpected answer is that most of them do not even notice it.
And if we reflect for a moment, we can see that this makes sense.
If I try to solve some puzzle—say a Rubik cube—after a few glasses of alcohol, my ‘insight’ refuses to function.
This is because alcohol seems to interfere with the connection between right and left.
It has, in fact, given me a kind of instant split-brain operation.
Yet I hardly notice this.
My conscious self is so accustomed to coping with reality that it hardly notices when the ‘other self withdraws its help.
But if I attempted to write this book after several glasses of alcohol—or when I was so tired that the ‘two selves’ had lost contact—I would instantly realize that something was wrong.
For writing is an act of close co-operation between the two selves.
The right takes a ‘bird’s eye view’, surveying all the possibilities; the left chooses between them and decides which of them to turn into words.
If the right fails to do its half of the job, the left stares blankly at the sheet of paper and wonders what to say.

Is the right cerebral hemisphere ‘the unknown guest’?
That might be going too far.
We still know so little about the brain and its working that it would be better to preserve an open mind.
But we can safely say that the right hemisphere is the entrance to the ‘invisible palace’ of the unknown guest.

There is another point of vital importance to be made.
All mental illness is caused by the conflict between ‘the two selves’.
The left ego is the master of consciousness, the right is the master of the unconscious.
And the relation between the two is not unlike the relation between Laurel and Hardy in the old movies.
Ollie is the left-brain, the boss.
Stan takes his cues from Ollie.
When Ollie is in a good mood, Stan is delighted.
When Ollie is depressed, Stan is plunged into the depths of gloom.
Stan is inclined to
over-react.

When Ollie wakes up on a wet Monday morning, he thinks: ‘Damn, it’s raining, and I’ve got a particularly dreary day in front of me .
.
.’
Stan overhears this and sinks into depression.
And—since he controls the energy supply—Ollie has that ‘sinking feeling’, and feels drained of energy.
This makes him feel worse than ever.
As he walks out of the gate he bumps into a man who tells him to look where he’s going, then trips over a crack in the pavement, then misses a bus just as he arrives at the stop, and thinks: ‘This is going to be one of those days .
.
.’
And again, Stan overhears, and feels worse than ever.
And once more, Ollie feels that sinking feeling.
By the end of the day, he may be feeling suicidal—not because things have been really bad, but because of a continual ‘negative feedback’ of gloom between the right and left.

Consider, on the other hand, what happens to a child on Christmas Day.
He wakes up full of pleasurable anticipation; Stan instantly sends up a flood of energy.
When he goes downstairs, everything reinforces the feeling of delight—Christmas carols on the radio, the Christmas tree with its lights, the smell of mince pies in the oven.
Each new stimulus causes a new rush of delight; each new rush of delight deepens the feeling that ‘all is well’, and that the world is a wonderful and exciting place after all.

What, then,
is
hypnosis?
The first thing we have to recognise is that all creatures are, to a large extent, machines.
The body is an elaborate machine; so is the brain.
But a machine can be operated by anyone who has access to it and knows how it works.
It seems fairly obvious that the hypnotist somehow puts the left brain—Ollie—to sleep, and gains direct access to Stan.
And Stan can make the machine do some remarkable things.
If the hypnotist tells him that he will become as stiff as a board, and will lie on two chairs, with his head on one and his heels on the other, while a heavy man jumps up and down on his stomach, he will do it without hesitation.

Which raises an interesting question: if Stan possesses these powers, why will he not exercise them when Ollie tells him to do so?
The answer is that he knows Ollie too well, and does not trust him as he trusts the hypnotist.
Yet it should also be obvious that if we
could
somehow persuade Stan to trust Ollie, we would gain access to all the ‘hidden powers’ that Stan controls.
And man would suddenly become a kind of superman.
This
is why it is so important for us to understand the basic mechanisms of hypnosis .
.
.

Robert Temple’s story about how he wanted to embrace a tree reminds us that most of us spend a great deal of time in a semi-hypnotised condition.
Our ‘everyday consciousness’ is only half-awake.
It becomes fully awake only when we are full of excitement or sense of purpose.
(Doctor Johnson said: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’) As soon as our attention begins to flag, we sink into a kind of light hypnosis.
And when our minds ‘go blank’, we are virtually in a trance.

All this was known long before Mesmer.
In 1636, a mathematician called Daniel Schwenter observed that if a small bent piece of wood is fastened on a hen’s beak, the hen fixes its eyes on it and goes into a trance.
Similarly, if the hen’s beak is held against the ground and a chalk line is drawn away from the point of its beak, it lies immobilized.
Ten years later, a Jesuit priest, Fr Athanasius Kircher, described similar experiments on hens.
All that is necessary is to tuck the hen’s head under its wing and then give it a few gentle swings through the air; it will then lie still.
(French peasants still use this method when they buy live hens in the market.) A doctor named Golsch discovered that frogs can be hypnotized by turning them on their backs and lightly tapping the stomach with the finger.
Snapping the fingers above the frog is just as effective.
Crabs can be hypnotized by gently stroking the shell from head to tail, and unhypnotized by reversing the motion.
In
Hypnosis of Men and Animals
(published in 1963), Ferenc András Völgyesi describes how Africans hypnotize wild elephants.
The elephant is chained to a tree, where it thrashes about savagely.
The natives then wave leafy boughs to and fro in front of it and chant monotonously; eventually, its eyes blink, close, and the elephant becomes docile.
It can then be teamed with a trained elephant and worked into various tasks.
If it becomes unmanageable, the treatment is repeated, and usually works almost immediately.

Nothing in all this contradicts the Freudian ‘suggestion’ theory of hypnosis.
But Völgyesi also discusses the way that snakes ‘fascinate’ their victims.
Far from being an old wives’ tale, this has been observed by many scientists.
Toads, frogs, rabbits and other creatures can be ‘transfixed’ by the snake’s gaze—which involves expansion of its pupils—and by its hiss.
But Völgyesi observed—and photographed—a large toad winning a ‘battle of hypnosis’ with a snake.
Völgyesi observed two lizards confronting each other for about ten minutes, both quite rigid; then one slowly and deliberately ate the other, starting at the head.
It was again, apparently, a battle of hypnosis.
What seems to happen in such cases is that one creature subdues the will of the other.
Völgyesi observed that hypnosis can also be effected by a sudden shock—by grabbing a bird violently, or making a loud noise.
He observes penetratingly that hypnosis seems to have something in common with stage fright—that is, so much adrenalin is released into the bloodstream that, instead of stimulating the creature, it virtually paralyses it.
(We have all had the experience of feeling weakened by fear.)

All this supports the observations made by Puységur, Gibert, Messing and Hammerschlag: that hypnosis often involves a ‘beam of will’ directed from one person to another.

And now, at last, we can see the basic obstacle that separates us from our ‘hidden powers’.
We are unaware that we possess this ‘will-beam’.
We are always allowing it to ‘switch off’, so we fall into a passive condition, like a blank television screen.
You could compare us to a person with amnesia, who goes out shopping with a wallet full of money, then suddenly ‘goes blank’ and returns home without his shopping or his wallet.
If you had such a person in your family, you would obviously not allow him to go shopping alone.
Yet most of us are subject to this kind of amnesia.
When we are full of energy, we fulfil our daily tasks with a sense of determination and purpose.
But as soon as we grow tired, the energy switches off, and life seems oddly boring and meaningless.
If a sudden problem arises, we groan with boredom and feel that it is ‘not worth doing’.
We have, in fact, fallen into a hypnotic condition, exactly like Schwenter’s hen with the wood on its beak.
The ‘hidden will’ switches off; the ‘unknown guest’ falls asleep; we become, in effect, robots.

If we wish to evolve to the next stage in human development, we must learn to grasp the meaning of the discoveries of Mesmer, Puységur and Maeterlinck.
It is true that the ‘unknown guest’ lives in an invisible palace.
But he is nonetheless real.
And if we wish to learn to make use of his powers, we must train ourselves to recognise his reality as clearly as we recognise the reality of the material world around us.

Visions of the Past

P
ERHAPS THE MOST
remarkable of all the now-forgotten explorers of Maeterlinck’s ‘invisible palace’ was another American, Joseph Rodes Buchanan, whose discoveries were, in their way, even more astonishing than those of Mesmer.
Buchanan came to believe that every object in the universe has its whole history ‘recorded’ on it—rather like a videotape recording—and that the human mind has the power to ‘play back’ this recording.

But before we proceed any further, let us consider a practical example.

In the winter of 1921, a number of people had come together in a room of the Metapsychic Institute—the French version of the Society for Psychical Research—in Paris, to test a clairvoyant, Madame De B-.
Dr Gustav Geley, a leading French investigator, and director of the Institute, asked someone to pass a letter to her.
A painter and novelist called Pascal Forthuny grabbed it.
‘It can’t be difficult to invent something that applies to anybody!’
He began to improvise jokingly.
‘Ah yes, I see a crime .
.
.
a murder .
.
.’
When he had finished, Dr Geley said: ‘That letter was from Henri Landru.’
Landru was at the time on trial for the murder of eleven women—crimes for which he was guillotined in the following year.

No one was very impressed by Forthuny’s performance; after all, Landru’s trail was the chief news-event of the day, so murder was an obvious topic to come into Forthuny’s mind.
Geley’s wife picked up a fan from the table.
‘Let’s see if that was just luck.
Try this.’

Still light-hearted, Forthuny ran his fingers over the fan in a professional matter and looked solemnly into space.
‘I have the impression of being suffocated.
And I hear a name being called: Elisa!’

Madame Geley looked at him in stupefaction.
The fan had belonged to an old lady who had died seven years earlier from congestion of the lungs; the companion of her last days had been called Elisa.

Now it was Forthuny’s turn to suspect a joke.
But Madame Geley insisted on another experiment.
She handed him an officer’s cane.
This time Forthuny looked serious as he let his fingers stray over it.
He began to describe army manoeuvres, somewhere in the Orient.
He spoke of the young French officer who had owned the cane, of his return to France by sea, and of how the ship was torpedoed.
He went on to say that the officer was rescued, but developed an illness and died two years later.
Madame Geley verified that he was right in every particular.

This curious faculty—which so amazed Forthuny—had first been discovered more than sixty years earlier by Joseph Rodes Buchanan.
He had labelled it ‘psychometry’.

Buchanan was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, on December 11, 1814, three months before the death of Mesmer (who died on March 5, 1815, at the age of 81).
His father was a doctor and an author, and Buchanan was something of an infant prodigy, studying geometry and astronomy at the age of 6, and taking up law when he was 12.
When his father died in the following year, Buchanan supported himself as a printer, then as a schoolteacher.
And at some time during his teens, he came upon the theories of Mesmer, and was fascinated by the notion that the universe is permeated by some ‘magnetic fluid’, and that the stars and the planets cause ‘tides’ in this fluid.
As we have seen, Mesmer believed that these ‘tides’ cause sickness and health in human beings, for we are also full of a kind of magnetic fluid generated by the nerves.
When this fluid becomes blocked or stagnant, we become ill.
When it is unblocked—by magnets, or by the doctor’s own ‘animal magnetism’—we become well again.