HOW TO CULTIVATE THE PSYCHOMETRIC FACULTY.
Class Experiments.—The sensitives are not to be magnetised or unduly influenced by positive manner and suggestions, but are to sit in their normal state (and without mental effort or straining to find out what they have in their hands), and simply give expression to their impressions—sensations, tastes, etc., if any, and no matter how strange to them these may be. Let the experimenter or operator place different metallic substances in their hands, taking care that these substances are carefully covered with tissue paper or other light substance, which will help to hide their character, and at the same time not prevent their influence being imparted, or try them with medical substances. In those sufficiently sensitive, an emetic will produce a feeling of nausea. The substance must be put down before it causes vomiting. Geological specimens can be given—a shell, a tooth, or tusk. Let the experimenter record the utterances patiently, and seek confirmation of the description from an examination of the specimen subsequently. He should not know what special specimen it is previous to the psychometer’s declared opinion. Good specimens are best. Thus a fragment of pottery, a piece of scori, or a bit of brick from, say, Pompeii would present material from which the psychometrist could glean strong and vivid impressions.
If a medical man is not satisfied as to the correct pathological conditions of his patient, he might ask the psychometer to take some article of the patient in hand, and get, in the sensitive’s own—and therefore very likely untechnical—language, what he feels and sees regarding this particular patient’s case. Unsuspected abscesses and tumours have been correctly pointed out in this way.
In the same way a correct diagnosis of character can be given in many instances more correctly, more subtle, and penetrating in detail, than estimates built upon mere external and physical signs of temperament and cranial contours.
Lay a coin on a polished surface of steel. Breathe upon it, and all the surface will be affected save the portion on which the coin lay. In a few minutes neither trace of breathing nor of the coin are likely to be seen on the surface of the polished steel. Breathe again, and the hitherto unseen image of the coin is brought to light. In like manner, everything we touch records invisibly to us that action. Hand your sensitive a letter which has been written in love or joy, grief or pungent sorrow, and let them give expression to their sensations. As the breath brought back the image on the steel, so will the nervous and the psychic impressionability of the sensitive bring to light the various emotions which actuated the writers who penned the letters. Mr. G. H. Lewes says “that he has brushed the surface of the polished plate with a camel’s-hair brush, yet on breathing upon it the image of the coin previously laid upon it was distinctly visible.” The mere casual handling of letters by intermediates will not obliterate the influence of the original writers; they have permeated the paper with their influence, so that, if a score or more of psychometrists held the paper, they would coincide, perhaps not in their language, but in their descriptions of the originals and the state of their minds while writing.
The experimenter may help, by asking a few judicious but not leading questions, to direct and guide the attention of the psychometrist. The description will be a capital delineation of the individual who wrote the letter. We have frequently tested the sincerity of correspondents, real and other friends, by this process. If the results have sometimes been unpleasant revelations, we have yet to find in any case that we have been mistaken. How is the sensitive able to glean so much of the real character of the original? one is inclined to ask. While writing, sincerity and earnestness leave a deeper impression than indifference, pretence, or ordinary come-to-tea politeness. Some letters are instinct with the writer’s identity, individuality, masculinity, earnestness, and enthusiasm. Others are lacking in these things, because the writers were devoid of these qualities, while others vary at different times. The writer writes as his soul moves him, and the writing expresses his aims and hopes as they appear to his external consciousness. While writing, his soul draws his image on the paper, and pictures out thereon his real thoughts; and when the sensitive gets hold of the letter, outstands the image of the writer and the imagery of his thoughts. The psychic consciousness of the psychometer grasps the details and describes them.
“The strange new science of psychometry” is of profound interest to all. Psychometers are to be found in every household. The whole subject is one about which a good deal more could be easily written, but this must do.
Those who desire to understand psychometry cannot do better than read up fully the literature of the subject, and those who desire to practise psychometry may do much to ascertain whether they possess the faculty in any degree; but all are warned to have nothing to do with persons who undertake to develop their powers, a self-evident absurdity.
CHAPTER V.
Thought-Transference and Telepathy.
Thought-Transference is evidently a phase of psychic perception. In some respects it bears a greater relation to feeling than sight. It is distinguished from pure clairvoyance by the result of experiment. For instance, suppose I had in the Rothesay case designed M. C., the clairvoyante, should see “a maid in the room, dressed in a black dress, with neat white collar and cuffs, wearing a nicely-trimmed white apron, and a white tulle cap with bows and streamers, or that a black-and-white spotted cat lay comfortably coiled up upon the hearth-rug, or some other strongly-projected mental image.” Now, suppose while M. C. was examining the room, she declared she saw the maid, and described her, or the cat, or other objects projected from my mind, and described these, then this would be a case of thought-transference.
There is a distinction between thought-transference and thought-reading. It is no mere fanciful distinction either. Thought-transference occurs when the ideas, thoughts, and emotions of one mind are projected by intense action and received by the sensitive and impressionable mind of another—awake or asleep is immaterial—so long as it occurs without pre-arrangement and contact.
Telepathy is a more vivid form of sudden and unexpected thought-transference, in which the intense thoughts and wishes of one person, more or less in sympathy, are suddenly transferred to the consciousness of another. The thoughts transmitted are often so intense as to be accompanied by the vision of the person, and by the sound of their voice.
Telepathy bears about the same relation to thought-transference as “second sight” does to clairvoyance. Thought-transference and clairvoyance can be cultivated. Not so telepathy and second sight. They are phenomena, which belong to the unexpected, portents of the unusual, or sudden revelations of what is, and what is about to happen. Doubtless, there are conditions more favourable than others for inception of these. One needs to be “in spirit on the Lord’s day,” or any day, before telepathic and second sight messages are secured. Hence it is noticed telepathic revelations mostly come in the quietude of the evening, just before sleep, between sleep and waking, and under similar conditions favourable to passivity and receptivity in the sensitive or percipient.
In thought-reading both operator and sensitive are aware that something is to be done, and indications, intentional or otherwise, are given to make the thought-reader find out what is required. More or less sensitiveness is required in both phases. In telepathy and thought-transference the psychic elements are in the ascendency; in thought-reading they may be more or less present, but intention, sensitiveness, and muscular contact are adequate enough, I think, to account for the phenomena, as witnessed at public entertainments—so far, at least, as these entertainments are genuine.
How do we think? what are thoughts? and how are thoughts transferred? are reasonable questions, and merit more elaborate solution than is possible in an elementary work like this.
We think in pictures: words are but vehicles of thought. In thought-transference we can successfully project actions, or a series of actions, by forming in our minds a scene or picture of what is done and what is to be reproduced. When, however, we think of a sentence consisting of few or many words, there is nothing more difficult to convey. Words belong to our external life here, and are but arbitrary expressions and signs for what in the internal or soul-life is flashed telepathically from mind to mind.
Thoughts are things for good or ill, veritable and living realities, apart from our exterior selves, independent of words. The more words, often the less thought. Try to teach a child by the slow, dry-as-dust method of words, and the road to knowledge is hard and wearisome. Convey the same thoughts by illustrations and experiments, and the child’s mind at once grasps the ideas we desire to convey.
Thoughts are living entities (how poor are words!) which our own souls have given birth to, or created in the intensity of our love, wisdom, or passion. One Eastern adept has taught, “A good thought is perpetuated as an active, beneficent power, an evil one as a malignant demon. The Hindoo calls this karma. The adept evolves these shapes consciously; other men throw them off unconsciously.” How true in our experience! The thoughts of some men blast, while those of others bless. There is wisdom in thinking deliberately, intelligently, and therefore conscientiously, not passionately, impulsively, or carelessly.
In thought-transference the reproduction of exact words and dates seems to be most difficult. Indeed, the transmission of arbitrary words and signs is apparently the most difficult. The reason, I conclude, is, ideas belong to our inner, real, and spiritual life, and names, words, and dates to our exterior existence. The ideas can be expressed in the language of the sensitive, according to culture or the want of it. If the true lineaments of the picture are given, need we be too exacting as to the special frame surrounding the picture?
Notwithstanding the difficulty in transference and the reading of the exact words, this has also been frequently done. A very high state of receptivity and sensitiveness, however, is necessary in the percipient.
An incident of exact word-reading is related by Gerald Massey, the distinguished philosopher and poet. Mr. Massey met Mr. Home at the London terminus just on his (Mr. Massey’s) arrival from Hertfordshire. Home and he entered into conversation, during which Home suddenly said “he hoped Mr. Massey would go on with his poem.”
“What did he mean?” asked Mr. Massey.
“The poem,” replied Home, “you composed four lines of just now in the train.”
This was surprising to Mr. Massey, who had actually composed, but had not written, the four lines of a new poem on the journey. Mr. Massey challenged Mr. Home to repeat the lines, which Home did word for word.
How are thoughts transferred? No one can positively say. There are theories enough—the theory of brain-waves and of a universal impalpable elastic ether, of undulating motions, or other more or less materialistic hypothesis.[E]
We know there are no psychic phenomena without their corresponding physical correlatives, and, in this life at least, these are in thoughts evolved without producing corresponding molecular changes in the brain.
We notice the human brain is capable of being, and is, acted upon daily by much less subtle influences than mental impressions. We can appreciate light impinged upon our cerebral centres at the rate of millions of undulations, and sound as the result of 20,000 to 30,000 vibrations per second. So sensitives, when in the mesmeric or psychic states, are readily acted upon, and respond as in thought-transference to our thoughts and sensations, and veritably read our minds, because of the rapport or sympathy thus established. Whether they become percipients of the nerve-vibrations which escape from our own sensoriums or not, what does it matter if they can, as they frequently do, read our minds?
“Professor Wheaton,” says Hudson Tuttle, “devised a means of illustrating sympathy. If a sounding board is placed so as to resound to all instruments of the orchestra, and connected by a metallic rod of considerable length with the sounding board of a harp or piano, the instrument will accurately repeat the notes transmitted.
“The nervous system, in its two-fold relation to the physical and spiritual being, is inconceivably more finely organised than the most perfect musical instrument, and is possessed of finer sensitiveness.
“It must not be inferred that all minds are equally receptive. Light falls on all substances alike, but is very differently affected by each substance. One class of bodies absorb all but the yellow rays, another all but the blue, another all but the red, because these substances are so organised that they respond only to the waves of the colours reflected.”
All persons do not hear alike. They receive certain sounds and are deaf to all others, although the sound-waves strike all tympanums alike. All persons do not see alike. Some perceive colours, others cannot distinguish between one colour and another, or can only see the more striking colours—fineness of shade they do not perceive. So there are individuals who cannot receive mental impressions, unless, indeed, they are conveyed in the baldest and most esoteric manner. In a word to convey and receive impressions they must be sent along the line of the least resistance, that of true sympathy. There must be one mind adequate to the projection, and another mind sufficiently sensitive to receive and record the thoughts projected.