CHAPTER X

EXPERIMENTS, DOMESTIC AND OTHER There are certain parlour tricks which have an attractive flavour of the occult and sometimes form an introduction to it. Most of us have seen children mystified by a thought-reading performance depending upon a more or less obvious code, but sometimes we are treated to one which is more genuine. The procedure is something like this: One person goes out of the room and the others decide that on his return he shall perform an action such as unlacing a shoe or pushing on the hands of a clock to a certain hour. Then he returns and, according to arrangement, may be blindfolded or not, and one of the party may or may not place a hand upon his shoulder; the audience next 'concentrate their minds' upon what the performer is to do, whilst he 'makes his mind a blank'. Sometimes success follows, and the result is taken as proof of 'thought-reading'. Now let us examine the process in the light of what we have assumed in previous chapters. To make the mind a blank, if it means anything, means to cut off the stream of consciousness, and we straightway have our old friend a dissociation. The performer is then in a state resembling hypnosis, and, as we have seen before, in hypnosis the senses may be abnormally sharpened. This sharpness, together with the receptivity of the subject, makes him ready to pick up the faintest signs, and in the case where the hand of a second person, also concentrating his mind on the desired action and therefore to a certain extent dissociated, is placed upon his shoulder, there are easily conveyed enough pressure-signs to indicate when he is going right or wrong. When there is no actual contact other indications than touch are not lacking. The passing expressions of pleasure or disappointment on the faces of the audience, the sigh of relief when a wrong step is retraced, the glances at the object to be handled, are all picked up by the dissociated stream whilst the main personality of the subject is for the time almost obliterated. We must bear in mind that all the audience are concentrating their minds, that concentration of mind upon an action is likely to be followed by movements corresponding to the action, and that no one is watching his neighbour or suspects any such unconscious indications. The thought-reading is not performed without prolonged pauses, the subject making several halting steps before the right one is taken. It reminds one of the manner in which the medium feels his way to the thoughts of his victims. Domestic blindfolding is not very efficient, and may be of use to the subject by allowing him to look without the direction of his glances being noticed. So this thought-reading is reduced to the children's game of 'Hot and Cold', but instead of fully conscious people producing and receiving sounds we have a group of 'concentrated' (that is, partly dissociated) streams sending out indications to be picked up by a hypersensitive dissociated stream. The subject is often exhausted by his efforts, and the performance is not likely to be of benefit to any one who misinterprets it. The human mind contains enough errors without producing a voluntary dissociation further to deceive its owner. There is one well-known experiment the significance of which is generally missed. If the reader is not familiar with it let him follow these directions and he will probably find that he is possessed of some amount of so-called hypnotic power. Having procured a weight fastened to a short cord (a heavy watch with its chain will serve), direct a friend to sit in a chair and, resting his elbows upon his knees, to hold the cord by the fingers of both hands so that the weight is suspended between his separated knees. Let him keep his eyes upon the weight and assure him that it will begin to swing from knee to knee. The weight, at first indecisively wobbling, will soon take on the swing you describe, which will gradually increase in amplitude. I have heard people ascribe this motion to 'magnetic power'--blessed words that mean nothing, but serve to give an appearance of reason to an explanation that should satisfy no one. The real cause of the motion is shown if you experiment with a fresh subject, who must know nothing of the first trial. Ask him to hold the weight in the same manner but, standing in front of him, tell him the weight will swing towards you (that is, at right angles to its swing in the first experiment). If you show sufficient assurance you will probably succeed in both experiments, but your chance of success is less than that of the man who has seen the trick and accepts the 'magnetic' explanation, for his belief in the physical cause of the phenomenon will give him a natural assurance which is lacking in one who realises that the weight swings in a certain direction because the agent is made to believe that it will. It is plain that your friend swings the weight himself, but he is unaware of two factors: He knows nothing of his own muscular action and nothing of his own mental processes which have produced that action; hence this experiment must be placed among the automatisms like table-turning and water-divining. One is prepared to find that the trick has its place among the mechanical adjuncts of spiritualism: it was used in ancient times as a means of divination, and is used by mediums of to-day when they tap out spirit revelations with a gold ring suspended in a glass tumbler. If intelligent people like your friends can be made to believe that the weight is moved by some extraneous force, it can be understood that the trained medium, full of a belief in the supernatural, finds it an easy task to let the unconscious have possession of his or her muscular actions and spell out memories and fantasies which one is asked to accept as evidence of spirit control. Planchette (described in Chapter IV) finds a place in the family circle, sometimes with the result that a single hit becomes a tradition after all the other stuff has faded from memory. A friend, who told me that he saw Planchette predict truly the month in which the Boer War ended, admitted that his family had toyed with the instrument night after night, but he failed to remember any other results. I must add that he never believed in the thing, but, nevertheless, the one lucky shot was remembered. Table-turning is another half-way house between the parlour trick and the full-blown occult. Several people sit round a light table with their hands placed upon it, and, after due 'concentration of mind', aided often by a dim light, the table begins to move and the spirits are at work. Then a sort of Morse code is invented to communicate with the spirit entities, and the revelations begin. Here I will quote from page 219 of _Raymond_, that widely-circulated book by Sir Oliver Lodge:-- 'During the half-hour ... I had felt every now and then a curious tingling in my hands and fingers, and then a much stronger drawing sort of feeling through my hands and arms, which caused the table to have a strange intermittent trembling sort of feeling, though it was not a movement of the _whole_ table.... Nearly every time I felt these queer movements Lady Lodge asked, "Did you move, Woodie?" ... Lady Lodge said it must be due to nerves or muscles, or something of the sort.' Compare this with the feelings of the water-diviner (Chapter V):-- 'The muscles of the arm become contracted when the bodily magnetism is affected by the presence of water.... I suppose it must have something to do with the composition of the blood and nerve cells.' Or with those of a hysteric who, previously relieved from mutism, was again struck dumb during a thunderstorm: ... 'I felt the electricity passing all over my body; it made all my muscles quiver and then went out at my finger-tips.' No one can deny the reality of these feelings, as feelings, but in the first instance they are due to spirits, and in the next to water, and only in the case of the man known to be sick in mind is the real explanation likely to be accepted by the subject. They are all products of imagination, suggestion, self-deceit, or dissociation--call it what you please if you understand that the feelings have their origin in the mind of the subject and are not due to any external cause. But in the first two examples they are associated with muscular movements which, we must believe, are carried out unknown to the doers and hence have their source in a dissociated stream. As usual, once the dissociation is established, there is no limit to its manifestations. Picture three or four Dissociates at work at a table, all bent upon producing signs of the marvellous, all blind to the mechanism at work, and with the hypersensitiveness of the dissociated stream ready to draw on the memories of the unconscious. Mixed with this is the possibility of more elaborate deceit: when the hands of all are raised from the table their knees may still be under it; and if the knees are clear of it a blackened lath concealed up a sleeve can still work miracles. This is taking us beyond the purely domestic, but there is no difference between the after-dinner tilting of the table for amusement and the same thing done at a seance--the mechanism is the same, but one is treated as a jest whilst the other is something worse. We see again the typical series with simple trickery at one end and reason-destroying dissociation at the other. Palmistry seems too absurd to be discussed, but it is another half-way house. That the lines of Life, or Love, or what-not, are to be found on the palms of dead-born babies and of monkeys should be enough to stop the cult; but handbooks of palmistry seem to profit their publishers, and the palmists and clairvoyants flourish. The girl who buys a handbook and amuses her friends by reading their hands is comparatively harmless, though even she, becoming shrewd to note when she hits the mark, is likely to develop an unconscious receptivity and drift into fraud. Crystal-gazing is a form of mediumism admirably fitted to give play both to trickery and dissociation. Used by the medium to 'see as in a glass darkly' and gain time for the help of his or her receptivity, it also allows of the induction of a self-hypnosis, the memories or fancies from the unconscious showing themselves as visions in the crystal. Table-turning is easily first among the ways of giving rein to the unconscious. It has the advantage of allowing several people to play the same game at once, and further of allowing one Dissociate to work the miracle, whilst no one, not even the Dissociate himself, knows who is doing it. This is illustrated in _The New Revelation_, p. 19, where Sir Arthur says: 'Some one, then, was moving the table; I thought it was they. They probably thought that I did it.' _The Gate of Remembrance_[18] gives an illustration of tapping the unconscious and producing results that seem astonishing. [Footnote 18: By F. B. Bond; Blackwell, Oxford.] Two gentlemen, Mr. F. B. Bond and his friend J. A. I., had devoted years of study to the archaeology of Glastonbury, exploring every available source of information in history or tradition and thinking hard and often about the Edgar Chapel, a part of the Abbey whose site was undetermined. After this preparatory storing up of memories and thoughts in the unconscious, they proceeded to tap them. I quote from page 18:-- 'What was clear enough was the need of somehow switching off the mere logical machinery of the brain which is for ever at work combining the more superficial and obvious things written on the pages of memory, and by its dominant activity excluding that which a more contemplative element in the mind would seek to revive from the half-obliterated traces below.' Recognising an old friend, we are not surprised to find that automatic writing was the means employed to switch off the main stream of consciousness and produce a dissociation. I find myself more in accord with the writer than reviews had led me to expect, for he disclaims 'the action of discarnate intelligences from the outside upon the physical or nervous organisation of the sitters' (p. 19). The automatic writing is apparently controlled by Richard Bere, Johannes, and other influences which would be welcomed by spiritualists as 'objective entities'; but the writer gives his opinion regarding Johannes (p. 50) as follows: 'Whether we are dealing with a singularly vivid imaginative picture or with the personality of a man no one can really decide.' Here I must differ and claim to have decided, for myself at least, that no personality other than that of the actual writer was concerned. The record of hysterical phenomena contains so many similar 'personalities' that I find no reason to call in the supernatural to account for this one. If a natural explanation is available we must not appeal to the supernatural; I am sure that F. B. B. is not unacquainted with Occam's razor--miracles must not be unnecessarily multiplied. Since the writer does not stress the supernatural, and allows me to credit to his unconscious the poetical imaginings produced in the script and the 'veridical passages' concerning the discoveries of the Edgar Chapel, I have no need to criticise them, especially as he is scrupulous in giving credit to the conscious predictions of others when they hit the mark. The book is a record of an experiment--successful from the psychological point of view--carried out by two Dissociates who _knew what they were doing_; the dissociated streams were entirely out of their control, and although I must, from the psychological standpoint, class the experiment with the other dissociations described in this book, yet it is far from my purpose to class the experimenters with 'Feda' and others of her kind. The earlier chapters of this book were written before I read _The Gate of Remembrance_, but whoever reads the conclusion in the latter book will find many opinions in agreement with those in my chapter on the unconscious. Table-turning, water-divining, automatic writing, thought-reading, and the use of the pendulum are examples of a psychological automatism in which the agent is conscious neither of the muscular movements concerned nor, what is more important, of the mental processes producing them. They can be cultivated to provide amazing results in tapping the memories of the unconscious, and if the agents remain in ignorance of their true mechanism a systematised delusion is built up and accepted as proof of the supernatural.