Manchester meltdown A reader asks me why I don't write more about myself in this column ? Well, I write about what interests me, and there are a lot of things I find interesting enough to write about. However, as it happens, I was involved in a very unusual incident recently, so here is my version of what happened. The scene was the banquet held in Manchester last December to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Jewish Telegraph, for which I write a regular column. Before we sat down, I was introduced to the Lord mayor of Liverpool, who was wearing his ceremonial gold chain and a very handsome diamond-encrusted gold and enamel medallion. On the back of this, a gold disc with an inscription had been fastened by six rivets. I admired this piece as we shook hands, but joked that maybe I shouldn't get too near it just in case...Then we sat own at separate tables at least 20 feet apart, my neighbor being the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester for whom I bent a spoon. We had just begun our meal when there was a great commotion at the Mayor's table - at first I was afraid somebody had dropped dead. However, all was well except with the Mayor's medallion. Here is what he told one of the reporters who were present : "I was just leaning forward to reach for the pepper when I heard and felt a rattle around my neck, and found the back piece of the jewel hanging outward and bending." All six of the rivets had somehow worked loose or melted, bending to the extent where the gold disc came loose in the Mayor's hands. It was also slightly bent. The jeweler to whom it was taken for repair said "You might expect the odd rivet to come loose but for all of them to drop out and bend at once is bizarre...In my entire professional life as a jeweler I have never seen anything like this." Nor have I. I have never bent a piece of gold before, the nearest I came being when I broke a silver spoon and bent the sword on a statue at Longlear, with the Marquess of Bath's permission. (The objects are now on display there). And I don't think I have ever bent even a teaspoon in front of so many reporters and distinguished witnesses. The Mayor took it very well. He told reporters, "I know some people say Geller is a magician, but I don't. I accept that he has psychic powers. He had not touched the jewel at any time." True, but I don't think my psychic powers were responsible on this occasion - I suspect what happened was that when we met, I seeded his mind with the thought that something could happen and his psychic powers, not mine, did the rest. It was an example of what hypnotists call indirect suggestion, when you suggest something without actually saying it, and I've heard it said that this is far more effective than direct suggestion, because there is less resistance to it. I would love to know how exactly incidents like this one can happen. There's certainly no explanation in terms of science as we know it. Maybe there never will be one, scientists finding it less trouble to write me off as a magician (like the Mayor I suppose). However, I reckon the Manchester meltdown was an example of just what the mind can do, even accidentally, and gave an idea of what it could do without destroying anything. I reckon scientists, especially psychologists, still have a lot to learn. While I am blowing my own trumpet, I'd just like to mention an item that appeared in the November 16th edition of Autosport. It's columnist "Pit Bull" had come across the account of how I bent a chrome vanadium spanner in the pit at Silverstone in 1998 in Guy Lyon Playfair's excellent book MindForce (available from Tesco). Obviously he didn't believe it and asked readers if any of them had seen me doing it. One of them had indeed and described what he saw in the November 23rd issue : "he bent the spanner", he wrote. "It came straight from one of the mechanics' cabinets, and Uri had no way of having touched or even seen the spanner before he made it droop over to one side." A similar spanner was bent recently on a strain gauge at Imperial College, London, and needed a force of more than 6 kilonewtons to get it to the same angle, about 30 degrees. That's the equivalent of more than half a ton, and whatever bent it was definitely not any physical powers. Finally, a flashback to the 1987 edition of my book The Geller Effect, where I mention (page 365) meeting a group of US senators including "a man who could well be a future US president - Albert Gore". Well, he came close, and many believe he should be the current president, he does plan to stand in 2004. February 2001 The Crystal Effect There is something about crystals that has fascinated people ever since history was recorded. The Chaldeans, the egyptians and the ancient greeks all used them for all kinds of purposes, both decorative and practical. In fact, crystal technology is one of the oldest there is and it is used today more than ever, from the first wireless sets to the NASA spacecraft, whose astronauts carried special aluminium cards containing crystals chaged at 7.85Hz, the so-called Schumann resonance - the fundamental mechanical vibration reate of the earth -ionosphere cavity - to help them cope with weightlessness and absence of the natural magnetic field of earth. It's well known that crystals are good conductors of energy because of the piczoelectric effect, whereby a crystal under pressure converts one form of energy to another, and it's memory storage capacity has made this ancient mineral vital to the modern computer. They have also been used for centuries as "crystal balls" in which people claim to be able to see things and foretell the future by what the Greeks called crystallomancy. I became seriously interested in crystals in the mid-eighties. Upto then I had been a bit dubious about claims that they could actually affect people, and I wondered what people who called themselves 'Crystal healers' thought they were doing apart from conning people. When I read on the first page of a book about crystals thats Atlantis was destroyed by misuse of crystal power (Plato clearly says it was destroyed in a flood), I didn't bother to read any further. Then, soon after I had moved into my present house, I saw a picture of a huge quartz crystal, a foot wide and more than two feet high, in an auctioneers catalogue, and I decided to buy it for my entrance hall just as an ornament. I had no idea it could be anything else. Then, one day my six year old son had a very nasty accident, falling over the banister on to the marble floor beside the crystal on it's podium. He was rushed to hospital and well treated, and I spent a sleepless night. Getting up very early, I made some coffee and was walking past the crystal when I suddenly saw a beam of light emanating from one of it's facets. It shot across the hall almost like a laser beam, breaking into thousands of little prisms on the wall. This effect lasted for about twenty seconds, long enough to be sure that I was not hallucinating. It was a greay morning with no sun, and I even checked to see if anyone was shining a torch through the window. I still have no idea what produced this extraordinary effect which has never been repeated. All I know is that it made a powerful and lasting impression on me. If any reader has a normal explanation for it, I would be glad to hear it. It seems to me that there is a good deal of research to be done into crystals and the way in which their energies interact with ours, which they certainly can do. I have found (quite by chance) that I can make natural crystals get very hot just by holding them in my hand, and I like to give small 'hot' crystals to sick children, telling them they will act as a good luck charm. I never claim that the crystal will heal them, although I believe- it can act as a placebo that helps put people in a positive frame of mind, and so enhance their immune systems. Whether it also transmits energy remains to be seen. I am not the only person who has had a unexpected experience with a crystal. For the past twenty years the Dragon Project Trust headed by author Paul Devereux has been studying ancient sites all over the world and measuring their energies. He and his colleagues have seen (and photographed) light emanating from crystal-bearing stones, they have recorded ultrasonic pulses and have even been given electric shocks by them. Their Quartz watches have frequently gone haywire on site, but they have also reported getting a kind of energy-charge after a day among the stones. And English Heritage Inspector has even reported seeing a rainbow above the ancient site of Carn Ingli in Wales - after sunset! Curiously enough Britains best known site, Stonehenge seems to be the only one where no magnetic anomalies have been recorded. When you think of the enormous effort involved in building those stone circles, it is obvious that they were not just decorations in the landscape, but were built for practical purposes, perhaps for healing or for altering consciousness. A House of Lords select committee recently declared that crystal therapy was one of the 'unacceptable' alternative therapies but while we cannot yet say exactly what crystals do to people, there seems no doubt they can do something that was of great importance to the ancient circle builders. Perhaps they knew something about natural energies and ways of converting them that we have forgotten? Information on the Dragon Project Trust : Read Uri Geller's stunning online novel, Nobody's Child, at www.uristory.com. Visit him at www.urigeller.com and email him at urigeller@compuserve.com Jan 2001 I got biorhythm ? About a century ago a Viennese psychologist named Hermann Swoboda announced his discovery that the state of his patients' minds seemed to go up and down in regular cycles of 23 and 28 days. The first was their physical "biorhythm" and the second was their emotional one. When the lines of the two cycles crossed each other on the baseline of the chart, this was a 'critical day' when something unwelcome was unlikely to happen. So the science, or as many prefer, pseudoscience of biorhythm was born. At about the same time a Berlin doctor named Wilhelm Fliess came to the same conclusions, while a few years later, an Austrian engineer, Alfred Teitscher claimed to have found yet another natural and universal body cycle, this time of 33 days. This one was supposed to govern people's intellectual performance. Swoboda designed a slide rule to help people work out their "critical days" and today you can buy watches and other gadgets that help you find out where you are in your bio-cycles. You don't really need any of them, because all you have to do is work out how many days you have lived (not forgetting the leap years) and divide the total by 23, 28 and 33. The last day which was an exact multiple of each number was the first day of your current cycle. Each cycle is now divided into halves, the first being the positive and the second the negative one. Now you draw all three cycles on a piece of chart paper so that each crosses the baseline in the middle (i.e. at 11.5 and 16.5 days). The idea of a universal biorhythm seems fairly plausible at first sight. Every form of life is affected by some kind of cycle, the most obvious one being the 24-hour period of day and night. This has a direct effect on most of our vital functions, as we know only too well when we take a long jet flight and become completely desynchronised, sometimes taking several days to recover from jetlag. The month is also an important cycle, and a somewhat confusing one s there are several different months, the most important being the period between full moons (29.53 days) and the period between lunar perigees, when the moon comes close to earth (27.55 days). Considering what a dramatic effect the moon has on our oceans as it causes tides to ebb and flow, it wouldn't be surprising if it had some effect on our bodies, which after all are full of water. Are there tides in us ? Apparently there are. A Californian doctor named Laughton Miles did some fascinating research with a blind patient of his, and found that his body functions had become phase-locked with the lunar day - the time it takes for the moon to go onceround the earth (24.84 hours). The man would even go to sleep exactly at the same time of the local low tide. He had of course never even seen the moon and had no normal way of knowing where it was on his own. It cannot be mere coincidence that the most important physical cycle of all, the female menstrual cycl, is close to that of a lunar month and could well have been locked on to it in the days before we lived in cities. JHowever - and this is where pop biorhythm theory begins to fall apart, there are no known natural cycles of exactly 28 days, or of 23, or of 33 days. No supporter of the theory has yet suggested what might be causing any of these cycles, and you cannot have an effect without a cause. Another problem is that a good deal of research hs gone to show that we certainly do have biorhythms, but not of universal and exact lengths. Sixty years ago, Dr. Rexford Horsey made a detailed long-term studt of a group of factory workers and found they did indeed have emotional cycles at least, but they varied in length from 16 to 63 days, averaging around 33 days (which is supposed to be the intellectual cycle). Another researcher, Cr. leonard Ravitz, found another genuine biorhythm in the body's natural electricity, the most prominent cyclic fluctuations being from 14 to 17 days and 28 to 29 days in length. Again, it looks as if the moon was responsible for this. The only way to be sure if you have any biorhythms is to measure them yourself. The easiest method id the one Hersey used - he got his subjects to keep a record of how they felt, ranging from +3 for feeling great to -3 for feeling terrible. He only looked for emotional cycles, but you can keep scores for your physical and intellectual cycles as well and wait to see if a pattern emerges. My guess is that we all - men as well as women - have a cycle that is close to but not exactly 28 days, caused by the motions of the moon. The other two cycles, if they exist, are caused by circumstances beyond our control, and since there is nothing we can do about them, we may as well forget them. Sick Building Syndrome Does your office make you sick ? I don't mean that you just don't like it for whatever reason, but that it actually makes you physically ill. If no, you are suffering from what has come to be known in the last 20 years as Sick Building Syndrome. This is now recognized by the World Health Organisation, and it is reckoned to cause the loss of millions of pounds a year in loss of production and absenteeism due to sickness. A survey carried out in 1987 found that a staggering 80 percent of office workers were made ill by their daytime environments, symptoms ranging from lethargy (57 percent), stuffy nose (47 percent), dry throat and eyes (45 percent) to headaches (43 percent). Chief culprits were viruses and spores coming out of the air conditioning, fluorescent tubes giving out light of a kind quite unlike natural daylight, (often flickering as well), ozone coming out of photocopiers, plus all kinds of vapors, fibres and volatile organic compounds originating in carpets and furniture. On top of all that was the feeling of claustrophobia and isolation from real life felt by people who spent all day staring at a computer screen under a low ceiling beside a tinted window that, of course, they couldn't open. All of this combines to create what environmentalists call a 'sub-lethal environment', one in which while we may not be struck dead the minute we walk into an office, we can e steadily and imperceptibly weakened over the years, to the point where our natural resistance to serious disease just collapses. In some buildings the problem is really serious, especially, it seems, the brand new ones such as the handsome Public Record Office at Kew, London which had to close down soon after it's opening for a complete overhaul of the air conditioning. Another state of the art building, the hospital claimed as the most technically advanced in Britain, Fenland House in Peterborough, certainly made it's staff sick, whatever it did for the patients. A local union official was reported as being "inundated with complaints from staff about the working conditions". Another union survey found that an alarming 40 per sent of the staff at the huge new Kensington Town suffered from 'afternoon malaise'. To ad to all this misery, office workers who complain are often made to feel worse by members of management refusing to admit that there is a problem. There have certainly been improvements lately, with increasing use of pot plants and bright paintings to cheer people up, but can't help feeling there is a wider problem here. It isn't just the sick buildings, but a whole sick lifestyle of agonizing journeys to work in crowded trains or traffic jams moving slower than a dying snail, hastily gobbled mouthfuls of junk food and fizzy drinks, another ordeal getting home and another evening glued to the television. Where has the real life gone ? There are some encouraging signs that all this is about to change, or at least to begin to change here and there as far as domestic buildings are concerned. There has been a lively 'biohouse' movement in Germany for some years, based on the principle that natural materials are better for use than synthetic ones. The large Schlatbruhl housing estate near Tubingen was built with such devotion to eco-principles that the architects even had special paint made that is colored only by natural plant dyes. One of the more immediate results reported by those who first moved to the new bio-estate was how much better they felt in general and how less often they were ill. Another was that although there are nearly 4000 people living on the estate, crime and vandalism are virtually unknown. There seems to be a pretty obvious lesson to be learned here. Another place of good news comes from Turkey, where teams of architects from MIT are planning housing for the victims of the recent devastating earthquakes there. They too plan to use only natural materials and traditional Turkish design instead of putting up soulless chunks of concrete. Telepathy and Twins As I mentioned in my July column, the first scientists to take a serious interest in twins was Sir Francis Galton. In an article first published in 1875, he noted that he had found "a similarity in the association of their ideas" in eleven out of thirty-five twins he studies. He did not use the word telepathy, of course, because it hadn't been invented then (it was coined by Frederick Myers in 1882). It was a very long time before anybody looked more thoroughly in to the twin connection. Not until 1961, in fact when a team of psychologists from Toronto published their reports on it. They never actually got around to doing any experiments, but they did question total of 35 twins, the same number as Galton studied, and came up with exactly the same percentage of those who had felt they had experienced some kind of telepathy with their brothers and sisters. This is the kind of thing they reported "Yes, I know frequently when something goes wrong." "Once when my sister had cut her hand, I could feel the pain in my hand ." " I can imagine what he's doing and see the place...even if I've never been there." The Toronto team took a closer look at the twins who had experienced this kind of thing, and found they had three things in common. Firstly, they were absolutely identical, and they had been brought up together, going to the same schools. Secondly, they were extraverts rather than introverts by nature, and finally they had no problem admitting the possibility of telepathy. Again it was to be a long time before anybody followed up their recommendations. In Fact, as far as I have been able to discover, the first really large - scale survey of twin telepathy was not published until 1987 when a private researcher and mother of twins named Mary Rosambeau received six hundred replies after making an appeal in the national press. Her questionnaire included all aspects of twinhood, and two of the questions she asked were if they had thought they had ever read their twin's mind, and if they had ever had the same pain or illness at the same time ? A total of 187 said yes, they had almost exactly the same percentage as Galton and the Toronto team had reported. Mary Rosambeau made an important discovery. Telepathy between identical twins, she found, always involved bad news an accident, illness or death. Or it could be just one twin "just knowing" that the other was in some kind of distress. She did not come across a single case of a twin picking up good news. This probably explains why the few laboratory experiments that have been done have produced pretty unexciting results. The ideal experiment from the researcher's point of view (but not the subject's) would be to give one twin a whack on the head and see if the other reacted at a distance! Actually, two experiments along these lines have been carried out, one of them in public though without causing any harm to anybody. In 1975, a team of Spanish doctors and psychologists set up an experiment in the home of two four-year-old girls, which was disguised as a routine medical checkup. The father took one little girl to an upstairs room, where there was a camera running as there was in the downstairs room where the other twin, with her mother, was given a number of tests by the doctor in charge. First, he tapped her on the knee to get a knee-jerk reflex. He got it, and so did he upstairs twin, who began to kick so wildly that her father had to hold her leg down! Then the downstairs one had a bright light shone into her eye. The upstairs one began to blink rapidly. Then she shook her head and held her nose her sister was being given a noseful of a strong scent. As it happened, on the day of the researchers' visit, one of the girls had banged her head on a door, whereupon the other one burst into tears, which her other sister did not. Their parents reported numerous similar incidents once, one of them was ten miles away with her grandparents when she burned her hand on a clothes iron, causing a large blister to appear. At exactly the same time a red spot of the same size appeared on her twin's hand in exactly the same place. The second experiment was included in Paul McKenna's 1997 series of TV programmes on the paranormal. One twin sat in the studio in front of a large audience (and several million viewers) and was just told to relax and look at the large pyramid a few feet in front of her. As she did so, her sister was in another part of the building wired up to a polygraph and watched by a leading expert. The chart showed a sudden peak at the very moment that the pyramid exploded in a cloud of colored smoke. "Looks like a surprise," the expert commented. I hope more experiments of this kind will be done to make clear what perhaps one third of identical twins already know : telepathy does happen, but only under certain conditions. I hope we don't have to wait another hundred years before everybody reaises this. August 2000 Thoughts through spaceIn April, BBC Radio 2 invited me (at rather short notice) to come into the studio for a chat with Lynn Parsons about an item that had appeared in the independent (April 17) headed, "Arctic explorer tries to be a mind reader. It described how arctic explorer David Mills just set off from somewhere in Canada in an attempt to break the record for solo walk to the north pole. which meant that he would have to cover 420 miles in 55 days, arriving around mid-June. It was not to be an entirely normal expedition. Mr. Mill, who studied psychology at London University, is also interested in parapsychology (the branch of science that reaches the other parts that scientists cannot reach). he planned to while away some of the time he would spend tramping over the ice and snow in a series of attempts to record images being transmitted to him - not by radio, but by telepathy, from an unnamed team somewhere in the U.K At the end of the experiment, Dr. Caroline Watt, a research fellow at the Koestler parasychology unit at Edinburgh University would study the results. She would assess whther Mr. Mills impressions matched the images beamed to him at a significant degree, ir of nothing more than chance/guesswork was involved. Dr. Watt mentioned that the experiment hoped to repeat that of the famous explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins in the 1930's, who did indeed seem able to communicate mind to mind with a friend in New York. Now as it happens, I met a friend briefly soon after I arrived in The U.S.A in the seventies, and did not know much about who was who in the psychic world. His name was Harold Sherman, a successful writer who also had remarkable abilities in the area of telepathy and clairvoyance. He had just published his ESP manual (1972), one of the best practical guides to expanding the mind I know of. One of his dozen or so books was Thoughts through space (1942) in which he tells the whole story of what has to be the most remarkable series of experiments of their kind ever recorded. It all began when Wilkins was chewing the fat with his friend and fellow club member in New York about his forthcoming plan to search for a russian aeroplane missing on a flight from Moscow over the Arctic Ocean. He knew that communication was going to be difficult- susnspot activity in 1937 was the highest nearly recorded for nearly 70 years, meaning that his radio link would be very unreliable. It was in fact frequently knocked out altogether. So, Sherman, suggested, why don't we see if teleppathy gets through when radio doesn't ? Wilkins liked the idea. He remembered from his boyhood in Australia that the Aborigines made regular use of telepathy and precognition, so he knew it could be done. Sherman was equally convinced by his many years of experience of psi phenomena. They agreed on a routine: Wilkins would keep a diary, sending it when he could in installments to a third party for witnessing, and Sherman would note down his impressions picked up at prearranged times. These would also be witnesses as they were made, so nobody could accuse either man of fiddling with data after the event. Wilkins headed north on 25th October 1937, and over the next five months Sherman was able to record a total of 68 reports containing nearly 300 specific statements. The results were astonishing. As Wilkins himself concluded "You seem to get all the very strong thoughts and sense the vivid conditions". Not surprisingly, I got a lot about ice, snow, and cold, but some of his impressions seemed quite out of place. One evening, for example he wrote "You in company, men in miitary attire....evening dress, important people....You appear to be in evening dress yourself." Who would imagine that an Arctic explorer would be in evening dress? However, on the evening in question Wilkins had been invited to an armistice Ball attended the local top brass - and yes, Wilkins was wearing (borrowed) evening dress suit. Soon after that direct hit, Sherman scored another. "Some kind of banquet...seem to see it held in church..connection school, standing in front of the blackboard, chalk in hand, you give short talk". At the time, Wilkins was attending a banquet in Missionaires' House, Point Barrow- about 4000 miles from New York- and that day he had given a short talk to the school children. Yet another coincidence of course. So it went on and on. Sherman made notes about a fire, a funeral, a ladder, and a diamond mine. Wilkins had seen both a fire and a funeral, had nedde to use a ladder, and did have toothache. Infact, the only time when psi-communication seemed to go adrift was when they were doing some card guessing. Wilkins found this tedious and clearly did not try very hard and results were close to chance. This is just what Mt. Mill and his team is doing right as I write this (in May) and I would not be surprised if they got the same result, as I told Lyn Parsons in April. Wilkins succeeded because his survival was at stake and he had worked out a code for emergency signals which luckily he never had to use whereas Mr. Mills team seem to be merely carrying out an academic exercise. And Telepathy usually only works when it has to work. Alfred Russel
Wallace - Part 2 In an earlier column, in the May edition, I pointed out that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently worked out theories of evolution by natural selection and presented them in the same meeting in 1858, were very different in their beliefs. Darwin is seen today by many as the man who did away with God as creator of the universe and introduced a rationalist, materialistic view of life. Wallace, who disagreed with his friend over a number of details, had a completely different approach. Let's hear how he came to his conclusion in his own words. "During twelve years of tropical wanderings between the years 1848 and 1862, occupied in the study of natural history, I heard of the strange phenomena said to be happening in America and Europe under the general names of "Table-turning" and "Spiritrapping"; and being aware, from my own knowledge of Mesmerism, that there were mysteries connected with the Human Mind which modern medicine ignored because it could not explain [them], I determined to seize the first oppurtunity on my return home to examine into these matters. And that is just what he did. His interest in Mesmerism went back to the early days as a school master, when he had carried out experiments in "community of sensation". A mesmerist and a subject were able to blend their respective consciousness to the point where, for example, if somebody pinched or stuck a pin into the mesmerist, the subject would feel the pain. Similarly if the mesmerist took a mouthful of salt or sugar, the subject would also taste the stuff. Sounds weird? Maybe, but if we accept Wallace's feelings as a naturalist, why not accept his opinion that "the sympathy of sensation between my patient and myself to me was the most mysterious phenomenon I had ever encountered ?" He was soon to encounter more. On 22 July 1865 he went to visit a sceptical lawyer friend, and this, according to the notes he wrote immediately afterwards, is what happened : "Sat with my friend, his wife and two daughters, at a large low table, by daylight. In about half an hour some faint motions were perceived and some faint taps heard. They gradually increased; the taps became very distinct, and the table moved considerably, obliging us all to shift our chairs. Then a curious vibratory motion of the table commenced, almost like the shivering of a living animal. I could feel it upto my elbows." This went on for two hours, and afterwards the five of them tried to repeat what they had just experienced by normal means, but without success. They held about a dozen more sessions, and Wallace then got a group of friends and relatives to sit in his home, and they were even more succesfull, being able to produce "tapping, rapping, thumping, slapping, scrathing and rubbing sounds," and eventually to get all four legs of the table a foot from the ground. Anyone who suspects Wallace made all this up, or had suddenly gone crazy, should bear in mind that several others reported identical results with their tables. These included the eminent French politician and aristrocat Count Agenore de Gasparin and a Swiss Astronomer, Professor Marc Thury. Gasparin was convinced that he had discovered a genuine phenomenon, and insisted that "it can neither be explained by the mechanical action of our muscles, nor by the mysterious action of spirits". Thury's own conclusions were : "Firstly the will, in a certain state in the human organism, can act at a distance on inert bodies, by a mean other than muscular action and secondly under the same conditions, thought can be directly communicated from one individual to another in an unconscious manner," That was written nearly 150 years ago, long before such words as Telekinesis and Telepathy came into the language. Wallace did his best to get his fellow scientists interested in his findings, but with litle success. The only one prepared to look into this strange new force was a brilliant young man named William Crookes, who had ben elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 31. (He later became it's president and received a knighthood) Wallace attended one of the many experimental sittings Crookes held with the star medium of the day, Daniel Douglas Home (more about him in a later column) and kept up his interest in psychic matters until his death in 1913, aged 90. Some of his ideas were well ahead of their time. For instance, writing about ten years before Einstein was born, he noted that "matter is essentially force, and nothing but force" and it was obvious that some force, atleast, originated in the human mind, he argued that : "If, therefore, we have traced one force, however minute, to an origin in our own will, while we have no knowledge of any other primary cause of force, it does not seem an improbable conclusion that all force may be will-force" Darwin, I'm sure would not have agreed with him what he wrote next : "....and thus, that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually is the will of higher intelligence or of one Supreme Intelligence "
June
2000
Are you
an identical twin? Or a parent or close relative of a pair? If so, you
may be getting tired of people asking if there really is a special link
between them, because it seems that in the majority of cases there isn't,
at least no more than there can be between any two people who are particularly
close to each other. In fact, there have been scientific experiments
carried out that showed twins to be no more special - intercommunication-wise,
than anyone else. Yet this
is not the whole story, as I discovered when I dropped in recently on
one of my regular consultant researchers, who always has something new
for me. That Morning, I had seen a piece in one of the dailies about
a twin who seemed to know that his brother had been involved in an accident,
although there seemed no normal way he could have known. Almost
the first question my friend asked me was did I know any twins, because
he was doing a research project on them and wanted to collect all the
cases he could ? (He already has a fat file of them). As it happens,
I didn't as far as I knew, and nor did he until recently, and I was
surprised to learn how little research has ever been done on what could
be quite an important matter. The first
person, I learned, who even suggested that twins might be telepathic
was the novelist Alexandre Dumas (senior). In 1844 he published a novel
called The Corsican Brothers in which the heroes are a pair of identical
twins, one of whom had this to say: "We had
to be cut apart with a scalpel, which means that however far apart we
are, we still have one and the same body, so that whatever impression
- physical or mental one of us receives has its after-effect on the
other." Later in
the story his brother is killed in a duel (in Paris). And at the same
moment he falls from his horse (while riding in Corsica) after "receiving
such a violent blow that I passed out". Indeed, he thought he had been
shot, and when he found he hadn't been, he told his companion "in that
case it's my brother who has just been killed". As indeed he had. The Corsican
Brothers never became a best-seller like The Three Musketeers or The
Count of Monte Cristo. And the critics didn't take much notice of it.
It is only mentioned in passing in one of twelve biographies of Dumas.
Nobody seems to have followed up the suggestion that twins might have
a special link until 1883, when Francis Galton published his enquiry
into Human Faculty. This book included five pages of anecdotal evidence
and Galton reckoned that about one pair in three of identical twins
really did have a special link between them. (Later research suggests
that he was right). A few years
later, three founder members of the (then) newly founded Society for
Psychical Research brought out a huge volume entitled Phantasms of the
Living in which they included several detailed accounts of inter-twin
communication at a distance. You might have thought that somebody would
have followed up with a properly conducted survey of a large sample
of twins, but nobody did. In fact it was more than fifty years later
before any respectable scientists took any notice of the subject. The one
who finally did was Horatio Newman, professor of zoology at The University
of Chicago and a twin himself. "One cannot," he wrote, "associate closely
with one-egg twins [i.e. monozygotle or identical twins] without soon
discovering that many of them regard themselves as endowed with something
like telepathic powers." Two of his graduate students happened to be
identical twins, and."both of these hard-bodied critical biologists
strongly favour the view that there is some subtle affinity between
one-egg twins that makes it possible for one to know what the other
is thinking about. They themselves have almost daily supported the view
that they are in communication without employing the ordinary media
of exchange in common use". Almost
daily, indeed Professor Newman is generally regarded as the pioneer
of modem twin research, so how come nobody seems to have taken up his
suggestion that the scientific community should have a look at twin
communication until 1961. Nearly
twenty years after be wrote the book from which the above quote is taken?
In a future column I will be telling you about the important discoveries
reported in that year by a team of psychologists from Toronto - findings
that seem to have been swept under the rug. I'll also be telling you
about some remarkable recent cases that are strikingly similar to that
of the fictional Corsican twins; and explaining why some twins seem
to be telepathic while others do not. Meanwhile,
if you are a twin or are close to a pair, please write or e-mail me
to let me know if you have had any experience of unusual communication.
I'll pass your letter on to my colleague who will contact you. Please
Indicate if you wish to remain anonymous. May 2000 Wallaceism?Since writing my January column in which I mentioned Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the theory of natural selection, I have been finding out more about a man who is less known today than he should be. Everyone has heard of Darwin, but a good many people have never heard of Wallace, or if they have, they have never read any of his many books, not even the one he generously called just Darwinism. Also, not many biologists seem to have read his contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1871). He raised a kinds of objections to his own theory, and pointed out a number of reasons why 'Darwinism' was not the answer to quite all the mysteries of life or "the all-powerful, all- sufficient, and only cause of the development of organic forms". For instance, he wrote, how do we explain the fact that primitive humans had brains that were much larger and more developed than they needed to be in order to cope with the needs of their time? "Natural selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher." The conclusion he drew from this and many other awkward facts must have horrified the atheistic Darwin. "The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms... Some more general and fundamental law underlies that of 'natural selection'." I was amused to learn that the joint presentation by Wallace and Darwin of the theory each had worked out on his own without any knowledge of what the other was up to, was a bit of a flop. When the President of the Linnean Society (where they had given their joint presentation on July Ist 1858) gave an address the following year in which he reviewed the Society's activities during 1858, he made the following memorable remark: "This year has not been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear." However, Darwin soon brought out his classic Origin of Species (1859) and the cat was well stuck into the pigeons. Feathers flew in all directions. There was the story of two devout ladies praying in church - the first said "Dear God, tell us that Mr. Darwin's theory is wrong", to which the other one added 'And if it is right, please help us cover it up". I hope those ladies kept in touch with Wallace, at least, for in 1874 he published a book that might have cheered them up. Here, he showed how far he had come since 1858. The conclusions he reached after the research he had been carrying out during the 1860s can be summarised like this: 1. Man is a duality, consisting of an organised spiritual form, evolving coincidentally with and permeating the physical body. 2. Death is the separation of this duality, and doesn't bring about any change to the spirit. 3. Our destiny is progressive intellectual and moral evolution, with the knowledge we acquire during life forming 4. The basis for our afterlife existence. Shock, horror! This is pure spiritualism, and indeed Wallace did become an ardent spiritualist, remaining one until the end of his long life - he died in 1913, aged 90. He was also a prominent member of the Society for Psychical Research, and his interest in psychical matters went way back to the 1840s when as a young schoolmaster he carried out experiments in mesmerism with some of his pupils. Then during his wandering around the world a decade later he began to read about the table-tilting craze that was sweeping Europe and the U.S.A. Almost as soon as he was back home he set about studying this at first hand in his own home. By 1865 he could write that he had earlier considered himself "so thorough and confirmed a materialist that I could not at that time find a place in my mind for the conception of spiritual existence... Facts, however, are stubborn things. The facts beat me. They compelled me to accept them as facts before I could accept the spiritual explanation of them." In a later column, I hope to describe some of these dramatic and very meticulously observed facts. Isn't it ironic that Darwinism, originally seen as a strongly anti-religious theory, has now become something very like a religion itself. And, as the eminent biologist Sir Alister Hardy pointed out, if Wallace had published first, as he would have if he had not heard about Darwin's earlier but sti ll unpublished work, "we might not be talking of Darwinism today, but of Wallaceism". February 2000, No.146 Let There Be LightThe other day I dropped in on a friend of mine who helps me now and then with research for my books and columns. It was a dull, overcast day and as we had some papers to shuffle, he asked me to come into the kitchen. "The light's better in there," he said. It certainly was. When I walked into the small room, I thought at first I was in a conservatory. Yet there was no glass roof, just two four feet fluorescent tubes in the centre of the ceiling. They looked different, somehow, and as my friend soon explained, they were indeed different. "Just a minute," he said "I'll go and get the file". (He has files on everything under the sun). While I waited, I looked at the rows of postcards on the wall. The colours really jumped off the wall at me. The bowl of fruit on the sideboard might have come straight out of a painting by Cezanne, their greens and reds were so vivid. The fills, I noticed was labeled 'F.S. Light' This, I learned stood for Full Spectrum, and what was different about it was that its tube was coated in a special way so as to make the light coming from it very similar to natural daylight. "It certainly fools the birds he said," ,if I leave the door open when it's on, they fly in here all the time, thinking they're still outdoors." I went home with a pile of photocopies and brochures from the DuroTest company in the U.S.A., who make the tubes, and Full Spectrum Lighting Ltd (for their address, see the end of this page) who import them into the United Kingdom. I was amazed by what I learned about a type of lighting I had vaguely heard of without quite knowing what it was, and confusing it with those sunlamps that give you an artificial tan, which I had never bern tempted to try when I feel like getting a suntan. I get it from the source! I discovered that there are three different ways of measuring light:
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