Dhamma

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Our teacher, teaches the removal of desire and lust

 Attached to Our inner enemies

(...)


“There are, friends, wise khattiyas, wise brahmins, wise householders, and wise ascetics who question a bhikkhu when he has gone abroad—for wise people, friends, are inquisitive: ‘What does your teacher say, what does he teach?’ Being asked thus, friends, you should answer: ‘Our teacher, friends, teaches the removal of desire and lust.’

“When you have answered thus, friends, there may be wise khattiyas … wise ascetics who will question you further—for wise people, friends, are inquisitive: ‘In regard to what does your teacher teach the removal of desire and lust?’ Being asked thus, friends, you should answer: ‘Our teacher, friends, teaches the removal of desire and lust for form, the removal of desire and lust for feeling … perception … determinations… consciousness.’*

“When you have answered thus, friends, there may be wise khattiyas … wise ascetics who will question you further—for wise people, friends, are inquisitive: ‘Having seen what danger does your teacher teach the removal of desire and lust for form, the removal of desire and lust for feeling … perception … determinations… consciousness?’ Being asked thus, friends, you should answer thus: ‘If, friends, one is not devoid of lust, desire, affection, thirst, passion, and craving in regard to form, then with the change and alteration of form there arise in one sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair. If, friends, one is not devoid of lust, desire, affection, thirst, passion, and craving in regard to feeling … perception … determinations … consciousness, then with the change and alteration of consciousness there arise in one sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair. Having seen this danger, our teacher teaches the removal of desire and lust for form, the removal of desire and lust for feeling … perception … determinations … consciousness.'

“When you have answered thus, friends, there may be wise khattiyas … wise ascetics who will question you further—for wise people, friends, are inquisitive: ‘Having seen what benefit does your teacher teach the removal of desire and lust for form, the removal of desire and lust for feeling … perception … determinations … consciousness?’ Being asked thus, friends, you should answer thus: ‘If, friends, one is devoid of lust, desire, affection, thirst, passion, and craving in regard to form, then with the change and alteration of form sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair do not arise in one. If one is devoid of lust, desire, affection, thirst, passion, and craving in regard to feeling … perception … determinations … consciousness, then with the change and alteration of consciousness sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair do not arise in one. Having seen this benefit, our teacher teaches the removal of desire and lust for form, the removal of desire and lust for feeling … perception … determinations … consciousness.’

“If, friends, one who enters and dwells amidst unwholesome states could dwell happily in this very life, without vexation, despair, and fever, and if, with the breakup of the body, after death, he could expect a good destination, then the Blessed One would not praise the abandoning of unwholesome states. But because one who enters and dwells amidst unwholesome states dwells in suffering in this very life, with vexation, despair, and fever, and because he can expect a bad destination with the breakup of the body, after death, the Blessed One praises the abandoning of unwholesome states.

“If, friends, one who enters and dwells amidst wholesome states would dwell in suffering in this very life, with vexation, despair, and fever, and if, with the breakup of the body, after death, he could expect a bad destination, then the Blessed One would not praise the acquisition of wholesome states. But because one who enters and dwells amidst wholesome states dwells happily in this very life, without vexation, despair, and fever, and because he can expect a good destination with the breakup of the body, after death, the Blessed One praises the acquisition of wholesome states.

”This is what the Venerable Sāriputta said. Elated, those bhikkhus delighted in the Venerable Sāriputta’s statement. SN 22: 2

* Matter, feeling, perception, determinations, consciousness - the “five aggregates affected by clinging” (upādāna-kkhandha) are best regarded as five convenient “classes” or categories under which any arisen component of experience (in its widest sense) can be grouped for analysis and discussion; they have no existence of their own separate from the components that represent them. Their representatives do not occur separately. Also they are structurally interdependent, rather as a glass tumbler implies at once the feature of material (glass), affective (attractiveness, or the reverse or indifference), individual characteristics (shape, colour, etc.), determined utility (all these constituting the “name-and-form”), and consciousness of all this, which it is not. (Nanamoli Thera)

Hatthaka


On one occasion the Blessed One was dwelling at Āḷavī on a heap of leaves spread out on a cow track in a siṃsapā grove. Then Hatthaka of Āḷavī, while walking and wandering for exercise, saw the Blessed One sitting there. He then approached the Blessed One, paid homage to him, sat down to one side, and said to the Blessed One:

“Bhante, did the Blessed One sleep well?”

“Yes, prince, I slept well. I am one of those in the world who sleep well.”

“But, Bhante, the winter nights are cold. It is the eight-day interval, the time when snow falls. The ground trampled by the hooves of cattle is rough, the spread of leaves is thin, the leaves on the tree are sparse, the ochre robes leave one cold, and the gale wind blows cold. Yet the Blessed One says thus: ‘Yes, prince, I slept well. I am one of those in the world who sleep well.’”

“Well then, prince, I will question you about this matter. You should answer as you see fit. What do you think, prince? A householder or a householder’s son might have a house with a peaked roof, plastered inside and out, draft-free, with bolts fastened and shutters closed. There he might have a couch spread with rugs, blankets, and covers, with an excellent covering of antelope hide, with a canopy above and red bolsters at both ends. An oil lamp would be burning and his four wives would serve him in extremely agreeable ways. What do you think, would he sleep well or not, or what do you think about this?”

“He would sleep well, Bhante. He would be one of those in the world who sleep well.”

(1) “What do you think, prince? Might there arise in that householder or householder’s son bodily and mental fevers born of lust, which would torment him so that he would sleep badly?”
“Yes, Bhante.”

“There might arise in that householder or householder’s son bodily and mental fevers born of lust, which would torment him so that he would sleep badly; but the Tathāgata has abandoned such lust, cut it off at the root, made it like a palm stump, obliterated it so that it is no more subject to future arising. Therefore I have slept well.

(2) “What do you think, prince? Might there arise in that householder or householder’s son bodily and mental fevers born of hatred … (3) … bodily and mental fevers born of delusion, which would torment him so that he would sleep badly?”

“Yes, Bhante.”

“There might arise in that householder or householder’s son bodily and mental fevers born of delusion, which would torment him so that he would sleep badly; but the Tathāgata has abandoned such delusion, cut it off at the root, made it like a palm stump, obliterated it so that it is no more subject to future arising. Therefore I have slept well.”

He always sleeps well,
the brahmin who has attained nibbāna,
cooled off, without acquisitions,
not tainted by sensual pleasures.
Having cut off all attachments,
having removed anguish in the heart,
the peaceful one sleeps well,
having attained peace of mind.

AN III : 35

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Arigo - surgeon of the rusty knife

 

Author’s Note

In this story, so strange, so incredible, there are undisputed facts, facts that cannot be denied, cannot be altered even by the most obdurate skeptic.

It is an established fact that Ze Arigo, the peasant Brazilian surgeon-healer, could cut through the flesh and viscera with an unclean kitchen- or pocket-knife and there would be no pain, no hemostasis – the tying off of blood vessels – and no need for stitches. It is a fact that he could stop the flow of blood with a sharp verbal command. It is a fact that there would be no ensuing infection, even though no antisepsis was used.

It is a fact that he could write swiftly some of the most sophisticated prescriptions in modern pharmacology, yet he never went beyond third grade and never studied the subject. It is a fact that he could almost instantly make clear, accurate, and confirmable diagnoses or blood pressure readings with scarcely a glance at the patient.

It is a fact that both Brazilian and American doctors have verified Arigo’s healings and have taken explicit color motion pictures of his work and operations. It is a fact that Arigo treated over three hundred patients a day for nearly two decades and never charged for his services.

It is a fact that among his patients were leading executives, statesmen, lawyers, scientists, doctors, aristocrats from many countries, as well as the poor and desolate. It is a fact that Brazil’s former President, Juscelino Kubitschek, the creator of the capital city of Brasília and himself a physician, brought his daughter to Arigo for successful treatment. It is a fact that Arigo brought about medically confirmed cures in cases of cancer and other fatal diseases that had been given up as hopeless by leading doctors and hospitals in some of the most advanced countries in the Western world.

But none of these facts, all carefully brought together and examined, can add up to an explanation. And it is for this reason that this story is so difficult to write. The question keeps repeating itself in my mind: How am I going to write this story so that the reader will believe it – especially when I had so much trouble believing it myself until completing the research in Brazil?

Any understanding of the events here must arise from an understanding of the atmosphere and culture of Brazil itself. It is a country of contrasts, a country of vast wilderness and of bristling modern cities. São Paulo, for instance, is a city of nearly eight million, approximately twice as large as Chicago or Los Angeles. Belo Horizonte, in the plateau region northwest of Rio, is larger than Baltimore, Washington, or San Francisco. Yet it is a city little known to most people in the United States. Brazil is larger in area than the continental United States. Its population ranges from highly sophisticated intellectuals and scientists to primitive Amazon Indians.

Most important to understand in this story is the prevalence in Brazil of a willingness to accept paraphysical happenings as basic realities. This willingness cuts across all social and economic lines. In fact, it almost seems that the more sophisticated and educated the group, the more likeli- hood there is of acceptance of a philosophy known as Kardecism, springing from the writings of a nineteenth- century French mystic known as Allan Kardec, a French professor whose real name was Denizard Rivail.

The Kardecists flatly believe in the rational reality of the spirit world, and in communication with and effective use of it. They believe in reincarnation. The Kardecists are known as intellectual ‘spiritists’ who do not believe in ritual and paganism. They meet quietly, most often in private homes, and embrace most of the tenets of Christianity.

They believe, however, that they can draw on the power and knowledge of the spirit world through mediums who are carefully trained for this purpose.

Some Kardec theorists who are knowledgeable about every aspect of Freudian theory believe that ‘possession’ is a phenomenon that has been overlooked in the headlong development of modern psychotherapy, and that there is rational and viable evidence that many cases of psychosis from schizophrenia to dementia praecox could be ascribed to the phenomenon of ‘possession’ by an alleged spirit that refuses to accept the fact that he or she is dead. The spirit, whether good or bad, is said to be ‘incorporated’ in the living body of a receptive person.

This idea is mostly rejected by the modern pragmatic mind, and ‘possession’ has been summarily dismissed by medical science without either positive or negative evidence being examined until recently. Catholicism has long struggled with the problem, but remains ambivalent about it.
‘Possession’ is a very heady concept for the materialistic mind to accept or cope with. Modem parapsychology is beginning to reexamine the concept, although gingerly.

There are other signs on the horizon that foreshadow a reawakening of interest in this area, not only in Brazil but also in the United States. It may or may not have been an accident that the novel The Exorcist rode the best-seller lists for so many months. Many people do not realize that this story was based on an actual documented case of possession in the archives of the Catholic Church, and that there are many recorded cases similar to it.

Any serious exploration into this field in the United States is bound to raise eyebrows. There are many good reasons why it should. Charlatans and irresponsible writers have created so much static and high noise level, without any reliable documentation, that they defeat their own cause. Anyone exploring a strange phenomenon has to assume that the burden of proof lies on his shoulders. The more strange it is, the greater the documentation needed, and the greater the need for understatement.

No other so-called ‘psychic surgeon’ in Brazil or the world has been confirmed and documented as thoroughly as Arigo. Many reports have come from the Philippines about feats of surgery by untutored and untrained psychics there, but there has been a constant exposure of trickery in their work. Further, their lack of cooperation with medical researchers has made their case untenable.

Arigo was unique. He cooperated in every possible way with medical science in the hope that he could discover for himself the strange mechanism that created his inexplicable powers. He defies classification. What he did was vividly real. How he did it remains a mystery and a challenge for science.

John G. Fuller Westport, Connecticut

***

Nor did they know quite what to expect as far as Arigo was concerned. He had entered the small room alone. But in moments, he came back out of it, briskly.

He seemed to be totally a different person. He held his head high, almost arrogantly. His eyes, very burning and penetrating before he entered the room, were now radiantly piercing, but at the same time withdrawn, almost as if they were out of focus. They glistened in the dim light of the room. Now he spoke sharply, like a Prussian officer. The interpreters noted a thick German accent in his Portu- guese, harsh and guttural.

Arigo pointed to another sign on the wall, which read:

NO ONE WILL BE TAKEN CARE OF TODAY WHO HAS TAKEN ANY ALCOHOLIC DRINK. COME BACK TOMORROW WITHOUT ANYTHING TO DRINK.

Then, imperiously, he walked over to Puharich and Belk.

‘Come’, he said, and led them through the now-open door of his treatment room. The attendants moved the line of patients up, along the wall of the big room and into the smaller one, where the first dozen patients took their positions. Arigo summarily ordered the two Americans to stand by the table. ‘There is nothing to hide here’, he said. ‘I am happy to have you watch. I must assure you that what I do is safe – and that the people who are ill become well’. He said this with the great confidence of a Prussian general, quite out of character with his former rural bearing.


Suddenly and without ceremony, he roughly took the first man in line – an elderly, well-dressed gentleman in an impeccable gray sharkskin suit, firmly grasped his shoulders, and held him against the wall, directly under the sign THINK OF JESUS. Puharich, standing next to the man, was startled by the action, wondered what to expect next. Then, without a word, Arigo picked up a four-inch stainless steel paring knife with a cocobolo-wood handle, and literally plunged it into the man’s left eye, under the lid and deep into the eye socket.

In spite of his years of medical practice and experience, Puharich was shocked and stunned. He was even more so when Arigo began violently scraping the knife between the ocular globe and the inside of the lid, pressing up into the sinus area with uninhibited force. The man was wide awake, fully conscious, and showed no fear whatever. He did not move or flinch. A woman in the background screamed. Another fainted. Then Arigo levered the eye so that it extruded from the socket. The patient, still utterly calm, seemed bothered by only one thing: a fly that had landed on his cheek. At the moment his eye was literally tilted out of its socket, he calmly brushed the fly away from his cheek.

As he made these motions, Arigo hardly looked at his subject, and at one point turned away to address an assistant while his hand continued to scrape and plunge without letup. In another moment, he turned away from the patient completely, letting the knife dangle half out of the eye.
Then he turned abruptly to Puharich and asked him to place his finger on the eyelid, so that he could feel the point of the knife under the skin. By this time, Puharich was almost in a state of shock, but he did so, clearly feeling the point of the knife through the skin. Quickly, Puharich asked one of the interpreters to ask the patient what he felt.

The patient spoke calmly and without excitement, merely stating that although he was well aware of the knife, he felt no pain or discomfort.

Arigo, still speaking in a harsh German accent, told them that he often used this technique as either a diagnostic tool or for eye operations. To Puharich, this violated every medical technique he had known in his twenty years of experience since studying medicine at Northwestern. For Belk, who had studied psychology at Duke, the procedure was simply inconceivable. He felt limp and slightly nauseated.

Within a few moments, Arigo withdrew the paring knife from the eye, bringing out with it a smear of pus on the point. He noted it with satisfaction, then unceremoniously wiped the knife on his sport shirt and dismissed the patient.

‘You will be well, my friend’, he said. Then he called the next patient. The entire ‘examination’ had taken less than a minute.

The scene began moving so swiftly that neither Puharich nor Belk had time to collect his thoughts. Puharich was at least able to think fast enough to stop the first patient and made a quick examination of his eye. There was no laceration, no redness, no sign of irritation. The patient explained through the interpreter that he felt altogether normal, that he had had no anesthesia beforehand, and that he had complete faith in Arigo. By now the second patient had been passed through Arigo and was headed toward the assistant and his typewriter in the corner of the larger room, carrying a slip of paper with some sort of prescription scrawled on it.

Puharich and Belk watched incredulously as the people moved up in line to the table, rich and poor, of all ages.

Arigo would barely glance at them. For most, his hand began almost automatically scribbling a prescription at incredible speed, as if his pen were slipping across a sheet of ice. Occasionally he would rise, place a patient against the wall, wipe the paring knife on his shirt again, drive it brutally into a tumor or cyst or another eye or ear, and remove whatever the offending tissue was, in a matter of seconds.

There was no anesthesia, no hypnotic suggestion, no antisepsis – and practically no bleeding beyond a trickle.

They did not observe Arigo’s reported ability to make blood stop on verbal command. But they noted that he rarely asked a question of a patient; his diagnosis was wordless and immediate. In the speed and confusion of the first scores of patients on that morning, Puharich was content simply to watch and observe.

Obviously, there was much checking to be done. These prescriptions – what were they? How could Arigo write them so fast, barely looking at the paper, never taking time to analyze either the prescription or the patient? How could he possibly get the alleged miraculous results, when he spent so little time with each patient? How could the assistant read the hopeless scrawl on the plain sheet of paper to translate it for the pharmacist? Where had Arigo learned his pharmacology? How could he expect to arrive at a rational therapy without an examination of the patient or without even asking questions? How could a patient feel no pain when a paring knife was brutally pushed into one of the most sensitive and painful areas of the body – the eye? These questions would have to be suspended until full and incisive study could be made.

It seemed that Arigo averaged less than a minute for each patient. Arigo, obviously with tongue in cheek, insisted that whatever surgical work he would be doing at this time was merely an examination. He was actually under court injunction not to operate.

Recalling the scene later, Puharich said: ‘It was the first time in my life when I’ve seen a scene like this. Where, one minute from the time a patient steps up, until the time he leaves, he either receives a prescription or an actual operation, and walks out without any pain or disablement. Arigo never said much of anything. It was like a nightmare. Belk and I were looking at each other, speechless. We really felt we were in a science fiction atmosphere. Belk, who wasn’t a medical man, finally had to walk out of the room. I continued watching. It sort of piles in on you. These people step up – they’re all sick. One had a big goiter. Arigo just picked up the paring knife, cut it open, popped the goiter out, slapped it in her hand, wiped the opening with a piece of dirty cotton, and off she went. It hardly bled at all.

‘But there was no opportunity to follow up anything at this time. He was working so fast that it was impossible to catch a patient before they stepped up. You were afraid to talk to any of them immediately afterward, because you didn’t want to miss anything coming up. This first ex- posure to this man was almost too much to comprehend’.

By eleven that morning, Arigo had treated some two hundred patients. A dozen or so he sent away, summarily, gruffly telling them that any ordinary doctor could handle their complaints. Others he scolded or chided. There had already been about ten eye and ear surgery cases. Each operation averaged only half a minute.

The surgery routine was almost always the same. The swift, almost brutal plunge of the paring knife. The violent and apparently careless maneuvering of the blade under the eyelid, or whatever part of the body he was working on, the casual wiping of the blade on his shirt.

In no case was there any preoperative procedure – no anesthesia, no sterile precautions, no hypnotic suggestion whatever. The patients stood by the wall, fully conscious, and walked out of the room without assistance. Puharich was watching carefully for hypnosis; it could at least explain part of the procedure. But there was no evidence of it.

If anything, Arigo himself seemed to be in a trance state.

This, Puharich and Belk later surmised, might account for the strange explanation they had heard in their earlier inquiries about Arigo, before they left Rio. It was alleged that Arigo claimed he incorporated the spirit of a deceased German doctor, whom he identified as Dr Adolpho Fritz.


It was Dr Fritz, Arigo claimed, who did the operating and the prescribing of the complex pharmaceutical agents he wrote so swiftly. It was Dr Fritz, a German physician who had died in 1918, who provided the instantaneous diagnoses.

Both Belk and Puharich, with their interest and experience in exploring the paranormal, were at least willing to examine this bizarre explanation with an open mind. On this day, not even the incredible objective evidence of Arigo’s prowess could be adequately assessed. The facts that were piling up in chaotic profusion revealed one certainty: that Arigo was violating every rational procedure of medicine and surgery. And it was becoming evident that only the most extensive, lengthy study and technical evaluation could create an intelligent appraisal of that. The exotic and ephemeral concept of some sort of benign possession by a deceased German physician was too incredible to even consider at this time.

Promptly at eleven, Arigo rose from his small chair by the wooden table and declared the session at an end. He would be returning, he explained in his rough German accent, at two until six that afternoon. For those patients he was unable to see at that time, he would start again at eight in the evening and continue until all patients were taken care of, regardless of the time.

He invited the two Americans and their interpreters to accompany him as he strode across the large room, washed his hands in a small basin, and put on a jacket. He would be going to his regular job, he explained, a job with the government and social-security office, known by the acronym IAPETC. If the Americans wished, he indicated, they could go there with him, and he’d be glad to give them further information.

Without ceremony, he led them around the corner and down the cobblestone street toward the state welfare office.

It was an omnibus health-and-welfare installation. There were pension records, small medical and dental offices, a line of people waiting for unemployment compensation, and the musty atmosphere of bureaucratic confusion. His jacket was unpressed and well-worn. He was still rough and unshaven, yet he carried himself with what seemed to be enormous energy and dignity. But now the German accent had left him. He spoke with the hearty, gusty crudeness of a First Avenue bus driver who affectionately caj- oles, curses, and jokes with his passengers on his daily run.

Arigo was the receptionist. He directed the people to the various departments of the office, verbally whipping them at one moment, comforting them in another. His paramedical self had left him completely, but he still remained an imposing man. The people in line, poor and subdued, seemed to find affection and warmth in him, in spite of his gruffness. To the Americans, he was more of a riddle than ever. His personality change, from the moment he had left the clinic and gone to his job, was startling. His Prussian stiffness had given way to an earthy amiability. His eyes had lost some of the strange luster that had marked him as he worked with the patients in his clinic. He invited the Americans and their interpreters to go through the welfare office, make themselves at home.

They did so. Puharich was particularly interested in getting a playback from the dentist and doctor on duty there.

Certainly, these professional men would have to have some sort of concrete opinions about this strange phenomenon who was in fact invading their professional field, and apparently attracting an avalanche of people into the village in direct competition with them.

The government dentist was most amiable about Arigo. He commented on how well liked he was around the town, how well he did his job for the welfare office, how much the people who came there enjoyed his kindness and jokes and good humor. He seemed indifferent to Arigo’s separate medical activity, shrugging it off with a gesture of puzzlement. The pension-department physician was not much more eloquent. He also shrugged, and indicated that Arigo did his thing, and he did his own. He did acknowledge that he knew of no one who had been harmed by Arigo, and that the number of people from all over South America who came to see him was phenomenal.

His office hours at the welfare office were strange in North American terms. He worked from eleven in the morning until one. Then he began again at four, and continued until six. Arigo invited all four of his visitors to have lunch with his family, an invitation quickly accepted.

His house, on the Rua Marechal Floriano, reflected a state of near-poverty, but in spite of flaking plaster and shoddy furniture, it was clean and neat. Arlete, his wife, was slim and smiling, rustling her five boys about the house, handsome boys all of them, with the same striking, deep-brown eyes of their father. She was wearing hair rollers, unselfconsciously.

Arigo kissed her affectionately, and they all sat down at a rough table, Arlete squeezing four extra places among the boys. The lunch was simple – beans and rice and some stringy chicken – but there was plenty of it. Arigo ate heartily, laughing, joking with the boys, clearing his plate in moments. Almost automatically, Arlete refilled it, and pressed more food on the visitors.

Studying the scene, Puharich could find nothing to sug- gest anything extraordinary about the man or his family.

The wife was devoted, the boys lively, intelligent, well-mannered. The atmosphere was confused, but congenial and affectionate. Arigo had shelved whatever mystical qualities he had demonstrated with his patients. Puharich’s thoughts kept going back to the inexplicable events of the morning: the surgery without anesthesia, bleeding, or pain; the incredible speed with which the man worked; the lack of fear in the patient as a sharp knife went into his eye.

Somehow, he was thinking, he would have to find a way to prove to both himself and his medical colleagues back in the States that the whole thing was not a hallucination.

When Jorge Rizzini, the journalist, arrived that evening, part of the problem would be solved, because he was bringing a motion picture camera. Belk was already preparing his own still camera equipment, a step he had postponed during the morning session until he got more used to the bizarre events that occurred in such swift succession.

But would film be enough to convince the skeptics? Still pictures could of course be easily rigged; they would not be able to persuade a hard-core skeptic. Motion pictures are almost impossible to fake convincingly, therefore they were most important. Puharich would have to count on Rizzini for that part of the process; he hoped he would do well.
***
‘There was one patient I remember’, Puharich recalls, ‘who was hanging around all day. He was barefoot and had been in a wheelchair, and it seemed that he had a job as an auto mechanic. He simply came there and hung around, although he no longer needed the wheelchair.

‘We asked him through the interpreters just why he was doing this, and he explained that he had been in the Brazilian brigade in the Allied army in Italy during World War II. He had been wounded, and received injuries to both knees. He couldn’t describe technically what happened, but his knees had locked up, frozen on him. He had had something like thirteen operations since the war. He said he had heard about Arigo and came to him.

‘Arigo had looked at him, and very roughly said: “What the hell are you doing in the wheelchair, you bum?” Arigo was never reluctant to swear at people when the occasion seemed to demand it. The man had said: “I can’t walk. My knees are locked.” Arigo answered: “You’re a rotten, lazy bum. Get up and walk!” The man protested that he couldn’t. Arigo repeated his demand. The guy had no choice. He got up and started walking across the room.

Arigo never touched him. The man couldn’t believe it had happened. But he was scared to death the condition might return, so he continued hanging around, just to play it safe.

‘I examined the knees, although this is the kind of case that would need intensive study to verify completely. They were still a little stiff, and you could see the multiple scars from the many operations he had had. But he was able to move with considerable freedom. This was the kind of case I would be looking for when we returned with full diagnostic equipment and personnel. But at the moment, it was convincing enough to indicate the need for further study’.

By the time Jorge Rizzini, the intense, thirty-five-year- old Brazilian journalist, arrived from São Paulo, Puharich had plotted the best possible way for shooting both stills and motion pictures the next day. Unlikely as it was, there was still the possibility of fakery or of simply an unconventional and indiscernible hypnotic technique that might have brought temporary relief to the hundreds of patients that were filing by Arigo each day.

Rizzini, however, was not inclined to go along with this theory. He had experienced two very definitive cases close to home: his wife, who had suffered hopeless arthritis and had been given up by medical doctors; and his daughter, who had been medically assessed as having incurable leukemia. Both had come to Arigo; both had been cured, and the cure confirmed by the same doctors who had given them up. He also told about the daughter of past Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek, who had been successfully treated by Arigo for a kidney disorder that had defied conventional treatment in both Europe and the United States.

Rizzini’s 8mm Kodak did not have a zoom lens, but it would be adequate to record some of the operations. Puharich and Belk were still concerned about getting enough raw evidence to persuade a representative group of other American doctors to join them in making a thorough study of Arigo. Even with motion pictures of the unconventional operations, there could be enough doubts left to make persuasion difficult. It seemed to be something that had to be seen directly on location to be believed.

**

Puharich had felt it himself on arriving in the village. He still had doubts, but they were fading in the light of Arigo’s indefatigable dedi- cation to his patients, most of whom had come miles to see him.

It was during these thoughts that he absentmindedly scratched his arm – perhaps for a mosquito or flea bite. As he did so, he was reminded of a large and rather annoying but benign tumor on the inside of his right elbow, known as a lipoma. It was not dangerous, and he had had it checked within the last two years by his own doctor, Sidney Krebs, M.D., of New York City.

Medically, a lipoma is a fatty tumor that rolls around freely under the skin when it is examined. While they do not tend to become malignant, lipomas can often be rather large and unsightly. What causes them is really not known.

Puharich’s tumor had been there for seven years, and measured about half an inch high, half an inch wide, and one and a half inches in length. His doctor had suggested he might have it surgically removed, which, while seldom risky, is rarely an office procedure. Full sterilization is necessary in an operating room, and the usual scrubbing, painting, and draping of the tumor area is practiced.

The surgical procedure involves incision over the fatty tissue, the spreading of the incision with two retractors, and the use of hemostats and cauterizing the blood vessels to check the flow of blood for clear visibility. Usually, another clamp is placed over the tumor itself, and the tumor is cut free with a scalpel. The opening is then sewn up with sutures. Antiseptics and antibiotics, of course, are utilized to prevent infection. Without these, septicemia – blood poisoning – could result.

The average surgeon requires about fifteen to twenty minutes to complete the job. In Puharich’s case, the tumor was directly over the ulnar nerve, which controls the movement of the hand. Also, the brachial artery lay nearby, another possible complication. It was for these reasons that Puharich had been hesitant about having the tumor re- moved, and since it was not incapacitating, he had learned to live with it.

But an inept operation could be incapacitating – permanently. The movement in the fingers could be restricted or totally disabled by damage to the ulnar nerve. A slip that would sever the brachial artery would bring obvious danger.

In other words, the tumor was nothing to take lightly, in spite of its benignity. Speaking of the experience later, Puharich said: ‘When I felt the lipoma on my arm, lying there in bed, I said to myself: Well, here is a legitimate thing that Arigo could work on. Because I could see by now that you couldn’t just play games with him. If he was going to do something, you had to be sick or have something real.

I said to myself: This is a good idea. I’ll see if he will operate on this, and I’ll see what happens. I know what the condition is; I’ll see if these people are faking the lack of pain. I’ll find out if he really hurts or not. I’ll find out first- hand how the process works. If I get infected, I can always be flown down to Rio. I simply could not believe what I was seeing and experiencing with Arigo. Here was one way I could prove to myself and my colleagues that we were not hallucinating’.

The decision did not come easily. But it was the one sure way to put Arigo’s skills to the test. Puharich would be able to discover just what the lack of anesthesia, antisepsis, and sutures meant firsthand – and whether indeed Arigo was capable of preventing the major flow of blood.

The decision made, he turned over on his side on the shaky iron cot and went to sleep.
**

‘We’ll do the arm first’, Arigo said. ‘Just roll up your sleeve, Doctor’. The action was moving so fast now that Puharich turned quickly to check the camera setup. Rizzini was already lining up his motion picture camera; Belk and the one interpreter seemed to be set with their still cameras.

All three were now considerably tense and nervous. The operation was a one-shot take. There could be no such thing as a retake, and Puharich was as apprehensive about this as he was about the operation. He instructed the other interpreter to bounce the battery light off the ceiling, to prevent burning the image in the lens. Then he turned back and prepared to watch Arigo make the incision.

But Arigo instructed him to look the other way, and, it had become obvious, when Arigo commanded, it was useless to argue with him. Puharich obliged, again checking and directing the cameras and lighting.

In considerably less than thirty seconds – some of the others said it was less than ten – Puharich felt something wet slapped in his hand, along with the pocketknife itself.

He looked down and saw the bloody form of the lipoma and the knife Arigo had used to extract it. On his arm, where the tumor had been, there was a small slit, with a trickle of blood dripping down from it, but very little, considerably less than two inches. The skin area was flat; there was no longer the bulge of the tumor.

Puharich was stunned. There had been no pain whatever in the arm. He had felt only a slight, vague sensation. The others had watched with incredulity. Just before the opera- tion, Rizzini had started his camera rolling. It continued to roll all through the process and afterward. Arigo had taken the knife, seemed to scrape it over the skin, and within 38 seconds, had pulled out the lipoma with his hands. It was totally alien to any surgical procedure.

Arigo smiled, and said to Puharich that Dr Fritz had told him to say: ‘This is a demonstration only – so that people will believe. I think every doctor in Brazil should come here and do what you have done. After the legal process against me, you must come back, Dr Puharich, and I will do major surgery for you.

Arigo - surgeon of the rusty knife by John G. Fullerton


Thursday, March 21, 2024

Poniatowski & Ossowiecki - The psychic archaeology

 Exactly how Ossowiecki met the man who would become the scientist half of the best psychic archaeological team in history is now unknown. Perhaps Balcer introduced them. It is clear, however, that they knew each other by March 1936.

Stanislaw Poniatowski was fifty-two, seven years younger than the psychic, and since this was to be his major work for the remainder of his life, it was almost as if he had come to Warsaw for just these experiments. After eighteen years as a professor of ethnology at Wolna Wszechnica (University) he had suddenly accepted the same post at the University of Warsaw in 1934.

From a collateral branch of one of Poland's oldest and noblest families, he was named for Prince Joseph Poniatowski, one of Napoleon's most brilliant generals. Stanislaw Poniatowski had added luster to an already illustrious family name. (Strangely, it had been Prince Poniatowski's statue that Ossowiecki had gone to see in Homel the day he met Wrobel.) He was considered by many to be the most eminent ethnologist in Poland at that time, and was acknowledged as the founder of the cultural-historical school of Polish ethnology. But as important as his impeccable scholarship was his interest in psychic archaeology. "The possibility of a clairvoyant look at a prehistoric time [had] appeared to me as highly enticing ... as an ethnologist I was very interested in discovering if and what links exist between the most primitive and uncivilized contemporary societies and their counterparts in the oldest prehistoric cultures." Forty years later this study by analogy is still a major anthropological approach.

Nor had Poniatowski's interest been merely idle. He had been actively searching for "an appropriate clairvoyant," and had meticulously worked out the experimental protocol he would follow should his search be successful, concluding that the correct approach was multiple experiments by a psychic-archaeological team. His plan called for one major clairvoyant to serve as a baseline "and somewhere upward of ten other clairvoyants" as cross-checks. Indeed, Poniatowski's work is the model of how psychic archaeology should be practiced. Contained within his method were checks against any bias a psychic might have, as well as consideration for the limitations of his source. All the complexities that plague practical psychic research were fully thought through and compensated for, and amazingly, this had all been done before Poniatowski had completed even one experiment with Ossowiecki or anybody else.

Poniatowski immediately recognized that he had finally found "an appropriate clairvoyant" in Ossowiecki. The latter was equally enthusiastic, very possibly because he had been expecting such a meeting and knew what the consequences could be. In 1937, a year after they began to work together, Ossowiecki told Ms. Zawadzka of the journal Goniec Warszawski that Wrobel to that date had described his life "to the smallest fragment." Thus, while he may not have known the specific researcher's name, he had anticipated this final research.

At their first meeting it was agreed that the work should begin immediately. The first session was set for April 23, and on that appointed Thursday evening, a small group called at Ossowiecki's  flat, at number 32 Polna Street. The scene was described by Ms. Zawadzka.

"Entrance. A hall or a waiting room. Attention focuses first on a white statue of Christ standing in the window. The figure's outstretched hand is raised in benediction.

"On the wall are lithographs of the Creator awakening the world from chaos. High gothic chairs complement the interior.... In the large, light study a collection of memorabilia personal and inherited from the family.... Several important paintings and many photographs signed by famous people. There are two huge, potted fig trees and among them, flying freely, several birds. Always open cages are their nests. They go in and out at will and often sleep in the branches of the trees. The gray nightingale is so tame that he comes over at the sound of Mr. Ossowiecki's voice. When the man is silent, working at his desk, the bird sits on the back rest of the chair and sings.

"The most interesting room, however, is the small salon—the favorite place of the clairvoyant. It is here that most of his experiments take place. It is truly his home.

"There is a wide day bed covered with a Persian rug; low Eastern coffee tables and exotic paraphernalia [a recreation of Wrobel's study?]. Each fragment displayed on the walls is connected with some experiment of the clairvoyant. Over the door a gold statuette of the Chinese deity Cian-Fu; next, a Japanese Christian Madonna; a silk tapestry in a Japanese frame; drawings by the anthroposophist [Rudolf] Steiner; a fragment of the fabric with which the face of Dabrowka* was covered in the coffin—a gift from Bishop Lanbnitz; a letter from the current Pope when he was still a nuncio; an authentic letter from General [Tadeusz Andrzej] Kosciuszko [who fought in the American Revolutionary War] to General Dabrowski; a fragment from the original manuscript of Quo Vadis [by Nobel Laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz].... In a word, a small museum." This was the description of the launch site for sixteen ventures along the uncharted river of time.

Included in the group, along with Poniatowski and Balcer, were Michael Kamienski, professor of astronomy and director of the Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw, whose work in celestial mechanics had brought him world fame; Jan Lukasiewicz, one of the most emminent mathematicians and logicians of the century; Stefan Manczarski, world class geophysicist; and Witold Henser, one of Poland's leading archaeologists. They were not there by chance or out of curiosity. It was a basic premise of Poniatowski's approach to psychic archaeology that the research should always be interdisciplinary.

Consequently, for the entire two-part sequence of thirty-three experiments men and women of world stature were present; each was invited to provide commentary on the results of questions Poniatowski planned to put to Ossowiecki in matters concerning their specialties. This list, in fact, is one of the more remarkable things about this unique research project. At a time when Dr. J. B. Rhine and his wife Dr. Louisa Rhine in the United States were finding it difficult to get American scientists to take their parapsychological research seriously, Professor Poniatowski established an advisory and support group seventy-five percent of whose membership is still to be found listed in encyclopedias. This is no absolute judgment on the character and quality of the experiments, certainly, but it is doubtful whether any other research program in the twentieth century—except perhaps the Manhattan Project—could make a similar claim.

At about 9:30 in the evening, after an early dinner, the group moved to Ossowiecki's salon. Once settled, Poniatowski explained the procedure he would follow. Mostly this was for Ossowiecki's benefit, since he was totally ignorant of what would be happening. The professor said that the psychic would be told nothing about the guide object, would not even see it until it was handed to him. Nor would he be told what culture had produced it or where it had been found. All the experiments would be conducted in exactly the same way and every attempt would be made to keep conditions as uniform as possible. Ossowiccki was told that Certain controls had been built into the research series, but their exact nature was not explained. He was asked not to read any material dealing with archaeology or ethnology. He was then asked what conditions he wished the observers to meet. He said only that he preferred that they maintain a light conversation on some subject other than the experiment or the object, and that they not stare at him or do anything to make him feel conspicuous. Those present agreed to comply with this request insofar as they were able. Poniatowski then asked if Ossowiecki could take questions while giving the reading. Ossowiecki said he thought so, he would try. Finally it was agreed that Balcer, Kamienski, Kosieradzki, and particularly Stefan Radlinski would help Poniatowski maintain a complete and accurate record of what took place, and that each person present would agree to its correctness before leaving the room. (In fact, Poniatowski's reports are works of art. Artifacts are listed according to museum number, culture, and site, as well as description. The names of all present are given, as well as the location and the exact time the artifact was handed to Ossowiecki. There are notations as to how long it took him to begin and how long he spoke, what gestures he used, how he felt, and even the expressions on his face. Often there is a postexperiment commentary consisting of statements made by observers, and a final wrap-up by Poniatowski in which he reviews Ossowiecki's major statements and their validity, as well as any controls invoked.)

By the time the discussion ended, it was 10:15 and Poniatowski took from his pocket and handed to Ossowiecki a small flint tool he knew to be about ten thousand years old. After almost twenty minutes of concentration, Ossowiecki began with the words:

"Thick, thick forest ... such a strange forest, black leaves, such dark color ... vast distances ... yonder there are places where there is no forest, clearings, and on them mushroomlike squat houses made of twigs, smeared with clay. I see them well in this moment."

He then went on to give a detailed description of a microlithic culture, its people, and customs, answering questions, all put to him by Poniatowski, although some seem to have been suggested by other observers. Fifty-seven minutes later he stopped, complaining of tiredness and "a weight in my head." After he recovered, Ossowiecki offered a few other remembered impressions and then Poniatowski solemnly went around the room asking for comments; only two major thoughts emerged and they were held in common.

First, there was general agreement that Ossowiecki's vision was accurate, at least to the degree that reconstructions are ever testable. Second, the use of questions was considered a major breakthrough of great importance to the project.

This business of questions seems so obvious an approach today that it is easy to overlook the fact that Poniatowski's scheme of asking for elaborations on an unclear point, or for a shift in focus to something he considered more significant, was unprecedented. Previously Ossowiecki and clairvoyants like him were given a question or questions at the very beginning of a session. They then responded until they felt the subject was exhausted. (This was essentially how Balcer had conducted the mummy's foot experiments.) Now Poniatowski had proved that it was possible to exert some control and to be selective. He had been handed a wondrous new telescope that he had learned could be pointed into the past and focused at will. Poniatowski would later discover that too many questions tended to cause confusion, but once he had found the balance, the question-and-answer format became a major tool.

Two weeks later, on May 7, the same group met again at Ossowiecki's apartment, and after discussing the first session, a second was begun, this time using a stone club. The first artifact had been one from Poniatowski's personal collection. After the second session almost every guide object was to come from the museum named for and founded by Professor Erazm Majewski.

This was yet another part of Poniatowski's careful plan: using diverse objects from a uniform and academically accepted source. Stone tools, or lithics, as they are more properly known, comprise a subtle and complex branch of archaeology. It is difficult for even a general archaeologist to tell whether these stones are naturally formed or man-altered, and that task is an easy one compared with dating and assigning these artifacts to their proper culture. Even today, forty years after Poniatowski's research, when archaeology is far more sophisticated, only a few men and women are acknowledged to be experts by the discipline as a whole. Poniatowski was not such a person, so he believed it was important that the artifacts to be used be precertified. In this way he felt he had a reasonable, traditionally developed baseline against which to measure Ossowiecki's reconstructions.

Having done two successful experiments, thus establishing both the validity of the concept and the usefulness of his experimental protocol, Poniatowski next resolved to attempt something so awesome that even four decades later it sounds preposterous. On July 24, 1933, Dr. Berckhemer, the chief curator of the Natural History Museum in Wurttemberg, Germany, received a call from an acquaintance, a Mr. Sigrist, who owned a gravel pit near the town of Steinheim on the Mur. It was not the first time he had called, and Berckhemer anticipated the message as soon as he heard the name: Sigrist, he felt sure, had discovered something in his pit that he thought the scholar might find interesting. All the same, he was surprised at the agitation in the man's voice, until he heard what he had to say: an almost complete human skull had been found very deep in the pit!

It was in this manner that Steinheim man entered history. Two years later, in 1935, an English dentist who was an an amateur archaeologist, Dr. Alvan Theophilus Marston, was to discover a more fragmented but similar skull situated in the midst of some six hundred extremely primitive stone tools near the town of Swanscombe in England. The lithics at Swanscombe were identified as Acheulean; the gravel beds and the remains of two extinct animals found in proximity to the Steinheim skull dated it to the same epoch, the third interglacial period. As German writer Herbert Wendt notes in his book In Search of Adam, the two skulls looked like nothing so much as those of "a female chimpanzee." Yet their cranial capacity and certain other features established that they were unquestionably Homo sapiens, approximately twice as old as Neanderthal man and yet more modern in appearance. To this day they remain both anomalous and among the oldest remains of modern man discovered in Europe. At the time they were found, within the academic circles that concern themselves with such things, they were a sensation. To Poniatowski, the challenge was irresistible. He was interested in very primitive man, the people of the Pleistocene Age. Now with two discoveries that confirmed each other he had some idea of what an anomalous variation that man must have looked like. He also had a stone club from the Majewski Museum certified by lithic specialists as having come from one of the best Acheulean sites, Abbeville in France. With this to validate what Ossowiecki might say, he wondered if contact with a past so distant could be achieved. Could a psychic travel back in time almost three hundred thousand years?

The third experiment on May 21 was designed to discover just that:

"God how far.... They are very curious people ... small people ...not big heads and huge in the back," Ossowiecki said showing the shape of the head with his hands. "Hair matted ... falling down, it hangs [on the sides of the cheeks—Poniatowski]. Very different types. Height 150-160 cm. [approx. 4 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 2 inches] ... they are terrifically muscular ... nude ... skin ... dark … like light chocolate … so dark. Women very well developed, fat.... Hair long, falling down ... chins forward inclined, thin beards, eyes black, dark brown.... Noses very broad ... hips thick, forehead low, eyes wide open ... dark eyes. Women very ugly ... not pretty. Ears protrude some..."

The words poured out, a rambling near-monologue by a man whose speech was alternately enthusiastic and quizzical, like a person telling a long and complicated anecdote. There was no trance, nothing occult. Ossowiecki was obviously alert; he asked for paper and pencil with which to draw pictures of animals, houses, and people of the past, even stopping the narrative to give instructions to his maid when she came into the room. And yet, those present had the inescapable feeling that it was they who were unreal and dreamlike and this band of small dark naked ancestors that was solid and alive. Ossowiecki, surrounded by the accoutrements of a twentieth- century European parlor, gave the unmistakable impression of easily and casually looking on a scene three hundred thousand years old. His eyes were open and seemed to be moving back and forth as he followed this scene, actually seeing it. Indeed, very possibly on this occasion, and certainly on others, Poniatowski suddenly but quietly put a screen in front of Ossowiecki and the psychic complained that "his vision had been blocked."

Even stranger was the meaning of the words; as Poniatowski heard them, he knew that they made sense. More important, Ossowiecki's description passed another of his tests. He had never seen psychic archaeology as a new and independent science; rather, he believed it offered a new technique—one that would add to and complement more traditional approaches. Consequently, it was his conviction that a primary test of psychic data would be whether they supported solidly based orthodox observations on the same culture. And that was exactly what he was hearing. Of course, much of the psychic reconstruction was uncheckable. No artifact or bone, for instance, could reveal the skin color of early Homo sapiens, nor could Ossowiecki's statement that the women were wearing some kind of feather ankle bracelets be proved or refuted. But where orthodox data did exist, Ossowiecki's words were in agreement—the shape of the skull, for example. Ossowiecki's description would make even better sense to Poniatowski after he had done some further research on his own. The description of this early form of man, however, was just a start. Experiment three had much more to reveal.

To begin with, almost with his first words of the evening Ossowiecki had said, "This stone has a double history." He then suddenly began talking about another people: "Their skin is whiter beyond comparison. Their heads are different, not elongated here, letter-spacing:.55pt'>broader jaws, broader. Black hair, brown hair's already here. Many people. Faces nicer, less savage. The noses not so broad ... different people. The people are white ... they are whiter than the others ... they are more the color of brick, a bit, just a bit ... they are dressed ... have some fabric? ... something—I don't understand."A third culture emerged during the course of the evening, a people Ossowiecki merely described as "smaller." By the time he had finished, the stone's entire history of association with man was laid out for Poniatowski and the others. At various times the rock in an unaltered state had served as part of a hearth ring, a portion of the doorway to a primitive stone house, and, after being worked by man, a weapon.

In trying to sort the material out Poniatowski inadvertently arranged both an unplanned test of the information's accuracy and an experimental control. Seeking to clarify the various cultures, he asked Ossowiecki, in reference to the geography of the site, "Is there water?" The psychic, after looking around, said, "There is water on the right side. Flows fast, it's a stream." Later, during the description of what appears to be the most modern epoch, Poniatowskiasked, "Is the locale the same as before?" To this Ossowiecki answered, "The locale is the same. I recognize it. But it is greatly changed.... Now I'll tell you something interesting ... I see water, waves. Is this possible? I see the ocean ... I'm closer to Belgium [millennia before such a nation existed, of course] ... France.... Now I recognize this map. I see the peninsula of Normandy... . Need to go ... I'm departing ... countryside ... forest ... mountains ... mass of water ... huge waves, powerful, massive...."

Upon returning to the present time two hours and ten minutes after he had begun (this was the longest session he would ever do), Ossowiecki was told by his friend that experiment three had contained much that seemed accurate, although it was confusing sometimes as to which time went with which people. But Poniatowski said there had also been a major error. The prehistoric settlement whose people had used the stone as a weapon could not have been near the ocean, for the site where the stone had been found was in the central portion of southern France. Ossowiecki listened carefully but "with complete conviction ... that [the site] had to be on the shores of France between Belgium and Normandy." The following day Poniatowski checked. He was chagrined to learn that Abbeville was not in the French interior; it was on an "estuary of the River Somme to La Manche canal," easily within sight of the ocean. Ossowiecki had been correct! Now Poniatowski began to realize that he had been handed the keys to time's cabinet.

There would be nine experiments that first year, the greatest number in one year during the prewar period, and, just as Poniatowski had planned, the format never varied. Indeed, the only inconsistency in the entire sequence of sixteen sessions was the fact that in 1936 experiments were held in the spring and summer. Thereafter Poniatowski and Ossowiecki worked together only in the fall, when Warsaw's social life was at its height. It was a wonderfully gentle time and Andrew Norwina-Sapinski, who translated the Poniatowski research for the author in 1976, remembered it well:

"Prior to World War II the social pulse of Warsaw at the level Ossowiecki and Poniatowski occupied beat most strongly in the late hours. I remember my parents going out and receiving visitors until midnight ... on week nights. Shops were open and people promenaded down main street and sat in Kawiarnia's ... a kind of elegant super-coffee house. Warsaw smelled of fresh fruit and flowers because the shops that sold them displayed much of their merchandise outside their door front. In the early hours, while people still walked and talked, the streets were washed clean by water trucks and then their black-wet surfaces mirrored the neon lights. It was a lovely city. Full of life."

Only two things rippled this placid surface. In the fall of 1937 Ossowiecki became concerned enough about what he perceived as Europe's coming instability to give a series of lectures at universities in Warsaw, Poznan, and Lwow. He called these talks "Psychic Crisis and the Future of Mankind," but exactly what he said has been lost. It is known, however, that he decided to publish the talks in a somewhat different form, seeing this second book as the culmination of an earlier volume, The World of My Spirit and Visions of the Future,>which had been published in 1933 from an "inception of pain" with the purpose of showing people "the way to overcome spiritual suffering." Particularly it reflected Ossowiecki's concern with technology run rampant without moral control.

The second and more immediately frightening event took place on October 21, 1938, during experiment fourteen, the first one of that year.

The reading, for a culture identified only as Mezynska, had begun routinely enough at 10:07 P.M. at Ossowiecki's apartment, and had described for some time an extremely ancient and primitive people whose settlement the psychic had correctly located between Spain and the Italian peninsula.

Suddenly as the session seemed to be coming to a close, Ossowiecki became very agitated. "I cannot get out of here," he said, and then, almost against his will, began to describe a couple of these pre-Homo sapiens making love.

"I see him. They sit now. He makes advances to her. Takes her breasts and pulls to himself ... he moves around her to and fro. She jumps and sits next to him. He begins ... there are no kisses. With her hand he covers his face. She strokes his neck, back ... he lies down.... She sits on him equestrian style. She sits still, looking into his eyes. Now she jumps up, jumps up .... She traces with her nose along his nose, around his face. He embraces her with his whole strength ... she is active, not he ... she jumps up again, so …  she is washing his member with water, covers it with green grass … now she goes to fetch water ... fabulous elasticity of body. … There are no normal movements, they are like monkeys." Again Ossowiecki cried out, "I cannot return."This time both he and the observers became uneasy.

Unable to stop, the psychic continued, describing a zebralike animal. "Long ears. Several there are ... they graze near the house. Long tails, the end like thick gray brush. Rear white and from it toward the front darker. From spine white bands go to white belly. Huge ears, horns I do not see...."

Talking about the animals seemed to calm and release him. Then the man of the vision abruptly came into view again. "God how wild it is here ... savage ... they are like monkeys. The man is so hairy ... all are so hairy. Men's bodies are brownish, dark like fur. Hair on foreheads grows from bridge of nose." With the man's reentry some connection seemed reestablished for Ossowiecki. He yelled, "I can't get out of here!" and with those words dashed the stone-tool guide object to the floor. Even after he had returned to the world of the living, he still seemed to linger in the past and for another fifteen minutes felt as if the two realities had become confused and that he was alternating between them.

From the beginning the psychic and the scientist had realized that these experiences with prehistory were taking a toll on Ossowiecki. All too often he would end them saying he felt tired or had a headache. He also felt that doing such work "took phosphorus from my body." These were problems, however, they both were prepared to accept. But it apparently had never occurred to them that there might be far more dangerous factors involved in what Ossowiecki was doing. What had caused his entrapment they never knew. Possibly with a normal healthy man's curiosity he had become too interested in watching a couple make love hundreds of millennia ago. Or perhaps the explanation lay not in Ossowiecki but in the people he was watching, whose psychic energy generated a kind of whirlpool into which he was dragged. (What other event in human life is as intensely and singularly focused as a sexual act and its climax?) Such explanations can, of course, be dismissed with amused condescension as occult pseudoscience, but Ossowiecki did appear to be trapped and was observed in this state by men of unquestioned probity and considerable attainment in science.

Whatever the reason for Ossowiecki's seeming inability to shift his point of view, it had frightened everyone present. The complacency with which the session had begun was shattered; all now knew that psychic archaeology was not a simple process and that they were far from understanding it. One practical solution, however, emerged from the experience: Poniatowski concluded that his attitudes and state of mind had an effect on the experimental dynamics (something scientists rarely admit). He realized that he too had become entrapped because of his fascination with what Ossowiecki was describing, and in doing so,had relinquished some of his control over what was happening. In his superconscious state it was clear that Ossowiecki was vulnerable, pulled along by currents he only partially ruled. Poniatowski concluded that he himself would have to stay "awake" and avoid also being seduced into too intense a concentration. After the fourteenth experiment whenever Ossowiecki seemed to become too exclusively focused on a single scene, Poniatowski would draw him away by asking questions about some other topic. There were a few tense moments, but never again did the incident that had marred the fourteenth session repeat itself. Tiredness became an ever-increasing problem, but the remainder of the thirty-three experiments went off without tripping another psychic deadfall.

By February 24, 1939, fifteen psychometric contacts with eleven different cultures had been accomplished (since several guide objects were from very obscure Polish sites it is possible that the number is greater or smaller by perhaps one or two). The final (sixteenth) session in February was a distinct variation from the regimen. There were two good reasons for this early-spring variance in scheduling.

Poniatowski wanted to round off this first cycle of research with Ossowiecki by getting a reading on the relatively recent Magdalenian culture (approx. 15,000-10,000 B.C.) of the Stone Age. Then, in accordance with his plan, he wanted to try the same selection of artifacts with different sensitives, in this way assuring a psychic cross-check as well as an orthodox one. Unfortunately, he was able to find only one other clairvoyant who seemed to have the necessary skills, a professional commercial psychic he identified only as Mrs. S. Ch. After three sessions, however, he concluded that further work with her was useless. Although she had a twenty-year reputation as a gifted clairvoyant, he found her descriptions "muddy and devoid of originality." He even discreetly implied that she had read up on prehistory and filled in what she could not get psychically by regurgitating what she remembered of this cramming. The experience taught him a powerful lesson: " ... professional [i.e. commercial] sensitives ... can easily lead an uncritical researcher to error."

Secret Vaults of Time

Stephen Schwartz

Monday, March 18, 2024

Seeing psi


It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.

—John Tyndall (1820-1893)

Given the substantial historical, anecdotal, and experimental evidence for psi, why do some intelligent people positively bristle at the mere suggestion that the evidence for psi be taken seriously? After all, scientists studying psi simply claim that every so often they find interesting evidence for strange sorts of perceptual and energetic anomalies. They’re not demanding that we also believe aliens have infiltrated the staff of the White House. Still, some people continue to insist that “there’s not a shred of evidence” for psi. Why can’t they see that there are thousands of shreds that, after we combine the weft of experiences and the warp of experiments, weave an immense, enchanting fabric?

The answer is contained in the odd fact that we do not perceive the world as it is, but as we wish it to be.1 We know this through decades of conventional research in perception, cognition, decision making, intuitive judgment, and memory. Essentially, we construct mental models of a world that reflect our expectations, biases, and desires, a world that is comfortable for our egos, that does not threaten our beliefs, and that is consistent, stable, and coherent.

In other words, our minds are “story generators” that create mental simulations of what is really out there. These models inevitably perpetuate distortions, because what we perceive is influenced by the hidden persuasions of ideas, memory, motivation, and expectations. An overview of how we know this helps clarify why we should be skeptical of both overly enthusiastic claims of psychic experiences and overly enthusiastic skeptical criticisms, and why controversy over the existence of psi has persisted in spite of a century of accumulating scientific evidence.

The bottom line is that if we do not expect to see psi, we won’t. And be cause our world will not include it, we will reach the perfectly logical conclusion that it does not exist. Therefore anyone who claims that it does is just stupid, illogical, or irrational. Of course, the opposite is also true. If we expect to see psi everywhere, then our world will be saturated with psychic phenomena. Just as uncritical skepticism can turn into paranoia and cynicism, uncritical belief can turn into an obsessive preoccupation with omens, signs, and coincidences. Neither extreme is a particularly balanced or well-integrated way of dealing with life’s uncertainties.

Four Stages Redux

This book opened with a listing of the four stages by which we accept new ideas. In Stage 1 the idea is flat-out impossible. By Stage 2 it is possible, but weak and uninteresting. In Stage 3 the idea is important, and the effects are strong and pervasive. In Stage 4 everyone thinks that he or she thought of it first. Later, no one remembers how contentious the whole affair was.

These same four stages are closely associated with shifts in perception and expectation. In Stage 1, expectations based on prior convictions prevent us from seeing what is out there. At this stage, because “it” can’t be seen, then of course “it” is impossible. Any evidence to the contrary must be flawed, even if no flaw can be specified. The stronger our expectation, the stronger our conviction is that we are correct.

In Stage 2, after our expectations have been tweaked by repeated exposure to new experiences or to overwhelming evidence, we may begin to see “it,” but only weakly, sporadically, and with strong distortions. At this stage, we sense that something interesting is going on, but because it not well understood, we can’t perceive it clearly. Authorities declare that it may not amount to much, but whatever it is, it might be prudent to take it seriously.

In Stage 3, after someone shows how it must be there after all, either through a new theoretical development or through the unveiling of an obvious, practical application, then suddenly the idea and its implications are obvious. Moreover, if the idea is truly important, it will seem to become omnipresent. After this stage, all sorts of new unconscious tactics come into play, like retrocognitive memory distortion (revisionist history), and a whole new set of expectations arises. Inevitably, mental scaffolding begins to take shape that blocks perception of future new ideas. History shows that this cycle is repeated over and over again.

Effects of Prior Convictions

A classic experiment by psychologists J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman demonstrated that sometimes what we see—or think we see—is not really there.2 Bruner and Postman created a deck of normal playing cards, except that some of the suit symbols were color-reversed. For example, the queen of diamonds had black-colored diamonds instead of red. The special cards were shuffled into an ordinary deck, and then as they were displayed one at a time, people were asked to identify them as fast as possible. The cards were first shown very briefly, too fast to identify them accurately. Then the display time was lengthened until all the cards could be identified. The amazing thing is that while all the cards were eventually identified with great confidence, no one noticed that there was anything out of the ordinary in the deck.

People saw a black four of hearts as either a four of spades or as a normal four of hearts with red hearts. In other words, their expectations about what playing cards should look like determined what they actually saw. When the researchers increased the amount of time that the cards were displayed, some people eventually began to notice that something was amiss, but they did not know exactly what was wrong. One person, while directly gazing at a red six of spades, said, “That’s the six of spades but there’s something wrong with it—the black spade has a red border.”3As the display time increased even more, people became more confused and hesitant. Eventually, most people saw what was before their eyes. But even when the cards were displayed for forty times the length of time needed to recognize normal playing cards, about 10 percent of the color-re versed playing cards were never correctly identified by any of the people!

The mental discomfort associated with seeing something that does not match our expectations is reflected in the exasperation of one participant in the experiment who, while looking at the cards, reported, “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure what a spade looks like. My God!”

Studies like this in the 1950s led psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues at Stanford University to develop the idea of cognitive dissonance.4 This is the uncomfortable feeling that develops when people are confronted by “things that shouldn’t ought to be, but are.” If the dissonance is sufficiently strong, and is not reduced in some way, the uncomfortable feeling will grow, and that feeling can develop into anger, fear, and even hostility. A pathological example of unresolved cognitive dissonance is represented by people who blow up abortion clinics in the name of Jesus. Also, to avoid unpleasant cognitive dissonance people will often react to evidence that disconfirms their beliefs by actually strengthening their original beliefs and creating rationalizations for the disconfirming evidence.

The drive to avoid cognitive dissonance is especially strong when the belief has led to public commitment. Because the primary debunkers of psi phenomena are publicly committed to their views through their affiliation with skeptics organizations, we can better understand some of the tactics they have used to reduce their cognitive dissonance.

Reducing Cognitive Dissonance

There are three common strategies for reducing cognitive dissonance. One way is to adopt what others believe. Parents often see this change in their children when they begin school. Children rapidly conform to groupthink, and after a few years, they need this particular pair of shoes, and that particular haircut, and this video game, or they will simply die. Children are not just imagining their strong needs for this or that fad. Even in young children, the need to conform to social pressure can be as painful as physical pain. Likewise, a college student faced with trying to please a skeptical professor will soon come to agree that anyone who believes in all that “New Age bunk,” or psi, is either mentally unstable or stupid.

A second way of dealing with cognitive dissonance is to apply pressure to people who hold different ideas. This explains why mavericks are often shunned by more conventional scientists and why there is almost no public funding of psi research. In totalitarian regimes, the heretics are simply tracked down and eliminated. To function without the annoying pain of cognitive dissonance, groups will use almost any means to achieve consensus.

The third way of reducing cognitive dissonance is to make the person who holds a different opinion significantly different from oneself. This is where disparaging labels like “heretic” and “pseudoscientist” come from. The heretic is stupid, malicious, foolish, sloppy, or evil, so his opinion does not matter. Or she has suspicious motives, or she believes in weird practices, or she looks different. The distressing history of how heretics were treated in the Middle Ages and the more recent “ethnic cleansings” of the last half-century remind us that witch-hunts are always just below the veneer of civility. The human psyche fears change and is always struggling to maintain the status quo.5 Vigorous struggles to promote the “one right” interpretation of the world have existed as long as human beings have held opinions. As history advances, and we forget the cost in human suffering, old controversies begin to look ridiculous. For example, an explosive controversy in the Middle Ages was whether God the Father and God the Son had the same nature or merely a similar nature. Hundreds died over that debate.6Cognitive Dissonance and PSI

When we are publicly committed to a belief, it is disturbing even to consider that any evidence contradicting our position may be true—because public ridicule adds to the unpleasantness of cognitive dissonance. This is one reason that the psi controversy has persisted for so long. It also helps to explain why it is much easier to be a skeptic than it is to be a researcher investigating unusual effects. Skeptics may be overly conservative, but if they are ultimately proved wrong they can just smile and shrug it off and say “Whoops, I guess I was wrong. Sorry!” By contrast, frontier scientists are often blindly attacked as though their findings represented a virus that must be extinguished from the existing “body” of knowledge at all costs.

Commitment stirs the fires of cognitive dissonance and makes it progressively more difficult to even casually entertain alternative hypotheses. This is as true for proponents as it is for skeptics. Cognitive dissonance is also one of the main reasons that many scientists dismiss the evidence provided by psi experiments without even examining it. In science, said the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, “novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation. Initially only the anticipated and usual are experienced even under circumstances where an anomaly is later to be observed.”7This means that in the initial stages of a new discovery, when a scientific anomaly is first claimed, it literally cannot be seen by everyone. We have to change our expectations in order to see it. When one scientist claims to see something unusual, another scientist who is intrigued by the claim, but does not believe it yet, will simply fail to see the same effect.

Kuhn illustrated this bewildering state of affairs with the case of Sir William Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus. Uranus was observed at least seventeen times by different astronomers from 1690 to 1781. None of the observations made any sense if the object was a star, which was the prevailing assumption about most lights in the sky at the time, until Herschel suggested that the “star” might have been in a planetary orbit. Then it suddenly made sense. After this shift in perception, caused by a new way of thinking about old observations, suddenly everyone was seeing planets.8The same was true for studies of subliminal perception in the 1950s. Not all early experimenters could get results. No theory could account for the bizarre claim that something could be seen without being aware that it was being seen. But once computer-inspired information-processing models were developed, with their accompanying metaphors about information being processed simultaneously at different levels, then suddenly subliminal processing was acceptable and the effects were observable.9The effect of shifting perceptions was observed more recently when high-temperature superconductors were unexpectedly discovered in 1986. Soon afterward, superconducting temperatures previously considered flatly impossible were being reported regularly. The same had occurred with lasers. It took decades to get the first lasers to work; then suddenly every thing was “lasing.” It took decades to get the first crude holographs to work, and now they are put on cereal boxes by the millions. Some of these changes were the result of advancements in understanding the basic phenomenon, but those advancements could not occur until expectations about what was possible had already changed.

Another famous and poignant example is the case of German meteorologist Alfred Wegener. In 1915 Wegener published a “ludicrous” theory that the earth’s continents had once been a single, contiguous piece. Over mil lions of years, he claimed, the single continent split into several pieces, which then drifted apart into their current configuration. Wegener’s theory, dubbed “continental drift,” was supported by an extensive amount of care fully cataloged geological evidence. Still, his British and American colleagues laughed and called the idea impossible, and Wegener died an intellectual outcast in 1930. Today, every schoolchild is taught his theory, and by simply taking the time to examine a world map, we can now observe that Wegener’s impossible theory is entirely self-evident.10Expectancy Effects

I know I’m not seeing things as they are, I’m seeing things as I am.

—Laurel Lee

In attempting to understand how intelligent scientists could seriously propose criticisms of psi research that were blatantly invalid, sociologist Harry Collins showed that for controversial scientific topics where the mere existence of a phenomenon has been in question, scientific criticisms are al most completely determined by critics’ prior expectations. That is, criticisms are often unrelated to the actual results of experiments. For example, Collins showed that in the case of the search for gravity waves (hypothetical forces that “carry” gravity), reviewers’ assessment of the competency of experiments conducted by proponents and critics depended entirely on the reviewers’ expectations of what effects they thought should have been observed.11The expectancy effect has also been observed in experimental studies by Stanford University social psychologists Lee Ross and Mark Lepper. They found that precisely the same experimental evidence shown to a group of reviewers tended to polarize them according to their initial positions.12 Studies conforming to the reviewers’ preconceptions were seen as better designed, as more valid, and as reaching more adequate conclusions. Studies not conforming to prior expectations were seen as flawed, invalid, and reaching inadequate conclusions. Sound familiar?

This “perseverance effect” has been a major stumbling block for parapsychology. Collins and sociologist Trevor Pinch studied how conventional scientists have reacted to claims of experimental evidence for psi phenomena. In an article they wrote that focused on issues of social psychology, and in which they explicitly stated that their own position was entirely neutral with regard to the existence of psi, they received

a spleenful letter from a well known professional magician-and-sceptic which attempts to persuade us to change our attitude to research in the paranormal and claims that: “Seriously, how men of science such as yourselves can make excuses for … [the proponents’] incompetence is a matter of astonishment to me. … I was shocked at your paper; I had expected science rather than selective reporting.”13

Reviewer bias is not just evident in skeptics’ reviews of psi research; it is endemic in all scientific controversies. This is especially true for controversies concerned with questions about morality or mortality. For example, science becomes muddled with politics when we seek answers to difficult questions such as whether herbal remedies should be used to treat cancer, or whether nuclear power is safe, or whether a particular concentration of benzene or asbestos in the workplace is tolerable.

A reviewer’s judgment of a researcher’s level of competency is often established on the basis of who produced the results rather than on independent assessments of the experimental methods. For example, results reported by “prominent professors at Princeton University” will be viewed as more credible than identical results reported by a junior staff member at “East Central Southwestern Community College.”

Ultimately, it seems that scientific “truth,” at least for controversial topics, is not determined as much by experiment, or replication, or any other method listed in the textbooks, as by purely nonscientific factors. These include rhetoric, ad hominem attack, institutional politics, and battles over limited funding. In short, scientists are human. Assuming that scientists act rationally when faced with intellectual or economic pressures is a mistake.

Sociologist Harry Collins calls one element of this problem about getting to the “truth” of controversial matters the experimenters’ regress. This is an exasperating catch-22 that occurs when the correct outcome of an experiment is unknown. To settle the question under normal circumstances, where results are predicted by well-accepted theory, the outcome of a single experiment can be examined to see if it matches the expectation. If it does, the experiment was obviously correct. If not, it wasn’t.

In cases like parapsychology, to know whether the experiment was well performed, we first need to know whether psi exists. But to know whether psi exists, we need to run the right experiment. But to run the right experiment, we need a well-accepted theory. But … And so on. This forms an infinite, potentially unbreakable loop. In particular, this loop can continue unresolved in spite of the application of strict scientific methods. In an at tempt to break the experimenters’ regress, skeptics often argue that the phenomenon does not exist. Of course, to do that they must rely on invalid, nonscientific criticisms, because there is plenty of empirical evidence to the contrary.

It is difficult to detect purely rhetorical tactics unless one is deeply familiar with both sides of a debate. As Collins put it:

Without deep and active involvement in controversy, and/or a degree of philosophical self-consciousness about the social process of science (still very unusual outside a small group of academics) the critic may not notice how far scientific practice strays from the text book model of science.14

Judgment Errors

The acts of perception and cognition, which seem to be immediate and self-evident, involve absorbing huge amounts of meaningless sensory information and mentally constructing a stable and coherent model of the world. Mismatches between the world as it really is and our mental “virtual” world lead to persistent, predictable errors in judgment. These judgment errors have directly affected the scientific controversy about psi.

When a panel of expert clinicians, say psychologists, physicians, or psychiatrists, are asked to provide their best opinions about a group of patients, they are usually confident that their assessments will be accurate. After all, highly regarded clinicians have years of experience making complex judgments. They believe that their experiences in judging thousands of earlier cases have honed their intuitive abilities into a state of rarefied precision that no simple, automated procedure could ever match. They’re often wrong.

Psychologist Dale Griffin of Stanford University reviewed the research on how we make intuitive judgments for the same National Research Council report that reviewed the evidence on psi.15 Griffin’s job was to remind the committee that when we make expert judgments on complex is sues, it is important to use objective methods (like meta-analysis) to assess the evidence rather than to rely on personal intuitions. It’s too bad that the committee did not pay close attention to Griffin’s advice.

Starting in the 1950s, researchers began to study how expert intuition compared with predictions based on simpleminded mathematical rules. In such studies, a clinical panel was presented with personal information such as personality scores and tallies on various other tests, then asked to predict the likely outcomes for each person. The prediction might be for a medical assessment, or suitability for a job, or any number of other applications. The judges’ predictions were compared to a simple combination of scores from the various tests, and both predictions were compared with the actual out comes. To the dismay of the experts, not only were the mathematical predictions far superior to the experts’ intuitions, but many of these studies showed that the amount of professional training and experience of the judges was not even vaguely related to their accuracy! To add insult to in jury, the mathematical models were not highly sophisticated. In most cases, they were formed by simply adding up values from various test scores.16A flurry of studies in the 1950s confirmed that simple mathematical pre dictions were almost always better than expert clinical intuition for diagnosing medical symptoms such as brain damage, categorizing psychiatric patients, and predicting success in college. Clinical experts were not amused.

Today, when we evaluate complex evidence provided by a body of experimental data, we use the successor to those early mathematical models: the quantitative meta-analysis. So the National Research Council experts who relied on their personal opinions to evaluate the evidence for parapsychology, however intuitively appealing their opinions may have felt, would be as perplexed as the clinical experts of the 1950s to discover that their subjective opinions were just plain wrong.

What Do We Pay Attention To?

How could experts be so wrong? One reason is that expectation biases are self-generating. We cannot pay attention to everything equally, so instead we rely on past experience and vague mental “heuristics,” or guidelines, that worked fairly well on similar problems. Unfortunately, relying on subjective impressions and mental guidelines creates a cycle in which our past experience begins to divert us from paying attention to new things that might be even more predictive. After a while, since we no longer pay attention to anything other than what we have already decided is important, we tend to keep confirming what we already knew. This model-or theory-driven approach is called the confirmation bias.

The problem with the confirmation bias is that we end up learning only one or two ways to solve a problem, and then we keep reapplying that solution to all other problems, whether it is appropriate or not. This is especially compounded for highly experienced people, because past successes have made their theories so strong that they tend to overlook easier, simpler, more accurate, and more efficient ways of solving the problem. This is one reason that younger scientists are usually responsible for the giant, earth-shaking discoveries—they haven’t learned their craft so well that they have become blind to new possibilities. Younger scientists are invariably more open to psi than older scientists.

One well-known consequence of being driven by theory is the “self-fulfilling prophecy”—the way our private theories cause others to act toward us just as our theories predict. For instance, if our theory says that people are basically kind and loving, and we expect that people will act this way, then sure enough, they will usually respond in kind, loving ways, reinforcing our original expectation. In contrast, if we assume that people are basically nasty and paranoid, they will quickly respond in ways that reinforce this negative expectation. Many people know about the power of self-fulfilling prophecy through Norman Vincent Peale’s famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking.17An experiment demonstrating the self-fulfilling prophecy was described by Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal in a classic book entitled Pygmalion in the Classroom.18 Teachers were led to believe that some students were high achievers and others were not. In reality, the students had been assigned at random to the two categories. The teachers’ expectations about high achievers led them to treat the “high achievers” differently than the other students, and subsequent achievement tests confirmed that the self-fulfilling prophecy indeed led to higher scores for the randomly selected “high achievers.”

Such studies made it absolutely clear that when experimenters know how participants “should” behave, it is impossible not to send out unconscious signals. This is why scientists use the double-blind experimental design, so that their personal expectations do not contaminate the research results. And this is why we cannot fully trust fascinating psychic stories reported by groups that expect such things to occur, unless they also demonstrate that they are aware of, know how to, and did control for expectation biases.

An important consequence of the confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy is that the more we think we already know the answer, the more difficult it is for us to judge new evidence fairly. This is precisely why scientific committees charged with evaluating the evidence in controversial fields such as psi must be composed of scientists who have no strong prior opinions about the topic. It is too bad that the National Research Council committee did not heed its own advice.

Because of the confirmation bias, skeptics who review a body of psi experiments are likely to select for review only the few studies that confirm their prior expectations. They will assume that all the other studies they could have reviewed would have had the same set of real or imagined problems. And they end up confirming their prior position. For example, one of skeptical psychologist Susan Blackmore’s favorite arguments against parapsychology is based upon a single occasion when she thought she had reason to suspect one set of experiments. For years now, she has used that single experience to justify her doubt about all other psi experiments.19

THE CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE

The Scientific TruthOf Psychic Phenomena

Dean I. Radin, Ph.D.