Book Report: The Laws of Psychic Phenomena by Thompson J. Hudson (c)1893

The Laws of Psychic Phenomena by Thompson J. Hudson (c)1893

This is a big book that discusses a lot material dealing with the mind and consciousness, and is well worth a read, even if you're not a devotee of psychic phenomena. I imagine that in it's day, it was widely received, considering that it was discussed in other books of the period, including some of William Walker Atkinson's writings on New Thought (and I think he even lifted a paragraph or two directly!) The author was a lawyer with a keen and logical mind.

Within the scope of the book is a great deal of what was then cutting edge psychological thinking, some of which is still valid today. At the time he was writing his book, spiritism was very popular with the public, and some of the top thinkers of the day were investigating the possibility of any validity to their seances. While the author is confident in telepathic psychic phenomena, he is not a believer in spirits of the dead or the ability of spiritualists to communicate with them, but he is willing to concede that some genuine psychic phenomena may unwillingly be generated by the spirit mediums themselves, and he also explores the psychology he feels is behind both the people involved and the practice which produces what seems to be messages from beyond.

He describes the Conscious mind and the Subconscious mind as the objective and subjective minds, respectively, and that practical terminology is still occasionally used today. His observations on the subjective/subconscious mind are particularly valid and modern-sounding, such as it's ability to focus deeply on a subject while being oblivious to things like the passage of time, how it has incredible recall of memory, and how it has little objective judgement and so it can easily be led into imaginary experiences and even hallucinations. He even posits that some mental illnesses may be the result of an imbalance between the objective and subjective minds. 

In discussing the three big varieties of hypnotism at the time of his time -- those of James Braid, The Nancy School of France, and Mesmerism-- he defines them more practically with the following terms: "Physical hypnotism" for Braid's use of physical suggestion, like the eye-lock (subject rolls his eyes upward until eye fatigue occurs), "Suggestive Hypnotism" for the Nancy practitioners that employed purely verbal techniques, and "Magnetic/Fluidic Hypnotism" to refer to Mesmerism.   

A lot of his book discusses events and experiments being published at the time which come from a variety of sources, from newspapers to the official publications of scientific organizations, and he examines them with a clear an logical mind. 

Of  course, he is very confident in the reality of psychic phenomena, and his book, after all, is an attempt to bring it from an occult art to an applicable science. He examines various practices for their effectiveness and finally endorses Mesmerism, since it is the only trance method that employs the metaphysical magnetic fluid that seems to be responsible for psychic phenomena. He discusses telepathy and also remote healing (another very popular subject art that time), and cites examples recorded by the British Society for Psychical Research. His primary interest in in what is called "Mental Therapeutics" which is to say, using Mesmeric power for healing people. To that end, in Chapter 13, he presents "A New System of Mental Therapeutics," which takes into consideration all the latest data (from 1893), some of which he cites in the book. (Some rather un-PC experiments carried out by the experimenters from the British Society involved projecting a "ghost" of themselves into the bedrooms of unsuspecting female acquaintances, and happily reporting that the terrified women contacted them the next day to tell them of the of their experience!)

His simple solution to the eternal bugaboo of why time and distance are irrelevant in psychic communication is surprisingly simple-- those dimensions are relevant only to the objective/conscious mind. Psychic phenomena is subjective communication.

Towards the end of the book, he reconciles his scientific psychic observations with Christianity, which he feels are completely compatible. If this sort of thing interests you, he offers some interesting observations -- if people had a better understanding of the laws of psychic phenomena, the biblical descriptions of Jesus' miracles would have been much shorter and more technical, that the subconscious/objective mind is the immortal soul of the person and that the objective mind is merely a kind of logical function, and more. 

 

Book Report: Dream Telepathy by Ullman, Krippner and Vaughan -- Research Methodology

Dream Telepathy, Scientific Experiments in the Supernatural, (c) 1973 Macmillan Publishing

Despite the enticingly spooky title, this book is based on scientific research form the Dream Research Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center Psychology department. If you're looking for an exploration of this exotic phenomena from researchers firmly grounded in psychological sciences and the scientific method, this is the book for you.

Telepathy may not be something discussed today in many scientific circles, but until the 1980s, no topic was unworthy of being eyed through the lens of science. In fact, in those days ESP and psychic abilities were big both in popular culture and in serious research circles, thanks to research initiated in the Soviet Union, and the possibility of psychic spying was beginning to be considered seriously in political circles, So the time was certainly ripe to explore what could be explored. Moreover, many of the pioneering figures of psychiatry discussed psychic phenomena, including Freud, Jung, Ehrenwald and others. Some therapists even complained about having psychic dream-communications involving their patients!

In the opening of the book, the authors related a number of historical and literary cases of telepathic and prophetic dreams, as well as the type of psychological patients that seem to experience dream telepathy, (emotionally detached patients often do, but schizophrenics never do). 

The central portion of the book describes the experiments (mostly conducted between 1948-1954) in great detail, and analyses their results and the shortcomings, which were often addressed in subsequent experiments. In the course of their research, they also learned about various sleep states (ie: REM sleep was unknown until 1950). A fairly small pool of researchers participated in the experiments, so that the data was able to examine the effect of their character traits on the outcomes, as well as the effect of the relationships between the senders and receivers of the psychic messages. 

The third part of the book, Theoretical Implications, examines the data for conclusions and useful information (science, after all, is about findings that are verifiable and repeatable). The most obvious are that positive rapport between participants and things with strong emotional charges were most likely to be successfully transmitted. They also discovered that men tended to make better psychic receivers ("percipients") than women, despite accepted wisdom. Interestingly, telepathic messages were not necessarily bound by time, and may not be received at the same time they were sent.