Saturday, September 27, 2014

Miracle at East Grinstea


In May 1960 a 16 year boy was admitted to Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, suffering from a complaint known as fish-scale disease. He looked ghastly. John’s body was covered in black warts while his hands were encased in a black, rigid horny scale so inelastic that any attempt to bend it would cause it to crack and become infected. Fish-scale disease is congenital and considered incurable.
Queen Victoria’s Hospital had a worldwide reputation for plastic surgery. An attempt was made to transplant skin from John’s chest to the palms of his hands. The attempt was a failure. However the anesthetist, who was also a skilled hypnotist, had previously cured a case of warts with hypnotism. He had an idea. If a couple of warts could be made to disappear with hypnosis why not try with the boy whose skin resembled a mass of warts. When he suggested this to the surgeon, Sir Archibald McIndoe, he was not amused and, turning on Mason, sourly told him to have a go if he wanted to.
Dr Mason went ahead with John’s session and the boy fairly quickly went into a hypnotic trance in which Dr Mason suggested that the disease in his left arm was healing and would soon be gone. Five days later the scaly layer covering the boy's left arm fell off, revealing soft, healthy flesh beneath.  By the end of ten days the arm was completely normal. Dr Mason took John along to Sir Archibald who was stunned. “Good God man, do you know what you’ve done. That boy had congenital ichthyosiform erythroderma. Go and look it up.”
This discovery that the disease was incurable had a curious effect on Dr. Mason. Whereas before he had a sort of innocent confidence, now, in spite of his visible success, a shadow of doubt must have crept into his unconscious. For when he tried to repeat the process on the boy’s right arm, nothing happened.
The success of hypnosis depends not only on reaching the unconscious of the subject and on implanting, you might say, a belief. It also depends on the hypnotist’s state of mind too. He has to be confident, or just simply lack any doubt, a knowing that hypnosis works.  Dr Mason’s discovery that what he had visibly achieved was impossible cast a doubt right where it mattered. Logic cannot reach into the Soul Mind. And so, the second and third attempt to cure John’s right arm failed. Not only that, but some time later the boy himself proved to be unhypnotizable. Whereas before he had easily gone into a trance he was now completely resistant.
If we take divine intervention out of the equation, there are some important insights to be gained from remarkable stories like the one above. The first is that the mind (the Inner Soul Mind not the Analytical Mind) can create realities in the most dramatic way. When a person is hypnotised their Analytical Mind goes to sleep, making the Inner Soul Mind reachable. Their fantasy life and their perceptions can be completely changed. The imagination can make us see things that are not there and render things invisible that are - but John’s fish-scale disease was not just an illusion.  This was not dealing with mere imagination, but with physical reality. Quite a different thing. Somehow the laws of nature were subverted by human mental intervention. *  That the mind can directly effect physical reality we might call miraculous, forgetting for the moment that telepathy, an everyday occurrence, also violates ordinary scientific common sense. So does every placebo effect in the doctor’s surgery.

*  The ability of the mind to directly effect physical objects is called telekinesis.
See Dr Mason’s Hypnotic Miracle : http://anomalyinfo.com/articles/sa00107.php
  See also :  http://www.hypnosis-kids.com/hypnosis-healing-stories-brocq.htm

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264


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