Nocturne

People once woke up halfway

 through the night to think,

 write or make love. 

What have we lost by

 sleeping straight through?

    Karen Emslie

NOCTURNE

Electric light changed our experience of nighttime. Prior to Edison’s revolutionary invention of the light bulb, sleep was naturally divided into two parts. We think of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep as normal. But before gas and electric light, people bunkered down earlier and it was normal to have two segments of sleep. The time of the first sleep varied with the season and social class, but it usually started soon after dusk and lasted for three or four hours. In pre-industrial societies people naturally woke up from the first sleep to engage in activities that had a different quality, where perhaps the daytime analytical mind was not quite so active. Nearer to the dream-world, people were more imaginative, finding it easier to ‘write, think and make love’. A doctor's manual from 16th Century France advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when " they have more enjoyment" and "do it better". Such a reference to ‘first and second sleep appear in countless old records, literary texts, medical manuscripts, diaries, archives, documents and letters in pre-industrial times. It is not so much what they said about segmented sleep, but the way they referred to it – taking it absolutely for grated as the normal mode of nighttime life. 

This unnoticed aspect of our history has recently been investigated by sleep scientists, and most notably by the historian A. Roger Ekirch of the Virginia State University in his book At Close of Day,  a study based on 16 years of research. Ekirch tells us, ‘There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind.’ He goes on to say that people fell asleep not long after dark for the “first sleep.” Then they awoke, somnolent but not asleep, often around midnight, when for a few hours they talked, read, prayed, had sex, brewed beer or burgled. Then they went back to sleep for a shorter period. 

Psychiatrist Thomas Wehr suggests that the most common insomnia we suffer, is not a disorder but rather a harking back to a natural form of segmented sleep.  Wehr also suggests that not only have modern routines altered our sleeping patterns, they have also robbed us of this ancient connection between our dreams and waking life, and ‘might provide a explanation for the observation that modern humans seem to have lost touch with the wellspring of myths and fantasies’. In pre-industrial times people might simply have lain in bed ruminating on the meaning of a fresh dream, thereby permitting the conscious mind a window onto the human psyche that remains shuttered for us moderns in the rush to start the day, missing the experience of this slightly ‘altered state’.

Ekirch tells us: ‘By turning night into day, modern technology has obstructed our oldest avenue to the human psyche, making us, to invoke the words of the 17th-century English playwright Thomas Middleton, “disannulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies”. 

Night triggers hormonal changes in our brains that suit creativity. Wehr has noted that, during the waking period between sleeps the pituitary gland still excretes high levels of prolactin. This is the hormone associated with sensations of peace and the dreamlike hallucinations we sometimes experience as we fall asleep, or upon waking. It is produced when we feel sexual satisfaction and when nursing mothers lactate. In segmented sleep intervals it must also help create that non-anxious wakefulness that most nearly resembles a meditative state. 

But not always. When the iron grip of the analytic mind is loosened in such intervals, an unpleasant and repressed feeling may surface. It is an opportunity to look into what episodes in one’s life it relates and to re-experience, if not the memory, at least the felt-sense of it. This can free up the whole tone of a day.

Kate Bussmann writes in the Sunday Telegraph, “How does this history help insomnia? For me, it proved that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the idea of an eight-hour uninterrupted sleep. If I went to bed earlier, it was OK to wake up for a few hours. It also meant that I stopped howling into the void during those few hours I was awake and instead used that time to read novels, do relaxation exercises or write. In my efforts to keep as close to my medieval forbears as possible, I never looked at my phone.  The worst thing you can do when you wake up at 3am is to stress. And nothing is likely to induce panic more than the idea that sleeping uninterrupted for eight hours is necessary for mental and physical health.”

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

HEAVENLY LIAISONS

Relationships are made in heaven, beginning as the sweet promise of a new beginning and progressing into a perplexing entanglement.

 ‘Relationship’ is such a bland word. What we mean by it is really quite modern. We are aware of what goes on psychologically between people in a way our grandparents never were, so there are no old fashioned synonyms for the modern meaning of ‘relationship’. Our forefathers had no language and therefore no insight into the subtleties we perceive. Relationships were defined socially, not psychologically: you were a wife, a husband, a mother, a cousin – and that was that. Only the perceptive Victorian novelist gave us more subtle views.

Since, say the 1950s, many social categories began to break down, which left us in something of a muddle. Couples were living together in all kinds of arrangements. The categories gone, we were force to look more at the nuances that hold people together or spit them apart.

The human psyche is a vast vortex of unfathomable depths, constantly changing. Indifference and kindness, meanness and generosity vie with each other in the hidden caverns of my soul. But in close relationships my darker shades wake up with hints of passion and hate that I have never encountered before, surprising both of us.

More than anything else, relationships are where the great drama of childhood dependency is reenacted and played out. Of course, relationships are also much more than this. But the hidden reemergence of childhood dependency and the infant determination to get what I want triggers the turmoil with our loved one, most often without our realising the connection with the past.

A child comes into the world with two basic requirements. The first is to grow and develop in the way it needs to; the second is to be protected and looked after as it does so. The first is the need for freedom; the second is the fact of dependency.

To be free and grow in my own way means to be independent and self sufficient. And so, as I grow up, anything that reminds me of depenancy is likely to be suppressed and denied – “I wish Mum would stop fussing over me.” But there is another aim of childhood that persists throughout my life: and that is to be safe, to have someone that I can depend on. Safety in childhood essentially means the confidence that I will be looked after and cared for no matter what – what we know as unconditional love.

So, in my early years I have two basic ‘wants’ in opposition: to be free and to be dependant. These basic necessities are once again restimulated by coming into an intimate relationship later in life. The old longings are fuelled by new hope and desire which have all the power of those first vital connections – and all the conflicts and disappointments too. The sweet promise is that I will be unconditionally loved and also given the freedom to be myself.

Our actual experience in childhood meets the inevitable frustrations of those expectations; and it all gets fired up again in later-life’s intimate relationships. The very same patterns develop.

Both grown-up parties in a relationship have the same basic urge: how to be independent and free and, at the same time demanding care and love. How we get along together depends on how we both unconsciously negotiate this problem. I say ‘unconsciously’ because the dynamics of both ‘pasts’ are involved below awareness. Each person lives in the bubble of their past, limiting their perception of the other.

If a relationship is lucky it might survive long enough for the long process of adaptation. This is a process where states of muddle and clarity, conflict and resolution, alternate until there is a settling down where the old demands and conflicts of childhood begin to lessen.

There are some interesting aspects to this coalescing dynamic where couples adjust to each other. For example, one partner, lets say the woman, may be in therapy and the other, the man, is resistant to the idea. Eventually, the woman’s progress in therapy has a beneficial effect on him. He is forced to change, to begin to look at himself, without any direct attempt to change him.

 What changes him is who his partner is becoming.

He discovers that it is no longer possible to control her in the way he used to. He cannot secretly secure his need to be looked after by keeping her in the role of surrogate mother. The woman begins to experience the freedom to grow in the way she needs to. He goes through all his old rage and fear of abandonment, but eventually, when he breaks through, he too will have a similar sense of freedom.

Lucky are the couple who get thus far – but it takes persistent psychological work on someone’s part.

Why is it, I ask myself, that we seldom find the opposite situation: i.e. where it is the man who seeks change in the relationship and the woman who resists. Why is it so rare for a man to seek change by promoting communication as a solution?

Let me guess an answer: perhaps as a rule men are more afraid of self exposure.  A man might more easily take the plunge into another relationship as a way out, seeking freedom and love elsewhere. Perhaps a man is more likely to suddenly choose this route rather than talking things out and risk the exposure of his dependency that this might entail, an exposure that could fatally erode his ego-image. As John Kirwan said, ‘All Blacks Don’t Cry’ – a sad hint of what it means to be a man.

Self exposure is harder for a man who has spent his life rejecting the weakness and the dependency aspect of his personality. For it is true that deeper communication, such as person-centred work, exposes one’s weaknesses.

Fear of self-disclosure is not the prerogative of men. A woman can just as easily be stifled, uneasy about self disclosure because of early abuse or rigidity of upbringing, precipitating a protective shell around them.

Whatever the individual patterns, the process of self-disclosure and exposure is what is needed in both partners if the relationship is to work.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

ON YOU ROGER, SHAME !

A complaint of sexual harassment from a staff member to the State Services Commission has led to the resignation of Canterbury Earthquake Commission’s CEO, Roger Sutton. His major offence, it seems, was to address a woman on the staff as ‘sweetie’.

Everyone agrees that Sutton has done excellent work in the difficult job as CERA’s CEO. His decision to resign is regretted by Brownlee, Minister responsible for CERA, and I would guess most of his staff. He struck the public of Christchurch as a good man. His wife agrees with him: “He's a really good man - he's far nicer than I am. He's far more compassionate than I am, but he's also really silly. And that's kind of what I love about him. I think he kind of forgot that he was the leader of a public service; and he's too informal, he's too relaxed ... but that's who he is. That's what makes him amazing, and why his staff, the CERA staff, love him." She was an advocate, she said, of men and women being safe in the workplace, but added: "I just wish this could have been done in a less public, less hideous way."

One cannot but agree it would have been better if the offended staff member could have approached Sutton personally. He would have responded positively, I’m sure.

 I can remember myself, oh! – it must have been 25 years ago, a woman at a party offered me a plate of sausage rolls. I said: “No thanks dear, I think I’ll give those a miss tonight.” Whereupon she flashed at me: “Don’t you call me dear – I’m not your dear.” I didn’t have time to respond before she sped away with her sausage rolls. How should she have known that I am an old fashioned Cockney from the East-end where a bus conductor can inform a passenger: “Tooting Common next stop dear; or the local butcher can address a customer: “What will it be today dear – some nice sirloin?” The epithet ‘dear’ is common parlance in London Eastend. But then, my unfortunate use of the word was in New Zealand.

Times and sensitivities change – a little towards over sensitivity at times, as when the word Golliwog (a soft doll with a black face and fuzzy hair) in a  children’s story book can lead to protests of racial insensitivity.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

AM I DEAF OR SOMETHING?

Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.

And Hebrews learn it backwards,

which is absolutely frightening.

But use proper English you're regarded as a freak.

Why can't the English,

Why can't the English learn to speak?

So sang Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins in the musical My Fair Lady, a 1956 Broadway musical based on Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. The professor has made a bet with a friend that he can transform a cockney flower girl, Eliza

Doolittle, played in the film by Audrey Hepburn, into a lady he can pass off in society simply by teaching her how to speak. The professor gets himself very involved and empresses his exasperation with the inability of the English to speak properly.

Rex Harrison was an excellent choice for the part because he was one of the old school like Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier whose skill had been honed in the theatre, where one had to project one’s voice in order to be heard in the stalls, never mind the gallery. An actor had to speak out; otherwise the audience would be literally left in the dark.

In 1951 Marlon Brando mumbled his way across the silver screen in the film of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire. He used something called Method Acting, a technique developed by Constantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and director. In this method the actor aims at a complete identification with the person he is portraying. Unfortunately, Brando set a style that inarticulate mumbling under the breath is a sign of realistic acting and the traditional style came to be thought of as old fashioned and theatrical.

Whether they are consciously applying Stanislavsky’s method or not so many modern actors today are bedeviled by the need to mumble under their breath, especially in initiate love scenes. It seems they believe that to speak clearly would somehow violate the intimacy. And so the love scene becomes an exchange of inaudible whispering between the lovers in which the audience is left out.

Am I old fashioned to want to know what is going on in a movie or a novel? A certain amount of mystification I can stand. It’s not only that actors don’t speak English, but the action is too fast or the plots over-mystify. So many mystery series like Midsummer Murders start off quite easy to follow, but gradually winds themselves into such a tangle of complications that I literally lose the plot.

With the forced idleness of recuperation – I have been sick for a few months now – I am discovering my difficulties with television. Audibility and articulation is certainly a problem. I wonder, perhaps if, with US shows, it might help to introduce sub-titles for English speaking audiences !

Shakespeare knew that the play’s not the thing, the audience is the thing. That’s why his characters would often speak asides directly to the audience so that they were included. A play is for the sake of the audience. A play is not to show off the actors or clever directors or fabulously ingenious plots. A play is to enchant the audience; and an audience has to be able to comprehend, to be included, in what is going on.

When being entertained by a play, like most people I’m sure, I have this childish desire to be included in what is going on, to be able to identify with the characters and their lives. Drama as we know it originated in ancient Greece where the audience was very much included. Everyone knew the myths which the theatre dramas played out. There was no mystification. The actors spoke their lines from behind masks and had to project their voices into the open air theater. Moreover, seated in the Greek thearon, everyone knew what was happening to Oedipus in Sophocles’ play – the whole point of the story was that Oedipus didn’t know. He was ignorant of where fate was leading him, but not the audience. They knew in advance his tragic destiny and could be thoroughly involved as it was gradually revealed. But they knew every step beforehand. They knew the story; and as every child will tell you, you have to know how the story goes. Otherwise the whole thing is spoiled.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

DARWIN’S COMPLAINT

“Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure, and music very great delight. Even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”¹

What an amazingly insightful admission!

Astonishing that Darwin, probably the greatest scientist of modern times, should see so clearly that his powerful analytical mind has cut him off from his soul, and the awful cost that entails. He has lost his ‘aesthetic sense’, which we take to mean the feeling emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality.

Darwin recognises that the loss of the aesthetic sense can be detrimental to our ‘moral character’ - a rather old-fashioned expression, better stated as ‘kindness, gentleness and sensitivity. Indeed, these qualities only come into being when I am aware of the other as a person, only when the other person is as real to me as I am to myself. I need the presence of another subject, a first-person singular who can be addressed, implored, reasoned with, and loved. Without the aesthetic sense there is no subject-to-subject encounter. The other person isn’t actually there.  I ride rough shod over them and end up with a distorted version of how they actually are.

Also Darwin sees how the enfeebling of our emotional nature could be ‘injurious to the intellect’.  True. The intellect also fails without the esthetic sense. You have to feel what is there before you can think about it. Without the aesthetic sense you tend to ‘intellectualise’, dismissive of small, but vital details, again riding rough shod over discrepancies in order to bully reality into being what you want it to be.

The intellect begins with curiosity – and curiosity is very careful with details. Observation becomes a magical enthrallment with the finer points of how things actually are – nothing missed or overlooked. Only then can you afford to think.

The aesthetic sense is not interested in theories and structures but in the immediacy of sensation, the flow of life with all its muddle and indeterminacy. But the analytical mind wants a world that can be relied upon. All the facts and observations that Darwin has collected must be reduced to rational truths and so he grinds out general laws that sideline the confusion – very successfully.

This urge to abstract precise principles from the confusion of the world has been called ‘reductionism’. Booming, bustling nature gets explained away. Consistency is the watchword. Oddities get ignored. When something is odd we rush to a general principle to explain it away.

The urge to diminish confusion drives the compulsion to have things shipshape, like in the household where everything has its place.  ‘The fruit go there and the loose veggies there’. Everything in its place and a place for everything. Have you ever been in a household where absolutely nothing is out of place? It’s kind of scary. There is no flow, no confusion, no untidiness – everything is anesthetized and static. That’s interesting, isn’t it: an-esthetized means a loss of sensation - precisely what Darwin was complaining of.

It’s understandable that Darwin should lose his love of poetry and music, but why should it nauseate him. His analytical mind has become so overdeveloped by concentration on establishing principles that his soul has become ‘atrophied’, as he says. But why should poetry now turn his stomach, making him feel sick?

 I will hazard that there is something about the thinking mind, the analytical mind, that is against poetic feeling. The analytical mind doesn’t just neglect the aesthetic sense, but actually feels threatened by it. The naked world is too much, too overwhelming. The analytical mind feels terribly unsafe when confronted by primitive nature. That’s why every morning you forget your dreams. They don’t fit and so get put down.

Aldous Huxley suggested that the analytical mind is like a reducing valve.

 ‘Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed’. ²

No wonder Darwin felt sick – and I’m not feeling too well myself !

¹ The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882.   Collins, London 1958

²   Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception, 1952

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE UNEMBODIED

There are few things more disconcerting for the modern western mind than the idea of discarnate, autonomous spirits – souls without bodies. We don’t believe in ghosts any more and we have little faith now that clairvoyants can help us communicate with the souls of the departed.

Yet, during the Victorian area dabbling in spiritualism was popular at all levels of society in both Britain and America. The séance became a feature of drawing room society – sometimes entertaining, sometimes intense and serious. Interest in spiritualism became a veritable counter-culture, in many ways comparable to the 60s revolution in our own time. It tended to upstage current religion, indulge in altered states, and give more power to the intuitiveness of women. By 1855 two million people were followers of the movement.

In some circles the encounters in the darkened séance room could be quite risqué, taking on sexual overtones. Favorite familiars from the ‘other side’ would materialise to entertain the assembled guests, many of them elderly gentlemen who flirted with such ‘apparitions’. The spirit child Pocha ‘stole money and trinkets from the sitters, climbed on the laps of gentlemen, stroked their whiskers, and allowed herself to be kissed and cuddled.’ ¹

In spite of such fraudulent theatricals, sincere spiritualism carried Royal Approval. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert participated in Spiritualist séances. Later, the clairvoyant Georgiana Eagle demonstrated her powers before the Queen at Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. The Queen’s consort had recently died and the clairvoyant revealed to the Queen the pet name that Prince Albert used for her – a secret that no one else knew. The Queen was impressed.

And there were some very famous people who were deeply involved in spiritualism: William James, the psychologist, studied spiritualism, publishing supportive conclusions; people like Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling and other famous names were involved.² And in 1840 in The British Society for Psychical Research was founded – and still exists to this day.

I would like to remind my colleagues that Jung himself had an early interest in spiritualism; his mother was a psychic and later in life Jung dialogued with disincarnate spirits. His conversations with Philemon were just that:  ‘He taught me psychological objectivity and the actuality of the soul. He formulated and expressed everything which I had never thought, said Jung.

But the situation gets blurred by his calling Philemon ‘a fantasy figure’, suggesting that he is not an autonomous spirit. Philemon was, Jung said, taken from classical literature. In other words he was a mythical character. Jung thus gives the whole thing a scientific spin by granting objectivity to the spiritual world whilst sidestepping the objectivity of Philemon as an independent spirit. However, I would say, that for Philemon to teach Jung so much he was not simply fictional, he must have been a self-directed, thinking individual, capable intelligent communication.

 But Jung refuses to call a spade a spade, throwing out a smoke screen of mythical references. Such contrived avoidance is evident throughout Jung’s work as he tries to give his occult leanings a scientific spin. He was up against the medical establishment and had to give his writings the appearance of scientific objectivity. So Instead of being legitimate agents, his spirits become ‘archetypes’, seeming to be non-personal myths of the soul-at-large. This same evasion is seen in archetypal psychology where it is de rigueur not to be ‘literal’, but to keep the discussion in the realm of imagery and fantasy, befogging the reader with endless literary references. The simple phenomenological appearance of individual spirits is fudged.  Its all in the imagination.

We can distance ourselves from the whole unreliable farrago of ‘mediums’ who claim to have access to unembodied spirits. They are either cheats or sincere hysterics with over-excitable imaginations.

However, I can’t help looking over my shoulder at the ancient traditions of shamanism among indigenous people the world over or to the priestess at the Delphi’s Temple of Apollo. As Apollo’s voice she made prophesies that determined the political and military strategies of the state. ‘She also made thousands of pronouncements that led to the freeing of slaves, the creation of successful marriages, the honouring of local gods, the successful planting of crops and engagement in trade and industry.’ ³

I can tell you, no one in ancient Greece regarded the Oracle of Delphi as a figment of the imagination.

¹  Owen, Alex. The darkened room: women power and spiritualism in Victorian England. University of Chicago Press, 1989

²    Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Cornell University Press, 2002

³   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oracular_statements_from_Delphi

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

BRAIN FEVER

As a theory of everything The Brain has definitely won the Gold Medal in this year’s Memes Olympics. Everybody’s got the brain on the brain  – if it’s not the brain, it’s the genes that’s the fashionable theory of everything. Neuroscience has it all licked, or soon will have. It will not be long before everything about human nature is known and treatable.

Promises, Promises, promises !

 Your actual scientist may not say this much, but he allows the public to be blinded with science.

The brain is this miracle computer in your head with a hundred billion neurons that manages everything: perception, language, memory, emotions, planning, learning, social interaction etc; and each part of the brain has its allotted function. The external world is not at all what it seems – its all a vast phantasmagoria promulgated by your brain. A person who is brain dead may appear alive – there may be a heartbeat, they may look like they're breathing, their skin may still be warm to the touch – but they are dead. So runs the last word in medical science.

But what about the case of a man with hydrocephalus (water on the brain). His brain had shrunk to a thin sheet of tissue due to a build up of fluid in his scull, reports Dr. Lionel Feuillet of Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille. Intelligent tests showed that the patient had a IQ of 75.  The British neurologist John Lorber was tempted to ask if the brain was really necessary. ‘He scanned the brains of more than 600 people with hydrocephalus and found that about 60 had more than 95% of the cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Some were seriously retarded, but others were more or less normal, and some had IQs of well over 100. One young man who had an IQ of 126 and a first class degree in mathematics, a student from Sheffield University, had ‘virtually no brain at all’.

Some neurologists, clinging to their place in the sun, have suggested that the brain is marvelously adaptable. But one has to ask how is it possible for a brain that isn’t there to be adaptable ?

By rights that Sheffield University student shouldn’t have been able to recognise his own mother, never mind get a degree in mathematics. No, something is seriously wrong with our materialistic assumptions about human beings.

‘Cases such as these undermine established beliefs about the relationship between the human brain and consciousness and so are largely ignored by mainstream medical science. ¹

Rupert Sheldrake writes that there is no evidence for the materialist claim that the mind is nothing more than the activity of the brain. ‘No one has ever seen a thought or an image inside someone else’s brain or inside his or her own brain. When we look around us, the images of things we see are outside us, not in our heads. Direct experience offers no support for the extraordinary claim all experiences are inside the brain. Direct experience is not irrelevant to the nature of consciousness:  it is consciousness’. 2

What difference does it make?

Quite a lot when you begin to regard yourself, not just as a physical organism, not just as a lump of meat – but primarily as a psychological being.

¹   http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/science/is_the_brain_really_necessary.htm

²   Sheldrake, R. The Science Delusion. Coronet, 2012.  pp 214

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.”

Dr Mason took himself to the Medical Library and learned that congenital ichthyosiform erythroderma is a rare type of skin diseases which occurs in 1 in 200,000 to 300,000 births. The boys' condition was caused by a genetic fault and, therefore, should not have been curable in the least. The evidence as it stood suggested the possibility that Dr. Mason had somehow changed the boys' genetic code was impossible. There is no way the genetic code can be changed like that.

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