Archive for the ‘mind hypnosis’ Category
Amplified Mind Power
Whether the Nautilus experiment was fact or fancy did not actually matter to Soviet parapsychologists. They were ready to accept it as truth because it perfectly fitted their preconceived ideas. For years, Russian neurologists and psychologists had treated the human mind as little more than a complex electro-chemical apparatus. As such, they felt, it could function as the “recipient” of information or as an “inducer” of energies. With skill, these faculties might be manipulated: made more sensitive, more powerful, more responsive to outside influence.
This view of the human mind identified it with the brain as a biological entity. From the Marxist viewpoint, psychological or spiritual speculations about the human mind are idealistic and run counter to the approved materialistic approach. In practical terms, Soviet science viewed the brain as an apparatus available for probing and manipulation.
The use of the mind as a conveyor of shore-to-ship, base-to-submarine information fitted smoothly into Professor Vasiliev’s pattern of ideas, as well as those of his colleague, Bernard Kazhinsky. The latter’s book Biological Radio Communications, arrived in the office at the Parapsychology Foundation in New York two years after the Nautilus report. Indicating a further “thaw” in Soviet attitudes toward parapsychology, it dealt in still greater detail than Vasiliev’s work with the phenomena of telepathy.
Kazhinsky used the term “biological radio communication” to categorize what had “long been known as telepathy.” He traced four decades of research and theories on the subject; but I confess that our office, and I personally, initially failed to give the work the full attention it deserved. One reason for this neglect was the fact that the author had obviously taken an old manuscript, grown outdated during the Stalin period, and updated it in line with Vasiliev’s breakthrough. Its central ideas dated back to Kazhinsky’s experiments in 1919.
Another reason for placing the report relatively far down on the scale of importance was its emphasis on electromagnetic means of telepathy – a hypothesis parapsychologists had pretty much discarded in the intervening years. One of Kazhinsky’s sources was Italian researcher Ferdinando Cazzamali, who attributed telepathy to brain radiations, a theory apparently thoroughly disproved by tests that unsuccessfully sought to screen telepathy by means of copper cages (Faraday cages); if measurable waves were involved, copper should have blocked the waves. (Billy Meier had a copper pyramid for meditation)
In retrospect, the Kazhinsky work has gained significance because Soviet science focused on electromagnetism as an energy factor in parapsychological phenomena. His work provides us with a view of the foundations of today’s Soviet experiments and scientific attitudes. Edward Naumov, the Moscow parapsychologist speaks of Kazhinsky as one of his teachers. Naumov has told visitors that “after much effort,” he was instrumental in convincing the Ukrainian Academy of Science to publish his teacher’s work.
As a young man, Kazhinsky had a striking experience, something psychic researchers might categorize as “crisis telepathy,” when he heard as a “silvery sound,” a message from “the nervous system of a dying friend.” This started him on a lifetime of “studying the minutest details of the human auditory neural apparatus.” He found “an analogy between the natural purpose of the individual elements of the nervous system and the possible function of these elements as parts of a biological radio communication apparatus.”
His concepts suited the materialist view of science advanced after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. On February 16, 1922, the All-Russian Congress of the Association of Naturalists underwrote Kazhinsky’s project and promised to publicize it.
A lecture he gave three days later bore the title “Human Thought: Electricity.” More research followed. By August of that year, he had completed the manuscript of a book to be called Thought Transference. Kazhinsky concluded that the human nervous system incorporates the elements of its own historic evolution. He wrote:
“Like all other parts of the living organism, nerve elements and nerve circuits perform adaptive arid protective functions; that is, they adapt the organism to the influence of the environment, as well as to the influence of environmental factors. They have undergone changes and improvements for many thousands of years. Nature took care to equip all living matter with highly delicate nerve structures that have resulted in great improvement of all vital functions. Electromagnetic transmission of mental information over a distance is a vital function of the nervous system.
“This leads to a logically justified idea: the human central nervous system (including the brain) is a repository of highly sophisticated instruments of biological radio communication, in construction far superior to the latest instruments of technical radio communication. There may exist ‘living’ instruments of biological communication still unknown to contemporary radio engineering. A thorough and original laboratory study of such ‘living’ instruments may help us raise radio communication to an unprecedentedly high level, placing entirely new and vastly improved radio facilities at its disposal.”
Kazhinsky disagreed with those who regarded the telepathic ability as a remnant from man’s earlier stages of evolution. Instead, he maintained that “the phenomenal capacity of a person to exert a mental influence over others from a distance is still in an embryonic stage.” He added:
‘Those who believe that this brain capacity is moribund, degenerating, etc., are wrong. On the contrary, it is the beginning of a new and higher stage of development of the human mind, on a new and firmer foundation, based on biological radio communication. This hypothesis is confirmed by a simple law of nature: the more a capacity is exercised, the keener it will become and the greater man’s power over nature will be.”
Kazhinsky interpreted an incident of crisis telepathy in neuological terms. He cited the case recorded by a literary critic in Baku, Azerbaidjan, who reported that his aunt, E.G. Varlanova of Kokand, suffered from “a sharp pain in her left chest area,” although medical examination could not establish a cause. Later she heard from her married daughter, who lived in the town of Batumi, that the young woman had “undergone a very serious and painful mastitis operation in the left part of the chest,” just at the time her mother felt a pain in the identical body area.
This “telepathema,” as Kazhinsky and other Soviet researchers called this type of communication, was transmitted over a distance of twenty-seven hundred kilometers by a
“bio-electromagnetic wave emitted by the brain of the sick daughter in Batumi, with a frequency corresponding to the sensation of sharp pain in the left chest, and reached Kokand, where the mother lived at the time. The ganglion cell of the mother’s cortex, functioning as a detector, intercepted that wave and produced an oscillation action current of a similar frequency in the closed nerve-circuit of her left chest. The result was a vibration of these cells at the same nerve-end area in the left chest of the mother as it was in the daughter. This vibration in the mother produced the same bio-electric ‘painful’ irritation of the sensitive analyzer in her brain as in the daughter’s brain. The brain then analyzed and synthesized the morbid sensation of ‘her own’ sharp pain in the left chest.”
Kazhinsky’s concepts are, in several ways, a prototype of some Soviet thinking in this field. He notes the “insignificantly low energy emitted by the brain of the ‘biological radio transmitter’ in the transference of sensations and experiences over distance.” He urged that efforts be made to develop instruments that can duplicate the “remarkably delicate and perfect natural instrument” that the brain represents in functioning as such a transmitter. Kazhinsky bolsters his argument with a quotation from V. I. Lenin, “Sensation is the resulting effect of matter on our sensory organs” (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Moscow, 1953).
Linking his ideas of human memory, thought associations, and conditioned reflexes to the pioneering work of Ivan P. Pavlov (1849-1936), the great Russian physiologist, Kazhinsky also drew on the findings of a leading Canadian authority, Wilder Penfield, best known for reviving buried memories by stimulating specific brain areas. He also cited the work of Dr. Milan Ryzl, an internationally known parapsychologist, because he “succeeded in obtaining experimental proof of the fact that it is possible to educate, train and develop the ‘telepathic’ faculty of the human brain.”
