Sinclair, Mary Craig, 1883-1961; Sinclair, Upton, 1878-1968; Telepathy; Telepathy -- Case studies
In spite of all fraud, I am convinced that there are thousands of
genuine clairvoyants and psychics. My friend Will Irwin told me recently
how he spent a year or so collecting material and writing an exposure of
fraud, “The Medium Game,” published in _Collier’s Weekly_ some twenty
years ago. At the end of his labors he went, on sudden impulse, into a
“parlor” on Sixth Avenue, a cheap neighborhood of New York, and a fat
old woman in a greasy wrapper took his dollar, and held his hand in
hers, and told him things which he believed were known to no human being
but Will Irwin.
“What is the use of it?” some will ask. I reply with another question:
“What was the use of the lightning which Franklin brought down from the
clouds on his kite-string?” No use that Franklin ever knew; yet today we
make his lightning turn the wheels of industry, and move great railroad
systems, and light a hundred million homes, and spread jazz music and
cigarette advertising thousands of miles in every direction. It is an
axiom of the scientist that every scrap of knowledge will be put to use
sooner or later; get it, and let the uses wait. The discovery of the
cause of bubonic plague was made possible because some foolish-minded
entomologist had thought it worth-while to collect information about the
fleas which prey upon the bodies of rats and ground squirrels.
I know a certain Wall Street operator who employed a “psychic” to sit in
at his business conferences, and tell him if the other fellow was
honest. I believe it didn’t work very well; perhaps the circumstances
were not favorable to concentration. Needless to say, Craig and I have
no interest in such uses to be made of our knowledge. What telepathy
means to my wife is this: it seems to indicate a common substratum of
mind, underlying our individual minds, and which we can learn to tap.
Figure the conscious mind as a tree, and the subconscious mind as the
roots of that tree: then what of the earth in which the tree grows, and
from which it derives its sustenance? What currents run through that
earth, affecting all the trees of the forest? If one tree falls, the
earth is shaken—and may not the other trees feel the impulse?
In other words, we are apparently getting hints of a cosmic
consciousness, or cosmic unconsciousness: some kind of mind stuff which
is common to us all, and which we can bring into our individual
consciousness. Why is it not sensible to think that there may be a
universal mind-stuff, just as there is a universal body-stuff, of which
we are made, and to which we return?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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