by Colin Wilson
There happened to be a number of spiritualists present in the audience, and many of them were inclined to the hypothesis that real spirits were present, until Carpenter disillusioned them by summoning up the spirit of a philosophical pig which discoursed learnedly on the subject of the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation.
At about the time Hudson was witnessing these sessions in Washington, a young Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud was in Paris, studying medicine under the celebrated Charcot. Jean-Martin Charcot was not only one of the greatest medical men of the late nineteenth century; he was also one of its greatest showmen, and — as already noted — he took immense delight in demonstrating the amazing suggestibility of his hypnotized subjects, by, for example, making a woman shriek with horror and pull up her skirts when he threw a glove at her feet and told her it was a snake. Charcot mollified his less flamboyant colleagues — who were still inclined to believe that hypnosis was some kind of fraud — by assuring them that it was really just a form of hysteria. But this explanation left Freud as troubled as ever. He had seen a man’s arm blister after it had been touched with a piece of ice which the hypnotist declared was a red-hot poker; he had seen the swollen stomach of a woman suffering from hysterical pregnancy. Such cases made it perfectly obvious that there must be some part of the mind which is far more powerful than the ordinary conscious will. And on his return to Vienna, Freud gradually formulated his doctrine of the unconscious mind and built upon it the theory of psychoanalysis.
Hudson was equally baffled by what he saw, but he pursued a different line of reasoning. He also reached the conclusion that man has ‘two minds’, one of which has far greater powers than the other. But what precisely were they? According to some ancient philosophers, man possesses a soul and a spirit; but that was apparently neither here nor there. As far as Hudson could see, man possesses a ‘practical’ mind which copes with the problems of the outside world, and a kind of ‘non-practical’ mind which copes with his inner problems. Hudson decided to call these two the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ minds. The objective mind deals with the real world through the medium of the five senses, and its highest function is that of reason. The subjective mind prefers to use intuition. ‘It is the seat of the emotions, and the storehouse of memory. It performs its highest functions when the objective senses are in abeyance. In a word, it is that intelligence which makes itself manifest in a hypnotic subject when he is in a state of somnambulism.’
Hudson was convinced that the subjective mind is somehow independent of the senses. He knew of experiments in which a hypnotized subject, with closed eyes, was able to read a newspaper held by someone on the other side of the room. He knew of hypnotized subjects who could ‘travel’ to some distant place and describe precisely what was going on. Moreover the subjective mind seems to be capable of drawing upon a power and energy far greater than the subject could exercise by conscious effort. A Danish hypnotist named Carl Hansen used to tell people that they had become as rigid as planks then order them to lie across two chairs — their heads on one and their heels on the other — while members of the audience stood on the stomach or used it as a seat. It seemed clear that the subjective mind is somehow in charge of our energy supply. The objective mind is the person you call ‘you’. The subjective mind seems to be a ‘separate and distinct entity’, a stranger. And under hypnosis the ‘you’ is put to sleep and the ‘stranger’ is able to take charge of the brain and body — with remarkable results.
It was in 1893 that Hudson introduced these ideas to the public in a book called The Law of Psychic Phenomena. (By ‘psychic’, of course, he meant psychological.) He had only another ten years to live; but at least he had the satisfaction of achieving sudden fame and seeing his book sell more than a hundred thousand copies.
What excited the American public was the sheer flamboyant sweep of Hudson’s theory. He seemed capable of explaining everything from genius to insanity and from hypnosis to the miracles of Jesus. But perhaps the most exciting idea was that the subjective mind has incredible powers — of memory, of invention, of power over the body — and that we all possess a subjective mind. Then why are we not all geniuses? Because our objective minds cramp the powers of the subjective mind. We would be geniuses if we could release these powers. The subjective mind has an apparently limitless memory. Hudson tells stories of people who, under hypnosis, spoke in foreign languages they had never learned; but it turned out, on investigation, that they had overheard the languages in childhood and unconsciously ‘absorbed’ them. The objective mind inhibits the subjective mind, as a schoolboy feels inhibited when the teacher looks over his shoulder. A person who could ‘uninhibit’ his subjective mind would presumably be capable of learning a foreign language in a week.
There are some people, says Hudson, who are naturally free of inhibition, and whose subjective mind expresses itself as freely and naturally as a child. These are men of genius, and he offers Shakespeare as an example. He also tells a delightful story of the great American orator Henry Clay, who once asked a friend to tug on his coat-tails when he had been speaking for ten minutes in the Senate. The friend duly pulled on his coat-tails; Clay ignored him. The friend tried jabbing him gently with a pin. Still Clay ignored it. The friend jabbed the pin so hard that it went deep into Clay’s leg, but Clay was in full flight and did not even notice. Finally, at the end of two hours of magnificent eloquence, he slumped into his seat, overcome by exhaustion, and asked his friend reproachfully why he had not stopped him at the end of ten minutes. Hudson points out that when he made this speech Clay was almost too ill to stand up, and that it is an example of the ‘synchronous action of the two minds’ and the subjective mind’s power over the body.
This is the kind of story that accounted for the book’s popularity — with its implication that we might all learn to make better use of the powers of the subjective mind. After all we all know how easy it is to lose our spontaneity when we become self-conscious. (Hudson pointed out that the subjective mind is totally demoralized by scepticism, which is why people with ‘psychic powers’ find it so hard to demonstrate them before scientists.) The implication is that if we could learn to relax and trust the ‘hidden self’ we could all make better use of our latent genius. Why is it that some people, who appear perfectly dull and ordinary, have some special gift that enables them to write or compose or paint brilliantly? According to Hudson it is not a ‘special gift’ but a kind of accidental state of harmony between the ‘two minds’ that allows a free flow of communication between them. It could be compared to accidentally tuning your radio set so that you get perfect reception of some particular station. It could happen to anybody, and undoubtedly would happen to most people if they could merely learn not to undermine themselves with self-doubt.
Even more interesting from our point of view is Hudson’s assertion that mystics and visionaries — he instances William Blake — are men who have a natural access to the subjective mind. Most of us are tied to the external world by a kind of nervous vigilance; we are afraid of what would happen if we ‘let go’. Blake was able to ‘let go’ at will, and see strange visions. Another of these odd powers of the subjective mind is ‘eidetic vision’, the power to recreate a mental image so vividly that it seems to hover in front of the eyes. The scientist Nicola Tesla insisted that he could visualize his inventions so clearly that he could virtually ‘build’ them in his head and watch them working. Hudson had also known such a person:
The writer once knew an artist who had the power to enter the subjective condition at will; and in this state he could cause his visions to be projected upon the canvas before him. He declared that his mental pictures thus formed were perfect in detail and colour, and that all that he had to do to fix them was to paint the corresponding colours over the subjective picture. He too thought his fancies real; he believed that spirits projected the pictures upon the canvas.
All this sounds remarkably close to Eileen Garrett’s description of how she ‘shif
ts her point of view’. ‘What happens to us at these times is that, as we withdraw from the environing world, we relegate the activities of the five senses to the field of the subconscious, and seek to focus awareness … in the field of the superconscious — the timeless, spaceless field of the as-yet-unknown.’ But this makes it clear that we are already passing beyond the simple — and basically scientific — observations of Thomson Jay Hudson on the ‘two minds’ to something much more controversial and complex: the notion of ‘timeless and spaceless fields’ that give access to ‘paranormal information’. And this, of course, is also the point at which most scientists would dig in their heels. They can accept a Bergsonian notion of ‘two minds’ — rational and intuitive — but they would insist that the powers of the intuitive mind are the quite ordinary powers that we associate with intuition — sudden flashes of insight, and suchlike. But how can intuition tell us what is happening a thousand miles away or — worse still — what is going to happen tomorrow?
Hudson himself soon passed beyond psychological observations to the field of the paranormal. His studies in hypnosis convinced him that telepathy is a reality. He had undoubtedly heard of the researches of the Marquis de Puységur, the disciple of Mesmer who in the year 1780 had accidentally discovered hypnotism. Mesmer believed that there is some strange vital force — called ‘animal magnetism’ — which can be used to cure illness. Under Mesmer’s instructions Puységur had ‘magnetized’ a lime tree in his park and had tied to the tree a young peasant called Victor Race. While the Marquis was making passes over the patient’s head with a magnet — to increase the flow of ‘magnetic fluid’ — Victor Race went into a trance. When ordered to untie himself he did so, with his eyes still closed. And the Marquis soon discovered, to his amazement, that Race could read his mind when the youth was in a trance. Puysegur could address a question to him mentally, and Race would answer aloud. If they were in a room with a third person, the Marquis could direct Race’s conversation by giving him mental orders and telling him what to say. It would be another century before Frederick Myers invented the word telepathy, but by 1780 science had established that it was a reality.
Hudson was also impressed by a series of experiments conducted in 1819 by a certain Councillor H. M. Wesermann of Dusseldorf. Wesermann made a mental effort to make telepathic contact with a friend whom he had not seen in thirteen years, and chose the middle of the night for his attempt. The next day he went to call on the friend, who told him with amazement that he had dreamt of him the previous night. After this success Wesermann made an old man dream of the funeral of someone they both knew, and a woman dream about some secret conversation involving Wesermann and two other people. When a doctor friend expressed scepticism about all this Wesermann convinced him by making him dream of a street brawl.
Hudson devotes several pages to one of the most famous of all cases of this type — the Verity case. A young student named Beard was engaged to a girl, Miss L. S. Verity. ‘On a certain Sunday evening in November 1881, having been reading of the great power which the human will is capable of exercising, I determined, with the whole force of my being, that I would be present in spirit in the front bedroom on the second floor of a house situated at 22 Hogarth Road, Kensington.’ He made the effort at one o’clock in the morning. At that moment Miss Verity woke up, and saw her fiancé standing by her bedside. She screamed and woke her eleven-year-old sister, who also saw Beard. At that point Beard vanished.
In the following year Beard was involved in an even more remarkable experiment. In December 1882 he decided to try and ‘appear’ in the house in Kew to which Miss Verity and her sister had moved. He sat in a fireside chair and tried to fix his mind on the house. Suddenly he became aware that he could not move his limbs — his own theory was that he had fallen into a ‘mesmeric sleep’. And when, some time later, he regained his normal state by an effort of will, he recorded that he had been in a ‘trance’ state from about nine-thirty until ten. At midnight he made another attempt at ‘transmission’. The following evening he went to call at the house at Kew and discovered that his fiancee’s elder sister was also staying with her — he calls her Mrs L. Mrs L. told him that she had seen him the previous evening at nine-thirty going from one room to another. At midnight she saw him yet again as he walked into the bedroom, walked to her bed and took her long hair in his hand. After this the ‘apparition’ had taken hold of her hand and looked at the palm, at which Mrs L. remarked, ‘You need not look at the lines, for I have never had any trouble.’ When Beard had disappeared again Mrs L. woke her sister, who was in the same bed, and told her what had happened.
Mrs L. volunteered this information without any questioning from Beard, and when she had told him her story Beard took from his pocket his own notes, made the previous evening, in which he recorded going into a ‘trance’ at nine-thirty and making another effort to ‘appear’ in the bedroom in Kew at midnight. The interesting part of this second experiment is that the ‘apparition’ was solid enough to hold Mrs L.’s hair and take her hand — presumably under the impression that she was Miss Verity. Beard himself had no recollection of any of this.
Beard also made this interesting comment about his first experiment:
Besides exercising my power of volition very strongly, I put forth an effort which I cannot find words to describe. [My italics.] I was conscious of a mysterious influence of some sort permeating my body, and had a distinct impression that I was exercising some force with which I had been hitherto unacquainted, but which I can now at certain times set in motion at will.
This seems to demonstrate two things: that Beard used not only his conscious will, but also some other kind of will — the power of the subjective mind — and that once he had learned the trick he could sometimes repeat it. In fact he repeated it once more in 1884, when he again appeared to Miss Verity and stroked her hair. (It seems to have been a long engagement.)
This case was thoroughly investigated and recorded by the newly-formed Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882), and probably inspired Frederick Myers to embark upon his immense compilation Phantasms of the Living (co-authored by Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore), the first and most impressive study of this strange ability of some people to ‘project’ their ‘astral doubles’ (or doppelgängers) to distant places.
Hudson thought that the Verity case was an example of telepathy, which to some extent it undoubtedly was; but there was obviously rather more to it than that. (In fact, Hudson preferred to ignore this other aspect — ‘astral projection’ — for reasons we shall consider later.) But his chief concern now was to try to prove, to his own satisfaction, the hidden powers of the subjective mind. And like Lawrence LeShan almost a century later, Hudson decided that the best way of proving his theory would be through an attempt at healing. Why healing, rather than telepathy, or ‘astral projection’, or experiments in clairvoyance? Because Hudson’s basic theory is that the subjective mind is so powerful because it is in harmony with nature and the universe, and that illness is due to loss of contact with this fundamental harmony. So if one subjective mind can reach out to another, it ought to be able to place it once more in contact with the fundamental harmony. In fact Lawrence LeShan follows much the same line of reasoning, writing, ‘It is interesting to note that nearly all the great sensitives had a very unusual amount of joie de vivre and élan vital, and that typically the person who follows the mystical path and disciplines finds joy, serenity and a non-destructive life of peace and fulfilment of purpose.’*
Bearing in mind that Councillor Wesermann had been successful in transmitting telepathic messages to people who were asleep — a state that is, after all, akin to hypnosis — Hudson decided that the best time to attempt his experiment was when the healer was himself on the verge of sleep, that is when his objective mind was totally relaxed. Hudson’s first experiment was with an ageing relative who suffered from agonising rheumatism which was so severe that one leg had become two inches shorter than the other and
he was hardly able to walk. Hudson began the ‘healing’ treatment on 15 May 1890, telling two friends about his intention so that he had witnesses. The method was for Hudson to think about the relative, who lived a thousand miles away, just as he was on the point of sleep, and to send out healing suggestions. A few months later one of the two ‘witnesses’ met the subject of the experiment and was startled to see that he now seemed to be in good health. She asked when the improvement had begun and the man replied, ‘In the middle of May.’
It could, of course, have been coincidence. So Hudson persisted with other sick acquaintances. Unfortuantely he offers no further details of the hundred experiments he claims to have carried out; but he reports that with two exceptions, they were all successful. In the case of the two exceptions, Hudson deliberately broke his usual rule and told his ‘patients’ that he intended to try to cure them. The result, he believed, was that their objective minds inhibited the natural healing powers of the subjective mind — like the schoolteacher peering over the schoolboy’s shoulder.
Hudson’s list of cures is impressive: neuralgia, dyspepsia, bowel complaints, sick headaches, torpidity of the liver, chronic bronchitis, partial paralysis, pen paralysis (presumably an acute form of writer’s cramp), and even strabismus (squint). He admits that the last case was not treated by himself but by the aunt of the ten-year-old girl concerned, who had been cross-eyed from birth. Hudson remarks that he himself would probably have lacked the confidence to attempt such a case, but the aunt completely cured her niece in three months.