by Lyall Watson
An unfertilized egg is a single cell that has yet to differentiate in any way and differs from a generalized tissue cell of the animal that produced it only in that it has half the usual number of chromosomes. Like all cells it is made up largely of proteins, including enormous numbers of vital enzymes. We know that the enzyme is an electrical apparatus and generates a field, so it seems reasonable to assume that the field of the egg could be produced either by the enzymes themselves or by their action on the other protein in the cell. However the field arises, it is clear that if this is the organizer that controls the pattern of development throughout life, then it is produced entirely by the female. We may inherit half of our genetic material from each of our parents, but it seems that the order to carry out the sealed instructions can only come from our mothers.
What could happen is that as an embryo divides and grows, each of the new cells picks up its part of the pattern of the field and reproduces it, so that acting in concert they all together form a faithful and magnified version of the original. This could explain why it is that isolated embryo cells are not able on their own to go on and produce a complete individual; but we are still left with the problem of the tobacco plant that was grown from a single cell. It may be that all organisms that are capable of vegetative, nonsexual reproduction can do this and that each of their cells has its own complete field like the first primitive protozoans. All this must remain speculative until someone can produce an instrument sensitive enough to distinguish partial from complete life fields.
The influence of life fields on the interpretation of chromosomal data is not a one-way channel. Another of Burr's experiments makes it clear that the chromosomes can use the field to impart design or changes in design to the protoplasm. [33] He examined several pure and hybrid strains of maize, taking his measurements only from single seeds, and found considerable differences in potential. One hybrid differed from its parent stock in the alteration of only one gene, and yet this change was sufficient to produce a marked difference in its voltage pattern. With his instruments, Burr was thus able to distinguish between two strains of maize long before their differences became visible.
In later work Burr and his colleagues turned to investigations of the changes that could be observed in life fields as changes took place in the organism producing those fields. [34] They were able to use the field as a signpost, charting the course of health, predicting illness, following the progress of healing in a wound, pinpointing the moment of ovulation, diagnosing psychic trauma, and even measuring the depth of hypnosis. Surprisingly, there was no attempt to use the life field as a means of determining when life itself had ceased to exist. In one experiment on the marine colonial polyp Obelia geniculata, Burr noted that during the first third of the animal's life, voltage gradients increased steadily; during the middle third, they leveled off to form a plateau; and in the last third, there was evidence of regression. [35] It is implied that when the field finally disappears, the organism is dead, but unfortunately no measurements have been made on man or any other animal at the moment of clinical death. What we do know about the life field and about the simpler fields of physics, however, does shed considerable light on the possibility of the separation of the field and its source -- at least while the latter is still alive.
The earth has a magnetic field. This field changes under the influence of lunar, solar, and cosmic events. Michael Faraday, the English experimental physicist, discovered that a changing magnetic field is accompanied by an electrical field; and his Scottish colleague James Maxwell went on to show that the reverse is also true and that the interaction between the two produces electromagnetic waves, which are fields that can travel considerable distances. Now that Burr has proved that living organisms possess an electrical field, and we know that this changes in response to both internal and external factors, there is every reason to assume that we, too, can produce field effects at a distance. At the University of Saskatchewan researchers have developed a detector sensitive enough to measure, from a distance of twenty feet, changes in the force field that accompany shifting emotions in the human producing that field. [271] Not all the emanations from living organisms are necessarily electromagnetic, but it seems that they obey the same fundamental laws and there is nothing in these that forbids the separation in space of a body and its field.
Most of the information we receive comes in via electromagnetic waves of light and the higher frequencies used by television and radio, but not all communication is this passive. In the muddy rivers of Africa, long thin mormyrid fish find out about the environment by projecting a symmetrical electric field into the space around their bodies. [167] If anything moves into this field, it produces a distortion that the fish feels as an alteration of the electrical potential on its skin. The sense organs of the mormyrid, with its tiny eyes and its drooping elephant snout, extend invisibly for some distance outside the body. The conclusion is inescapable: Every time it uses the system, this funny-looking fish is having an out-of-the-body experience. It may not be the only one.
A medical officer attached to the Royal Flying Corps crashed on takeoff at a small country airfield. [265] He was thrown out of the cockpit, landed on his back, and lay there showing no signs of consciousness. From the hollow in which the crash took place, none of the airfield buildings are visible, but the doctor apparently saw every stage of the rescue operation. He remembers looking down at the crash from a point of view about two hundred feet above it and seeing his body lying nearby. He saw the brigadier and the uninjured pilot running toward his body, wondered why they were interested in it, and wished they would let it alone. He saw the ambulance starting out of the hangar in which it was garaged and almost immediately stalling. He saw the driver get out, use a starting handle, run back to his seat, start off, and then pause while a medical orderly jumped into the back. He watched the ambulance stop at a hospital hut where the orderly collected something and then continue on its way to the crash. The still unconscious doctor then had the feeling that he was traveling away from the airfield, over a nearby town, westward across Cornwall, and out at great speed over the Atlantic. The journey came to an end suddenly as he resumed consciousness to find the orderly pouring sal volatile down his throat. A later inquiry into the circumstances of the accident proved that his view of the subsequent events on the airfield was correct in every detail.
This physician is by no means alone in his experience. [194, 52, 96, 255] William Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, Lord Tennyson, Arnold Bennett, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Bernhard Berenson, John Buchan, Arthur Koestler, and Ernest Hemingway all wrote about similar occurrences, most of them autobiographical. A survey of Oxford undergraduates by Celia Green showed that 34 per cent of them had at some time had the experience of looking at their physical bodies from an outside viewpoint. [95] From the thousands of reports of apparent out-of-body experiences, I have chosen the case of the flying doctor only because it includes so many verifiable details of an environment the subject could not have seen in any normal way or through anyone else's eyes. Flying hundreds of miles over Cornwall is quantitatively very different from the gentle probing of two feet of muddy water, but the mechanism could be essentially similar. We almost certainly use our life fields for "feeling out" things in our immediate environment; a good deal of our assessment of the character and intentions of other people is probably based on information acquired in this way. Projection over greater distances seems to occur in circumstances that we would expect to be disruptive and to involve dissociation. The vast majority of spontaneous out-of-body experiences take place at the time of accident or illness, under the influence of drugs or anesthetics, and during sleep or drowsiness. The few cases on record of people projecting deliberately or at will have taken place under hypnosis or involve relaxation procedures similar to those adopted during meditation or yoga.
Analysis of a number of cases shows that despite their diverse origins, they have a great deal in common. Mo
st subjects are able to specify exactly where the new vantage point is located -- usually it is above the body and, if indoors, it tends to be near the ceiling in a corner. Nearly all subjects suddenly find themselves out-of-body without any transition between the two states, but wherever the process has been observed it seems to follow a progressive paralysis like that which occurs in dreaming. Most disembodied subjects see their own bodies and if it is their first such experience, often realize what has happened only when they do so. The common reaction to being out-of-body is strangely casual; most reports mention a sense of well-being and a reluctance to return. [54] A few subjects, finding themselves free of the body, have apparently managed to travel deliberately to visit friends or to seek information in the same way that a lucid dreamer, if aware that a dream is taking place, is able to influence the course of the expenence. [286]
I do not find it difficult to believe that we can sense our environment in ways that have nothing to do with the traditional five systems, but I am surprised that the out-of-body view of the world is so much like the normal one that the subject may have difficulty telling them apart. Perhaps our brains have the ability to decode all incoming information and transpose it to forms with which we are most familiar -- in the same way that a radar screen converts electrical signals into a visual display for our benefit and lets us "see" through the fog. A great deal of what we normally see with our eyes is constructed in the imagination anyway, because the optical quality of the human eye is extraordinarily bad. The imagine projected onto the retina is blurred at the edges and fades away into iridescent halos, but all these defects are put right in the brain. At the University of Innsbruck, students have been condemned for weeks on end to wearing goggles with prismatic lenses that not only produce a rubber world in which there are no straight lines but also cause a rocking-chair effect by expanding or shrinking the image every time the head or the eye is turned. [103] At first this is very disturbing, but after a few days the brain adapts to the new patterns and once again produces a mental image with straight and stable lines, despite the fact that nothing like this exists in the subject's environment at that time.
Rattlesnakes and all the pit vipers that have dimples like concealed headlights between their nostrils and their eyes can locate their prey in total darkness. Each of these pits contains 150,000 heat-detecting cells that respond to infrared rays from the body of a mouse, building up a picture of its size and shape and whereabouts so that the snake never makes the mistake of striking at a mongoose. [28] A snake that is familiar with the appearance of its prey and sometimes hunts it by sight alone might well conjure up a visual image of the food when operating at night with its alternative heat-sensitive system.
There is one thing that has no equivalent in our normal visual world that crops up with great regularity in out-of-body reports. This is variously described as "an elastic string," "a silver cord," "a coil of light," "a thin luminous ribbon," and "a smoky thread." [53] It is impressive that this structure should be described in essentially the same terms by doctors, plumbers, musicians, farm laborers, and fishermen, no matter whether they live in Florida or Latvia and despite the fact that many of them have never before heard of astral projection. A South African psychiatrist records out-of-body experiences recounted to him in Basuto by people who could neither read nor write English and had certainly never heard others talk of the silver cord they described to him. [159] There seems to be little chance of cultural artifacts playing any part in reports like these. In the few accounts that mention the attachment of the card, it is described as being strung like an umbilicus between the forehead of the somatic system and the neck or shoulders of the out-of-body entity. The tradition among mystics is that this cord must remain intact; if it breaks, the two systems will be permanently separated and the body will die. It is interesting that the cord of light should arise in the area of the pineal, and no matter how insubstantial the thread may be, it is reassuring to an earth-based scientist like myself to find that there is any kind of connection at all between the two systems. This may be the best point to begin any attempt to identify the disembodied entity in physical terms.
The earliest deliberate attempt to lay the ghost of a living body in the laboratory was made at the turn of the century by the French pioneer Hector Durville. [68] He found a subject who claimed that he could project his astral body at will and persuaded this man to try to provide physical proof of his detachment. He apparently succeeded in making a rapping sound on a table at the other end of the room, in producing fogging on photographic plates, and by causing calcium sulfide screens to glow more brightly. These poltergeist-like phenomena could have been produced by psychokinesis, and are no less exciting because of that suggestion, but they do not necessarily provide proof that a personality can be detached from its base in the body. They do, however, raise the possibility that all psychokinetic phenomena, as shown by the few special people who have proved that they can affect matter at a distance apparently by the exercise only of their minds, might be operating out-of-the-body at the time. It is hard to decide which of the two phenomena is the least unlikely.
Both are amenable to investigation. There are now several established psychokineticists who can and will produce their talents on demand; the young Israeli Uri Geller does it several times a day, and I know of at least two psychics who claim to be able to project themselves at will. It would be interesting to know if infrared and ultraviolet light, fluorescent substances, and high voltage discharges would register any kind of activity in the space around their bodies while they worked. There may well be no normal electromagnetic explanation for their abilities, but Burr's simple demonstration of a previously undetected life field with perfectly ordinary electrical properties makes me wonder whether we have not perhaps been looking right through some other equally simple solutions.
Those who are able to project themselves out-of-the-body at will, give very precise instructions on how to do this. They recommend that no attempt be made unless the temperature is high, at least twenty degrees centigrade, and the air is clean and dry. Mountaintops are favored places, but only in good weather. Electrical storms are said to interfere with the results and one adept says that it always helps to "anchor oneself" by putting a hand into a bowl of water. These conditions make sense if one assumes that the phenomenon is itself electric or electromagnetic.
The most critical preconditions are those that concern the preparation of the body of the would-be projector. It is suggested that little food be taken, some say that it is necessary to fast, but all agree that a high protein diet is detrimental and that only fruit and green vegetables should be taken on the day of the attempt. We know that a vegetable diet reduces physiological acidity and that, in compensation for this, there is an increase in carbon dioxide pressure in the lungs and a reduction in the amount of oxygen getting to the brain. This amounts in effect to an increase in altitude and reinforces the perference for mountains as suitable sites.
Recommended breathing exercises produce a similar effect. Almost all the practitioners say that holding the breath helps, but that it has to be held in, not out. The author Emanuel Swedenborg added an incestuous slant to the exercise with his comment that "holding back the breath is equivalent to having intercourse with the soul." It is certainly equivalent to asphyxia and if held back long enough, will once again have the effect of limiting the supply of oxygen to the brain. It looks as though the unconscious intent behind these practices is to simulate a crisis in an attempt to scare the soul out of the body -- or at least to weaken the bond between the two systems.
Another point on which all are in agreement is that crossing the arms or legs is bad. This belief is so widespread that it deserves further investigation. It appears wherever spirit mediums practice and has, perhaps through them, found its way into common use in the superstitious practice of crossing the fingers to preserve good luck or to reserve an individual right to break an oath or contract. I have the feeling that it goes back muc
h further than that. When something happened to man's mind sometime in the middle Paleolithic and he first began to dig graves, he started right from the beginning to put his dead down in certain positions. Many of them lie with their arms deliberately crossed long before Christianity adopted this practice. Wherever arms or legs are crossed in ritual, the action is a protective one with the emphasis on holding something back or in. The phrase in body language that tells of a desire to remain intact in the fact of an implied threat always includes arms folded over the chest or legs crossed above the knee. The generation of energy necessary to transmit a prayer involves a posture in which the hands are firmly linked together. Rodin's enrapt "Thinker" produces a perfect and productive circle by resting his chin on a hand which in turn rests on his knee. Always a circuit is formed. It seems to be important. Try sometime thinking out a complex problem with your feet spread and your hands in the air.
There is a good physical reason for creating circuits. Electrons from a charged body drain away to the ground through a linear connection, because equilibrium tends to be restored and any potential difference will disappear if given the chance; but unstable differences can be maintained if the circuit is closed and current flows around in a circle. All living organisms are unstable charged bodies. Burr found that he could only measure the field strength in them by forming his own circle, by using two sensitive electrodes applied to the body at different points and linked through his apparatus and the body in a circuit. Life generates its own charges all the time and loses a great deal in unavoidable and natural depletion, but it can probably preserve unusually high potential differences by forming circuits in times of special need; and conversely, it must also be able to produce unusually low potentials by deliberately breaking those circuits. Perhaps it is only under such attenuated electrical conditions that the second system can be separated from the first. The recommended use of a bowl of water as an earth would certainly fit in very well with this suggestion.