FORWARD

NO MAN can contribute to the world more than his own personal experience, the harvest of his own research and experiment, unless it be the fruit of inspiration or prophetic insight. The works of Joseph Sadony contain a rich store of both.

Gates of the Mind is one of a number of manuscript volumes thus far withheld form publication by the author. Though its subtitle is Proven Psychic Discoveries, various digressions from the narrative reveal that its purpose is not autobiographical. It is an introduction of the anatomy of prophetic intuition. The small book here privately printed is rather less than a "condensation"; it contains but a small portion of the first volume of this unpublished work.

Underlying and eclipsing the narrative is a rational of the physiological foundations and scientific investigation of mental phenomena considered as tele-empathic and telepathic phenomena of the human nervous system.

It is a conclusion of the author and his associates in research that most mystic, psychic, and occult terms used in describing mental phenomena are misleading, that there exist no mysterious "faculties" of a mystic or occult nature, but that the imagination, if used correctly, is capable of portraying past, present, or future events within the limitations imposed by the fact that the imagination is dependent entirely on memory of past sensory experience to provide the elements of its portrayal.

For example, the author claims that the term "thought transference " is a misnomer, that it is impossible for what is usually designated a "thought" to be transferred from one mind to another mind, but that it is possible and of common occurrence to induce in another mind a thought that is similar to one experienced in your own mind, or vice versa. The exact degree of similarity will depend upon the similarity of past experience. The induced thought, however, is entirely the product of the selective simulation of memory elements in an activity of the imagination. The thought is your own, and has not been "transferred" from another mind, even though it be similar in every respect. A phenomenon has taken place, but it is one of thought induction, not thought transference.

We are living through a crisis the full extent and meaning of which is realized by only a few. We are and have been witnessing periods of confusion and revolution, not only in world politics, in science, education, industry, and art, but also in psychology, philosophy, and religion.

We are witnessing and shall witness the collapse of theories and concepts in all fields of thought. No science can continue to stand on its present foundations without adjustments made necessary by the confusion and poverty of existing verbal organization. Neither the philosophies nor the psychologies can withstand the critical application of the operational view with any greater success than the physical sciences. They will be forced to more strict correlation of Language, Logic, and Life.

Thus we have undergone and are still undergoing a revolution in the physical sciences. Even now new foundations are being lad to complete the bridge extending from atomic to organic, thence to astronomic dimensions. The biologist must know his physics and chemistry as well as his psychology; and a psychologist without knowledge of the former is not worthy of the name. The philosopher who does not know by first-hand research and experimentation these fundaments of life and the physical universe must resign himself to his own amusement, for his mental structures can be only dialectic castles in the air.

The confusion of the age was manifest in the first few sessions of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion at the opening of World War II. The scholars admitted that they were confused, and that they did not know how to "think with a view to action," or how to teach each other to the end of reaching mutual understanding and agreement. As a result they were forced to agree to disagree, to predict a pluralistic instead of a monolithic civilization.

Gates of the Mind is the beginning of an answer to the scholars on the part of a student of life and human nature, a seeker for truth and an independent investigator on an experimental basis of the operations of the human mind in relation to physiological and psychological consequences. Here for the first time is the beginning of a detailed account of a personal adventure in the deliberate and purposive development of prophetic intuition, and its application to problems of nature and human nature, science, philosophy, religion, education, industry, war, and peace.

There has been need for an effort on the part of someone capable of experiencing and demonstrating as well as observing so-called psychic and mental phenomena to separate the wheat from the chaff, to paint the picture of just what can and cannot be expected of it in the present state of man's development; to function of man's sympathetic sensitivities from all the technical and psychic "racketeering"; to encourage the individual development of these sensitivities along healthy and constructive lines, and to discourage the authoritarian capitalization of psychological or spiritual truths and the subjugation of peoples by psychological tricks. In this small book is the beginning of Mr. Sadony's answer to this need.

And in answer to those who may ask "Who is Joseph Sadony?" we quote data contained in Who's Who in Michigan and Who's Who in the Central States:

SADONY, Joseph A. Founder and director, Educational Research Laboratories, Montague, Michigan; columnist, Muskegon Chronicle (Mich.) since 1929 Home: "Valley of the Pines," Montague, Michigan; b. Montabaur, near Ems, Germany, Feb. 22, 1877; s. Alexander Nichols and Apollonia Reipert) S.; m. Mary Lillian Kochem, in 1906; ch. Joseph Jr. (1909). Came with parents to America in 1894 and located in Kalamazoo, Mich.; later moved to Chicago; traveled in West, walking eighteen hundred miles on foot investigating conditions in Indian Reservations for Theodore Roosevelt. In 1908 returned to Michigan and purchased 80 acre estate now known as the "Valley of the Pines" which he equipped with shops and laboratories later known as the Educational Research Laboratories, affiliated with Valley Research Corporation. Held office as constable, justice of the peace, spl. Deputy sheriff, school moderator, dir. of the district school board, etc. Has done much good in his guidance and help to people and carries on an extensive correspondence throughout the world as "philosopher, guide and friend" (without compensation) to many thousands of people. For several years editor and publisher of The Whisper an Independent, international journalette of Prevenient Thought) and the "Voice of Tomorrow Calendar." Originator of "Plastic Prose" as a literary form adapted to radio script; author of Fragments in Plastic Prose, My Answers, and other works; technical papers: "Concerning Tidal Effects on Atmospheric Diathermancy," "The Function of Gravitation in the Determination of the Fundamental Constants and Ratios of the Physical Sciences," etc.; research developments and patents: moisture vapor barrier materials used by armed forces during the war; apparatus and methods of sonic analysis for detection of defects in exhaust valves and other mental automotive parts. Member American Association for the Advancement of Science; Mason (past master, Montague Lodge No. 198 F. & A.M.); demit to Whitehall Lodge No. 310; Muskegon Commandery No. 22, Knight Templar, life member; served as organist for the Eastern Star (Mrs. Sadony being past worthy matron); Saladin Temple, AAONMS. Life member; De Witt Clinton Consistory, Grand Rapids.

From the view of some, a greater importance should be attached to the application of prophetic intuition to fundamental problems of science, philosophy, education, and religion, rather than to elements of mere personal experience. But to the laymen there can be nothing more important than how he can benefit by personal experience, rather than by the acquisition of knowledge or theory concerning the more abstruse problems of science or philosophy.

For his benefit, then, who cares little for the deeper problems that might be discussed at greater length, we may conclude this introduction by assuring him that so far as mental phenomena are concerned, together with the conclusions expressed in Mr. Sadony's comments in Gates of the Mind, we are only a few of many who will agree that they have been established with as much certainty for those of us who have participated in the experimental investigation of this subject as the results of our research in the fields of radionics, electrostatics, electro-magnetism, and gravitation.

Educational Research Laboratories

It matters not who in the world of time the mind may be; Truth imprints upon its tablet its own law. If that mind is so constituted, it can no more help reflecting the fact than a mirror can help reflecting the rays of the sun if at just that angle to catch the eye as well as to send the reflection that will come to the human eye that receives it. The receiver is just as important as the sender.

JOSEPH SADONY

INTRODUCTION

PERIODICALLY in the history of the world it becomes essential for men mentally akin to find each other, to know each other, and in unison deliver a message of truth to enlighten, to strengthen, to correct mistakes, in an effort to avoid just what has happened to us all. But how is this to be done, if not by education? Not to condemn the methods of others, but to substitute a better way that will defend itself.

All religions embody good and have bettered the world. There are still two factors: Faith and Science; two rules, and both are evidently right. Is it expecting too much that Religion and Science together create the third principle, resulting in the transformation of the world into one human family of many children, each to his own? With Science to preserve order by eliminating fraud and trickery, there would be no fear of judging the innocent as guilty.

As man is inclined toward superstition, he naturally falls an easy prey to those clever enough to deceive his eye. In fact, some of the brightest minds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been completely deceived in this way. The possibility of our loved ones returning after having passed away, or at least of sending us some message or thought, cannot be doubted. But it is the unreliability of the method used to receive these messages, as well as the unreliability of the person receiving them, that gives rise to a question. The truth is often exaggerated, and the open-minded victim easily duped.

Within mankind there is a power so great that it would be dangerous to know it until we are perfect in humility and self-control. Until then it is hidden from us by our selfish, animal nature, which causes the mind to become cloudy and discontented.

Even as trees sleep in the winter and blossom again in the spring, so also does humanity alternately sleep and blossom: periodically come the fruits of genius, great minds and sensitive souls who give voice, as "human radios," to the great broadcasting of the ages, the Song of Truth. And with their passing, humanity gradually falls asleep again until the next "wave" or cycle.

In this spiritual sleep, this ebb of the soul, is the heyday of false prophets: therein will be found the origin of superstition, in "imitation" of what did hold some truth, but is now a word without meaning, a body without a soul.

Why do supposedly great but false prophets and teachers flourish for a day and then die in obscurity, leaving no flourishing field to prove the fertility of their teaching?

The shell of the wheat was there; the worlds and phrases-all borrowed to feed people who do not think for themselves; and even when planted, gave up no fruit because the spirit of God was lacking, and because they who professed, denied the simplicity which was the soul itself.

Man slowly approaches the epoch of the human radio. His antenna of imagination opens that inner ear that hears the silent broadcast of the ages. It still vibrates in the atmosphere. Man's mortal ear already hears the music and the words...

We may view this psychologically rather than from a spiritual or religious point of view; nevertheless, it is clear that an even greater revelation will accompany the discovery of a "radio" in the human mind than what took place industrially, internationally, and domestically with the invention and introduction of radio into our homes.

The entire universe is within the human head in the same manner that music broadcast from various cities all over the world is within the radio, or within the room in which its is being received.

We forget that a well-governed and trustworthy imagination contains the tools that make education from the specifications of wisdom; that therein also are the antennae of man with which he searches for God: that aerial to receive the message; the chamber of transformation in which the "word is made flesh'; where thoughts are dramatized in symbols that are revelations if they be attuned to "facts."

We still have more to learn of the rooms of man's mind, to find the doors leading to that religious ecstasy, the mystery, the frenzy of the aborigines, the bliss of divinity felt by martyrs and saints, the hypnotic power of our professional men-all still in its infancy.

No one will deny facts, unless he has a subtle purpose to use opportunities for selfish purposes. Truth is self-evident, and needs no support. It supports itself. And if the pillars of a structure are lies, it will collapse. Still, the spirit of true support is ever present, so that a new permanent structure shall rise from the ashes and dust of falsehood. There are ever present health germs to continue life, even among death germs. That is the law of adjustment, compensation, and growth, the manifestation of life.

All that matters most to man is back of his own eyes, and there he flounders in the dark, thinking he thinks a thought, but unaware of the origin of that thought, or of its fruits; "imagining' things without the slightest conception of the power and mechanism that he is using.

Surely we may learn much by watching the insect with its antennae moving in every direction, sensing the danger we cannot see. It protects itself without the great gift to man: imagination. It only acts upon its inherent power of instinct. It uses its antennae to sense approaching danger, which it avoids, but knows not its source, without reason. Why should not man have a more highly developed sense by the protection of reason, or the cause with its effect?

If the same amount of energy and education had been utilized for psychological, mental, and spiritual power as for the comforts of economic, mechanical, and electrical power, what would have been accomplished to further the progress of humanity?

There is no excuse for man to underestimate the power of the mind at the loss of his inheritance from God or Nature, from ancestry, or self-acquired. If we refuse to use reason and logic as a foundation to intuition, whom can we blame for the failure in evolution? whom but our own negligence? Nature offers us her fruits. Why are men ashamed to admit their belief for or against spirituality?

How can anyone judge or give an opinion of the power of prayer, of Christianity, or of the prophets, unless he has given it a lifetime of experience to see the answer, and then left us the records, by which we may judge?

There is much that might be said of certain facts and truths that would by compel us to search the Book of Mistakes made by those who were sincere, but too enthusiastic to allow Nature to grow in its own good time; where swords have been unsheathed without provocation, only in fear of apparently losing opportunities. If there be any loss, let us go back and see whether the purse had a hole in it: whether the compass was influenced by a nail; whether the watch kept good time as it should, or whether we were controlled by our stomach, our heart, or our mind...

We are ever traveling toward the future, where all truth is born. Should we waste time in disputing the possibility of truth we think we have not, or be open to the possibilities that the world shall know tomorrow, as yesterday gave us for today?

We have a duty we owe to humanity-to those who have knocked upon doors of empty churches, temples, and schools, but not prisons. We must help men and women who can do work, not as missionaries; nor under the flags of politics, cults, or isms, but just pure, cleanhearted leaders who are handicapped, discouraged, held back -- being used as steppingstones to respectability by the profane.

Why waste time, paper, and ink analyzing flavors, the taste of fruit? Let us eat what Nature has given for thousands of years; and turn it into good health, joy, long life, and normal appreciative thoughts, so that the real knowledge of life may be born normally for today and tomorrow, and not for thousands of years hence.

We cannot afford to spend much time considering the opinions or methods of yesterday; nor stop to harvest their fruits today, when we must plant for a new generation, knowing that all those who do not now understand will gradually do so as time passes, for "Time proveth all things."

The individual awakening and cultivation of intuition is the foremost concern of all leaders and teachers who may be pioneering in the prevenience of a new era; until all education is "Prevenient education" our problems as a nation shall not be solved.

Written history contains no records of a nation in the position in which the United States of American now stands, with the possibilities in its hands for the manifestation of a spirit of prevenience that would enable it to become the dominating culture of a new epoch by demonstrating a new level of revolutionary "warfare": without muscle and bloodshed, as an example to set before the other nations of the world.

Who shall plant the seeds of the new viewpoint in the ground thus made ready; who but those thinkers and leaders who prove by their stability, adaptability, reliability, and endurance that they have been chosen by their own fertility to survive as the foundations for new structures and the roots of a new generation?

As Americans should we not fight for what America represents, as the melting pot of the world, with many laws inherited, yet obeying but one law, that of our pioneering forefathers for freedom of thought, speech, and religion founded on logic, reason, and reality, as well as (and above all) one Supreme Being of power that may be clothed in any raiment desired, but internally one and the same hub of that Wheel of Truth, where the spokes are teachers and exemplifiers; the rim, those whose personal responsibility is to protect those who teach; the steel hoop, the beasts of burden; and the movements, of the combined machinery of the world?

Things have only been partly done. The mansion is still in process. We are all but workers at the scaffolding (parties and divisions) of American as well as Christianity. When a mansion is done, what happens to the scaffolding? It is torn down, revealing the completed examples as models for a Universal Christianity and a United Nations of the World.

The two are inseparables, the north and south poles of each other, the spirit and the body, the ideals and the nation, the way of life and the government to make it possible.

Can we expect to crystallize Utopia and usher in the long-heralded Millennium? That's not the question. It is the dream and the vision that point down the highway. Though we fall by the wayside and never reach it, we must believe in it. Otherwise we travel in a vicious circle. It is only the hope that leads us on.

The problems of the ages still face us, but today we are better equipped than ever before to understand them, if we will only discard the limiting thought habits of ancestral education, and adopt the mental tools and implements offered us today, with which to understand and shape tomorrow.

What excuse have we to neglect a progress that we may further in our own way? Who should be to blame in the misunderstanding of a bugle call-the wounded lips that fail to shape the notes, the bugle, or the man who is supposed to know the signal and fails to execute it?

Someone must hit the gong so the blind may hear the hour. Another must turn the hands for the deaf, so they may see. Why the slate and chalk, memory's purpose and traces of the blueprint? Surely there must be many laborers to one architect or overseer. Why should we deny our destiny? If there be an effect, surely there has been a cause. If we hear an echo there must have been a voice to send it. If you or I have an ideal to express, whence came its cause? Others may try to play music and fail. Why? Is it for the want of a piano, a melody, or trained fingers?

If you have dreams and visions only, without framing them exposed to eyes that seek them, you speak a language that you alone understand. It is useless to those called to cooperate with you-workmen of the temple idle, waiting for your designs while you sleep, and they vanish. Whom do you think shall spin, weave, work in the quarries, or gather timber to materialize dreams given you, if you fail to sing your melody?

Why cannot more men utilize the gifts they really possess, but which they do not seem to realize are in their possession? Why carry the newly felled trees to be made into lumber, when beasts of burden would gladly carry them for a cast-off meal? Why all the spiritual confusion throughout the world, when there is no discord where truth exists?

How many fine minds are there hidden in obscurity at the front line of commercialism, shackled to an organization because of wages and an inferiority complex; while if but allowed to dream, away from the grinding note of gears, a new musician, poet, or scientist may be born. Give men a change to spread their shallow or clay roots. The top can always be pruned from faults. But let their roots alone, to allow character to prove their value before we forget why we live, and how.

Why do not men of learning come together to exchange views, as pugilists do blows; wrestlers, holds; athletes, feats of endurance, so that monuments of knowledge may be like large, fine trees as landmarks to the wayfaring man who is traveling through unknown lands, the labyrinth of the world's paths, to his home and loved one, whether mortal or immortal, and do those things of the sake of truth instead of wealth and glory? Truth itself if glorified, and so are they who dispense it.

The progress of the world's education, research, and understanding would be so much more enhanced if we allowed thinking men to do their thinking without a handicap. Let them be able to think and do their best while the man with muscle removes stumbling blocks so the dreamer may dream visions governed by thinkers for the doers to give it life.

If each man or personality in the entire world represented an individual key to his greatest treasure vault, we would not need to fear a burglar picking our lock, for no two keys would be alike. Still, all are expected to eat from the same plate the same amount, dress alike, be punished alike, be rewarded alike, and die alike. Why not examine the tumblers of these human locks and see who should be trusted most, and with what responsibility, so that we will find geniuses to teach us short methods, instead of waiting for them every century or so?

The trouble with most of us is that we shape things to suit ourselves, according to past acquirements; whereas we should permit truth to come to us, crystallizing in its own shape; we should then try to figure out what the shape its.

The seed of truth must preserve itself for future generations in a vocabulary untainted by those words that have attracted to themselves all the odium of a confusion of fraudulence, fakery, trickery, and overgrown superstition.

The world is waiting for someone to come to teach them; all looking in different directions for another coming, save those who believe that He has already come. Does one appear upon a crest of notoriety? Then it is not He. Does he found a cult or a "system"? The Maser himself comes not in these ways-but as a breeze across a prairie where labor all notions, all races, sects, and creeds... each fanned by the breeze, and differently; each giving expression to his reception and appreciation of the One Gentle Breeze through this world: each clothing a Christ in virtues thus conceived. One is wet, and the breeze dries him. One is covered with dust, and it blows away this dust, fanning the hair from his eyes. One draws a bow at his enemy, and the breeze prevents, carrying it back to the sender. One aims with the breeze a dart just to warn, and fall short of its mark, but the breeze carries it on to the heart of him who deserved the death-blow that it was...

At best we are but cogs in the Wheel of Time, and call it "history"-which is but the echo for philosophers: the flames, and the smoke rolling away; cause and effect, blinded by the blindness of man to know neither the beginning nor the end, nor what is one; thinking mortal what is immortal; feeling the heat; seeing the smoke; combining nothing as one cause-thinking only in jets, as the beating and breathing of heart and lungs. Is it not true?

The only cause a man has for not realizing his power as a man, is that he never has tried to select the mental food his brain should digest to prove how in all simplicity his ideals lie at his feet if he will but select the mental food to accomplish all his desires that but cast their shadow before him. Let him but cast their shadow before him. Let him but awaken his gift of logic and reason to realize that to think a thing is to shape action, energy, and influence to that creation thought. For we only want those things made manifest by what we have allowed our brain to consume.

Thus we arrive at the purpose of these prefatory and fragmentary paragraphs, which is to provide a few samples of the food for thought that has sustained me in the continuation of that quest of which the beginning is subjected to both chronicle and commentary in Gates of the Mind.

JOSEPH SADONY
Valley of the Pines
January, 1948

JOSEPH SADONY

Chapter I

My mother was showing me a picture. She said, "That is where I was born, Joseph." For a minute I looked at it, and it didn't seem right. I said, "But, Mother, shouldn't there be a river over here?" I pointed to the right. "And shouldn't there be a barn besides just a house?"

"What makes you say that, Joey? The artist made this just like it was. No, We were away from the river. We had no barn. What makes you say that?"

"Well, anyway," I said, "I remember the river, and a barn and a bridge."

Mother said, "Joseph, you mustn't talk like that. You never went as far as the river. You couldn't possibly remember it. Besides, that's where your father was born. It was his father who had a" Suddenly my mother stopped and looked at me biting her lower lip. For a moment she seemed not to see me, though looking right at me.

I said, "Mother! What's the matter? "She said, "Joseph, you couldn't possibly remember that, because you were never there, but that's where your father was born, by the river, near a bridge. And your grandfather had a barn, because he had horses. That was on the Rhine, near Coblens. "Herman was my only brother, and he was older than I was. When I was seven he was twelve. He was a cripple from birth, but he was beautiful and he was good. I always went to Herman when I didn't understand something and no one else would talk with me.

It was spring, and we were watching a robin build a nest outside the window.

I said, "Do you think that's the same one that built there last year, the nest that fell down when the wind blew this winter?"

Herman said, "I think it's maybe one of the young ones that was born in the old nest."

I said, "But how would it know? If it was born in the old nest, how would it know how to build a new one? Can a mother robin teach it?"

"But how?" I insisted.

"Well, they call it instinct, Joey, but what that is I can't tell you. I guess it's born in them because the mother and father knew; back and back so far that nobody knows anything about it."

"Herman, do you think we know things because Mother and Father knew them, even if they don't tell us?"

"Well, I think maybe we feel things and do things like they did, Joey. I've heard Father say you are sometimes just like Grandpa Jean Marie Felix Reipert. He was a bookbinder, like Uncle, and an artist too, always working with his hands, making things like you do."

I said, "Herman, sometimes I feel as if I could almost remember things before I was born. But just when I think I do, I forget it again. Do you ever feel that way?"

Herman said, "Well, I know what you mean. It's like a dream. When you wake up you can't remember it, but you know you were dreaming.

I said, "Yes, only it's not when I'm asleep, Herman. It's when I'm awake, and when I've been thinking and then stop thinking for a minute. When I start thinking again, it's gone."

Herman looked at me a minute and said, "You've always been funny that way, Joey. When you say things without thinking you are usually right, and everyone wonders how you know. But when you think about thins you act as if you didn't know anything at all. I suppose you know that sometimes worries Mother, because she's afraid Father won't understand it. He doesn't like that sort of thing one little bit."

"But what can I do about it, Herman?"

"Well, I wouldn't say too much without thinking when Father is around. It's better when he thinks you're dumb than when he worries, wondering what's got into you. Some day I'll tell you why he worries about it."

"Tell me, Herman! Please tell me!"

"Ssh! Joey, they'll hear us. I'll tell you sometime when nobody's home but you and me."

It was pitch dark and I woke from a nightmare in a cold sweat. I must have cried out in my sleep because Mother had her hand over my mouth, whispering, "Be quiet, Joseph! Don't wake your father. What were you dreaming?"

I said, "I dreamed that Herman was hanging on the wall with his arms out, like on a cross. He was nailed there."

My mother gasped and said, "Joey! Promise me you won't tell anyone that! Don't tell your father, and don't tell Herman or your sisters."

I promised, and then asked, "Why?"

"Because," she said, "your father doesn't like such things, and we mustn't think of the or tell about them. But you frighten me."

"I'm sorry, Mother."

"I'm not blaming you, Joseph. You can't help how strange it is. I dreamed a dream like that about Herman the night you were born, and I didn't dare say anything about it. Because eight months before you were born I started dreaming strange dreams, and they all came true. That never happened to me before, and it has never happened since you were born. But during that time all my dreams came true except that last one about Herman. You're the first I've told, because now you dream it too! Let us say a prayer, Joey, and not tell anyone."

So Mother left me, but I didn't sleep. Something troubled me, but I did not know what it was. It was something more than my dream about Herman; something that made me feel all alone in the world, even with a large family.

I lay in the dark; then suddenly something happened to me that I did not comprehend until years later, in memory. The vague distress of an internal conflict I could not understand suddenly vanished. In that moment I gained a new sense of identity. Yet I felt like a stranger in the bosom of my own family. Suddenly I didn't know who I was, and lay there in the dark asking myself, "Who am I? Where am I? How did I get here?"

But there was no uneasiness in the sensation; rather a sense of impending excitement, as if I had entered a new world and could hardly wait to explore it. Somewhere in this new world a treasure was hidden, and I would find it. For some reason my heart was glowing as if I had fallen in love with something I couldn't see. All my inner senses were affected by this, so that strong, tender arms picked me up, but I could see no face because I was suddenly tired, and suddenly safe. When I woke it was morning.

The world was the same, after all; but something inside of me was different. I felt happy about something and didn't know why, I saw more than I usually did. I stopped to look at things that I usually passed by; and when I looked at the same old things I had seen every day, I now saw something I hadn't before, and identified them in my mind. I heard sounds and knew what they meant without turning my head to look. I felt the urge to go out exploring, but suddenly felt the need of sharing all this new world with someone who would understand it. I though of Herman, but he was crippled and couldn't go with me.

So I stayed home with Herman, I couldn't tell him about my dream, so I asked him, "Herman, can't you tell me now why Father worries about what gets into me? Mother is

outside now. No one will hear us. The girls have gone too. What is Father worried about? What does he think is going to happen to me?"

"Well, he thinks something gets into you, Joey. And he doesn't know whether it's a devil or an angel. Sometimes he's sure it's a devil, and that it'll lead you to no good end. Remember how one time you would run off with his gun and go shooting by the castle on the Rhine; and next thing he knew you would be playing priest with an old soap box for an altar, serving mass? One day you would be catching crabs down by the pond, and spend hours looking at the worms you would break out of those long stick-like things you found. And next day you would imitate Saint Joseph, and say you wanted to be a carpenter."

"Do I have to be the same all the time, Herman?"

"Not for my part, Joey. That's what I like about you. One never knows what you are going to say or do next."

"Doesn't Father like that?"

"Well, it isn't just that. It's when you say things about the future, or when you seem so positive about something you couldn't possibly know. And when things happen to you that are mysterious." "But nothing mysterious happens to me, Herman."

"Do you remember the time you had Uncle take you coasting on Montabaur hill? You didn't have a sled, so you took a ladder instead. The hill was all ice, and at the bottom was the crossroad. Uncle said a team of horses was coming, but it was too late for him to stop you, and you could not stop yourself. He said there was nothing on earth could keep you from being killed or badly hurt."

"But I wasn't hurt a bit, Herman."

"That's just the thing, Joey. Ladder and all, you shot right through between the legs of the horses, entirely unhurt. How did you do it? You didn't know. No one knew. That was a mystery. And then when they asked you if you weren't frightened when you saw the team ahead of you, you said no, you weren't, because the minute you saw them you thought about something else and forgot all about them."

"Well, I did, Herman, I closed my eyes, and saw the picture in the church."

"Yes, I know, Joey. But you said you knew you weren't going to be hurt."

"I did know it. I wasn't hurt."

"Well, all right. I believe you. But I'm showing you what worries Father. When they asked you how you knew you weren't going to be hurt bad or killed, you said it was because you were going to marry a girl named Mary, with black eyes and dark hair when you were twenty-seven years old, so that's how you knew you weren't going to be killed before then."

"That's how I did know, Herman."

"Well, that's what Father doesn't like. It's either nonsense, or you know. And if you know, how do you know? He doesn't like it either way, Joey."

So that night I lay there again in the dark feeling like a stranger, I tried to remember how it all came about that I was there, and why I felt like I sometimes did. It was the "feeling" that made me say things and think things like Herman said Father didn't like, and Mother seemed to understand but hushed me up so he wouldn't hear me.

I was six years old we were still in Montabaur, when there began to be talk in the family about going to America. It was then that I began to be conscious of a world beyond the village limits, I climbed to the top of the hill to try to see some of it. I was alone, but I imagined that men were walking up the hill with me, and that I was one of them.

We all had on light, flexible suits of armor, like fish scales made of metal. There was a bright red cross on each breast, a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other.

It was fifty years before I found out, inadvertently, that the village of Montabaur and the hill I climbed that day were originally called Humbach; and that centuries before met the Crusaders had climbed that hill and looked down over the beautiful country, calling it "The Holy Land." The hill reminded them of that Mount that Christ had ascended to pray, with Peter, James and John, where He was transfigured before them. So they christened it Mount Tabor, and henceforth the little village at its foot was called Montabaur.

I did not know this as I trudged along that day, surrounded by the creation of my own imagination, a company of Christian warriors with swords and Bibles.

When I reached the top I still could not see America. So I closed my eyes, but all I could "see" was a lot of Indians. That was of course because of what I had heard about America.

So far as I know now I had no knowledge of the Crusaders, or in any case of their relation to the hill at Montabaur. Of course it is possible there was a foundation for the "image play" with my remembering it. The fact is here unimportant as the purpose of these early recollections is more to provide the background and to portray the general nature of early thought elements as based on experience.

At present his is merely illustrative of a later problem: What distinguishes a "true" imagination from a "false" one as an element of imaginative experience when it is regarded as an established fact that we can think only with what we have acquired to think with? In other words, all imaginative experience is made up of combinations and recombinations of elements of sensory experience with a physiological foundation. Nevertheless it has been established by experiment that the separate parts or memory elements may be put together correctly or incorrectly to form a true or false internal representation of external events or conditions. What distinguishes between the true" and the "false" when immediate verification by observation or experiment is impossible?

The answer, later to be set forth more fully, is that the distinguishing characteristic of a "true" imagination is a "feeling" that must be felt in order to understand its nature.

I did not at first comprehend this, but now in looking back at many thousands of imaginative experiences of childhood and youth, I see that when the exercise of the imagination is either unaccompanied by any feeling whatsoever, or when the imagination produces a feeling as a result of its exercise (e.g. imagining Indians is followed by a feeling of excitement and anticipation), the imagination is not to be trusted unless a train of thought is followed back to determine its origin, and unless the logic and reason are sufficiently matured and trained to adjust and retouch the picture in accordance with experience, or reason based on observation and experiment.

On the other hand, if a certain type of "feeling" (which is a dominant experience throughout this record) precedes the exercise of the imagination, and in fact produces the imagination by selective stimulation and blending of memory elements to express, to clothe, to embody, or to interpret the "feeling," we have then a type of spiritual inspiration and mental phenomena that merits further investigation, to which an introduction will be found in these pages.

My first experiences of a distinction in feeling associated with imagination were largely unrealized at the time, but preserved in memory. In climbing Mount Tabor, for example, the "feeling" came over me first that I was not alone. This caused met to imagine myself surrounded with companions all starting out together for some distant place to fight a battle. We would have swords but we would also have Bibles. The Cross would be our armor inside, but outside we would need armor of steel.

I did not then realize that these details characterized the Crusaders, who gave the hill historic background and a name. All the elements were familiar to me, but not the history. My memory contained swords, Bibles, Crosses, metal armor, and the idea of men who would use these things. Emphatically, I did not see the "spirits" of Crusaders walking up the hill with me. What I "saw" was entirely the product of my own imagination in which was composited various elements of memory acquired by previous sensory experience.

But these memory elements were selectively stimulated, assembled, and imbued with life by a "feeling" at a particular time, under a particular condition, at a particular place, which invested them with a meaning I did not myself comprehend until fifty years later. Whence and what the "feeling"? Why the particular mental imagery evoked by the feeling? Not in these few childhood cases alone, but in thousands upon thousands of cases extending through a lifetime: my own and the lives of many others whose experiences I have investigated.

That was the quest in which, symbolically at least, I set forth with a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other, to find the answer. I sought the truth, and as time went on I found that my imagination provided the truth in one instance and deceived me in another. It deceived me when I used my own reason and memory to speculate on things I didn't know enough about. It deceived me when I concentrated or "tried." It never deceived me when I didn't try, and didn't care, and had a "feeling" first that started my imagination going to piece together in a flash what was aroused from my memory by the feeling. What was the feeling?

I stress this because as time went on people who knew more about such things than I would say, " The boy is psychic, " or "He is clairvoyant." "It must be telepathy or psychometry," and so on. And I knew they were all wrong. I possess no special, mystic, or occult sense that other men do not possess. My mental operations are limited entirely to what I have acquired and recorded by sensory experience. My imagination has only my own memory to draw on. I visualize something spontaneously past, present or future, near or far; it proves correct, with witnesses to verify it. My records contain thousand of such witnessed cases in which I was correct 98% of the time. What did I "see"? Nothing but a composite of my own memory elements of past experience.

Truly and literally it was "nothing but my imagination." Still it corresponded with the truth. Why? Was it a good guess? Was it "coincidence"? Was it "chance"? These were questions to be answered by experimental research. At first I did not know. But time ruled out chance beyond all dispute. And I did soon find out that man's most important thinking does not take place in the brain alone, but with the entire body and nervous system.

Truth is not to be found in man's memory of words or his reflective visual or oral thinking. Words and memories of sights and sounds may be woven together into endless combinations. What gives them meaning? What determines the exact word or memory elements that will be combined in any given concept or idea or train of thought? What assurances have we that our ideas have any correspondence with reality at all?

Our only assurance from a scientific point of view is one based on experience, observation and experiment. How then is it possible to know things in the future, at a distance in the present and in the past, without opportunity for experience, observation, or experiment? I can only say that I have established this fact for myself, that I am writing this commentary on my early experience to introduce you to what I did and how I did it, so you too may establish the facts for yourself, without taking anyone's word for it; mine or that of anyone else.

It requires not the use of some mysterious faculty you do not possess, but rather the suspension of the use of your "intellect"(verbal memory, reason, etc.) until after your feeling of intuition has clothed itself imaginatively. Then harness it by "logic and reason," by all means, if you can. But you must first learn how to stop thinking at will. You must learn how to "deconcentrate" instead of concentrating. You must make no strenuous "effort." You can't "force" it. You can't "play" with it. You can't "practice" it. Spontaneity is its most essential characteristic. It cannot manifest in the realm of habit or "conditioned reflexes," as in the case of instinct.

In the language of the New Testament, you must not try to move the spirit; you must let the spirit move you. This means that you must let the truth shape you, for the simple reason that you cannot shape the truth. Your relation to truth is direct, and not by reflective or verbal representation. You will find the truth neither in words nor in memories, but only in direct nervous coordination of the whole of your immediate sensory experience, internal as well as external.

Just as the law of crystallization and chemical combination in the mineral kingdom and the inorganic world, so also the law of selective absorption in the organic world and vegetable kingdom, preserving the species, materializing the truth and meaning of the seed. And so also the selective excitation and conditioning of reflexes in the formation and operation of instinct in the animal kingdom. And there is evidence that a similar law is at work in a more complicated system of self-conditioning reflexes as manifest in the

Vastly superior nervous organization of man: a mechanism of adaptation not only to so-called seen or visible environments, but also to "unseen" environments such as those manifest in radiant energy and the specifications of future growth as manifest in seeds.

All I knew as a child was that I had some sort of relation with what I could neither see, hear, smell, taste nor touch; and that relation was a "feeling."

But I found that "thinking" and "imagining" first created a false feeling that lied to me. It was only when the feeling came first, without thinking, that the feeling was right. And my thoughts and imaginations were right only if they were induced by the feeling and not by association of thought resulting from what I saw or heard. Sometimes there was nothing in my experience to fit the feelings that came to me. Often I could not understand them at all in terms of word or ideas familiar to me. Still I "knew"; but I couldn't explain it.

I feel it necessary for the sake of the intellect of those who have had no such experiences to explain thus at length the view from which my own are regarded. None was regarded as occult or mystic in nature; none involved mysterious unknown senses, nor were they "extra-sensory" or "super-sensory." Man's relation with his environments, the universe, the rest of mankind, Deity, or forms of energy or life beyond his present understanding is regarded as a physiological, neurological, sensory relation. No responsive or imaginative activity is regarded as possible without a nervous organization with a physiological foundation. And I have established to my own satisfaction by experiment that if I apparently "see" a vision or dream, a dream that proves to be prophetic, there is no so-called faculty of prevision, or second sight. The "third eye" employed in such experiences is nothing more nor less than the "imagination" that every man, woman, and child exercises to a greater or lesser degree. This "mind's eye" of imagination has never, does not, cannot, and never will "see" anything outside of one's own physiological organization. Its sensations are entirely "memory sensations." It is strictly limited to the momentary and fragmentary revival of past experiences as recorded in memory. Its one and essential power, which distinguishes the complicated nervous organization of man from the more simple one of the animal, is the power of recombination by means of which the imagination can make new creations out of the memory elements of old experiences.

Thus we symbolize; we indulge in fantasy; we speculate and theorize; we create works of art; we invent; and thus we produce a culture and a civilization. But as we thus change environments, we change our "destiny," and we change the character of adaptation that operates in the law of the survival of the fit. It becomes necessary to adapt oneself to subtler and more complicated environments. It becomes necessary to develop foresight, a knowledge of consequences; to plan, to prepare, to prevent. We find that only those who do this survive.

So now we have a law of the survival of the intuitively fit. But intuition needs to be redefined, or we shall have to find a new word for it.

Possibly there was a time when brute strength survived, but it soon became evident that a less strong and more sensitive nervous organism better adapted itself to environments in the survival of the instinctively fit.

With the appearance of man there was anew element; intelligence. Neither brute strength nor instinct could cope with it. The intellect that could make a trap, dig a pitfall for mastodons, and invent a gun soon became king of the earth.

And then what, as men fight each other as well as the elements of nature, to say nothing of man's own creations, which break his bones and blast him from the face of the earth? Do the strong battle and kill themselves off so that the meek shall inherit the earth?

Man now finds others than himself to battle. He builds cities, and the earth trembles, opens great jaws and swallows them up. Volcanoes belch forth and bury them. Winds blow and lay them low. The rain falls and great floods sweep all before them. Lightning strikes and burns his structures to the ground. He builds ships and they sink at sea. He makes fast-moving engines and dashes to destruction. He digs in the bowels of the earth for its riches and is buried alive. The sun dries up his crops and he perishes in famine.

Pestilence breaks out and leaves a city of dead to be buried unknown by the sands of ten thousand years, which he later digs up to decipher its records. And ever and anon, as the beating pulse of an eternal war drum, he goes to battle again, with ever increasing cunning in horrible devices with which to slay himself.

It is the last cycle; the final "survival." And is it the strong who survive? Is it the cunning? Is it the meek? Is it the tyrant? Is it the selfish and arrogant? It is not. It is they who feel the "feeling" and act on it. It is they who had a "hunch" not to buy tickets on the ship that was going to sink. It is they who did not build a city where Vesuvius would belch forth its lava and flames. It is they who do not buy or build a house below the future flood-crest of a river. It is they who packed their belongings and left the day before an earthquake shattered their home. It is they who do these things without even thinking why.

What is the "feeling"? If we waited to use it until we knew what it was, we would be like the farmer who still uses kerosene lamps because he doesn't intend to use electricity until he knows what it is. The wren does not know why it flies south; but it flies, and thus escapes cold and starvation. An animal obeys a "feeling" directly, without translating it into words or thoughts of visual (imaginative) representation. Man has so far lost his neural relation with reality (by having substituted a world of words and symbolic representations) that he regards as abnormal those who retain it or regain it. He invests it with an air of mystery, and represents it by misleading words of special vocabularies, mystic, occult, theosophical, theological, psychological, and psychic.

The mystery is no longer in the physiological and nervous organization of mannot any more than in the construction of the Geiger counter. The mystery is in the so-called cosmic rays that act on the Geiger counter. What are they, and where are they from? The mystery is in the source of energy or life that acts on the nervous organization of man to produce the "feeling." What is it, and where is it from? There need be no other mystery. The organism upon which it acts is now fairly well known. New ductless glands will be discovered. Many functions and operations will be better understood. But in all its essentials the physiological foundation and nervous organization is well enough understood, in the light of developments in the field of electronics and radiant energy, to know that man is capable of experiencing "feelings" (independent of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching) that emanate from sources known or unknown. Heat is but an obvious example, as well as electrical conditions of the atmosphere.

Beyond this coordinated sensitivity of the entire nervous system no further or special sense is required. It is superfluous and absurd to postulate mysterious powers of vision, clairaudience, "psychic abilities," and so on, when the normal powers and modus operandi of imagination and memory not only suffice in explanation, but may be investigated experimentally to establish the fact that one's so-called psychic faculties are entirely limited constituently to the contents of the individual memory, just as the constituents of words are limited to the alphabet employed, and my verbal representation is limited to my vocabulary (i.e., my verbal memory_, unless I pause to look up or coin a word for an idea that has not yet been incorporated in my verbal organization.

And yet I have had words come to mind and pass over my tongue in experimental conditions, words entirely unfamiliar to me, words in foreign languages, or technical terms that could be found in a dictionary, and some that could not, containing information that I did not myself knew, and that was verified as correct. I used familiar syllable, however. I used the familiar alphabet. And even where I inscribed hieroglyphics entirely unfamiliar to me, it was a composition of familiar smaller elements of lines and curves, shapes and angles. The fact still described in terms so vastly misleading and misunderstood as remains that my vision of these things cannot correctly be "psychic," telepathic, and so on. It was nothing whatever but imagination compositing familiar elements of previous sensory experience recorded in memory.

I see and correctly describe a scene ten thousand miles away. (I have done this under experimental conditions as recorded in my files.) I see and describe a future event, which occurs exactly as I described it, with only minor variations. What is lacking or faulty in my description is lacking in my memory. For what so I see? Nothing but my own imagination.

Actually I do not see ten thousand miles away with any form of "vision" whatever. I do not "see" the future. My reception or perception of these things is entirely formless, entirely a "feeling," entirely devoid of image, word, thought or concept. What makes it intelligible to myself or someone else is the activity of my imagination, which endeavors to symbolize, portray or interpret the "feeling."

And what is the "feeling"? That is the one great mystery. That is the quest. That is the source of all inspiration, the fountainhead of all spiritual gifts, the heart and life of all religion. This is the foundation that science has provided for spiritual understanding: a physiological foundation for a nervous organization that responds to an unknown source or sources of energy in the form of "feelings." These feelings are neurological and physiological; not the activity of a special or occult "sense," but the coordinated activity of the entire nervous organization. The reaction is one of selective stimulation of previously experienced and conditioned reflex arcs of memory. The imagination interprets the "feeling" in terms of memories associated with similar feelings. Thus a complex feeling is broken down into its elements by symbolic representation in an imaginative composite of memory elements. Thereby we "understand" it.

With this explanation we may hope to contribute to a better understanding of mental phenomena stripped of the deceiving terminology of generations of "psychic racketeering." Man's "all-seeing eye" is his imagination, and his imagination sees not beyond his own nerve ends. It sees only the "past" that has been recorded in memory. Still, by this means he may portray what has not yet been recorded (i.e., the future); he may "see" around the world; and he may explore the past before his birth in the history of the human race. And why? Because his quivering nerves are open to the universe and susceptible to innumerable feelings. The feelings stimulate and thus clothe themselves in reawakened memory sensations.

Thus we do not see the past, present or future beyond the range of our senses, but we "imagine" it. And if our "feeling" is genuine, or imagination is "true."

Can there be a "false feeling"? Yes, when it is merely the echo of a past feeling aroused by suggestion, association of thought, and memory of words: i.e., intellectual activity in general. The "feeling from outside" can bring you information of a phenomenal nature only when you are able to suspend all internal activity of thought. The "feeling" must have an empty slate to write on. It must be allowed to select your memories, to shape them in your imagination, to choose its own words. The result will be instantaneous; and until you understand the language of feeling, you may not be able to distinguish such formations from your own thoughts. Or, on the other hand, the experience may be so pronounced that you will think you see a "vision," a "spirit" or a "ghost."

You may feel indignant if others call it a hallucination or "imagination," but that is exactly what it is, nothing more. Still, it may be a genuine experience and the "vision" may be true in every detail within the capacity of your memory to provide the necessary elements.

To help you understand how this can be, and to help you to distinguish between false and true, the wrong and right use of the imagination, the false echo from the genuine feeling, I have taken these pains both to record and to comment on my own personal adventures and research along these lines.

Not everything is easy to explain, but we must avoid attaching the "mystery" to the wrong place. Within all seeds is the "design" of what they will become by growth and development. The creative power exists in the unrecorded. What has been recorded is already "dead." Thus the creative and progressive power in man necessarily manifests as a prophetic power, active in determining what he shall be, and not what he has been.

What has been inherited or already determined as a conditioned reflex is of the past. But what selects or chooses, as in the power of selective absorption of a seed, or the power of selective stimulation in physiological man, is of the "future" in function of "time," which exists solely as a biological phenomenon of succession in growth.

Thus there are innumerable sources of prophetic "feeling" in man that need not be the occasion of any "mystery." In our very careless and inadequate verbal organization we speak of wishes, wants, desires, appetites, hunger; of ambition, aspiration, ideals; hope,

Anticipation, expectations, faith, and so on. These terms are neither clearly understood, defined nor differentiated; and means have not been provided to distinguish between those sources of prophetic feeling that are inherent to the structure of our physiological organization, as in the case of animals whose cycle of progressive activity repeats itself each generation, and those sources of prophetic feeling that are not inherent to the individual physiological structure but which manifest in human progress, which repeats itself in cycles extending through several generations.

To the latter we must attach the "mystery." Self-preservation is not a remarkable phenomenon, but race-preservation is. The man who will fight to preserve himself or his family is not a particularly interesting object of study, but the man who will live his life and give his life for the sake of mankind and human progress is manifesting the mystery that is the religion of mankind. What is the source of his "feelings"?

But to return to my own experiences, I have found that whereas "memory is not inherited (i.e., it is not possible to "remember" before we were born in terms of our ability to recall our own sensory experience since birth), we do nevertheless inherit enough of our parents, and through them of past ancestors, to manifest a "feeling" that is capable of arousing parallel memories in our own experience. And thus our imagination may approximate some condition or memory of a parent or ancestor before our birth.

I make this statement on the basis of considerable evidence. Often, however, there is a composite of elements derived from both father and mother, so that the feeling is complex and the resulting imagination a mixture.

Just what caused my mother to dream prophetic dreams while bearing me, and not any of the other children, is something that I do not even attempt to explain. What caused me to dream at the age of seven, going on eight, on a night when I was "reborn" by a distinct psychological change, a dream similar to one my mother dreamed the night I was born one month too soonthat again is something I cannot explain at this stage of the record. And why we both should have dreamed that Herman was hanging on the wall, nailed there as if he had been crucified, might possibly be considered a coincidence, in view of the fact that the symbolism is not unusual in a Catholic family; and if we consider crucifixion to be a symbol of suffering, it could certainly apply to poor Herman, a cripple from birth.

Nevertheless I can swear that under the circumstances neither Mother nor I breathed a word to Herman about that dream; nor did we tell anyone else, on account of Father's attitude toward such thins.

We could not regard the dream as prophetic in a literal sense, since it would be absurd to think that Herman would ever really be found hanging on the wall. At most we could regard it as symbolic, and at worst as symbolic of death. But the dream of a series that had not come true, and it had upset her so much at the time that I was precipitated into the world in a premature birth.

Therefore our feelings can be imagined when Herman called Mother one day, after a spell of suffering, and said, "Mother, hang me on the wall here!"

Shocked, and thinking he was perhaps delirious, she asked, "And why should I do that?"

He answered, "Because I want to die like Christ died."

Mother said, "But you are not going to die, Herman! Don't talk that way."

He answered, "Yes, I am, Mother."

She put her arm about him, and they prayed together.

Then Herman cried himself to sleep.

He never woke up again.

Chapter II

So Herman died just when I felt that I needed him most. Now I was the only boy; I had no brother; and I was indeed alone in the world. For my father was working all day at the large paper mill; my mother was kept busy; the girls had their own interests. I was sent to a Catholic school, but outside of school had to shift for myself.

And now I made some discoveries; first, that Herman was not "dead."

How did I know? I could not see him, nor could I hear his voice. But I very definitely "felt" his presence. And then, of course, I could imagine him by remembering him and in my imagination I could carry on a conversation with him.

Was this really Herman or only my imagination? Well, in the first place, what is the difference between the first sense impression, and the recalling of that sense impression as a memory?

When the reflection of light from Herman that affected my optic nerves affected instead the silver emulsion of a photographic film, we look at the result and say, "That's Herman."

I recall the image of Herman in my memory and say to myself, "It's Herman."

Certainly I know that it is only my memory, and only in my imagination. But then I think, "Well, anyway, Herman is still alive in my mind."

It was that way when Herman was still alive; when I was off somewhere and he was home. I could remember him then too. But now this was different, because there was a "feeling." And somehow Herman, or the thought of Herman, seemed to be able to put a life into my memory and make me imagine things I never imagined before, all through that feeling.

The first time I felt it was a few days after Herman was buried. The feeling came first, and then I thought of Herman.

I imagined him saying, "Well, Joey, I'm still here in your memory, anyway."

I thought, "Now you won't have to stay home all the time, Herman. You can play with me"

And then in my imagination, my memory of Herman said, "Then don't remember me this way, Joey! I'm not crippled any more."

It was then that I realized I was remembering Herman just as he had been when I saw him last. So I changed everything except his face and his eyes and my memory of his voice. Limb by limb I took my memory of Herman and made it over in my imagination, until it could run around as I did.

And then I was so thrilled by the difference that tears came to my eyes. The feeling became so strong that it burst out of my mouth, and I said, "Thanks!"

Then something struck me funny, and I said, "Herman, was that me thanking you, or you thanking me?"

Suddenly a joyous feeling filled me, and I laughed with it.

I ran out to play and imagined Herman running out with me. I began to show him all the things he hadn't been able to see or do when he was crippled.

It did not occur to me to regard it as anything other than pure imagination on my part. I did not think Herman's "spirit" was running around with me. I had always carried on conversations in my mind; and now for a while, instead of talking with myself, I talked with a reconstructed memory of Herman in my imagination. The fact that my imaginary and reconstructed brother occasionally said things in my imagination that I did not knowingly put into his mouth was a fact that passed unnoticed by me at the time. I took it for granted as something quite to be expected.

For example, I would go to the woods, and I would imagine Herman saying, "Well, Joey, we haven't seen any Indians yet."

And this would remind me that my chief anticipation on leaving Montabaur for the New World was the prospect of Indians. There was first a long coach ride. It was right, and I was the only one of all the passengers who stayed awake. I imagined Indians stopping the horses and saying that they would kill me if I made a sound or woke the rest up.

I thought, "But you were asleep, Herman."

And my imagination of Herman answered, "Not when you were scalped, Joey. That woke me up."

And then I laughed, because I had forgotten that incident; but now I remembered that right while I was in the thick of my imaginary Indians during the coach ride, someone in the coach dropped something that hit me on the head. So vivid were my imaginings that for a moment I thought I had been scalped, and woke Herman up with my war-whoop.

School made me nervous, sitting so still. One day I began to beat a rhythm with my hands and feet. The teacher told me to stop, and asked me what I was doing it for. I couldn't answer her.

She said, "Well, if you can do a thing, you can explain why you were doing it. Now tell me!"

All I could say was, "I don't know."

So she struck me over the knuckles with a ruler, and said, "Well, don't do it again, or this ruler will know a better place to hit you."

I sat there stunned and humiliated, with tears blinding my eyes. It was not just the pain on the knuckles. It was worse than that. I had not been long in the school, and I had looked up with admiration at the teacher. I had wanted her to like me, and now she had struck me.

Needing some comfort, I imagined Herman saying, "Why didn't you tell her, Joey? Tell her why you were doing that. Go after school and tell her."

"But I don't know why."

"Yes you do." And then it came to me. On the way to America we could not afford a first class passage, so we were near the engine of the ship during the entire trip. For seventeen days the rhythmic beat of the engine pounded its way into my system, so that whenever I became nervous or restless my feet or fingers unconsciously tapped out the rhythm of the monotonous chugging of the ship's engine.

Then I imagined Herman saying, "Do you remember how you tied a tin can to a string and let it down over the side of the ship, Joey?"

Then I thought, "Yes, I would draw it up full of water sometimes. But one day the water in the can was warm. And then it was cold again. I wonder why that was?"

The answer came, "Ask her. Ask the teacher when you explain about beating your hands and feet."

And so I did. She was interested, and talked about it with someone else. Then she told me that when the water I drew up was warm, we were crossing the Gulf Stream. She said she was sorry she had struck my knuckles with the ruler, and would not have done so if I had explained to her; but I wouldn't answer her, and that's why she struck me.

As time passed I took more and more to wandering through the woods, studying all living things in my own way, speaking to them and making believe that they answered me.

I thought, "Everything could speak if we could only interpret it."

By this even as a child, I did not believe that animals and trees could speak the English or any other language of spoken words, or that they had human qualities. (That would have been anthropomorphic!) But I did believe that everything in nature had a "meaning," like a word in the language of Nature; and that this language that we see through our eyes, hear through our ears, smell through our nose, touch with our fingers, and taste with our tongues, was also the language that was in my head when I closed my eyes and ears, and "imagined" things.

This was a language "without words," and this, I thought, was the one language of all the world, the language of thought itself, in which all knowledge could be expressed. I was forced to this language for my own understanding, moving from a country where one language was spoken to a country where another language was spoken.

So I looked at a tree and understood it. I heard a sound and knew what made it without looking to see. I smelled odors in the woods, and knew what they came from. And then I found that if I touched something with my fingers, I could tell whether anyone else had touched it before me.

How did I know? It was a "feeling." And then I found that if I let that feeling make me "imagine" things without thinking, I could describe who had touched, it, and other things

connected with it in the past. As time passed, someone told me, "What, that's psychometry. You were able to psychometrize things."

I answered, "But that's silly. It isn't anything but what I feel with my fingers. And then I try to imagine what the feeling means."

And then they would say, "But you described the whole scene exactly, where this object came from. You must see it in order to do that."

But I didn't see it. I saw nothing but my own imagination; nothing but bits and fragments of my own past memories. But what put them together correctly to express the meaning of a "feeling"?

What puts the letters of the alphabet together to form words? What puts words together to form sentences of understanding?

No one could answer me. Nor could I. All I knew was that if I stroked a thing with my fingers until I felt that it was a part of me, like my foot, I could "feel" it, just like my foot.

There is only one way my foot can talk to me, and that is by a feeling. It may be pleasant or unpleasant, hot or cold; comfortable, tired or painful. My own memory tells me why, and what it means. I can't see my foot; it's in my shoe. I can't see my foot even if it's bare. All I can see is the dead skin outside. That's all I can see of anything. All we ever see is the dead skin of things. We never see what anything really is. We can only "feel" it.

If people were going to insist on calling that "seeing," very well then. I could "see" better with the ends of my fingers and with my eyes closed. Also I could "hear" better that way.

To prove it, and to amuse my friends, I would hold my hand high, fingertips in the direction of a distant railway engine five miles away that none of my friends could hear or see. I would say, "It's whistling, only you can't hear it now." Then, "It's coming closer, closernow it's going to whistle: one, two, three" and whooo came the shriek of the engine just after my third count.

"But how did you know?"

"I saw the engineer reach up to pull the whistle."

"But how did you see it? We couldn't even see the train yet."

"With my fingers."

"But you can't see with your fingers!"

"Of course not. But that's what you insist on calling it." "But you must see it in your mind, then. It's second sight. It's clairvoyance."

"Those are just words. And what they mean to you isn't true. I don't see that train and that engineer at all. I'm just imagining it. What I see in my mind is a train I remember looking at one time from close up. The engineer in my mind is one who waved at me one time. That may be him, but I don't think so, and I don't know. It's the engineer in my memory and not the engineer in the train that starts reaching for the handle to pull the whistle. When he starts reaching, I start counting. That's all there is to it."

"But what makes the engineer in your imagination start reaching at the right time?"

"I don't know."

"Well, I don't understand it at all. You're a strange one, and no fooling."

I didn't like this. I would say, "You could do it too, but you don't try."

One time I said, "I'll show you. Let me put your coat over your head. Hold up your hand. A cloud is going to pass over the sun. You tell me the minute it does. Then after a few minutes tell me when the sun breaks through again."

When this was done successfully, I asked, "How did you know?"

"Because I could feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. When it was cool I knew the cloud had covered the sun. When it was warm again I knew the cloud had passed."

"Well what's strange about that? It was a feeling in your hand and you knew what it meant."

"But that's different."

"No, it isn't different. Not in the way you mean. Of course it's different, but it's the same thing."

"What a way to talk! It's the same thing only different! That's about as clear as mud, Joey."

So I stopped trying to explain things for a while. I didn't know enough about them myself.

In school, things didn't go so well. Not that it was hard for me, or that I got poor marks. But they didn't teach the things I wanted to know about, and they didn't talk the language I understood best.

What I wanted I couldn't express or explain at that time. My soul cried out dumbly what others before me and after me found words to say: "Give me the things, not words about things. Give me the thoughts, not words about thoughts."

So I could not bring myself to study then; and in a whole lifetime of research I have never been able to study since; to study things and nature, yes; but not words and books.

Thirty years later I dreamed a dream of being a schoolboy again, kneeling on a dusty corner asleep, while the other pupils worked their heads off studying the essential oils. When recess came, I went out and had a fine time, but the rest were too tired.

This was symbolic of my whole life. I have seen more lives blasted and stunted by brain-cramming than by utter ignorance. Hence I have always preached against tiring out the colt in practice before the hour set for the race.

Man's worst enemy is his memory, he has misused it. It was never meant to be a trunk into which to pack a lot of words and opinions. It was meant to record experience as a sample-case, an alphabet of nature's language, like stringing a harp or piano, one string of each tone. Then any melody in the world of music can be played on it. And even from a distance the vibration of another tone will produce a vibration in my instrument, if I possess a string of like pitch to respond to it. I do not need to see, hear, smell, taste or touch it. The string in my piano is going to vibrate if someone strikes the same string on another piano at a distance.

But the string of my piano is not going to vibrate if I use the piano as a trunk and pack it full of words. The words are going to bang around on the strings so I cannot hear anything else.

As long as I didn't learn from books; as long as I kept my memory from recording anything but direct experience, experiment and observation; and as long as I could seal off a part of my brain for a vocabulary, but refrain from using it in my thinking, then my thinking was not confined to my head. I could think with my whole body, with every nerve and organ: then I would know the truth, for they would not lie to me as men did, and as books did, using words.

I wanted the truth to select its own words, and not for men to try to shape ideas of truth in my brain with their words. This would not be true, and it was impossible ever for it to be true; for that is not what truth is.

Every argument that I ever heard was caused by someone trying to shape the truth by words, instead of allowing the words to be shaped by truth.

Fervently and deeply I wanted the truth, and I could see that none of the teachers knew the truth; none of the books told the truth. It was nothing but words, and words about words. Brick by brick, word by word, I saw the wall being built around us children to seal us for life into one room of our brain, with only two windows, our eyes, safely guarded with prison bars of words stronger than steel that also kept out most of the light; with every other gate of the mind carefully sealed by a word, so that no feeling could be arrived at, save through a word first, like putting gloves on our hands, shoes on our feet, spectacles on our eyes, muffs on our ears, and a woolen padding on every nerve end so we would be cut off from the quivering, life-giving pulsations of direct contact with the truth.

So I revolted; tore down the wall of words; threw off my shoes, both physically and mentally, and walked barefoot even where the stones were sharp and painful.

I went on alone in rain and thunderstorms, praying to God to let me feel the truth that no one could tell me in words. I promised that if He could make me "feel" the right things to do, I would always obey those feelings, instead of what other people told me to do when one person said one thing, and another said another.

When I got out alone like this, a strange feeling would sometimes come over me. When it did, then as far as I could see, everything, instead of being outside my head, seemed to be inside my head.

Looking out over a marsh where the frogs were croaking, I would hear them as if they were inside my head. They seemed to be a part of me, and I would amuse myself by pointing in a certain direction, saying, "One, two, threenow!"and a big bullfrog would croak from where I pointed.

So far as the evidence of personal experience is concerned, it does not answer the question whether the seeming ability to "cause" a frog to croak at will was a real one, or whether I predicted the croak.

This is merely illustrative. The problem comes up repeatedly in my records, as this type of phenomena is now an established fact with a sufficient number of reliable witnesses, so that the solution to this problem is one of the most fundamental considerations in the fields of science, philosophy, and religion. To what extent does the mind "make" things happen, and to what extent does the mind foresee what is going to happen? Does the mind create thought, or is it acted upon by thought?

Has man deceived himself by extending his conception of biological time beyond the sphere of its function in nature? Does cause precede or follow effect? Have we perhaps gotten the cart before the horse in thinking that the cause comes first because of our manner of recording biological time in a reflective function of memory, where things are naturally reversed as in a mirror or any other phenomenon of reflection? How is it, for example, that in dreams the sound that caused a dream wakes you up, and that the dream precedes the sound that has "caused" it?

Then again, here is an acorn. Overhead I see the oak tree from which it fell. I know that if I plant it, it will grow into another oak tree; and if I gather all the acorns from that, I can prove that within my hand at this moment I hold the means to produce a whole forest of oak trees.

The past is "outside," over my head; the acorn has left if forever. Yet in the same moment I imagine the future forest of oak trees; and I know that at this very minute, though the chemical constituents of that oak tree of the future are in the air I breathe, and in the soil beneath my feet, I know that the true cause of that future forest lies in the palm of my hand, inside the seed (in the future of that growth), and not in the tree overhead, (its past), from which it has departed forever.

The cause of a thing is in action or a function, and not a position or sequence in space or in biological time. The old oak tree produced the acorn in my hand, but now the active cause of the future oak tree is in that acorn as its own future, which becomes manifest by selective absorption in growth manifest by selective absorption in growth. The old oak tree is cut off from any possible function as a cause of growth in the new tree. The power of creation is the future biologically. The past is the memory of the body, the future is the memory of the seed. My dream precedes the sound that causes it, just as my backward is forward in the mirror, for a dream is a reflex of memory.

And likewise when by shock of emergency or will of intent and earnest desire we suspend our logic and reason, and revolt from our walls of words, then only our raw nerves are exposed to nature; we think with our spine, our hands, our feet, our skin. What is outside of us is now part of us, inside. We are a waking dream; we are conscious on the other side of the fence; our actions precede what causes them.

I say, "One, two, three"and the train whistles. I say, "One, two, three"and a frog croaks. And one time, before eleven witnesses who are all still living as I write this (this was later in life), I said, in the midst of a storm. "Look at that tree, if you want to see something. Suppose I told you that I could make the lightning strike that tree; would you believe me? Of course not. But watch it. One, two, three"

And no one was more astonished than I when a bolt of lightning split the tree before our eyes; for I was in a "waking dream" at the time, having abandoned myself to the

the spirit and enjoyment of the storm. The lightning bolt broke my state of contemplation, or whatever you may choose to call it; hence I was astonished at the fulfillment of what I had been only half conscious of saying.

This may sound incredible, but I assure you that it is a fact of experience before witnesses, and only one of several thousand cases embodying the same principle. None of my witnesses is of a type to grant me power to cause a particular tree to be split by lightning at the third count of my finger. There are, therefore, only a few other possible conclusions:

1. That as in a dream, my speech preceded the sound or event that caused it; in which case, our conception of and relation to "time" needs deeper investigation and perhaps drastic revision.

2. That neither my speech nor the event was the cause of the other, both being the effect of a common cause; viz. the power that caused the event also called my attention to it, and through me the attention of others before it happened.

Either 1 or 2 with variations could be embodied in a theory of prophecy or prevision. We could state another possibility:

3. That the cause of my speech was not the power that caused the event, but rather a power in myself, or acting upon myself, which could foresee the event without any causal connection whatever.

Still further, 2 might be clarified by limiting the "power" to a purely material nature. For example, we say that "instinct" causes muskrats to "hole in" just before a storm; but reflex conditioned by a change or degree of atmospheric pressure associated with a consequence would account for it.

Moreover, I have turned one of my laboratories into a large electrical condenser, with an electronic ohmmeter connected between a metallic roof and the ground. The radiation resistance of this portion of space started building up one rainy day; and as the needle mounted higher and higher, till it could record no more, at one hundred million ohms, I knew without any "mental phenomena" that lightning was going to strike in the vicinity. It struck within two minutes after the capacity of the meter had been reached. Who is to say that the human nervous organization is not as sensitive as one built by man's hands?

Still, that would not account for picking the right tree. Nor did the meter tell me what my nerves now did after the crash, when I asked, "Did anyone get the horses in before it started to rain?"

My assistant said, "I don't know. Why? Shall I go and find out?"

I said, "The bolt was so close it made me feel as if I were a horse. I imagined a horse leaping into the air and falling down dead."

My assistant went back to the barn and found that the horses were not in, as the rain had come on so suddenly. One of the other men was standing in the barn looking out at the downpour that followed the crash.

He said, "Yes, I know the horses should have been brought in, but I was just starting back to the pasture for them when it started. I'm just waiting for it to let up a little"

So both went back to look for the horses, and found two of them dead. One of them had leaped a six-foot fence and was several feet away without any tracks leading there.

In this case and others like it, I have had delicate instruments in my laboratory, in a temperature-controlled room, which correlated in their functions with outdoor temperature and weather changes, but slightly in advance of the outdoor effects. It became evident that the instruments were being acted upon at once by forces that a little later, sometimes five to twenty minutes, brought about the outdoor changes; thus enabling us to predict them by a small margin. Changes in atmospheric and electrical conditions, for example, preceded local meteorological effects, as also atmospheric tidal effects on temperature changes.

Thus it seems reasonable to believe that the human nervous system might be able to detect conditions on the same basis. But this will not account for all the phenomena observed. The imminence of a lightning bolt might be felt, but what explains pointing

to the tree it will strike, and timing the flash to the second? What explains the fact that when a real horse leaped into the air and dropped dead, a memory of a horse in my imagination did likewise?

And if what causes a frog to croak can act more quickly upon my nervous system when "attuned" to it, giving me time to count three before the frog reacts, how does this work with the engineer tooting his whistle, or a man doing what I say he is going to do without his knowledge of the fact, so that the power of direct suggestion is eliminated? Did I make him do it; did I foresee that he was going to do it; or were we both acted upon by some unknown third factor that caused me to predict the act, and the other man to fulfill it?

All that is established experimentally (and this I have done thousands of times in the course of my research) is a relation of sequence with respect to the biological time of me and my witnesses. (1) I state what is going to happen. (2) It happens. Is 1 the cause of 2? Is 2 the cause of 1? Are both 1 and 2 the effect of a common cause? Is the relation entirely fortuitous, i.e., just a matter of "chance" or "coincidence"? Or is there some other explanation?

For example, is it possible that our conception of causality is in error, and that prevision does not imply predestination; that prophecy and "free will" are perfectly compatible if not identical, in the sense that free will requires dimension in biological time?

If free will on the part of Deity or man requires the setting in motion of processes that require or constitute time, the determination and the fulfillment of free will will be separated by a time interval that may vary from an instant in which you ask your neighbor at the table to pass the butter, up to a lifetime that may be cut short if it is your "free will" to end it, or to violate the laws of health in slow suicide of neglect.

In any case the aim of the bullet can be altered up to the moment the trigger is pulled; but once pulled, the bullet is on its way to a target that was not predestined until the release of nature's forces beyond man's control.

Since in every case free will does involve a time interval, however short or long, between its determination and its fulfillment, it is perfectly possible that prophecy is based on immediate knowledge or foreknowledge of the execution of free will in a determination that thus permits the manifestation of prophecy in perfect harmony with free will. Yet this has been considered in philosophic and theological difficulty of insurmountable nature, whereas it is in nature and human experience no difficulty at all.

The only difference between scientific and intuitive prediction is that in science the execution of an act of free will is known by observation or intention, and that in the case of intuition it is "sensed" or "felt" in a way no more "occult" or mysterious than the function of an insect's antennae, but in man by the coordinated activity and sensitivity of his entire nervous organization. And whereas science is based on reflective analysis and comparison of sensory perceptions and memories of past sensory perceptions, intuition is based on the automatic and synthetic coordination of man's entire physiological organization, wherein by selective stimulation of reflex arcs (called "memory") a series of "feelings" is transformed into an activity of imagination that constitutes understanding and provides a basis for responsive activity of the motor or sympathetic nervous system.

If thoughts may be changed, environments may be changed. If environments may be changed, destiny may be changed, for there is a constant adaptation to environments. So "destiny" may be altered by one who knows the laws by which he can do so intelligently. This knowledge constitutes "free will" and involves "moral responsibility." Not everyone acquires or exercises it, hence the present condition of the world today.

Most of us do what we do today because of the momentum of yesterday, or by reaction to stimuli, without exercising the ability to resist or suppress that reaction. Thus we are governed by past and present (i.e., memory and sensory reaction), which perpetuates vicious circles, retards progress, and prolongs undesirable conditions; whereas the exercise of "free will" consists of and entirely depends upon a consideration of and preparation for "tomorrow."

The present moment is too late to exercise this prerogative with any expectation of altering the present moment. We can alter our future in cooperation with nature's laws, by considering between two possible courses of action, and choosing not merely the course of action leading to the "most desirable" result, but the criterion by which we shall evaluate that "desirability."

The mistake many make is in considering the "will" and "desire" as simple things. They are not simple but complex. It is possible to change the will by "willing to will," and to change a desire by "desiring to desire" (i.e., by changing one's criterion).

Man has two sources of desire and will that are founded in two distinct physiological systems of conditioned reflexes. One of these he shares in common with all animals; the other is distinctly the endowment and distinguishing characteristics of man. Neither of these two systems is "free" insofar as the reflexes have already been formed and conditioned. The freedom that is denied to animals and enjoyed by man is the power and the necessity by reflection to create and modify the growth and development of further reflex arcs (i.e., to make or modify tendencies, habits or hopes).

If we call this reflective and representative ability "intellect," then this is the seat and source and modus operandi of individuality and free will. For the intellect may lend its aid as a modifier to either one of man's two sources of will; or man's two sources of will may engage in conflict for the possession of the intellect. The one is the will of experience, habit, instinct; the other of the selective development of latent possibilities in the seed. One is the voice of the past; the other of the future. Free will is the gift of prophecy; and the gift of prophecy is free will.

The moment you lose hope and faith, your destiny is established regardless of your will, like a bullet shot from a rifle that cannot be turned from its course. As long as your optimistic hand holds opportunity, you govern "fate"; but if you drop it through doubt, carelessness or pessimism, you are in the hand of fate's "destiny," not your own will.

Thus religion, as the guarantor of hope and the guardian of faith, is our only organized insurance of freedom and free will. A wholly dogmatic and authoritarian religion, however, is a religion in mane only, a speculative system of beliefs, not an operative and phenomenal function of faith.

Free will is the power. What man believes to be his "will" is but a dam for the capture and use of this power. All is right until he uses his will power the wrong way.

This is the power of the individual, of governing the polarity of his desires by commanding the animal propensities or the spiritual sentiments. Thus he determines which shall predominate, according to whether he allows himself to respond to instinct (past), or to be influenced by intuition or inspiration (future).

Man's only escape from this fundamental conflict of choice has been a disastrous one for him (i.e., to reject both instinct and intuition), thus confining himself to the independent operations of the intellect (i.e., to a world of reflective and verbal representations).

Within this sphere of purely intellectual activity, the truth is entirely irrelevant with respect to the physiological and psychological consequences of the reflective and representative activities of the brain and nervous system. For the multifarious combinations of memory sensations create states of mind and motivate action without regard to their "truth" or "falsity" with respect to any criteria whatever.

Until we embody the physiological laws of thought in a logic capable of correlating language with life, more philosophic speculation is barren and without any probability of correspondence with truth.

Our only practical physiological means of insuring the correspondence of our imaginative activity with external conditions is by the use of special sensory organs in the acquisition of experience, the exercise of immediate observation, and the invention of apparatus in experiments. This is science.

Our only practical means of insuring the correspondence of our imaginative activity with external or internal conditions beyond the capacity and ability of our sensory organs to acquire experience, to exercise immediate observation, or to invent and apply activity of the entire nervous system as "antennae" in the acquisition of knowledge by "feelings," which are to be understood only by the selective stimulation of memory elements in the activity of imagination from which all independent operations of the intellect have been rigidly excluded.

This is the domain of religion, not as a system of speculative belief, but as an operative function of intuition and faith that involves and includes the inspiration of all the so-called spiritual gifts, including prophecy and all types of mental phenomena to which have been falsely attributed occult or psychic connotations.

The exercise of the latter to the exclusion of the former produces but half-men and half-truths: i.e., mystics and mysticism. The exercise only of the former produces but half-men and half-truths: i.e., skeptics and skepticism.

The materialism of science and the spiritualism of religion are each in themselves incapable of embracing the whole man or the whole truth. It is only the two together, functioning in one man, not in separate men, that produces the capacity of mankind to a universal consciousness, coordination and understanding.

Chapter III

It was shortly after the time in my boyhood when I revolted against the schoolroom and turned to nature instead for my lessons. I would play truant and go off alone in a storm, talking back at the thunder as if it were God speaking.

I would say, "If I call upon you, and still fail to find the truth and the true religion, it will not be my fault, because we have been told, `Ask and ye shall receive; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.'"

I would say to myself, "If there is such a thing as a Holy Spirit, let me feel it. I don't want anyone to tell me about it any more. All I ask is let me feel it myself, and then I will know."

I said this, not doubting, not asking for "proof," but as a hungry child demanding food, not words about food and pictures of good things to eat.

When I thought this way, a tingle would start in my spine that chilled me from head to foot, and then a feeling would go out to the end of every nerve in my body as if my heart were pumping warm wine instead of blood. I would feel a glow all over.

I would say, "Thank you, God!" And then the tears would come to my eyes because I was happy. I never told anyone about this. People wondered why I was always happy, and always whistling and singing; and this was why.

That was in the spring, and when summer came I was sent to a farm to work for a man who was kind to me.

I tended the cows every day, taking them a long way out on a road where I staked them to graze. This was the school for me. I learned more doing this than I had learned all year in school.

When it was time to go back to school again I became so nervous and restless that I was allowed to leave school and work in a spring shop for a dollar and twenty-five cents per week, to help my parents.

Thus I left school at the age of thirteen, and have never been inside of one since, except later in life as moderator and director of local school boards.

As for religion, I was absent from churches as well as schoolrooms, and for the same reason: I had found outside in nature, and within myself, what they did not or could not give me.

I have in the course of my life investigated every religion known to man on earth, past or present. I have enjoyed close friendships with leaders and laymen in all faiths; with priests, rabbis, and ministers of many denominations; and I must say that when I dug beneath the words and the various intellectual representations of doctrines and concepts, I found the same fundamental, universal faith by which man sustains a relation to his Creator and the spirit of truth in a function of neutral activity or consciousness other than "intellect."

And when as a scientist I convinced myself of the irrelevance of truth with respect to the physiological and psychological consequences of the operations of the intellect, a conclusion immediately follows that dispenses with all argument. It does not make any difference whether or not the doctrines, the concepts, and the verbal representations are true, so long as the physiological and psychological consequences are favorable to man's spiritual progress: i.e., if they lead the various types of intellect (to which the various doctrines are helpful) to the establishment of a relation with truth in a function of faith that is more fundamental than belief: i.e., an operative, not a speculative relation with the creative reality of God, or truth.

I have therefore devoted my life to the experimental investigation and study of the scientific foundations of the spiritual verities that are of necessity and by virtue of the essential unity of mankind in common with all religions as the essence of a universal Christianity.

Because I have found these spiritual verities to be operative and not speculative; and because in my own experience I have found that they operate in mankind through a physiological function of faith and not an intellectual function of speculative belief, I urge the support of all religions with emphasis on the faith they have in common, rather than the doctrinal beliefs by which they differ, and which a study of the history of religion and the history of mankind will reveal to have been the necessary expressions of intellectual variations to insure the perpetuation of the more essential elements of man's physiological relation with truth through the nonintellectual operations of a living, universal faith.

At the age of fourteen I went to Chicago with my father. My mother and sister followed later. This was during the World's Fair, and my father was employed in connection with one of the exhibits. Later, my parent had a bakery and a milk depot in the city. I got up early every morning when it was still dark to deliver milk.

By this time my father was a citizen of the United States, and was employed at the government appraisal store.

Not going to school, I always had some time for myself outside of work. I used it experimenting; and my mechanical, electrical, and chemical "inventions" were a source of great bother and worry to my mother, who was afraid of fires and explosions.

From time to time I secured work in various trades, in search of different kinds of experience. When I was fifteen I worked for a company that made window screens. Here I invented and constructed a machine for stapling the screening onto the frames.

I used to dream of having a wonderful shop, fitted out with every tool imaginable, so I could make things. I wanted also a chemical and electrical research laboratory and workshop. All of these daydreams materialized, though some of them many years later.

During this time I began to have experiences with regard to which space here permits the inclusion of only a few examples.

One time while working for the Hall Safe & Lock Company, I was sent out to dismantle the lock of a safe that had been blown open by safecrackers. I placed a drift in position and raised my hammer to strike it.

Now came the first experience in my life in which something happened in my arm that I could not account for as an act of will or reflex to my own thoughts. With hammer in mid-air, something held my hand sot that I could not hit the drift. The feeling was not as if some outside force held my arm, but something inside the muscles. They refused to make the motion I had instructed them to do by the impulse of my brain and the reflex of habit. So I examined the lock to see if perhaps I was hitting it in the wrong place to accomplish what I had to do.

Satisfied that I was hitting it in the right place, I raised my hammer again but could not bring myself to strike the drift. Then down my arm came the "feeling" that there was something there I shouldn't hit. So I pulled the drift out again; and behind it I found a dynamite cartridge that had been placed there by the safecrackers, and that had not yet been exploded.

This was the first of many similar experiences. Again and again throughout my life, I would have lost fingers, hands, arms, legs, and life itself were it not for an independent action of my muscles in making a movement I did not direct, or in refusing to make a movement that I did direct.

What was it, within myself or in the universe, that had the power to move my muscles without my own will, or to prevent them from carrying out what I had every reason to believe to be my will? I did not know. All I could swear to was that it happened not once or twice but again and again; and at the age of seventy it still happensbut always as a last extremity. In later years, I learned to look for a feeling and to obey it in time to direct my own course of prevention. But failing this, "something else" took over; and as a result of it, in a long life of activity, of travel, of driving various kinds of vehicles, operating all kinds of machinery, I have never had a serious accident, but innumerable narrow escapes, all owing to some kind of purposive or automatic reflex of self-preservation.

Problem: What is it? I have friends, bless them, who seem to think that such questions are answered by muttering a name.

I demonstrate to them the fact that I can attract and repel a piece of steel "at a distance" by means of another piece of steel concealed in my hand.

I say, "There you behold an invisible force. You can't see it , smell it, taste it, hear it, or touch it. Yet I can cause that piece of steel to roll away from me or roll toward me at will. What is it?"

Secure behind their wall of words, such people say, "Why, any school boy knows what that is! It's magnetism."

"Do you know what magnetism is?"

"It's what you're using to make that piece of steel move."

"But do you know what it is."

"Well, no. Does anybody?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out. Very few admit they don't know until I drive them to it. They solve all he problems of the universe by means of magic names."

As long as things have names people are satisfied. As long as they can mutter a sound or draw signs on a blackboard, or stir the sign and the sound up out of their memory, that is all that is necessary. Look around the world and hear the torrent of mutterings like a perpetual hailstorm. See the rivers of ink flowing onto tons and tons of paper. Man has built ships for himself out of paper, and sails out into the universe on a river of ink blown by the breath of empty words. Then when the ship of his illusions collapses, eh finds himself in total ignorance. For now, without words he knows nothing; but had he not deceived himself, he might now, without words, have known all.

Some of my friends do not like this line of thought. "You can't do without words," they argue, "You yourself speak and write every day of your life. You have written a newspaper column for years, using perhaps four or five million words. You can't convey your thoughts without naming words."

To this I answer, "But I don't think in words, and I don't think with the part of my brain that remembers words. I'm trying to break down the wall of words that holds you prisoner, and unbar the gates of your mind that words have sealed shut. I'm trying to show you that your fingers, your muscles, your spine, and every organ and cell in your body knows more that you do; and that here is nothing more ignorant in the human anatomy than an educated brain that has barred every gate of the mind except that associated with verbal reflex.

"A man with such a brain is nothing more than a piece of machinery; his voice but a phonograph record. It is beyond his comprehension (because he has no comprehension; only fixed ideas, concepts anchored to words): he cannot believe because he cannot personally experience what it means to stretch out a quivering antenna of nerves that pick up feelings and transform them from electric currents, which stir up visual and verbal memories and reactions, into the echoes of a past, a living, or a future voice or scene."

It is not the knowledge of the brain that holds the hand from hitting a dynamite cartridge that can't be seen, or that causes one to hesitate and miss the plane or train that is going to crash. What is it? Are we going to "fix" it with a name?"

A name is nothing without a meaning; a meaning is impossible without understanding; and an understanding is impossible merely on the basis of a chain-reaction on our verbal memory. An understanding is possible only on the basis of neural activity in direct response to the object or subject of that understanding; not merely a twitch in a brain cell that awakens the memory of a few words, but the coordination of the entire physiological and neurological organization.

How glibly the vocabularies of philosophies and ideologies, of sciences and theologies flow from the tongue! And how many know anything? How many really understand anything? Very few can define the words they use; and when they do, the words are dead.

We speak of hunches, intuition, presentiments, precognition, extrasensory perception, inspiration, psychometry, spiritualism, clairvoyance, telepathy, divination, superstition, faith, the Holy Spirit, God. All these words are used to talk "about" something. None of the words, as defined and understood by anyone I have ever talked with, adequately represent what they are talking about, because the words have not been coined by men who know or understand adequately what they are trying to name.

Public conception of the terms has been deformed by the operation of "psychic racketeers" who have capitalized on the crudity and the hunger of people for truth, by deceiving them with tricks. I have investigated these things and I know all these tricks. One of the purposes of this commentary is to attempt to rescue the truth, and to restore understanding and faith in man's God-given spiritual gifts, so that "each may prophesy, that each may be comforted" for himself without being deceived by charlatans and false prophets; and without being dependent upon the self-assumed authority of others for what he may seek and find and feel and know himself.

One day when I was walking down the street I felt very blue and discouraged without knowing why. This was unusual for me, because I was ordinarily contented and cheerful, if not happy, in those days. This was a new feeling and I could see no reason for it. I did not know of anything that would make me blue. I felt that way all day, and I could not identify or interpret the feeling. My imagination was no help to me now.

That night my father asked me what ailed me. I said I did not know. He insisted that if I was unhappy there must be a reason for it, and he wanted to know what it was.

The moment he asked the question the answer was there. It was something about my father that made me feel unhappy. Now my imagination had something to work on, but I didn't want to tell him about it, because now in his presence I felt and imagined that he was going to die, and that was what made me feel so upset and unhappy.

However, he forced me to tell him that I was afraid he was going to die suddenly, within two weeks. And then he punished me for dabbling with such nonsense, and said he thought I had gotten over that sort of thing long ago.

For the moment my father convinced me that I was wrong, because I hoped I was wrong. So for the next few days I tried to put it out of my mind. At least I never spoke of it. But early in the second week my father came down suddenly with a fever that developed into typhoid pneumonia. At the end of two weeks he was gone.

Overnight my boyhood was over. I was now the only man of the family. I went to work to help support my mother and sister.

Shortly after my father's death my mother met friends who attended "spiritualist" meetings. She accompanied them one time, and told us at home of what she had heard and seen. I could not believe her, and was curious to find out how much of it was true.

So I went to see this medium of whom my mother and her friends were speaking so enthusiastically. I was sorely disappointed. Before the seance was over I had detected and knew how all of the tricks were done by which the public was being deceived.

Here I do not wish to be misunderstood. The fact that I found one medium fraudulent was not grounds enough o form a judgment that all mediums were fraudulent. But the fact that the first medium I ever met was fraudulent is sufficient to explain why I avoided all seances on general principles until I made up my mind to investigate and expose the tricks for the sake of the truth that did exist, and that I felt needed no "stage trimmings."

Later on I met a number of very sincere mediums whom I judged to be honest but to some extent self-deceived. Also I met a few who confessed their tricks, and justified them by saying, "We use a trick to make people believe a truth, because the people cannot understand and will not believe the truth without the trick."

I cannot here include details of my later investigations along these lines, but I must say that while my own personal experience convinced me absolutely of the truth of immortality, the reality of survival, the fact that death does not end all, in the reality of a type of communication based on "feeling" such as might take place also between two living persons who are attuned by bonds of love and affection, I have yet to be convinced of any form of "materialism," trumpet blowing, slate-writing, spirit-photography, and so on. And at the time I am speaking of it, in the city of Chicago, this is just about all that spiritism consisted of; and in every instance where I was a witness I privately exposed the trick and revealed how it was done. And I can assure you it was not done by a "spirit"

Yet at the same time I frequently "felt" the presence of my father; the feeling revived a memory, and I could imagine him walking along beside me. I could "talk" with him by saying something and "imagining" what he might say in return.

If I had been willing to deceive myself as some mediums were, I could have said, "I see my father, and he tells me so and so." But I did not see my father. What I "saw" was a memory of my father. He did not speak to me at all. The words were out of my own verbal memory, and I put them into the mouth of the memory of my father in my imagination. Then how could I explain it when the memory of my father in my imagination told me things I did not myself know, and that only my mother knew/?

It all comes back to the "feeling" again. So far as I could see, the only link between the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen, was a "feeling," just as the only link between two telegraph operators is the current in the wires. The click that the receiver hears is not the click that the sender hears. It is a different" click." You do not hear the voice of your friend over the telephone; what you hear is a vibration in your receiver that sounds like your friend's voice.

Perhaps there do exist people who think that the voices they hear in their radio are the voices of the broadcasters a thousand miles away; but of course that is not true. What we hear is the vibration of a diaphragm in the Magnavox and not the vibration of the larynx of the person who is speaking.

And perhaps people who watch the images on a television screen are really under the illusion that they are seeing the faces, forms, and movements of the players in the broadcasting studio; if so they are deceiving themselves like the mediums who think they "see" spirits and "hear" voices.

You see nothing on a television screen but the variations of intensity of a spot of light, which is moving with such great rapidity that it creates the illusion of sustained vision; and the distribution of light intensity throughout the field, being determined by the reflection of light from the players and scene in the studio, deceives your optic nerves into believing you "see" the players. But how is this done from a distance, "without any wires" and through the air"?

Answer that and you will have an adequate explanation of all so-called mental phenomena; with the sympathetic nervous system as antennae, the imagination as amplifier and television screen; and what you see in your mind's eye of imagination is nothing but the flickering composite of one's own memory element.

Whether or not this "means" anything more than your memory depends entirely on whether you can turn the switch in your nervous system that reverses the current, so that the nervous system is acting on the memory and not the memory on the nervous system.

If the nervous system is acting on the memory, then your "feeling" manifests in imagination by selective stimulation of memory elements to form an "image" or a succession of remembered sounds. Then just as a seed manifests what it contains by selective absorption of chemical elements for the soil and air, so does a thought or "truth" or a "spirit," or whatever you prefer to call it, manifest in a "feeling" that translates itself by selective stimulation of memory elements or motor elements, into imagination or action.

At least this was my early understanding of the matter. At no time have I ever had evidence that a "thought" or "spirit" could move anything other than a human organism and nervous system. At no time have I ever had evidence that either a thought or a spirit could be "seen" or photographed. At no time have I ever "heard" a thought or a spirit. All I can state from personal experience is that whenever a feeling originates in my nervous system without internal cause, whenever I succeed at the same time in eliminating all other influence, suspending all other sensory reactions; i.e., when I stop thinking independently and allow my thought to be "shaped" by the feeling, then what takes place in my imagination (though it remain only imagination, composited of my own memories) nevertheless corresponds with some external reality or event, past, present or future, without any limitation in space or time save the decided and very troublesome and insurmountable limitation of what my memory contains to contribute to the visualized representation that is the foundation of my understanding.

If this view disappoints any follower of fraudulent spiritism, let him then take comfort in the conclusion that though a "spirit message" may not be a direct contact of a loved one, neither is the voice over the radio. But you recognize the voice and understand its intimacy. Why not the thought of a comforting mother in the "beyond"?

Of course it's nothing but your "imagination." But your imagination will tell you the truth if you seek with a prayer (tuning in), and if you will stop thinking with your brain and offer up every nerve from the top of your head to the tips of your fingers and toes, for inspiration. What is inspiration? First it's a "feeling," and then the feeling paints a picture, sings a song, writes a book, or solves a problem that changes the course of history.

One medium said to me, "I realize all that, but if I tell my people that I only imagine what their deceased loved ones are saying, will they believe me? No, I have to work a trick, and pretend that the spirit writes it on a slate directly. I can't admit that my finger does the writing."

But to this view I could not agree. The search for truth is far more thrilling, more comforting and more profitable here and forever than any imagined thrill or advantage to be gained by deception or self-deception.

Nor could I feel that this was something to "dabble" with, like a plaything. My friends would talk about books on the subject, and tell me that I ought to read this one or that one. But every time I was tempted to do so, a "feeling" would stop me. Just as I was stopped from hitting the drift with my hammer when there was a dynamite cartridge behind it and I didn't know it.

The only book I was able to open without this feeling was the Bible, and there I found the whole subject covered in the 12th chapter of the first epistle of the Corinthians, "Concerning spiritual gifts"' and the fourth chapter of John: "Beloved, believe not every spirit but try them whether they are of God, for many false prophets have gone forth into the world."

So when my mother and her friends became interested in "table-tipping" and kindred phenomena, I didn't want any part of it. Later, I investigated various forms of "automatic writing" and the phenomena of hypnosis and self-hypnosis to an extent that does not permit inclusion in this record; and for reasons given in the connection I did not feel it advisable to experiment along those lines.

All hypnosis is fundamentally self-hypnosis. No man has the power to hypnotize another against his will, if one exerts that will. All that a "hypnotist" is able to do is to contrive by psychological tricks to secure the willingness and cooperation of the subject. The "power" is in the subject, not in the operator; and the success of the operator depends largely upon securing the confidence complete trust, or fear of the subject.

Ninety per cent of the people in the world today have spent the largest portion of their lives in various stages of self-hypnosis. The production of these states of mind in the people has been the obj