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Part Two Much of the rest of this report will include material from Dr. Sadler and will be presented to those with internet access in blue surrounded by quotation marks. Dr. Slagle states that in twenty five years as a psychologist he has never experienced evidence of a pathology that could relate to the spiritual qualities of the transmissions being received at this time. I don’t entirely agree. Some of these messages are indeed beautiful and even occasionally somewhat profound. There has been very little interest in the last several decades regarding this type of pathology, if indeed we have a pathology. However, in the 1920’s and ‘30’s such cases did abound and several theories formulated as to the pathognomic nature of this kind of mediumistic thought transference. I will offer the following explanations formulated by the foremost investigator of mischievous mind phenomena of his day – a day embracing the first half of the 20th century. And so discriminating was this investigator in revealing self-deceptive thought impressions that he was assigned the human directorship of the messages from which all these recently purported transmissions relate – The Urantia Book. Having pursued hundreds of cases of clairvoyants, automatic writing and hearing, channeling, and so called mediumship, few passed the scrutiny of the planetary reservist Dr. William Sadler. In an effort to clarify this controversial and little understood medium, I will present pertinent extractions of random material that might shed some light on the overall aspects of thought transference as it relates to today’s channeling movement. ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS “It is probably due to errors in the working of mental machinery in the realm of the association of ideas that we must ascribe the origin of much of the autosuggestion, self hypnotism, and other self deception which many mediums and clairvoyants learn to perpetrate and practice upon themselves. Association of ideas is usually wholly unconscious to the individual, but in some cases it may be highly conscious. Association of ideas may be regarded as the psychic clearing house, as the great majority of all our concepts and mental images pass that way in route to the realms of higher thought activity. What we call intuition, which is so largely possessed by these various sorts of psychics (in the majority of cases women), is simply the process of spontaneous association of ideas – unconscious association. What unlimited possibilities must exist, for weal or for woe, in the confines of this little known realm of idea association! How many of the delusions of the spirit-world must be concocted in this mysterious center of the mind! How many of our psychic phantasms must have had their origin by the shuffling of the cards in this region of the mind, in the case of those hereditarily unstable and neurotically predisposed individuals who form so large a part of the world of spiritualism! Let the reader stop for one moment and consider the tremendous possibilities of their getting wires crossed, messages tangled, thoughts twisted, images substituted; in fact it might not be out of the way to imagine thought wrecks and other psychic catastrophes as the result of misthrowing switches and misreading signals in this important and more or less mysterious realm of the mind. It is highly probable that in some cases of clairvoyants and mediums we have a mental condition that actually borders on insanity. These persons may be suffering from “complex detachment” in a mild degree, so that they are able from time to time to recognize voices and other impressions that come up from this sort of dissociation, complex detachment, or double personality; and they are therefore, sincere when they represent to others that they have heard these voices of the mind from an outside source. “In the case of a certain type of psychic researcher it is possible to form a spiritualistic mood of mind, a “spook” habit of thought, and thus in time one’s own intellect would come to be a victim of one’s own “spook complexes. There can be little doubt that some of the milder forms of insanity are due to this sort of psychic insurrection on the part of certain associated groups of complexes, and that the individual’s irrational conduct is the result of a slow but sure surrender to the dictates of these associated rebel complexes. “I am fully convinced that many mediums and other spiritistic enthusiasts have so persistently successfully built up their “ghost complexes;” that they have so effectively come to transfer the reality feeling to these “spook” creations of their own subconscious minds; that they have so ardently welded their emotions to these spirit concepts, that in time this group of complexes becomes so powerfully entrenched in the psychic life of such individuals as to be able to institute some sort of psychic insurrection, and thus more or less fully to dominate the conscious life, opinions, and behavior of their victims.” PSYCHIC SENSATION “We begin to see that an item, an experience, a sensation, a pain or even a disease, may be wholly unreal – that it does not follow that it is genuine just because the mind reports it as true. The mind is capable of almost unlimited deception, monstrous imposition, and is subject to innumerable errors and inaccuracies of internal working… and it is possible for the body to originate and for the mind to recognize sensations which are not actually present; for instance, a foot afflicted with cancer may be amputated, and yet the patient may keep on recognizing pain as coming from the foot… and so various sensations of feelings – itching, burning – as well as sounds and voices, sights and objects, may arouse in the brain, while in reality they have no existence; they are merely illusions, sense delusions; or mental hallucinations. Sensations can produce ideas, and it should be borne in mind that ideas can reproduce sensations.” In 1957, not having yet met Dr Sadler, I was in Los Angeles conducting some of my own experiments in thought transference. I can recall being asked to perform some experiments with hypnosis to a moderate audience that had collected in a nearby residence to delve into the saucer mysteries of that era. This place was called the Cosmic Council Center and its devotees (about 100) were really into the movement. That evening I hypnotized a young man who in front of this audience was able to contact space beings hovering in a space ship just above the stratosphere. What was more interesting than the subject’s hypnotic hallucination of elaborate events aboard the saucer was the fact that several people in the audience had also been hypnotized and recounted, in their prone to suggestion state of mind, the exact same things that the primary subject had just related to the audience. These were in a sense “copy cat” subjects, so influenced by the experience that when awakened they were certain that they had been aboard a spacecraft. None of the sixty other people in the audience experienced the delusion, yet the three businessmen in the audience, in no way associated with the lunatic fringe, were quite convinced of the reality of their experience. The psychological dynamics of this common delusion will be discussed in greater detail throughout this report, in relationship to a desire for the extraordinary, hypnotism, and self deception. I mention this and the following only to reveal the facility and lack of effort required to experience delusional states of mind. In the same general period in 1957 my associate and close friend, Max Miller, Hollywood’s illustrious paparazzi was also present at the Cosmic Center to investigate the so called “contactees” of space beings. Commissioned by Motor Trend magazine at the age of fifteen to write a book called Flying Saucers – Fact or Fiction, Max was already regarded as an objective authority in the investigative field. Max, having creatively set into motion the first Saucer (UFO) Convention at the Hollywood Hotel on Hollywood Blvd. had to turn away over 200 people who overflowed into the courtyard, and being unable to hear a word of the presentations stuck around for the festivities, to meet such fascinating people – crazy or not. Everyone seemed to know the prodigy Max who by now was regarded as some kind of aficionado in the UFO movement. Once for a joke we ran an outspoken (more likely outrageous) character named Gabriel Green for the office of U.S. Senator from California in the UFO party. Even our platform was outrageous, hoping that if we could appeal to enough fringe groups in California we could somehow get close to a majority. We went after every group we could think of, from the beatniks in Hollywood and San Francisco to Cubans ousted from Cuba. We included in the platform a repeal of the McCarrin Internal Securities Act, so they could effectively bypass the government regulations preventing them from visiting their friends back in Cuba. The strategy seemed to work, for no longer did the press consider it a joke when we pulled in 270,000 votes to put old Gabe into a distant second place in the primaries. None of the television stations were following the stats on Gabe, then someone happened to look at the board and yelped, my God who is this guy Green, how did he get up there, he’s in second place and we have no idea who the hell he is. It became rather comical since no one in the studio seemed to know a thing about Garbiel Green; how could he have escaped the scrutiny of the pundits was a complete mystery to them. Gabe being somewhat articulate could convince people that there were space people infiltrating every available space on earth, a guy totally living in a world of UFO’s, and, to think we almost made him a U.S. Senator. Had we pulled that off I would have had to move to an island somewhere. Through all of this I don’t want to imply that I’m against the movement. I believe that there is definitely some kind of strange phenomena coursing our atmosphere, but as Stanton Friedman once said, only when we once discover one and hold on to it will it be recognized as the most important event on earth. (I hope this satisfies our illustrious Field Director – Lt. Major Don W. or I’m dead meat, as they say.) What Max discovered, but unrevealed in his book was that well over 90% of those interviewed were to his satisfaction experiencing a common delusion – what in psychology used to be called a “specific paranoia,” fine in every respect except one. They are apparently quite sane for the most part except they are the commander of a space ferry between Jupiter and Saturn on the weekends. Some even professed to be kings and queens on other worlds and you couldn’t convince them otherwise. The guy at the Cosmic Council Center actually played recordings of strange ethereal music which came from a distant planet. When asked how he got the tapes – what would you expect, other than the space people recorded it as a favor. What seemed rather mind boggling to me at the time was that these people had really come to believe in their own outrageous behavior. They were walking, talking parodies; caricatures of their favorite fantasies – emperor Ming, Flash Gordon, Empress what’s her name; quite oblivious of reality, but only in a singular sense. When they weren’t walking around in stately fashion pretending to be kings and queens, for the most part they appeared quite normal. They met at Giant Rock, just north of Indio California in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. The previous paragraphs are mentioned because they have a bearing on the desire for the extraordinary and have become a corollary experience to what I have perceived to be the reality of the Urantia teaching mission. Establishing the validity of the teaching mission has little to do with the content of the spirituality of their messages, it does have to do with their integrity and subsequent credibility. And, they do take away from the study of The Urantia Book by establishing themselves as the new authority of contacts with the spiritual forces beyond, so it goes without saying that confusion will reign if readers spend more time with the so called newer revelation. It sets the stage for individuals like Gabriel of Sedona to market Urantia Book 2, and with nothing to stop him maybe I should do Urantia Book 3. THE DESIRE FOR THE EXTRAORDINARY Sadler would label the above paragraphs the desire for the extraordinary. He states: “Spiritualism panders to the egotistic human desire for excitement and adventure. The average man likes to dabble in the extraordinary. We tend to overlook the remarkable nature of the common occurrences of everyday life, and long to make contact with big things and unusual events. We enjoy the exhilaration of talking through the air; wireless telephones and radio appeal to our imagination; and we long to project the experiment one step farther – to hoist our spiritual aerials and get the wireless waves from other worlds. Some people are not satisfied with making contact with the material world about them; they want that extension of ego contact which reaches out to worlds beyond. They long to conquer regions that are invisible and unknowable. They are not content with the limitations of the finite; they want as it were, to touch elbows with the infinite.” In discussing the nature and origin of the recent transmissions with several mediums (T/R’s), it appears that while some hear actual voices, others merely receive mental impressions, even sensory impressions such as scents or aromas whereupon they commence to initiate some benign messages of spiritual import purportedly from outside their own minds. In the course of these interviews and through the perusal of the transcribe material I have so far found absolutely nothing that transcends the contents of The Urantia Book and little of import that is not derived from the book. End of Part Two |
