Reality Stretching

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch. ~ Lily Tomlin.

I began this topic with A Tart Experiment, which described silent communication between two deeply, mutually hypnotized subjects in a formal experiment. It is described in sufficient detail to allow anyone or “anytwo” to repeat the procedure. The experimenter remained in good reputation at UC Davis for 28 years until he retired, indicating no one found his work fraudulent.

There are other experiences in hypnosis that stretch reality and allow trial of replication. For example, Michael Talbot, in The Holographic Universe, described a birthday party from his youth where the entertainment was a stage hypnotist. The hypnotist selected a father, hypnotized him, and instructed him that his daughter was invisible. The hypnotist pulled out a pocket watch, held the inscribed back to the daughter’s stomach while she stood facing away from and immediately in front of her father. The hypnotist asked the father to read the inscription, which the father did, right through his daughter.

An even richer stretching of reality comes from placebo healings—the healing power of nothing at all. Half a century of rigorous research demonstrates an overall 35% success rate of placebo. In the 1950s sham surgery, just cutting patients open and stitching up the cut, proved equally successful to actual surgery. Rigorous double-blind studies determined placebos 54% effective as aspirin and 56% effective as morphine.

Lewis Thomas related a story of a doctor who regularly eliminated warts by painting them with harmless purple dye. Thomas, then president emeritus of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute, stated, “If my unconscious can figure out how to manipulate the mechanisms needed for getting around that virus, and for deploying all the various cells in the correct order for tissue rejection, then all I have to say is that my unconscious is a lot further along than I am.”

Placebos have proven effective in arenas of headaches, allergies, fever, the common cold, acne, asthma, warts, pain, nausea, peptic ulcers, psychiatric symptoms such as depression and anxiety, rheumatoid and degenerative arthritis, diabetes, radiation sickness, Parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, and cancer—diseases from mundane to the most malevolent.

Patients can also change conditions themselves. A woman having multiple personalities was admitted to hospital for diabetes switched to a personality that did not have diabetes, and the diabetic symptoms disappeared. Similar stories change color blindness, asthma, drug response, allergies, epilepsy, etc. A multiple who is drunk might change to a different personality and be instantly sober. A multiple can change to an “unanesthetizable” personality and wake up on the operating table. Multiples have entirely different brainwave and speech patterns. Under normal medical reality, these things are impossible, except they happen.

These indicate the unconscious mind has powers largely unimagined, and definitely unmastered—except by a few. The objective then becomes to determine how to enlist the unconscious into controlling one’s health and curing it when needed. Our "collective hunch" has been wrong.

The first step is to collect such experiences and look for possible techniques toward self-mastery. Hypnosis, of course, suggests itself as a first technique of great potential. The apparent task is to instruct the unconscious in what is wanted and trust it knows how to accomplish it. The problem is to make it do it, want to do it, and/or believe it can do it.

I’ll either find the book—or write it! Surely this one is already written many times over.

Miracles happen, not in opposition to Nature, but in opposition to what we know of Nature. ~ St. Augustine
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Michael Talbot reported these examples in The Holographic Universe. Talbot passed away from leukemia, at age 38. He wrote of the potential, but not of techniques for mastery.