I turned the radio on at the tail-end of the NPR interview,
and heard the voice of Byron Janis, renown pianist, and author with his wife,
Maria Cooper Janis, of a book with a very unusual title: Chopin and Beyond: My Extraordinary Life in Music and the Paranormal. This is a book I recommend as providing
a rare glimpse into the surprising connections between creativity, partnership,
and the paranormal. Here’s a statement from a chapter called
“Paranormal High Jinks,” which
covers such topics as table-tilting. Byron Janis writes: “I generally
seem to be able to activate tables quite quickly, and this one came to life
within a couple of minutes.”
Well, I can vouch for the veracity of this claim. We were at a conference on
parapsychology, Byron, Maria, and myself, and we decided to try a table-tilting
experiment as a break from listening to papers. I forget whose room, but we found an appropriate table, laid
our hands on it, and addressed it, intending to stir up its spirit--as it were.
This is what I recall of the experience. Almost immediately upon laying hands on
this modestly-sized but substantial table, it became agitated. Instead of asking questions of the
“spirit” where it raises a leg and knocks once for yes or twice for no, this
table, inspired by our threefold presence, moved about excitedly, and seemed to
lead us around as if it wanted to break free, or, at any rate, take off on a
romp of its own.
And that is exactly what happened. What I recall most clearly is that, barely keeping our fingers
on the table, myself losing contact with it several times, it moved, and
jauntily. I did not push nor did it seem that Byron or Maria were pushing;
rather, we tried to stay in contact with the table as it pulled away and led us
out of the room into the hallway wherein it ran around in a display of
exuberance as we chased it, hands intermittently touching it.
Somehow we seemed to animate a physical object with an
unexplained capacity to move through space. Levitate means to make light, and indeed we somehow caused a
table to lighten up and indeed behave bizarrely, almost comically, in space.
My second eyewitness levitation experience was an experiment
I performed in a course on personality development at City University of New
Jersey, in which we studied and practiced a variety of mental training
exercises such as meditation, breathing exercises, image-holding, and chanting
in unison. We had, in effect, formed
a kind of solidarity of consciousness.
It was suggested that we play a childhood game called “light
as a feather,” in which four persons try to levitate a fifth, by uniting
consciousness around the target person and lifting him up merely by touching
him, just as in the previous story, we caused a table to take off in space.
So now, in the presence of another professor, we sat a two
hundred pound ex-marine on a chair, and four of the least brawny female
students placed two fingers face-up under the two knees and two elbows of the
target person.
After breathing in unison and clearing their minds a bit, I
made the command: lift! And much
to my (and everyone else’s) amazement, the ex-marine rose into the air, the women
in no way making any effort, pushing or puffing; he, afloat in the air, his
eyes popping with amazement. The
ascent was brief; the descent smooth; and our minds were blown.
I tried the same experiment again several times with other
groups, without success; the class where we had been meditating and chanting probably
laid the groundwork for success by enabling us to create a group rapport.
My experiences—in the two examples given—raise a big
question. Why can a group of people do things that
one person alone cannot do?--even things that seem impossible, as the
levitation of the marine.
The question applies to destructive and creative performance. It is well known that in certain group situations
like war or ritual people will do things savage and inhuman. More to our liking, special groups may also
display creative power. For
example, James Merrill and William Butler Yeats relied on the presence of an
intimate friend or wife. Sometimes
highly creative people are unable to fully manifest their gifts without the
right psychic partner. Two
seemingly ordinary people who achieve the right rapport may do extraordinary
things.
I suppose that many potential partners of latent creativity are
wandering about, unaccountably dissatisfied because their complementary spirit
is missing; the necessary spark for mutual ignition is missing.
The take away idea: if a special rapport among people can bend
the most basic of the four forces of nature out of shape, gravity, then who knows
what the limits are of what we might accomplish
together. It seems that the
society we keep may determine the limits of our creative achievement.
If you’re interested in levitation and other extraordinary mind-body
phenomena, see my book Wings of Ecstasy,
available from Amazon. It contains
the Life of Joseph of Copertino, the most extraordinary levitator on record, a
master of consciousness and of a spectrum of supernormal powers.
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