Whatever the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, man is not the criterion. Best leave it all to the vast, creative, non-human mystery. Best strive with oneself only, not with the universe.
“God cannot do without man.” It was a saying of some great French religious teacher. But surely this is false. God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed with them. In the same way the mystery could dispense with man, should he too fail creatively to change and develop. The eternal creative mystery could dispose of man, and replace him with a finer created being. Just as the horse has taken the place of the mastodon.
From Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence
Great snippet by a great writer. Humans think they are irreplaceable but are we? As Lawrence writes: “In the same way the mystery could dispense with man, should he too fail creatively to change and develop. The eternal creative mystery could dispose of man, and replace him with a finer created being.” Apropos of this paragraph, I will share with you the story I wrote in my nonfiction book Afterlife Tracks: Glimpses of the Occult.
THE MIND READER
The day dawned sunny and joyful in the city of Granada, Spain, nine years ago. It was early spring and flowers of all shapes and colors—red, orange, white, fuchsia, pink—were everywhere. Their scent hovered over a large square plaza that bustled with Sunday revelers. It was my first visit to this city. I walked with my wife arm in arm, mesmerized by the beauty of the surroundings. Overhead, we admired the snowy peaks of Sierra Nevada commanding a view of the city, and at their feet, La Alhambra with countless arch windows and thirteen square towers fringed with battlements. The 1.5-million-square-feet Moslem citadel enclosed several palaces whose chambers overlooked central courts filled with fountains. The rippling of the crystalline water brought by channels from the neighboring mountains fused with the songs of nightingales. The courts were hemmed by column arcades ornamented with arabesque of blue, red and golden yellow. The passage of time had enhanced their beauty with a soft fading. In the interior, the chamber walls teemed with foliage and decorations of Arabic writing, whose Koran verses proclaimed love for God and His prophet Mohamed. If the architects wanted to recreate paradise on earth, they succeeded.
We strolled under the spell of the tales of “One Thousand and One Nights,” when we saw a group of people forming a circle around a man and a woman at about twelve yards from the couple. He must have been in his early thirties, and she in her late twenties. Tall and slender, he was dressed in a gray suit and a blue-and-white silk tie and was going around the circle, requesting questions from the crowd. Sitting on a chair in the center, the woman boasted gorgeous dark lustrous hair and lips red like a poppy flower. She wore an elegant black dress with narrow collar and a necklace with a silver cross pendant resting on her shapely bosom. I pictured her eyes large, dark, and sumptuous, but I never saw them because she had been blindfolded with a black, dense kerchief.
“Who wants to ask her a question?” He said. “Anything you wish to know about yourself … you, lady, the lady in the red sweater. What’s your name?”
“Maria.”
He approached her and she asked him a question. He then walked to the middle of the circle and repeated it to his companion aloud.
“The lady wants to know what she is thinking about.”
A deep silence fell upon everyone as the mind reader pressed her knees against each other and tensed her mouth into a grimace. Only the wailing notes of the flutes of a Peruvian Indian group could be heard in the distance, the music and the colors of their attires incongruent with the time and place.
“You have lost someone recently,” she finally said, her voice tender and confident. “This relative is taking care of you from above.”
Maria nodded her assent and explained she had recently lost her mother. Other people asked the mind reader all sorts of questions, and by the expressions on their faces I was able to observe that her answers were correct. I had never believed in the existence of transmission of thoughts or telepathy. I was very shy and preferred the comfort of being an anonymous member of a crowd. But his time curiosity tempted me and became stronger than my timidity. I asked her if she knew who I was. After a few seconds of concentration she said,
“You come from a faraway land. The sea separates Granada from that place. You have an important profession, doctor or lawyer, with a lot of responsibility and you are in charge of many people.”
At the time, I was the medical director at a hospital. Her correct response is still a mystery to me. Our brains emit electrical activity that we have been able to record on electroencephalograms for many years. Are some of us capable of capturing brain waves in a similar way a radio receives waves emitted by a station? Did she hear me and a particular accent in my voice lead her to conclude where I came from? I do not know.
Most claims of “supernatural powers” such as telepathy—or clairvoyance as I will discuss later—are everyday tricks. Some cases are hard to explain. There is an entire field of parapsychology dedicated to their study. There might be functions of our brain which we have never developed from lack of use, something akin to those who were born without upper limbs and managed to use their feet with the same dexterity as hands. Another explanation could be the presence of new mutations in the brain which are appearing only in a handful of humans. If so, it will eventually become a standard quality of all of us after thousands of years. The human being, like anything in nature, is in a constant evolution.
