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Clairvoyance and Occult Powers by Swami Panchadasi

LESSON IV SCIENTIFIC TELEPATHY

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The report gives the methods of the experiments, as follows: "The inquiry has taken place partly in Mr. Creery's house, and partly in lodgings, or at a hotel occupied by some of our number. Having selected at random one child, whom we desired to leave the room and wait at some distance, we would choose a pack of cards, or write on a piece of paper a name of a number which occurred to us at the moment. Generally, but not always, this was shown to the members of the family present in the room; but no one member was always present, and we were sometimes entirely alone. We then recalled the child, one of us always assuring himself that, when the door was suddenly opened, she was at a considerable distance, though this was usually a superfluity of caution, as our habit was to avoid all utterances of what was chosen. On re-entering, she stood--sometimes turned by us with her face toward the wall, oftener with her eyes directed toward the ground, and usually close to us and remote from the family--for a period of silence varying from a few seconds to a minute, till she called out to us some number, card, or whatever it might be."

In the first experiments, in "guessing" the name of objects, the child guessed correctly six out of fourteen. She then guessed correctly the name of small objects held in the hands of one of the committee--five times out of six. She guessed fictitious names chosen by the committee--five out of ten, at the first trial. The committee then tested her by writing down the name of some object in the house, fixed at random, and then, after all had thought intently of the thing, they sent for the child and bade her try to find the thing thought of, the thought-concentration of course continuing during the search. The result is thus reported: "In this way I wrote down, among other things, a hair-brush--it was brought; an orange--it was brought; a wine-glass--it was brought; an apple--it was brought; and so on, until many objects had been selected and found by the child."

Passing over the details of many other experiments we find that the following remarkable results were obtained by the committee: "Altogether, three hundred and eighty-two trials were made in this series. In the case of letters of the alphabet, of cards, and of numbers of two figures, the chances of success on a first trial would naturally be 25 to 1, 52 to 1, and 89 to 1, respectively; in the case of surnames they would of course be infinitely greater. Cards were far most frequently employed, and the odds in their case may be taken as a fair medium sample, according to which, out of a whole series of three hundred and eighty-two trials, the average number of successes at the first attempt by an ordinary guesser would be seven and one-third. Of our trials, one hundred and twenty-seven were successes on the first attempt, fifty-six on the second, nineteen on the third--MAKING TWO HUNDRED AND TWO, OUT OF A POSSIBLE THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-TWO!" Think of this, while the law of averages called for only seven and one-third successes at first trial, the children obtained one hundred and twenty-seven, which, given a second and third trial, they raised to two hundred and two! You see, this takes the matter entirely out of the possibility of coincidence or mathematical probability.

But this was not all. Listen to the further report of the committee on this point: "The following was the result of one of the series. The thing selected was divulged to none of the family, and five cards running were named correctly on a first trial. The odds against this happening once in a series were considerably over a million to one. There were other similar batches, the two longest runs being eight consecutive guesses, once with cards, and once with names; where the adverse odds in the former case were over one hundred and forty-two millions to one; and in the other, something incalculably greater." The opinion of eminent mathematicians who have examined the above results is that the hypothesis of mere coincidence is practically excluded in the scientific consideration of the matter. The committee calls special attention to the fact that in many of the most important tests none of the Creery family were cognizant of the object selected, and that, therefore, the hypothesis of fraud or collusion is absolutely eliminated. The committee naturally came to the conclusion that the phenomena was genuine and real telepathy.

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