#010: Maxim

Is it possible to kill with the mind? It has never been done, to my knowledge, under laboratory conditions—nor have I heard of anyone in modern times being hauled into court charged with psychic murder or manslaughter—but the literature of mankind, including holy writ, is rich with examples of human preoccupation with just that sort of power.

Consider, if you will, the witch scare of early America—which, at its height, was but an extreme realization of a centuries-old terror exported to the New World from England. Consider also the voodoo priests who rule certain religious convictions of the Caribbean area, also ages old and imported from Africa.

I toss these two up as ready examples for easy recognition by almost any literate person, but there are thousands more, and they have their roots in virtually every culture on the planet.

Of course such preoccupations today are instantly labeled, by those in the know, as superstitious clap trap. And maybe they are. We do not have to look much farther than our television sets to realize that a leading human trait is suggestibility, and that there are always those among us who will seek to exploit that trait to their own advantage. That could well be the real story behind today's shamans, witches, and other black magicians, as well as religionists of various hues.

But a pure scholar or scientist will want to know a lot more than the evidence available today is able to tell us about the origins of ideas in the human belief system. We may, as a species, be naturally suggestible or gullible—but what made us that way?

Can a shaman wield power over any individual who has no living or genetic memory of an actual "supernatural" event? And for a modern definition of supernatural, we have only to look at the so-called Cargo Cults of New Guinea, born during World War II among primitive tribesmen who could not make the natural link between cause and effect with respect to their "manna from heaven" dropped from American cargo planes.

To this very day the shamans of New Guinea continue to build crude mock-ups of aircraft upon mountaintops to attract the pleasure of gods long departed from their skies, and they may well go on doing so for centuries out of mind if their culture remains isolated from the tide of human evolution. So somewhere about the year 2550, descendants of the World War II shamans may begin to question this superstitious practice, pointing out that no gods have been seen in the skies over New Guinea in living memory and therefore probably never were—so who the hell do these guys think they're kidding?

I do not know how pure I may be as scholar or scientist, but I do not close the door on witches or shamans or any others without wanting to know a hell of a lot more than I can know about the heart of their belief systems.

How did the witch idea get started? Did someone see or experience something so mind-blowing as to anchor a possibility within human psyche for generations to come?—and have others added fuel to that possibility by duplicating, at least to some extent, that experience?

Or how many "superstitions"—examined and fully understood by the modern mind—would fall neatly into "natural" but "real" categories, as easily and accurately explainable as the cargo gods?

Is it possible to kill with the mind? Millions upon millions of modern humans believe it possible to heal with the mind and to sicken with the mind. The entire science of psychosomatic medicine is built upon that belief. And how many medical doctors with no interest whatever in psychosomatic or psychic/religious phenomena have consigned a medical prognosis to the patient's own "will to live"?

Is it possible, then, to fabricate a thesis that may explain a purely psychic power that can and does manipulate matter? I think so. I have been toying with one for years. And I need no supernatural laboratory in which to examine it. It is, actually, implicit in virtually every discovery of science during the Age of Einstein. So I find my anchor not in superstition and black magic but in the basic modern tenets of physical science.

Is it possible to kill and/or to otherwise manipulate matter with the mind? I say yes, with the shamans; yes, with the witches; yes, with Jesus and Gautama and all the mystics; yes, with Einstein and Bohr and Planck; yes, with modern medicine.

The full exposition of my thesis would fill a book of its own, so I give you here only the maxims from which it operates:

Pure energy is the underlying reality of the space-time continuum; in its purest form, energy is never more than wave-potential.

The potential of energy manifests as matter imbedded within structured energy fields that themselves result from fluctuations within the energy constant.

Consciousness is an energy constant, expressing as wave-potential.

Self-consciousness, or Knowingness, is a fluctuation within a conscious continuum. Fluctuation within a consciousness field may be produced by "thought" and/or may be expressed as "thought" inside space-time.

Since fluctuations within the energy constant are the source of all "matter" and since consciousness itself is an energy constant influenced by thought, it therefore holds that thoughts may produce matter and may be said to be capable of physically influencing matter.

Is it possible to kill with the mind? Do not ever bet your life that it is not.