Fiona wanted to show me how a crystal seemed to work. The crystal is on the end of a thread. You hold the thread over a paper ouija board, well, that is what it looked like to me.
The crystal swang over the board and answered questions. But I was watching her entire body moving gently back and forth and side to side - so gently that she hadn’t noticed.
Fiona went on to finish her course in medicine and is now a doctor (of medicine, equivalent to "M.D." in the USA). So she is no bunny. Yet she had no idea that she was the initiator of the response. How can this be?
The movement required (by the whole of the body) to arrive at the correct swinging of the pendulum is complicated and requires feedback from the visual system to regulate movements and there also needs to be (a subconscious) awareness of the desired result.
Thinking on this it strikes me just how elaborate the subconscious processing must be in such movement and I wonder just how elaborate a self fulfilling prophesy requiring subconscious movement could be?
The difficulty with studying this is obvious - as soon as the ‘trick’ was pointed out to Fiona it no longer ‘worked’. One must have some degree of faith that some unknown force might act and be oblivious to any mechanisms that might precipitate it.
Yet I wonder if I believe that I can’t sleep whether I might not drink a coffee or two at night and not realise it? Could I have been contributing to my own bad back? Am I doing something to dim my vision unnecessarily?
And what of the mechanisms within my mind? How is it that an elaborate, highly intelligent mechanism can operate to fulfil my beliefs without my knowledge and to the detriment of my overall well being?
If this was an isolated case then one could pass it off as an anomaly that might go away if we examined the situation more carefully. But "fooling the self" is very common, and I may well have witnessed, objectively, just the small tip of a very large iceberg.
© Robert Karl Stonjek 2002