The Holographic Universe (21 page)

Moreover, many of the
witnesses, such as the investigators from the Roman Catholic Church, had a
vested interest in refuting the Jansenist miracles, but they still went away
confirming them (the Roman Catholic Church later remedied this embarrassing
state of affairs by conceding that the miracles existed but were the work of
the devil, hence proving that the Jansenists were depraved).

One investigator, a
member of the Paris Parliament named Louis-Basile Carre de Montgeron, witnessed
enough miracles to fill four thick volumes on the subject, which he published
in 1737 under the title
La Verite des Miracles.
In the work he provides
numerous examples of the convulsionaries’ apparent invulnerability to torture.
In one instance a twenty-year-old convulsionaire named Jeanne Maulet leaned
against a stone wall while a volunteer from the crowd, “a very strong man,” delivered
one hundred blows to her stomach with a thirty-pound hammer (the
convulsionaires themselves asked to be tortured because they said it relieved
the excruciating pain of the convulsions). To test the force of the blows,
Montgeron himself then took the hammer and tried it on the stone wall against
which the girl had leaned. He wrote, “At the twenty-fifth blow the stone upon
which I struck, which had been shaken by the preceding efforts, suddenly became
loose and fell on the other side of the wall, making an aperture more than half
a foot in size.”

Montgeron describes
another instance in which a convulsionaire bent back into an arc so that her
lower back was supported by “the sharp point of a peg.” She then asked that a
fifty-pound stone attached to a rope be hoisted to “an extreme height” and
allowed to fall with all its weight on her stomach. The stone was hoisted up
and allowed to fall again and again, but the woman seemed completely unaffected
by it She effortlessly maintained her awkward position, suffered no pain or
harm, and walked away from the ordeal without even so much as a mark on the
flesh of her back. Montgeron noted that while the ordeal was in progress she
kept crying out, “Strike harder, harder!”

In fact, it appears that
nothing could harm the convulsionaires. They could not be hurt by the blows of
metal rods, chains, or timbers. The strongest men could not choke them. Some
were crucified and afterward showed no trace of wounds. Most mind-boggling of
all, they could not even be cut or punctured with knives, swords, or hatchets!
Montgeron cites an incident in which the sharpened point of an iron drill was
held against the stomach of a convulsionaire and then pounded so violently with
a hammer that it seemed “as if it would penetrate through to the spine and
rupture all the entrails.” But it didn't, and the convulsionaire maintained an
“expression of perfect rapture,” crying, “Oh, that does me good! Courage,
brother; strike twice as hard, if you can!”

Invulnerability was not
the only talent the Jansenists displayed during their seizures. Some became
clairvoyant and were able to “discern hidden things.” Others could read even
when their eyes were closed and tightly bandaged, and instances of levitation
were reported. One of the levitators, an abbe named Bescherand from
Montpellier, was so “forcibly lifted into the air” during his convulsions that
even when witnesses tried to hold him down they could not succeed in keeping
him from rising up off of the ground.

Although we have all but
forgotten about the Jansenist miracles today, they were far from ignored by the
intelligentsia of the time. The niece of the mathematician and philosopher
Pascal succeeded in having a severe ulcer in her eye vanish within hours as the
result of a Jansenist miracle. When King Louis XV tried unsuccessfully to stop
the convulsionaires by closing the cemetery of Saint-Medard, Voltaire quipped,
“God was forbidden, by order of the King, to work any miracles there.” And in
his
Philosophical Essays
the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote,
“There surely never was so great a number of miracles ascribed to one person as
those which were lately said to have been wrought in France upon the tomb of
Abbe Paris. Many of the miracles were immediately proved upon the spot, before
judges of unquestioned credit and distinction, in a learned age, and on the
most eminent theatre that is now in the world.”

How are we to explain
the miracles produced by the convulsionaires? Although Bohm is willing to
consider the possibility of PK and other paranormal phenomena, he prefers not
to speculate about specific events such as the supernormal abilities of the
Jansenists. But once again, if we take the testimony of so many witnesses
seriously, unless we are willing to concede that God favored the Jansenist
Catholics over the Roman, PK seems the likely explanation. That some kind of
psychic functioning was involved is strongly suggested by the appearance of
other psychic abilities, such as clairvoyance, during the seizures. In
addition, we have already looked at a number of examples where intense faith
and hysteria have triggered the deeper forces of the mind, and these too were
present in ample portions. In fact, instead of being produced by one
individual, the psychokinetic effects may have been created by the combined
fervor and belief of all those present, and this might account for the unusual
vigor of the manifestations. This idea is not new. In the 1920s the great
Harvard psychologist William McDougall also suggested that religious miracles
might be the result of the collective psychic powers of large numbers of
worshipers.

PK would explain many of
the convulsionaire's seeming invulnerabilities. In the case of Jeanne Maulet it
could be argued that she unconsciously used PK to block the effect of the hammer
blows. If the convulsionaires were unconsciously using PK to take control of
chains, timbers, and knives, and stop them in their tracks at the precise
moment of impact, it would also explain why these objects left no marks or
bruises. Similarly, when individuals tried to strangle the Jansenists, perhaps
their hands were held in place by PK and although they thought they were
squeezing flesh, they were really only flexing in the nothingness.

Reprogramming
the Cosmic Motion Picture Projector

PK does not explain
every aspect of the convulsionaires’ invulnerability, however. There is the
problem of inertia—the tendency of an object in motion to stay in motion—to
consider. When a fifty-pound stone or a piece of timber comes crashing down, it
carries with it a lot of energy, and when it is stopped in its tracks, the
energy has to go somewhere. For example, if a person in a suit of armor is
struck by a thirty-pound hammer, although the metal of the armor may deflect
the blow, the person is still considerably shaken. In the case of Jeanne Maulet
it appears that the energy somehow bypassed her body and was transferred to the
wall behind her, for as Montgeron noted, the stone was “shaken by the efforts.”
But in the case of the woman who was arched and had the fifty-pound stone
dropped on her abdomen, the matter is less clear. One wonders why she wasn't
driven into the ground like a croquet hoop, or why, when they were struck with
timbers, the convulsionaires were not knocked off their feet? Where did the
deflected energy go?

Again, the holographic
view of reality provides a possible answer. As we have seen, Bohm believes that
consciousness and matter are just different aspects of the same fundamental
something, a something that has its origins in the implicate order. Some
researchers believe this suggests that the consciousness may be able to do much
more than make a few psychokinetic changes in the material world. For example..
Grof believes that if the implicate and explicate orders are an accurate
description of reality, “it is conceivable that certain unusual states of
consciousness could mediate direct experience of, and intervention in, the
implicate order. It would thus be possible to modify phenomena in the
phenomenal world by influencing their generative matrix.” Put another way, in
addition to psychokinetically moving objects around, the mind may also be able
to reach down and reprogram the cosmic motion picture projector that created
those objects in the first place. Thus, not only could the conventionally recognized
rules of nature, such as inertia, be completely bypassed, but the mind could
alter and reshape the material world in ways far more dramatic than even
psychokinesis implies.

That this or some other
theory must be true is evidenced in another supernormal ability displayed by
various individuals throughout history: invulnerability to fire. In his book
The
Physical Phenomena of Mysticism
, Thurston gives numerous examples of saints
who possessed this ability, one of the most famous being St. Francis of Paula.
Not only could St. Francis of Paula hold burning embers in his hands without
being harmed, but at his canonization hearings in 1519 eight eyewitnesses
testified that they had seen him walk unharmed through the roaring flames of a
furnace to repair one of the furnace's broken walls.

The account brings to
mind the Old Testament story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. After
capturing Jerusalem, King Nebuchadnezzar ordered everyone to worship a statue
of himself. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused, so Nebuchadnezzar ordered
them thrown into a furnace so “exceeding hot” that the flames even burned up
the men who threw them in. However, because of their faith, they survived the
fire unscathed, and came out with their hair unsinged, their clothing unharmed,
and not even the smell of fire upon them. It seems that challenges to faith,
such as the one King Louis XV tried to impose on the Jansenists, have
engendered miracles in more than one instance.

Although the kahunas of
Hawaii do not walk through roaring furnaces, there are reports that they can
stroll across hot lava without being harmed. Brigham told of meeting three
kahunas who promised to perform the feat for him, and of following them on a
lengthy trek to a lava flow near the erupting Kilauea. They chose a
150-foot-wide lava flow that had cooled enough to support their weight, but was
so hot that patches of incandescence still coursed through its surface. As
Brigham watched, the kahunas took off their sandals and started to recite the
lengthy prayers necessary to protect them as they strolled out onto the barely
hardened molten rock.

As it turned out, the
kahunas had told Brigham earlier that they could confer their fire immunity on
him if he wanted to join them, and he had bravely agreed. But as he faced the
baking heat of the lava he had second and even third thoughts. “The upshot of
the matter was that I sat tight and refused to take off my boots,” Brigham
wrote in his account of the incident. After they finished invoking the gods,
the oldest kahuna scampered out onto the lava and crossed the 150 feet without
harm. Impressed, but still adamant about not going, Brigham stood up to watch
the next kahuna, only to be given a shove that forced him to break into a run
to keep from falling face first onto the incandescent rock.

And run Brigham did.
When he reached higher ground on the other side he discovered that one of his
boots had burned off and his socks were on fire. But, miraculously, his feet
were completely unharmed. The kahunas had also suffered no harm and were
rolling in laughter at Brigham's shock. “I laughed too,” wrote Brigham. “I was
never so relieved in my Life as I was to find that I was safe. There is little
more that I can tell of this experience. I had a sensation of intense heat on my
face and body, but almost no sensation in my feet.”

The convulsionaires also
occasionally displayed complete immunity to fire. The two most famous of these
“human salamanders”—in the middle ages the term
salamander
referred to a
mythological lizard believed to live in fire—were Marie Sonnet and Gabrielle
Moler. On one occasion, and in the presence of numerous witnesses, including
Montgeron, Sonnet stretched herself on two chairs over a blazing fire and
remained there for half an hour. Neither she nor her clothing showed any ill
effects. In another instance she sat with her feet in a brazier full of burning
coals. As with Brigham, her shoes and stockings burned off, but her feet were
unharmed.

Gabrielle Moler's
exploits were even more dumbfounding. In addition to being impervious to the
thrusts of swords and blows delivered by a shovel, she could stick her head
into a roaring hearth fire and hold it there without suffering any injury.
Eyewitnesses report that afterward her clothing was so hot it could barely be
touched, yet her hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows were never so much as singed. No
doubt she was great fun at parties.

Actually the Jansenists
were not the first convulsionary movement in France. In the late 1600s, when
King Louis XIV tried to purge the country of the unabashedly Protestant
Huguenots, a group of Huguenot resisters in the valley of the Cevennes and
known as the Camisards displayed similar abilities. In an official report sent
to Rome, one of the persecutors, a prior named Abbe du Chayla, complained that
no matter what he did, he could not succeed in harming the Camisards. When he
ordered them shot, the musket balls would be found flattened between their
clothing and their skin. When he closed their hands upon burning coals, they
were not harmed, and when he wrapped them head to toe in cotton soaked with oil
and set them on fire, they did not burn.

As if this weren't
enough, Claris, the Camisard leader, ordered that a pyre be built and then
climbed to the top of it to deliver an ecstatic speech. In the presence of six
hundred witnesses he ordered the pyre be set on fire and continued to rant as
the flames rose above his head. After the pyre was completely consumed, Claris
remained, unharmed and with no mark of the fire on his hair or clothing. The
head of the French troops sent to subdue the Camisards, a colonel named Jean
Cavalier, was later exiled to England where he wrote a book on the event in
1707 entitled
A Cry from the Desert.
As for Abbe du Chayla, he was
eventually murdered by the Camisards during a retaliatory raid. Unlike some of
them, he possessed no special invulnerability.