The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (8 page)

‘Our thoughts create our reality,’ she says. ‘You seem to experience the world as aggressive and dog-eat-dog. A lot of people do.’

She makes some more notes. She frowns irritably, and then scribbles her special light pen frantically back and forth on her notebook. It appears to have run out of ink.

‘Some people can deal with that world,’ I say, ruefully. ‘The go-getters, the businessmen.’

She puts the special light pen to one side and picks up a normal one.

‘Do you feel there are people out there who achieve success without treading on people?’ she asks. ‘Are there any wealthy people who’ve achieved success in honourable ways?’

Suddenly, I feel embarrassed.

‘No,’ I begin. ‘I mean, I don’t think there are.’ I pause for a moment. Vered looks at me, pleasantly. ‘But …’ I say. ‘But … maybe that’s a prejudice of mine. Because it’s obviously not true.’

‘It doesn’t matter what the truth is. It’s what you feel is the truth.’ She makes another note and stops for a think before musing, ‘There could be an issue here around worthiness.’

Before I am led to the couch, I ask Vered to explain what is about to happen. ‘I don’t really believe in linear time at all,’ she tells me. ‘We use terminology like “past”, “present” and “future” because we’re living in a three-dimensional reality.’

I probably look a bit confused.

‘It’s like a tuning,’ she continues. ‘Let’s say that you and I, at this moment, are tuned into the same consensual reality. With this process, I can tune you to have a double focus.’

I think what she is saying is that we are all living lots of different lives at once. I just happen to be ‘tuned in’ to this one at the moment. During hypnosis, Vered is going to fiddle with my tunings and that will enable me to glimpse other lifetimes – or, as she prefers, ‘time-space dimensions’.

‘All I’m doing is helping you move into a deeply relaxed state,’ she says, as I lie back on her massage table. ‘Then I ask your subconscious, your “higher self”, to take you to the most appropriate time-space. That can be in the past; that can be in the future.’

The hypnosis works surprisingly well. Vered asks me to picture a special place ‘like a meadow’. I think,
Hmmmm, meadows
and imagine a warm, flower-filled pasture fringed with a dark, looming forest. ‘This is the part of the mind we’ll be working with today,’ she says. ‘The part that deals with images and memories. The part that’s active at night. Can you see a cloud?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you sit on it for me?’

I sit gingerly on the cloud.

‘I’m on it.’

‘This cloud can carry you over the mountains and over the valleys and over the oceans, drifting and floating, soft, protected, comfortable and safe, floating and drifting, drifting and floating, over the land, over
the valleys, protected and safe. This cloud is like magic because not only can it carry you over the land and over the valley, it can also carry you back and back and back in time and space so I’m asking the cloud to move and carry you back and back and back in time and space, to another time, another place, where there’s information we would like to find to help you.’

The cloud floats down and I see a cot. Vered asks if I have feet. She wants to know what age they are; what colour the cot is; what room I am in; what I can hear. But we don’t get far in that life, so the cloud takes me to the 1920s, where I am speeding in a purple sports car following an argument. I crash into a tree. I am dead. Next up, it is fifteenth-century Germany and the murder with the hammer. And then I am in London’s West End in the 1940s. This time, I am a woman. I am hurrying to work – behind a ticket-till in a Soho nightclub – when I am suddenly gripped by a powerful, almost psychic sensation that my husband, who is at war, has been killed. All night, at work with the girls on the cash desk, I keep my fears to myself – many of my friends really have been widowed by the Nazis. They are the ones deserving of sympathy, not me, with my silly, superstitious ‘feeling’. Then it is 1945. I am in Portsmouth, watching my husband’s boat disembark. He is not there. I run up to a young sailor on the gangplank. He insists that he knows nothing about my husband but I can tell by his sad, frightened eyes that he is lying. Then, in the same life, I am taken forward to the late 1960s. I am lying ill and heartbroken in the attic room of a boarding house. I have been living on baked beans straight from the tin. I am wearing my overcoat and stockings in bed to shield me from the devilish grey cold. I don’t die so much as fade quietly away: after all, I have been dead ever since that rainy night in London’s West End – dead of heart, dead of hope and possessed by that mysterious and melancholy knowledge.

‘It was like opening the floodgates!’ Vered declares, after I have come round. ‘Your subconscious was so ready and ripe to allow the stories to rush out of your energy system. There was a beautiful, hungry flow. Especially in that last one. There was an intensity of emotion. I actually was getting chills in my spine. Your sadness was so overwhelming. But now – look at you! You look totally different!’

‘How do I look?’ I ask.

‘Frisky and cheeky and alive!’

And the strange thing is, I feel it too: light and unburdened. And there is something else: a dangerous thrill at having been so intimate and vulnerable with Vered. Grinning helplessly, I ask her to recount some of her proudest successes. She tells me about a man who had persistent problems with a nerve pressing on a shoulder muscle. ‘His was an almost textbook case,’ she says. ‘He told a very moving story of having been a knight in England. He’d come late to a meeting because he’d been cavorting in the forest with his beloved. His headdress wasn’t on properly and the other members of the brotherhood of knights were furious. One of them hit him with a sword in that shoulder. We had to bring him to a place of forgiveness. He opened his arms, in armour, to the other knight and held him. And he never had that pain again.’

I ask Vered if it is her experience that a high number of clients turn out to have been heroes of some sort – knights or kings or celebrities.

‘People who’ve had a profound effect on the world – the Cleopatras, the John Lennons – you could see them as sparks,’ she explains. ‘The soul has many sparks in it. So a lot of people may carry sparks of John Lennon.’

‘Have you ever had a John Lennon?’ I ask.

‘I
have
had a John Lennon.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘Actually, I’ve had two John Lennons. And who’s to argue with that? Others have had more mundane lives. One lady was a twig. During my first regression I experienced myself as a blade of wheat.’

‘A blade of wheat?’

‘I was literally a blade of wheat. It was a very, very moving experience. I was quite dry and yellow.’

‘How did it feel to be a blade of wheat?’

‘Vast and empty and alone.’

‘And now you’ve experienced yourself as a blade of wheat, do you sometimes feel guilty eating wheat-based products?’

‘I am totally wheat-intolerant!’

In the days following my regression, my thoughts keep returning to one innocuous comment of Vered’s: ‘The part of the mind we’ll be working with today is the part that deals with images and memories. The part that’s active at night.’

This, it seemed to me, was absolutely correct: my impression, as I lay on the couch, was that I was in a kind of dream state and that Vered was guiding me through it. What appeared to be happening was that my imagination, in its state of semi-consciousness, was not only producing images at Vered’s command, but creating narratives: stories in which I played the leading role. They were vivid and memorable and emotionally compelling. Having learned about placebo, with its motors of expectation, ritual and the focused attention of authority figures, I could quite understand how PLR therapy could have beneficial effects for many clients.

Over the last few years, scientists have been studying the satisfied customers of counsellors much like Vered. For a 2007 paper,
Maarten Peters and his team at Maastricht University
told a cohort of PLR believers to recite a list of forty random names. Later, they were shown a new list that contained those same names again, but also a jumble of famous monickers and others they had not previously seen. Then they were asked, ‘Which are the famous names?’

Compared to a control group of people with no belief in reincarnation, the PLR faithful were almost twice as likely to mistakenly conclude a name they had recited from the initial list was actually a celebrity. In other words, they had struggled to tell where the memory had come from. Did they know that person from out there in the world? Or was their name familiar because they’d seen it in that list earlier on? They had made what is known as a ‘source-monitoring error’.

Psychologists at Harvard University led by Susan Clancy
used a similar method to test the memories of people who believed they had experienced alien encounters. They recruited eleven people who ‘remembered’ being abducted, a further nine who believed they had been taken because of apparently mysterious symptoms, but couldn’t recall anything specific, and a control group of thirteen. Both the alien groups were significantly more prone to make source-monitoring errors than the control.
Although this result wasn’t replicated in an attempt by UK researchers
, led by Professor Chris French, he says, ‘There have been quite a few studies since then, both published and unpublished, that support the idea that paranormal believers are more susceptible to errors in “reality monitoring”, which is a general term
used to refer to our ability to distinguish between events that take place in the outside world and those which are internally generated.’

This, it seems, is another striking unconscious effect – an invisible force that, like placebo, has the power to conjure false beliefs.

*

Before leaving Vered’s clinic, I find another surprising connection between past lives and alien abductions. It happens when I ask her about the scientific basis for belief in past lives. She sighs, ‘Oh, fifteen, twenty years ago I would’ve been very, very concerned about proving this within the empirical scientific realm, but now I’m in a place where I have no need to even go there. I don’t even know what reality actually is.’ Then she makes the link. ‘But there are some amazing people that come from very, very conservative paradigms. Probably the person I most admire is Professor John Mack. He was a Harvard psychiatrist.’

It takes me a moment to place the name – then I remember. The heretic: the brave academic who was nearly thrown out by the Harvard dean for studying areas that they had considered forbidden.

‘John Mack did thirty years’ research into the abduction experience and I admire the way he had the courage to write about his findings,’ Vered tells me. ‘He said, “These are very sane people. They’re not psychotic or schizophrenic.” Having said that, he thought that there were people who had abduction experiences who then became schizophrenic, because they couldn’t deal with what happened to them.’

I don’t know why, but I am rather disheartened to find that Mack had been embraced so wholeheartedly by Vered. Then, just before she closes the door behind me, she says something that will come to resonate for many months to come. ‘I actually will suggest that when you’re ready, you come for another session. Very often I don’t, but I feel with you, we just touched the tip of the iceberg. I got the sense that your subconscious was saying, “Finally someone’s going to acknowledge me! I’ve got things to say, I want to be heard!” It’s like your conscious mind is so analytical, and your subconscious mind is saying, “What about me? I need to be addressed.”’

And as it turns out, Vered Kilstein could not have been more right.

A winter night in the Blue Mountains, 140 kilometres west, 1,065 metres above and many degrees of strangeness removed from the glories of Sydney, Australia. When the slow train that winds up the valley finally drops me off, I am surprised to discover that the compound I am heading for is a long hike out of the village of Blackheath. The road is narrow, empty and lined with tall trees that have become a gigantic wall of shifting shadows in the dark. I have never liked the Blue Mountains. Tourists seem to enjoy its views and its tearooms and its rainy, isolated towns, but whenever I have visited, it has always seemed to me to be an uneasy place, of bad memories, freezing mists and general human weirdness. You hear rumours of unkind people taking refuge among its epic forests, of suicides and dying walkers and long-ago massacres of Aboriginal tribes.

This is why, as I shuffle alone and slightly afraid up this unlit path, I am warmly anticipating the glad reception that will no doubt greet me when I arrive at the Vipassana Meditation Centre. Tonight, there is to be a welcome dinner and a get-to-know-you session and tomorrow will begin ten days of soothing and absolute silence. It is to be a retreat during which we will learn what is perhaps the world’s most ancient form of Buddhist meditation. This, it is claimed, is the method perfected by Gotama the Buddha himself more than two and a half thousand years ago. Other varieties serve to focus the mind with the use of counting, mantras or visualisation, but these practices are dismissed
by Vipassana teachers as crude ‘concentration techniques’. Vipassana is not concerned with childish ‘blissed-out states’, but with moral and psychological purification. By observing ‘the changing nature of body and mind’ we will perform a ‘deep, deep operation on the brain’ and thereby ‘experience the universal truths of impermanence, suffering and egolessness, penetrating ever subtler layers of mind until we reach the source of our misery.’ And when we are done, in about a week and a half’s time, happiness is going to follow us ‘like a shadow.’

Unlike past-life regression, there is
plenty of sound evidence for the efficacy of meditation
. Like PLR, though, it does come shrink-wrapped with some strange beliefs – about reincarnation, for example, and karma and the universe consisting of thirty-one levels, one of which is inhabited solely by giants. Although it seemed to me that what tangible effects PLR had were likely to be a product of the placebo effect, I would be being unfair to Vered Kilstein if I was to dismiss
all
of her healing powers as accidental. She was, I thought, an analyst of genuine talent. When, after only a few minutes of talk, she asked me if there exist any wealthy people who have achieved success in honourable ways, I replied, ‘No.’ And in doing so I had revealed myself to hold an implicit belief that is every bit as prejudiced as the ones John Mackay had preached to the mild-mannered gay-haters of Gympie.