Seeing Without the Eyes

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

William Avery Rockefeller Jr. (1841-1922) co-founded Standard Oil in 1870 along with his brother John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937).

He was taught and befriended as a “small barefoot boy” by an “early father-pioneer of parapsychology” — Rufus Osgood Mason (1830-1903).

Dr. Mason “is one of the forgotten figures of late nineteenth-century American psychical research.”

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Rufus Osgood Mason (Hypnotism and Suggestion in Therapeutics, Education, and Reform, 1901) wrote …

“The case of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, published in the great French Encyclopedia, remained a wonder which no one explained. A young ecclesiastic, a pupil of the Archbishop, was in the habit of getting up in his sleep during the night, preparing materials and writing his sermons; revising and correcting each page as it was finished, in the most systematic manner. When a piece of cardboard was placed between his eye and his work, he still went on writing and correcting with the same facility as before. In adapting words to music under the same conditions, the greatest nicety was observed in placing each syllable of the words directly under the note to which it was to be sung; and if by accident the words ran ahead or fell behind the proper notes he at once erased them and wrote them anew, with perfect adaptation. When awake he had no remembrance whatever of his work.”

According to the same source …

“I am fully aware of the infinite scorn with which the strict school of physiologic psychologists look upon experimental psychology, and upon any theory in psychology which is not based in physiology; but when [William Benjamin] Carpenter, the early apostle of that school, could offer no better theory to explain a coherent message, automatically spoken or written, than ‘unconscious cerebration’ and ‘unconscious muscular action,’ and when [Wilhelm] Wundt, its latest expositor, teaches that the usual cause of dreams is indigestion, that sleep-walking, like dreaming, ‘has no mystery about it,’ that ‘the popular belief in premonitions by dreams we need not stop to consider,’ and that ‘such superstitions as telepathy and clairvoyance are not even open questions,’ we know that, however scientific and however honest these teachers may suppose themselves to be, we are seeking explanations from men who accept or reject facts according to the influence they may have upon their own theories, and that they are useless as guides in this region, because they have never themselves traversed it.”

According to the same source …

“… with my patient M.M., I could at any time produce muscular contraction, showing itself in well-marked spasm, simply by pointing my finger at her, from a distance of ten or twelve feet, and this occurred whether she was aware of my action or not, or even of my presence, and the same effect was produced through a closed door. On one occasion I made a visit at an altogether unusual hour and asked an attendant, who was also interested in the experiment, to be in the room with the door just sufficiently ajar, so that my movements could be observed by her while standing near the very slight opening. The patient was lying on the bed at least ten feet from the door with her back toward it and quite unaware of my presence, but the moment I pointed energetically toward her through the door, the same convulsive action occurred and was repeatedly observed by the attendant.”
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