Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

Another example given by flammarion (1922, p. 87) concerned an English physician, dr. Rowland Bowstead. Once, when playing cricket, he and another player followed a ball to a hedge. On the other side, he saw his brother-in-law dressed in hunting clothes and carrying a gun. He smiled and waved to dr. Bowstead. But his friend saw nothing. And when Bowstead looked again, he could not see his brother-in-law. depressed, he went to his uncle’s house and told him what he had seen. It was ten minutes past one. Bowstead stated: “Two days afterward I got a letter from my father, telling me of the death of my brother-in-law, which had occurred at precisely that time. His death came about in a curious way. The morning of that very day, since he was feeling fairly well, after an illness, he had declared that he was able to go hunting. Then, having taken up his gun, he had turned toward my father and had asked him if he had sent for me. My father having answered in the negative, he had flown into a rage, and had said that he would see me, in spite of everything. Suddenly he fell down as though struck by lightning, a bloodvessel in his lungs having burst. He was wearing at that time a huntingcostume and had a gun on his arm, exactly as in the apparition that had startled me.”

On november 10, 1920, Monsieur Agniel, a member of the Morocco branch of the Astronomical Society of france, wrote to flammarion about an eclipse of the sun that had occurred on that day. He added to his letter an account of a telepathic experiment. In 1906, Agniel was living in nice. He decided to pay a surprise visit to his sister in nimes. Because his sister liked orange blossoms, Agniel brought some with him on the train. Agniel wrote: “Alone in my compartment, I tried an experiment while the train was rushing along at full speed between Golfe-Juan and cannes. concentrating my thoughts on the flowers and then closing my eyes, I sent myself, mentally, into my sister’s room in nimes, and spoke to her thus: ‘I am arriving. I am coming to see you and to bring you the flowers you love.’ I imagined myself at the foot of her bed, showing her my bunch of flowers, of which I formed a mental image” (flammarion 1922, pp. 98–99). When he met his sister the next morning, she said, “It’s very odd. I dreamed last night that you were coming, and that you were bringing me orange-blossoms!” (flammarion 1922, p. 99).

In the third volume of Death and its mystery , flammarion (1923) gave reports of apparitions that took place just before the death of the transmitting person. One such report was published in the year 1905 in the journal luce e ombra . In 1882, two Italian army officers made a pact. If one of them were about to die, he would signal this to his comrade by mentally tickling his feet. On August 5, 1888 one of the officers, count charles Galateri, was in bed with his wife, who suddenly said to him, “don’t tickle my feet.” Galateri said he was not doing any such thing, but his wife continued to feel the tickling. Thinking it might be an insect, they got a candle and searched under the covers, but found nothing. Shortly thereafter, as they again tried to go to sleep, the countess Galateri exclaimed, “Look! Look at the foot of the bed!” The count saw nothing. The countess said, “Yes, look; there’s a tall young man, with a colonial helmet on his head. He’s looking at you, and laughing! Oh, poor man! What a terrible wound he has in his chest! And his knee is broken! He’s waving to you, with a satisfied air. He’s disappearing!” The countess told friends and relatives about the incident the next day. Over a week later, on August 14, the newspapers announced that Lt. virgini, the count’s old friend, had died during an Italian army action in Ethiopia. He had first been wounded in the knee and then struck by a bullet in his chest (flammarion 1923, p. 59).

could such apparition reports be explained by chance? flammarion (1922, p. 167) thought not: “In ‘Les Hallucinations télepathiqués’ Monsieur Marrillier has made, on his own account, certain calculations, from which it appears that the part played by chance is reduced . . . for visual hallucinations to 1/40,000,000,000,000; that is to say, in forty trillion visual hallucinations there would be only one that could be explained by chance coincidence. Plainly, this reduces the hypothesis of chance to a number equivalent to zero.”Flammarion believed that some kind of vibration was transmitted from the dying person to a sympathetic person, whose organism converted the vibration into a perception, just as a radio receiver converts electromagnetic waves into sound. flammarion (1922, p. 369) said: “All these observations prove that a human being does not consist only of a body that is visible, tangible, ponderable, known to every one in general, and to physicians in particular; it consists, likewise, of a psychic element that is imponderable, gifted with special, intrinsic faculties, capable of functioning apart from the physical organism and of manifesting itself at a distance with the aid of forces as to the nature of which we are still ignorant. This psychic element is not subject to the every-day restrictions of time and space.” In my system, this psychic element would correspond to the mind element.

Like the curies, flammarion participated in extensive research with Eusapia Palladino. His first séance with her took place on July 27, 1897, in the home of the Blech family in Paris. A light-colored curtain had been stretched across one corner of the room, forming a “cabinet.” Inside the cabinet were a small sofa, a guitar, and a chair, upon which had been placed a bell and music box. The cabinet had been set up at the request of Eusapia, who explained that such conditions were necessary for the effects. flammarion would have preferred that the cabinet not be used, but noted that in every scientific experiment certain conditions may be required. “He who would seek to make photographs without a dark chamber would cloud over his plate and obtain nothing. The man who would deny the existence of electricity because he had been unable to obtain a spark in a damp atmosphere would be in error. He who would not believe in the existence of stars because we only see them at night would not be very wise” (flammarion 1909, p. 68). Although he accepted the conditions, as requested by the medium, flammarion (1909, p. 68) said, “In accepting these conditions, the essential point is not to be their dupe.” Accordingly, flammarion carefully examined the cabinet and the entire room, making sure that there were no concealed mechanisms, batteries, or wires in the floor or walls. Before the séance, in order to detect anything suspicious upon Eusapia, Madame Zelma Blech, whose integrity flammarion considered beyond question, carefully undressed and dressed her.

The sitting was carried out in various conditions of lighting, ranging from full light to dim red light. Eusapia sat outside the curtain, with her back to it. A rectangular wooden table, weighing fifteen pounds, was placed in front of her. flammarion examined the table carefully, and found nothing suspicious. flammarion and another participant carefully controlled the hands and feet of the medium. Each held one of the medium’s hands with one hand and placed a foot on one of the medium’s feet. In addition, flammarion placed his other hand upon the medium’s knees. The room was fully lighted by a kerosene lamp and two candles. flammarion (1909, p. 70) reported, “At the end of three minutes

the table begins to move, balancing itself, and rising sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left. A minute afterwards it is lifted entirely from the floor , to a height of about nine inches, and remains there two seconds.” Several other levitations took place in this session, causing flammarion (1909, p. 70) to conclude, “It seems that an object can be lifted, in opposition to the law of gravity, without the contact of the hands which have just been acting upon it.” Then a round table a small distance away, to flammarion’s right, spontaneously moved into contact with the table that had risen into the air. flammarion said that it appeared as if the round table was trying to climb onto the rectangular table. It then fell over. This took place in full light. The medium then signaled for less light. The two candles were put out, and the kerosene lamp was turned down somewhat, but there was still enough light for flammarion and the other witnesses to see everything that was happening in the room. The round table, which flammarion had set upright again, repeatedly made movements suggesting it was trying to climb onto the rectangular table. flammarion (1909, p. 71) tried to push the table down, but it resisted. He determined that the medium was not responsible for the round table’s movements.