Effect of mental attitude

Effect of mental attitude

We now come to the last experiment, which was also done on plants. It was designed to test whether saline solutions held by a person who was positive in his feeling, and genuinely and naturally so, not psyched up to be so, would have a positive effect on plants watered with it; whereas, a person who was depressed would have the opposite effect.

Now, to test this, we did the following experiment:

There were four groups, 18 pots per group, with 20 barley seeds in each pot. That means there were 360 seeds per group and there were four such groups, that is, 1,440 seeds in the entire experiment.

Now, one of the groups was a control group which received only untreated 1 percent saline solution, the bottle not being held for 30 minutes by anyone. This 1 percent saline, by the way, was the kind that is used by hospitals to give infusions to patients. It was sterile, nonpyrogenic and under vacuum.

In addition to the control bottle, three more were used in the experiment, each held by a different person.

The research subjects

One of these people was Mr. B. that I mentioned in the first experiment. Now, he has a passion for plants and is able to make them grow and thrive.

The other two people were depressive patients in the hospital where I worked. One of them had a psychotic depression and the other one had a neurotic depression.

I had obtained permission from their doctors to give them each a bottle to hold, during which time the bottle was to be in a brown paper bag as part of the multiblind system of the experiment. Each person was asked to hold the bottle for half an hour.

I gave the bottle to Mr. B. with the necessary explanation and I was ready to provide the same to the two patients.

When I came to the man who was the more deeply depressed of the two, he didn't even ask me why I was giving him the bottle. I was wearing a white coat, as I usually do, and he thought I was a medical doctor coming to prepare him for electric shock therapy and he told me he didn't need any.

I tried to explain to him that I wasn't there to prepare him for this but that all I wanted him to do was to hold the bottle in his hands for half an hour, but he appeared not to believe me and didn't bother to ask what was in the bottle; therefore, I didn't bother to explain. I just asked somebody to keep an eye on him during the time he held the bottle and I said I would be back in half an hour.

This man, I want to emphasize, was definitely depressed at this point in time and certainly in a negative state of mind.

The other patient was a young woman. When I came to see her she had a neurotic depression. She was depressed, but less severely so than the man, and she was sitting somewhat forlornly in an outpatient department.

When I came up to her and asked her if she would be kind enough to hold the bottle for half an hour, she was a little taken aback and asked, "Well, why are you giving me this to hold?"

I told her that this was part of an experiment; we wanted her to hold the bottle in her hand and later on we wanted to put the saline solution on some plants.

She thought this was a great idea and she brightened right up and this upset me, because I didn't want her to become enthusiastic. In fact, I chose her for the experiment just for the opposite reasons. So there we were and the die was cast and I decided we would just go ahead with the experiment.

When I came back half an hour later she was faithfully holding the bottle, somewhat like a mother holding a child, I thought, in a kind of cradling fashion. I didn't know what to make of all of this but I was going to see what would happen in any case.

The man with the psychotic depression was still busy engaging me in conversation about his not needing electric shock therapy and I departed without further explanation.

The watering experiment

We then proceeded to do the experiments.

The multiblind system was so extensive that one of my worries was whether I could get all of the pieces of information together again without having mixed the information up. When the information was decoded, it was a source of relief that there was no mixup at all.

What was even more astonishing to me (and I have had experience in this field) was that the results did turn out mostly as I had hypothesized.

Thus, the group that grew the slowest was the one watered by saline held by the man with the psychotic depression; the next lowest group was the untreated control, the bottle not held by anybody; and the next lowest group was that of the girl who had the neurotic depression. The best one was Mr. B.'s group.

Now, I had supposed that this girl's plants would grow more slowly than the control, but this was not so, and I attribute this to the fact that she was quite enthusiastic about the experiment.

The interesting thing is it is not the diagnosis which is important for this experiment; what is important is the state of mind you are in at the moment.

Emotions can be stored in matter

There are quite a few implications arising from this study.

Perhaps the most critical implication of all is the fact that it says that anybody handling any material imparts to that material something that bears a relation to his emotional state.

I assume that some energy was at the core of this transfer, for it took place through the glass wall of the bottle containing the saline solution.

Our earlier experiments on goiter and wound healing also suggested that such energy transfers can occur between man and animal, and I'm sure also between man and man. If this is accepted, it would help to explain why some physicians are more effective than others (this has something to do with what we call the bedside manner) and why some nurses, for example, can have a profound effect on patients, depending on what their attitude is.

Also, we know for example in psychotherapy, where a patient comes to a doctor repeatedly, that there is a kind of relationship that develops between psychiatrist and patient which Freud called transference. Now, I believe there is an energy process at work here; and I think that this process is at work between parents and children, teachers and students, man and wife, and in the old days between the pharmacist and the medication he prepared.

Some children are very disturbed because there is a lack of ... we call it rapport.

Rapport describes an energy process, I believe - something passing between parent and child which may be positive or the opposite.

Then there is the relationship of a mother to cooking. She has a responsibility there, and I can expand further on this, but time does not allow.

Thank you.

(Note: Psychometry, the science of how information is stored in matter, is covered in Jose Silva's UltraMind ESP System.)

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