Евгений Шубралов – Suggestion at a distance: theory, practice and philosophy (страница 8)

. According to the doctor of our clinic, Dr. M. I. Nikitin, during recent religious celebrations, a massive hallucination occurred in front of his eyes.

In one well, many of the worshippers began to see the object of their worship as it was usually depicted on icons; some even saw that the face made a movement with his hand. Such a vision, experienced by a large number of worshippers at the same time, lasted for several minutes, until one praying mantis who had just approached the well, who was not aware of the object of the vision in the well, when asked if she saw anything in the depths of the latter, replied decisively that she saw nothing but stones lying at the bottom the well. From that moment on, the mass hallucination quickly dissipated.

Such visions are explicable only from the point of view of mutual suggestion, completely involuntary on the part of some persons on others.

When one or another mood prevails in a population or in a group of people, and when thought works in a certain direction, then one or another person, especially with mental imbalance, easily develops deceptions of feelings that correspond in content to the mood and direction of his thought, which are immediately communicated to other persons by involuntary suggestion, verbal or otherwise being in the same mental conditions.

If those who knew the Andijan circumstances completely did not see the situation in a rosy light, imagine those to whom all this reached in forms inflated to chimerical, and you can easily imagine the state of the dark soldier's environment.

The orderlies were especially zealous suppliers of various absurdities in the soldier's environment.

The night when the alarm occurred in Andijan was dark-a dark southern night, cloudy. It was preceded by rain, it seems, with a thunderstorm.

The newly arrived riflemen were stationed in barracks and camps. The barracks were still poorly lit inside, and the barracks were almost the same as on the fateful night of May 18, that is, very sparsely. The rest of the city and the surrounding area were drowned in the thickest darkness. Lanterns in the city of Andijan were not lit that night, according to the glorious Russian custom of not lighting them if the moon is supposed to be on schedule, even if it was hidden by clouds (sic!).

It was after midnight. Soldiers both in barracks and in camps slept side by side, holding their guns tightly and feeling for cartridges. The silence was truly depressing and oppressive.

Suddenly, from somewhere in the distance, some vague noise came, which made all of us shudder, and a second later be horrified, and then gasp, because the noise grew and grew… now it's the hubbub of the crowd, now individual wild screams break out, then whole sheaves of screams, screams, screams.

Then a "hurrah" joined all this, at first rare, then loud, then thunderous… The victorious "hurrah"… "Hurrah" grew, covering the camp, the barracks.

Suddenly, gunfire crackled. The witness came to the camp when another day guard, having applied himself, fired the last charge after the fleeing enemy. At that moment, all the other people were standing, already lined up in their barracks-canopies, carefully looked around and reassured by their superiors. Everyone openly told where he had fired and how many times, but where the shooting and alarm came from, no one really knew either in the camps or at the posts.

Meanwhile, the reason for the false alarm was that the wounded man jumped up in delirium and started running screaming: after that, all the other wounded also jumped up.

The hunting team closest to the infirmary, instantly awakened, grabbed their guns and, shouting "hurrah!" rushed to the rescue of their wounded.

This has stirred up the camp! People started jumping up, putting on whatever they could, shouting and shouting. A "hurrah" was shouted, which, growing and rolling, reached the remotest corners of the garrison.

Then someone fired a rifle into the darkness, and the mass hallucination grew in all its glory – everyone saw, heard and shot the enemy. People became deaf for seconds to the voice of their superiors, to the signals.

Fortunately, there were no casualties, except for a few bruises and scratches.

STEREOTYPICAL DECEPTIONS OF FEELINGS AND SELF-SUGGESTION

From the same point of view, it is necessary to explain the stereotypical deceptions of feelings, peculiar only to well-known families, in which these hallucinations are given one or another, mostly fatal significance.

It is known that in the Habsburg House, for example, such a hallucination, which is given the fatal significance of a harbinger of death, is a vision of a black woman. The appearance of this woman has long been considered a faithful messenger of the approach of someone's demise and is transmitted by word of mouth in the form of a family, or generic, inspired idea, which is personified in appropriate cases in the form of a stereotypical hallucination.

Occasionally, in one or another family, you can meet with other kinds of inspired ideas, which also play an important role in the lives of members of this family. I had information, for example, about one family in which fear of fire was transmitted from generation to generation because of the possibility of dying from it, and, indeed, many of the family members died from careless handling of fire or even from suicide by self-immolation. In another family, the idea was held that the death of its members occurred from firearms, whether by suicide or by one or another accident, and it turned out that even the last descendants of this family, despite the terrible fear they showed of firearms, died from shots from a rifle or revolver, either completely accidentally or intentionally in the form of suicides.

It should be borne in mind that in such cases, autosuggestion often helps suggestion, by which we mean the inoculation of mental states caused not by extraneous influences, but by internal causes, the source of which is in the personality of the patient himself, who is undergoing autosuggestion.

Everyone knows that a person can set himself up in a sad or cheerful mood, that he can, in certain cases, develop his imagination to the appearance of illusions and hallucinations, that he can even instill this or that belief in himself. This is autosuggestion, which, like suggestion and mutual suggestion, does not need logic, but, on the contrary, often acts even contrary to all logic.

Who knows that it is enough to give free rein to your imagination and it is ready to draw all sorts of scary images in the dark of night, despite the fact that we can be firmly convinced that nothing terrible really exists.

But this is only one of the weak examples of the action of autosuggestion, which in certain cases can lead to real deceptions of the senses.

One must think that the stereotypical vision of a black woman before her death in the house of Habsburg is explained not only by mutual suggestion, but perhaps also by self-suggestion, which involuntarily adjusts the imagination in a certain direction. By involuntary autosuggestion, apparently, some other dark psychic phenomena, such as premonition, can also be explained.

It is also known that autosuggestion in some cases, like hypnotic suggestion, can have a dramatic effect on the vasomotor and vegetative spheres of the body. This way, among other things, explains various stigmata and even periodic hemorrhages from those areas of the body from which the blood oozed from the crucified Christ, as shown by the example of Louise Lato, known in the medical literature and carefully verified by prominent scientific authorities.

But we would be distracted far away from the main subject of our conversation if we set out to explain in more detail the phenomena of our mental life just mentioned.

CONVULSIVE EPIDEMICS IN HISTORY

The power of suggestion is no less pronounced in the so-called psychopathic epidemics.

These psychopathic epidemics are primarily reflected in the prevailing views of the masses of the people of a given era, a given stratum of society or a given locality. But there can be no doubt that the immediate impetus for the development of these epidemics are: suggestion, mutual suggestion and autosuggestion.

The prevailing views here are a favorable ground for spreading through the involuntary transmission of certain psychopathic conditions from one person to another. The epidemic spread of the so-called demoniacality in the Middle Ages undoubtedly bears all the traces of the popular views established at that time on the extraordinary power of the devil over man; but nevertheless it is also indisputable that the development and spread of these epidemics is largely due to the power of suggestion. For example, a medieval pastor during a church service talks about the power of a demon over a person, exhorting people to be closer to God, and during this speech

The place does not allow us to dwell any longer on this burning issue; but the whole picture of the self-destructive incidents in the Ternovsky farms resolutely defies any other explanation, if we do not take into account the influence of suggestion and mutual suggestion on the basis of already ingrained superstitions, which undoubtedly played a major role here. A detailed description of the Ternovsky events, except for newspapers, can be found in the article by Prof. I. A. Sikorsky: Free deaths in Ternovsky farms. Questions of neuropsychic medicine for 1897 in one of the pathetic places, to the horror of the audience, an imaginary demon exerts its power over one of those present, plunging him into terrible convulsions. This is followed by another and a third victim. The same thing is repeated at other divine services.