Monday, August 26, 2013
The
Hidden Persuaders
Working in a convent home for the care of
emotionally disturbed adolescent girls can throw up insights into the hidden
worlds of communication. Telepathy, empathy, subliminal advertising. I remember
Vance Packard wrote a book in the late 1950s, called The Hidden Persuaders. That was sometimes what it felt like as an
atheist working with committed religious women. They were kind, generous and
philosophically open, as earlier blogs will vouchsafe. Anyway, more of their
strange powers a little later.
A form of communication which will have
by-passed most men’s knowledge (and some women’s) is via hormones. All the
women and girls in the convent had synchronized periods. New girls would fall
into the same menstrual cycle within a couple of months of arrival. I remember
taking a nun into town for three months supply of sanitary towels. They filled
the back of the mini van!
The fact that we communicate with each
other in subliminal ways seems to be within most people’s experience. It is
usually laughed off as statistically inevitable that synchronous thought should
occur. Despite all those Russian experiments during the cold war to produce
secret agents who might gain the west’s secrets via telepathy, it remains an
unlit area of scientific progress – unless you add in the latest thought
controlled cursors in computer technology or quantum theory which stipulates
that any observer will change the patterns of movement within atoms by
observing the interactions. My vignette is more prosaic and easier to follow
than Heisenburg’s masterful theory.
We took all the girls to the Lake District.
Climbing big hills is symbolic for urban girls who do not know that milk comes
from big grass-munching beasts and that there are places where you cannot see a
house no matter how hard you look. The nuns had a sister convent up there with
dormitory accommodation and some separate rooms. We arrived in the evening
after a long drive from Norfolk. Nothing much happened to me that night. The
next day was a successful hiking, climbing, blistering, prickling, stinging
sort of day. The girls were tired out. They went to bed early and that was
that. I retired eventually. I lay in bed and was about to fall asleep (or did
so, who knows) when I was presented with a shimmering figure of Christ. The
apparition, delusion, actuality did not speak but communicated mind to mind, as
it were. It was trying to persuade me to become a Christian. It was
surprisingly powerful. I remember my stock reply was something along the lines
of “That’s not why I am here in this life”, thereby opening a door to the
notion or reincarnation perhaps but nothing more. This struggle of wills went
on for a few hours. The Christ figure in hippy beard and long hair, robes etc
(a rather late version of him as artists cloned this image from a Roman god;
all the original images being hermaphroditic, bare-faced and late adolescent)
eventually disappeared. I slept a couple of hours and then faced the day. The
nun who accompanied our party from the convent in Norfolk asked whether I had
experienced anything unusual during the night. I felt a bit embarrassed to
recount what I had seen. Before I described it, she said;
“You see, we were
all praying for you until late in the night, hoping you might see the light.”
There
are many levels and forms of communication of which we are either
unconscious or only dimly aware.
Twitter @profjacksanger
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