Men of Miracles – Part Five
Young children provide fertile ground for miracles, because their minds have not yet been conditioned by the limiting world-view shared by their parents. Because they do not yet know what is possible in life and what is not, they are often unwitting partners in events that defy common logic and scientific understanding. They are the modern miracle makers.
In the spring of 1984, Doctor Berthold Schwarz, a graduate of New York University College of Medicine and a Fellow in Psychiatry at the Mayo Foundation, met a young Florida housewife whom he called “Katie”, in deference to her wishes to remain anonymous. Katie was the tenth of twelve children born to her Cherokee Indian mother. In spite of her lack of formal education, or perhaps because of it, she was able to display a spectacular array of psychic talents to Dr Schwarz, including psychokinesis, stigmata, healing and telepathy.
Some of these talents appeared to have been inherited by her son, as he demonstrated an ability to bend and split metal spoons. One day, when her son was fifteen years old, he asked his mother whether she thought it was possible to go back in time. Katie replied that she believed it was. With that the boy went directly to their walk-in closet. He closed the door and lay down on the floor.
As he later told Dr Schwarz, “I wanted to see what it was like in the 1920’s”. The boy said he appeared to enter a trance-like condition, for he suddenly became aware of himself in a strange room. In this room he saw an old bald-headed man sitting next to an oil lamp. He also became aware of a Christmas tree, together with an interesting looking cardboard box. The boy reached for the box, but in doing so managed to knock over the oil lamp.
In the ensuing confusion, he recalled grasping the cardboard box before the vision faded and he found himself back in the walk-in closet. Incredibly, the cardboard box was still in his possession. He later showed this box to Dr Schwarz. Inside the box was an ostrich-skin cigarette lighter enclosed in a gold leather pouch. It bore the following inscription: “Compliments Moragues. Bay City, Inc., Mobile, Ala., Christmas 1928.”
In May 1974, a man purchased a book in order to pass the time while he was traveling. He became so enthralled by its contents that he extended an invitation to the author to visit him at his home in Venice, Italy. The author was Dr Lyall Watson, and the book was called “Supernature”. Watson traveled to Venice to meet the man, who said he wanted to show him a particular trick that his daughter Claudia was able to perform.
The father reached for a tube of tennis balls that lay on a corner table. He took out a ball and casually rolled it across the carpet towards his daughter. Claudia picked it up and held it affectionately to her cheek. Then, balancing the ball in her left hand, she gently stroked it with her right. What followed left Watson stunned. As he wrote in his book “Lifetide”:
“One moment there was a tennis ball – the familiar off-white carpeted sphere marked only by its usual meandering seam. Then it was no longer so. There was a short implosive sound, very soft, like a cork being drawn in the dark, and Claudia held in her hand something completely different: a smooth, dark, rubbery globe with only a suggestion of the old pattern on its surface – a sort of negative through-the-looking-glass impression of a tennis ball.”
When Watson examined the ball closely he found that it was an everted tennis ball – one that had been turned inside out. Yet it still contained a volume of air under pressure. When he squeezed the ball it returned to its former shape. He dropped it and it bounced. In fact it seemed exactly like a normal tennis ball, except that it had somehow been turned inside out.
Later that evening Claudia performed the trick again. This time Watson kept the everted ball and took it back to his hotel, where he placed it on the mantelpiece in his room. As he later described it, the ball stared at him like a mocking symbol. This enigmatic sphere completely defied his carefully structured view of the world. It seemed to undermine the very laws of nature.
“It still disturbs me”, he wrote. “I know enough of physics to appreciate that you cannot turn an unbroken sphere inside out like a glove. Not in this reality.” Watson was in fact faced by the same dilemma experienced by Albert Einstein. When confronted by experimental results that he was unable to explain, he turned to Niels Bohr and exclaimed in frustration that his theories were too poor to encompass the works of nature. “No no”, cried Bohr, “Nature is too rich for our theories.”
Here in a nutshell lies the basic conundrum of life and the inherent limitation of science. Our universe will always be too rich for our analysis, and scientists will never be able explain everything that happens in life. It is not so much that they lack the intelligence to understand. It is just that scientists have completely misunderstood the true nature of the world. And because of this, they can never hope to fulfil their underlying objective, which is to explain all human experience according to a prescribed set of laws.
