mingmong - 21 Apr 2012 15:29:19 (#83 of 181)

An example of the extraordinary (and still as yet largely unrecognised) constructive power of the unconscious mind can be seen in the placebo effect. More often used as a means of dismissing the power of non-conventional medicines, it is less frequently acknowledged how peculiar this power is in its own right. With reference to the effect of placebo on warts and other minor illnesses, Lewis Thomas of the Ketting Cancer Center in New York put it like this: "if the unconscious can figure out how to manipulate the mechanisms needed for getting around that virus, and for deploying all of the cells in the correct order for tissue regeneration, then all I can say is the unconscious is alot further along than I am"

aegiandyad - 21 Apr 2012 15:56:54 (#84 of 181)

mingmong,

It's strange how you don't hear so much about warts and the efficacy of 'folk medicine' these days. My childhood seems to have been full of such mentions. One bizarre cure was to put a stone for each wart into a brown paper bag and them attempt to 'lose' it. You weren't allowed to throw it away. It had to be left on a bus or a park bench or something. I'd heard this could be surprisingly hard to achieve as well meaning strangers would find the bag return it to it's 'owner'!

As for the 'unconscious', its power and range were probably increased by an order of magnitude when we developed language. The letters page of the NS this week was interesting in that regard. The evidence seems to show that we underwent some sudden transformation into beings that were more fully human than ever before because of the development of language some 40 - 50,000 years ago; and yet other evidence about the evolution of body, pubic and head lice suggests that we were 'naked apes' for up to three million years before that and only started wearing clothes about 72,000 years ago and hats possibly even more recently than that.

To cap it all a hominid foot with an arboreally adapted opposable big toe has been found in Africa which indicates that two distinct species of protohumans existed at the same time in the dim and distant past.

We have not heard the last of the power of the unconscious. In his 'UFOs, A Modern Myth Of Things Seen In The Skies' the very same C.G.Jung we have been discussing theorised that the UFO phenomena are manifestations of a collective unconscious desire for wholeness and salvation, or guidance from superior powers or beings. It is striking that witnesses and even 'abductees' are quite sane apart from insisting on the reality of their anomalous experiences, and that UFO phenomena have many aspects in common with paranormal phenomena; what researchers have dubbed 'the OZ factor'.

Can we humans really 'do magic' without knowing it, or having an inkling HOW we do it?

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