Thoughts on Mind and Matter
Annie Jacobsen’s ‘Phenomena’

Inner Light

I’m in touch with a Chinese professor of physics who’s written an entry for the Psi Encyclopedia on parapsychology in China. His English is quite limited, and the article needs a fair bit of work. But it contains some rather remarkable claims about work with children, which I’m keen to find out more about.

In one project, he writes, blind children were taught to ‘distinguish different colours by touch on the nose or ear, and even recognize the outlines of simple figures and numbers, thus improving their quality of life’. In another, blind children were taught to ‘see and read’ through skin contact.

Some children can now ‘skin read’ the colour, number and figure (animal shapes) on separate cards in some cases at up to 45 cards per minute, often with 100% accuracy. Blind children can be taught to telepathically communicate with each other and have even been taught to get together in a ‘virtual space’ and move objects by virtual PK. Most sighted children can be taught to develop their PK abilities to fold strips of paper or break matchsticks held in transparent sealed containers, and even write a few tiny words such as ‘Mother I love you’ and a figure of ‘love’ on a sealed match stick by using a mind controlled ‘virtual pen’.

Startling stuff. There are no references as yet, and I’m non-committal until I can find out more. But at the least, it seems like an interesting avenue for research. And I’d be curious to know what cultural differences might make it easier to do this sort of thing in China than the West, as I suspect is the case.

This brought to mind a detail in another Encyclopedia article, one that’s already published, on Extraordinary Light Phenomena, by a German philosopher Annekatrin Puhle.

She mentions the story of Jacques Lusseyran, a Frenchman who lost the sight of both eyes in a freak accident at the age of eight, but who, far from being devastated, was excited to discover an inner world bathed in brilliant light. This not only engaged his attention, it also helped him to continue to interact normally with the external world. Puhle quotes from his autobiography And There Was Light, and I found it so intriguing that I bought it, also a later book containing short articles in which he expands on the theme. Definitely worth checking out.

By his own account, Lusseyran enjoyed something of a charmed life growing up in Paris in the pre-war years. His parents sound quite enlightened, and they dealt with his blindness in what he considers to be an ideal way, ensuring as far as possible that he wasn’t treated differently from sighted children. They made him learn Braille at once. He recovered quickly, went back to the same school and was reading, walking, running and playing with other children within two months.

Lusseyran found that being blind was not as he had imagined, nor as other people seemed to think.

They told me that to be blind meant not to see. Yet how was I to believe them when I saw? Not at once, I admit. Not in the days immediately after the operation. For at that time I still wanted to use my eyes. I followed their usual path. I looked in the direction where I was in the habit of seeing before the accident, and there was anguish, a lack, something like a void which filled me with what grown-ups call despair.

Then he realised he was ‘looking in the wrong way’.

I began to look more closely, not at things but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place to one further within…

Immediately, the substance of the universe drew together, redefined and peopled itself anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me as within. But radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely, light. It was a fact, for light was there…

I saw light and went on seeing it though I was blind. I said so, but for many years I think I did not say it very loud. Until I was nearly fourteen I remember calling the experience, which kept renewing itself inside me, ‘my secret’, and speaking of it only to my intimate friends…

The amazing thing was that this was not magic for me at all, but reality. I could no more have denied it than people with eyes can deny that they see. I was not light myself, I knew that, but I bathed in it as an element which blindness had suddenly brought much closer. I could feel light rising, spreading, resting on objects, giving them form, then leaving them.

Withdrawing or diminishing is what I mean, for the opposite of light was never present. Sighted people always talk about the night of blindness, and that seems to them quite natural. But there is no such night, for at every waking hour and even in my dreams I lived in a stream of light.

Without my eyes light was much more stable than it had been with them. As I remember it, there were no longer the same differences between things lighted brightly, less brightly or not at all. I saw the whole world in light, existing through it and because of it.

Light threw its colour on things and on people. My father and mother, the people I met or ran into in the street, all had their characteristic colour which I had never seen before I went blind. Yet now this special attribute impressed itself on me as part of them as definitely as any impression created by a face.

Lusseyran experiments to see if he can block out the light, but he finds he can’t do that by willing it – it’s not something he imagines, but is objective, outside himself. But he does discover that it will disappear if his mood darkens: if he either starts to become narrow and calculating, or angry and impatient. Then he loses his bearings and crashes into things.

He talks in a similar way about sound, to which he has become super-sensitive, and which now seems to emanate from objects in a characteristic way that he learns to recognise. More than that, he seems to sense objects like walls as being present, as though they press in on him.

What makes Lusseyran’s story so riveting is what came next. Growing up in the 1930s he became very aware of what was happening in Nazi Germany, and took the trouble to learn German. During the Occupation, aged 17, he started a youth resistance group, which specialised in printing and distributing an underground newspaper based on BBC bulletins and other clandestine sources. This sounds fantastically dangerous. Yet his blindness, far from being a handicap, seems to have helped him. He took responsibility for recruiting, and a special ability to recognise a person’s inner nature ensured that he got people who were reliable and committed – some six hundred eventually. His group later merged with a much larger underground publication that eventually became France Soir, one of the country’s highest circulation newspapers in the 1950s and 60s.

Inevitably, Lusseyran and his colleagues were betrayed to the Gestapo, and he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. He made it to the end of the war, about eighteen months later, one of only a small handful of survivors of the thousands of French people imprisoned there. Afterwards he had to struggle because of a law passed by the Vichy regime that prevented blind people from teaching. But he prevailed, and eventually went to the US to teach French literature. He gave lectures about his experience of blindness (reprinted in his second book Against the Pollution of the I) and was on his way to deliver the last of them when he was killed in a car crash, aged 46.

As a European growing up in the post-war era, I’ve always been impressed by these sorts of heroics. Often I’ve found myself wondering how I personally would have measured up if I’d been in such circumstances, and to my great regret, feel certain I’d have been one of the masses who kept their heads down, hoping to get to the end in one piece. So it’s hard to put myself in the position of someone like Lusseyran.

I kept coming back to the inner light thing, reading the relevant passages over and over. Did he really mean he could see, in the sense of making out objects in his vicinity, both nearby and at a distance? How could that be? There certainly seemed to plenty going on in his internal vision that conveyed information to him, and some of this information helped him to move about. And he does sometimes seem to suggest that, in a literal sense, he could make things out, for instance the presence of a wall, or the line of distant mountains, and that, conversely, these shadows (as I think of them) disappeared completely when he was in a depressed or scheming state of mind, obliging him to maintain a cheery disposition.

But if he’s grateful, it’s not because he’d been left with a scrap of what he once had, that in some strange way survived without any sensory basis, but because he’d been gifted with something more. What one absolutely gets is his intense satisfaction with it all, as though he was privileged to experience something out of the ordinary, and pitied we ordinary mortals who merely see in a superficial way.

Wondering about this, I recalled that sometimes I’ve experienced a sense of illumination while meditating, with eyes closed, of a light field beginning to bloom. It doesn’t last long, and it doesn’t actually illuminate anything – it’s more a brightening of the darkness. And although it feels interesting, and potentially a portent of something meaningful, it doesn't lead anywhere.

I also remembered speculating in a similar away about the discarnate experience, trying to make sense of what’s said about it in NDE testimony and mediumistic texts. Clearly, this is not seeing with ocular apparatus, yet light and colour and visual beauty are pervasive characteristics, and there’s also a strong sense that they’re felt or experienced, subjectively, as much as observed in an objective way. Similarly suggestive descriptions are also found in narratives of mystical experience and psychedelic drug visions. So perhaps what Lusseyran was experiencing is essentially this, a way of relating to reality that’s obscured in the incarnate state, but starts to become evident when the physical mechanisms break down. What we think of as sight is merely a mechanical analogy of the real thing.

His experience might be described in psychic jargon – the colour emanations from people as ‘auras’, for instance, and his inner reality as the ‘astral’ – but I don’t think he’s familiar with this literature, and clearly doesn’t think in these limiting terms. He does occasionally talk about God, though, in a confident, unpreachy way, as the foundation of reality:

By the time I was ten years old, I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else, ready to take its place if it should fall by the way. And this continued miracle of healing I heard expressed fully in the Lord’s Prayer that I repeated at night before going to sleep.

But what does this mean: ‘everything in the world is a sign of something else?’ It’s obscure, but also potentially meaningful, if we grasp for it. He’s very aware of the limitations of language. He says that what he describes is ‘not magic but reality’; nevertheless, most people, I think, will fall back to supposing that this is how a blind person copes: he makes some kind of involuntary adjustment, a reordering of the neurological apparatus that enables him to continue to interact with the world – albeit in his case, in a rather exceptional way. It’s a very private experience, with no other relevance beyond his particular circumstances.

For others, like me, Lusseyran convinces that, on the contrary, his experience is important, and worth striving to understand. In a rather good introduction to Against the Pollution of the I, Christopher Bamford describes him as a ‘secular saint’, which is what I too found myself thinking: someone whose inner world is reflected in the exemplary moral courage of his outward actions, and whose testimony acts as a sort of beacon for the rest of us.



Well, it could happen again, I suppose. For now, I shall bathe in the warmth of a new found understanding.

Please help me to understand how the two quotes are opposing. I don't think I am "dismissive' as you say. It is true that I am skeptical of some paranormal explanations; perhaps more so of the people who use them as an explanation for every unusual occurrence.- AOD


Well, lets take this in reverse order. You are dismissive of modern explanations towards real psychology/pathology, preferring the idea of possession by another entity or entities.
There, you nail your colours to the mast.
Yet, you earlier state that paranormal explanations are often produced when the lack of a mainstream psychological/pathological explanation can be found.
There, you appear to be dismissive towards the paranormal for want of a psychological/pathological explanation.
Putting your own preferred ideas to one side, can you see how this appears to be 'wanting your cake and eat it?'

Look, maybe its the context which is misleading. You did precede your first observation by stating that there is no strong evidence regarding; telepathy, clairvoyance or super-psi.
For what its worth, I too feel that the reliance upon paranormality to explain missing explanations, undermines the whole summary and judgment of this case being of a pathological/psychological nature only.

I don’t know Stuart. You have totally confused me now. It’s kind of like putting words in my mouth and thoughts in my head. Let’s see now. I have had a lot of experience with psychology and psychiatrists and I have come to understand that some of the people in that field are not very smart and are themselves mentally disturbed, some more than others and that a lot of diagnosis in psychology and psychiatry is guesswork. That is, there is little real science or tests behind what has become known as psychiatric pathology. I see that some people, some very learned people, refuse to consider anything other than that which they have been taught in medical school which does not include anything spiritual and as you may know often comes to be changed over time as more and more facts or assumptions about mental disorders are entertained. My view is that there are many reasons for mental illness, some of which are biological, some due to life experiences and maybe some due to something paranormal, like possession. I don’t “prefer” possession as an explanation of all mental illnesses but I think it should be considered as an explanation as I think that past life histories might also account for some so-called mental disorders.
I don’t understand the last half of what you said. ‘Dismissive’ is a strong word and seemingly final. I don’t think that I am ‘dismissive’ of any explanation; rather I perhaps have a ranking with some explanations more reasonable to me while others are less reasonable. - AOD

And, whats more; I am suspicious of this whole article entirely. One has to be wary of doctored reports. I ask; did this case ever actually exist in reality? Was its very inception: fiction?
For instance: Lurancy Vennum - Mary Roff. If one takes off the R; as in R-off, from the name Lurancy, one is left with an anagram of Lunacy. The surname too, is odd. Vennum is obviously pronounced Venom. So, one has to ask; was Addington Bruce ever married to a woman named Mary? Were they divorced? Was their relationship soured?
Just a thought.

OK; I take it back. Sorry,.... dismissive was perhaps too strong.

Did Henry Addington Bayley Bruce ever visit London; maybe with his parents as a fourteen-year old?
Did he stay for three years?
Is he.......Jack The Ripper!
Just a thought.

Get a grip, Stuart! - AOD

Yes, you're right. It must be the full moon, which is due shortly.

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