Customer Reviews

The Law of Psychic Phenomena: A Working Hypothesis for the Systemic Study of Hypnotism, Spiritism, Mental Therapeutics, Etc.

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So far as psychic phenomena are concerned, people generally come into two categories: they believe everything they are told or they are total sceptics. Hudson chooses a middle course: he accepts the authenticity of psychic phenomena, but he examines them objectively, refusing to be swayed either by believers or by wishful thinking. His tools are experiment and cold reasoning. The result was that Dr Hudson made few friends among sceptics or believers alike; and this is why this classic work, first published in 1893, has been neglected. Hudson formulates three simple psychological laws, dividing the mind into objective mind (the conscious) and subjective mind (the subconscious). The subjective mind is capable of all kinds of psychic gifts but is open to hypnotic suggestion. This explains why, in the presence of sceptics and negative comments psychic gifts suddenly disappear. Hudson's chosen middle course blasts the sceptics, but it also lays into many believers as well. Spiritualists will not be very happy, because Hudson's laws, coupled with experiment, busts spiritualism. He shows beyond doubt that "contact with the dead," whether by medium, automatic writing, ouija board or planchette is merely contact with one's own subjective mind. (It also works for the electronic voice phenomenon.) Nowadays Hudson's laws are all but forgotten. However, they are - especially when coupled with Carl Jung's multi-layered subjective mind - the most formidable explanation of psychic phenomena ever devised. In every science, things are chaotic until someone arrives to rationalise the science and give his fellow scientists something to work with. In physics he is Isaac Newton, in psychology he is Sigmund Freud, and in parapsychology he is Thomson Jay Hudson. If you are searching for the truth, look no further.

TJH's explanation of the laws that govern psychic phenomenon is a bit hard to understand due to the scientific nature of the language used to outline his theory of psychic phenomenon. TJH believed that the mind was dual, split into the objective mind and subjective mind. The objective mind processes the concrete, material world and the subjective mind, or the eternal mind of the soul, is responsible for processing the abstract, invisible world. The subjective mind is dependent on the objective mind and the knowledge and information that it perceives from the visual sensory world, and is, therefore, highly open to the power of suggestion...ie..hypnosis.

I am a great admirer of Thomson Jay Hudson's work. I think this book was absolutely groundbreaking, especially when one considers that it was written more than one hundred years ago. Incidentally, this book was highly recommended by none other than Edgar Cayce - now, that is quite a compliment!

The author does an amazingly good job, but nevertheless, there a few points where I disagree with his conclusions - but, in all fairness, much material has become available since he wrote his book - material, which might well have (in fact, almost certainly would have) influenced some of his conclusions. So, I am not pretending that I would have done a better job than he, far from it.

Then too, I disagree with a few points of his logic (and here, I hope without being arrogant, I think I would have done a better job than he - only on these specific points, mind - I don't imagine I could ever have improved on the rest of his work, which I think is exceptionally good). For example, he states that there is no point in examining Eastern philosophy because they cannot know any more about the afterlife than we do - now, how unscientific is that? On another place he states, "I do not know anything about reincarnation. I know as much about it however, as anyone else does." Another unscientific, and rather arrogant statement, amounting to, "If I don't know something, no one else does" - again, very weak science, very weak logic.

In spite of these points, and in spite of the fact that five stars are the highest rating on this forum that one may award a book, when I see how easily many books of a far lower standard (with regards to research, data and logic) are awarded five stars, then I would argue, that if any book (of the many hundreds I have read in my lifetime) deserved six stars, it would be this absolute classic.