Helen Keller & ESP
Did the Deaf and Blind Genius
Possess Ways of Sensing
Beyond the Normal?
by
Preston E. Dennett
Index of Issue 17
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Helen Keller achieved worldwide fame for having overcome her double handicap
of deafness and blindness to become one of the most influential public
figures of her time. She was a true pioneer of social advancement. She was
one of very few women to attain a higher education. She worked tirelessly for
the rights of the handicapped. She was a also a suffragette, an enormously
popular public speaker, and a successful writer.
She rubbed elbows with the leaders of politics, religion, business and the
arts, including such legendary figures as Mark Twain, Alexander Graham Bell,
Charlie Chaplin, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and
others.
However, it was Helen's charm, charisma and good-nature in the face of her
handicaps that attracted the love of millions of people, making her one of
the most popular women of her time.
What few people know today is that Helen also displayed another remarkable
characteristic-very strong psychic abilities.
This first became evident in early childhood, soon after she met her lifelong
teacher, Annie Sullivan. After much work, Helen had finally grasped language
and was learning about the world around her. Annie Sullivan took Helen on an
automobile trip to the country. Afterwards, Helen excitedly described the
trip to her mother. This was not unusual, except for the fact that Helen used
a particular phrase which Annie Sullivan had not told her. Annie had told
Helen that "clouds touch the mountain softly, like beautiful flowers." But
when Helen described the clouds to her mother, she said "beautiful cloud
caps."
Of this first hint of psychic ability in Helen, Annie Sullivan wrote, "I
don't see how anyone is ever to know what impression she did receive."
This first incident was just a hint. There would be several other more
remarkable incidents, such as the following. In 1894, author Lawrence Hutton
had the opportunity to observe an unusual incident involving Helen. As he
says, "She seems to have a sixth sense. She receives and understands somehow
what of course she cannot hear. The devotion she has for her teacher is
beyond all words...and when some one spoke of this and wondered what would
become of Helen in case of any separation, the child, hearing nothing of
course, turned to the teacher, and pulling her face towards her own kissed
her on the lips, as if to say she could not think of it."
Hutton was amazed and mentioned what had just happened to Annie Sullivan.
Sullivan gave a startling reply. Says Hutton, "Miss Sullivan told us that
with no conscious movement, no intentional or perceptible 'talking with her
fingers,' she could make the child follow her own thoughts, do what she
wished her to do, go where she wished her to go, perform any of the acts of
'mind- reading' which the professional psychologists exhibit on stage, or in
an amateur way."
Many people were impressed by her apparent psychic ability. Will Cressey, a
New York columnist writes, "She cannot hear...she cannot see. But yet, in
some mysterious way, she senses many things. Let anyone walk by that she had
grown to know, and she learns them as quickly as she does everything else.
She recognizes the vibration of their footsteps. If there is dancing going on
on the stage, or the music is playing, she is beating time, smiling, and
weaving back and forth and from side to side in time with the music."
Part of Helen's genius was her photographic memory. She was tested for sense
of smell and touch and came within the average range. And yet, she continued
to amaze people. Because of her extreme popularity, she had hundreds of
friends. She was able to recognize each of them by simply holding their hands.
Mark Twain was also amazed by her extrasensory perception. He wrote of his
first meeting with Helen, "The wonderful child arrived now, with her almost
equally wonderful teacher, Miss Sullivan. The girl began to deliver happy
ejaculations, in her broken speech. Without touching anything, of course, and
without hearing anything, she seemed quite well to recognize the character of
her surroundings. She said, 'Oh, the books, the books, so many, many books.
How lovely!'...then Mrs. Sullivan put one of Helen's hands against her lips
and spoke against it the question, 'What is Mr. Clemens distinguished for?'
Helen answered, in her crippled speech, 'For his humor.' I spoke up modestly
and said, 'And for his wisdom.' Helen said the same words instantly-'and for
his wisdom.' I suppose it was mental telegraphy for there was no way for her
to know what I had said."
Artist and sculptor Gutzon Borglum wrote of his meeting with Helen Keller, "I
shall never forget that hour with Helen Keller...From it I learned that soul,
over and above the body, has eyes."
As can be seen from the above accounts, Helen was not only gifted in
clairvoyance but also with mental telepathy.
Helen was not entirely unaware of her talents. She was a strong believer of
life after death and the spirit world. She modestly reported that she wasn't
sure if she had the so-called "mystic sense" and yet she felt she had an
ability to "bring distant objects within the cognizance of the blind so that
even the stars seem to be at our very door. This sense relates to me the
spiritual world...This sense reveals the Divine to the human in me, it forms
a bond between earth and the Great Beyond, between now and eternity, between
God and man. It is speculative, intuitive, reminiscent. There is not only an
objective physical world, but also an objective spiritual world."
When Dr. Rhine's experiments with extrasensory perception were revealed,
Helen expressed her belief that such things do happen. As Helen wrote, "It
has always been a strong belief with me that there are powers in many animals
which can be developed beyond the physical senses, and it is a gratification
to note that orthodox scientists are beginning to seek other causes than
mechanical ones to explain telepathy...Surely if creatures without the
reasoning faculty can perform such wonders, Man endowed with spiritual and
intellectual powers can achieve phenomena not to be explained by mechanism
but by laws still waiting to be discovered."
Annie Sullivan was in a better position than anyone else (other than Helen
herself) to observe Helen's psychic abilities. Annie speculates that the
reason for Helen's strong intuition was to compensate for her blindness and
deafness. Says Sullivan, "Helen Keller's development suggests to me that the
loss of one or more faculties may, by way of discipline, drive the
handicapped person to deeper levels of will-power than is required of
normally equipped human beings. I have no doubt whatever that most people
live in a very restricted sphere of their potential capacities. They make use
of only a small portion of their possible powers and resources of their
minds. It is as if, out of all their physical furnishings, they should use
only a fraction of each sense. When the complete destruction of one or more
senses creates an emergency, we see how much greater our resources are than
we supposed. May not deafness and blindness be a way of getting at latent
functional possibilities?"
One of Helen's most incredible psychic incidents occurred near the end of her
life. Helen had become increasingly spiritual, and yet not confined to any
one religion. She was a strong believer in what she called "the separateness
between soul and body." And yet, she was searching for proof of the spirit
world when, finally, she had what appears to have been a profound out-of-body
experience.
Helen describes the experience in her words, "I had been sitting quietly in
the library for half an hour. I turned to my teacher and said, 'Such a
strange thing had happened! I have been far away all this time and I haven't
left the room.' 'What do you mean, Helen?' she asked, surprised. 'Why,' I
cried, 'I have been in Athens.' Scarcely were the words out of my mouth when
a bright amazing realization seemed to catch my mind and set it ablaze. I
perceived the realness of my soul and its sheer independence of all
conditions of place and body. It was clear to me that it was because I was a
spirit that I had so vividly 'seen' and felt a place thousands of miles away.
Space was nothing to spirit! In that new consciousness shone the presence of
God, Himself a Spirit everywhere at once, the Creator dwelling in all the
universe simultaneously."
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ATLANTIS IN ANTARCTICA?
by
J. Douglas Kenyon
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In the not-too-distant future, Atlantis-seeking archeologists may have to
trade in their sun hats and scuba gear for snow goggles and parkas.
If a rapidly growing body of opinion proves correct, instead of the bottom of
the ocean, the next great arena of exploration for the fabled lost continent
could be the frozen wastelands at the bottom of the Earth. And before
scoffing too vigorously, backers of North Atlantic, Aegean and other
candidates would be well advised to give the new arguments for Atlantis in
Antarctica a fair hearing.
Already enlisted in the ranks of those who take the notion very seriously are
such luminaries as John Anthony West and Graham Hancock. Founded on a
scientific theory developed by the late Dr. Charles Hapgood in close
interaction with no less a personage than Albert Einstein, the idea appears
robust enough to withstand the most virulent of attacks expected from the
guardians of scientific orthodoxy. At any rate, it will not take a wholesale
melting of the icecap to settle the question. A few properly directed
satellite pictures and the appropriate seismic surveys could quickly make it
clear if, indeed, advanced civilization has ever flourished on the lands
beneath the ice.
Leading the charge of those betting that such evidence will soon be
forthcoming are Canadian researchers Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, the authors of
When the Sky Fell, just out in a new U.S. edition (St. Martin's Press, New
York). Previously published in Canada, the book contains the couple's
painstaking synthesis of Hapgood's theory of earth crust displacement and
their own ground-breaking discoveries. The result has already won many
converts. Graham Hancock believes the Flem-Aths have provided the first truly
satisfactory answer to the question of just what happened to Plato's giant
lost continent. Since devoting a chapter in his best-selling Fingerprints of
the Gods to the work of the Flem-Aths, Hancock continues to opine in media
appearances about the importance of their Antarctic theories. John Anthony
West provides an afterword to the new edition of When the Sky Fell (Colin
Wilson writes the introduction). Flem-Ath himself discussed his ideas on the
February NBC Special, The Mysterious Origins of Man.
To get to the bottom of all the excitement, if not the planet, Atlantis
Rising recently cornered Rand Flem-Ath at his home on Vancouver Island in
British Columbia.
The author has not forgotten how his own interest in Atlantis began. In the
summer of 1966, while waiting for an interview for a librarian's position in
Victoria, British Columbia, he was working on a screenplay involving marooned
aliens hibernating in ice on Earth for 10,000 years. Suddenly, on the radio,
came pop singer Donovan's hit Hail Atlantis. Hey, that's a good idea. he
thought. I wanted ice, so I thought, Now where can I have ice and an island
continent? and I thought of Antarctica.
Later, researching the idea, he read everything he could find on Atlantis,
including Plato's famous account in Criteas and Timeaus where Egyptian
priests described Atlantis, its features, location, history and demise to the
Greek lawgiver Solon. At first the story didn't work for Flem-Ath, but that
changed later when he made a startling discovery, unmistakable similarities
between two obscure but remarkable maps.
A 1665 map by Jesuit scholar Athenasius Kircher, copied from much older
sources, seemed to have placed Atlantis in the north Atlantic but strangely,
had put north at the bottom of the page apparently forcing study upside down.
The 1513 Piri Ri'is map, also copied from much more ancient sources,
demonstrated that an ice age civilization had sufficient geographic knowledge
to accurately map Antarctica's coast as it existed beneath an ice cap many
millennia old (as pointed out by Charles Hapgood in Maps of the Ancient Sea
Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age). What seemed obvious
to Flem-Ath was that both maps depicted the same land mass.
Suddenly Antarctic Atlantis stopped being a science fiction story. The
revelation had dawned that it might be something that could have been real.
Further study of Plato yielded even more clues. I noticed that the
description is from Atlantis, he recalls. Soon, armed with a U.S. Navy map of
the world, as seen from the South Pole, he discovered a new way of
understanding Plato's story and a new way of looking at Kircher's map. Viewed
from this southern perspective, all of the world's oceans appear as parts of
one great ocean, or, as what is described in Plato as the real ocean and the
lands beyond as a whole opposite continent. Sitting in the middle of that
great ocean, at the very navel of the world is Antarctica. Suddenly, it was
possible to understand Kircher's map, as drawn, with north at the top, Africa
and Madagascar to the left and the tip of South America on the right.
The term Atlantic Ocean, Flem-Ath soon realized, had meant something quite
different in Plato's time than it has since the age of exploration. To the
ancients, it included all of the world's oceans. The idea becomes clearer,
when one remembers from Greek mythology that Atlas (a name closely related to
Atlantis and Atlantic) held the entire world on his shoulders.
The whole opposite continent, which surrounded the real ocean in Plato's
account, consisted of South America, North America, Africa, Europe and Asia
fused together in the Atlantean world view as though they were one continuous
land mass. And in fact, these five continents were at the time (9,600 B.C.)
one landmass in the geographic sense.
Flem-Ath would render Plato's account to read: Long ago the World Ocean was
navigated beyond the Straits of Gibraltar by sailors from an island larger
than North Africa and the Middle East combined. After leaving Antarctica you
would encounter the Antarctic archipelago (islands currently under ice) and
from them you would reach the World Continent which encircles the World
Ocean. The Mediterranean Sea is very small compared to the World Ocean and
could even be called a bay. But beyond the Mediterranean Sea is a World Ocean
which is encircled by one continuous landmass.
A common mistake in most readings of Plato, Flem-Ath believes, is the
inappropriate attempt to interpret the ancient account in the light of modern
concepts. Another example, is the familiar reference to the Pillars of
Hercules, beyond which, Atlantis was said to reside. While it is true that
the term sometimes referred to the Straits of Gibralter, another, equally
valid interpretation is that it meant the limits of the known world.
For Flem-Ath, the world as seen from Antarctica matched perfectly the ancient
Egyptian's account of the world as seen from Atlantis. The ancient geography
was in fact far more advanced than our own, which made sense if Atlantis was,
as Plato argued, an advanced civilization.
Platonic theories notwithstanding, the most difficult challenge, explaining
how Atlantis might have become Antarctica, remained. How could land, now
covered with thousands of feet of ice, have once supported any kind of human
habitation, to say nothing of a great civilization on the scale described by
Plato? For the Flem-Aths, the answer, it turned out, had already been worked
out, thoroughly, convincingly and published in the Yale Scientific Journal in
the mid 1950s.
In his theory of earth crust displacement, Professor Charles Hapgood had,
citing vast climatalogical, paleontological, and anthropological evidence,
argued that the entire outer shell of the Earth, over its inner layers
periodically shifts, bringing about major climatic changes. The climatic
zones (polar, temperate and tropical) remain the same because the sun still
shines from the same angle in the sky, but as the outer shell shifts, it
moves through those zones. From the perspective of Earth's population, it
seems as though the sky is falling. In reality the earth's crust is shifting
to another location. Some lands move toward the tropics. Others shift, with
the same movement, toward the poles. While yet others escape great changes in
latitude. The consequences of such a movement is, of course, catastrophic.
Throughout the world, massive earthquakes shake the land and enormous tidal
waves batter the continental shelves. As old ice caps forsake the polar
zones, they melt, raising sea levels higher and higher. Everywhere, and by
whatever means, people seek higher ground to avoid an ocean in upheaval.
The Flem-Aths corresponded with Hapgood from 1977 until his death in the
early '80s and though he differed with them about the location of Atlantis
(his candidate was the Rocks of Saint Peter and Saint Paul) he praised their
scientific efforts to buttress his theory. In the summer of 1995, Flem-Ath
was allowed to read Hapgood's voluminous correspondence (170 pages) with
Albert Einstein and to discover a much more direct collaboration between the
two than has been previously supposed.
Upon first hearing of the research, in correspondence from Hapgood, Einstein
responded very impressive...have the impression that your hypothesis is
correct. Subsequently Einstein raised numerous questions which Hapgood
answered with such thoroughness that Einstein was eventually persuaded to
write a glowing foreword for Hapgood's book Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to
Some Basic Problems of Earth Science (1958 by Pantheon Books, New York).
Earth crust displacement is not mutually exclusive with the now widely
accepted theory of continental drift. According to Flem-Ath they share one
assumption, that the outer crust is mobile in relation to the interior, but
in plate tectonics the movement is extremely slow. Earth crust displacement
suggests that over long periods of time, approximately 41,000 years, certain
forces build toward a breaking point. Among the factors at work: a massive
buildup of ice at the poles, distorting the weight of the crust; the tilt of
the Earth's axis which changes by over three degrees every 41,000 years (not
to be confused with the wobble which causes the precession of equinoxes); and
the proximity of the Earth to the Sun which also varies over thousands of
years.
One of the common mistakes, says Flem-Ath, is to think of the continents and
the oceans as being separate, but really, the fact that there's water on
certain parts of the plates is irrelevant. What we have in plate tectonics
are a series of plates which are moving very gradually in relationship to
each other. But what we have in earth crust displacement is all of the plates
are considered as one single unit as part of the outer shell of the earth
which changes place relative to the interior of the earth.
The theory, says Flem-Ath, offers elegant explanations for such phenomena as
the rapid extinction of the Mammoths in Siberia, the near universal presence
of cataclysmic myths among primitive people, and many geographic and
geological anomalies left unexplained by any other theory. Most of the
evidence usually cited to support the idea of ice ages serves earth crust
displacement even better. Under the latter, some parts of the planet are
always in an ice age when others are not. As lands change latitudes, they
move either into or out of an ice age. The same change that put western
Antarctica in the ice box also quick-froze Siberia but thawed out much of
North America.
While many establishment geologists insist that the Antarctic ice cap is much
older that the 11,600 years indicated by Plato, Flem-Ath points out that the
core sampling on which most of the dating is based is taken from Greater
Antarctica which was indeed under ice, even during the time of Atlantis. The
suggestion here is that a movement of about 30 degrees or about 2,000 miles
occurred within a relatively short span of time. Before such a movement, the
Palmer peninsula of Lesser Antarctica (the part closest to South America
whose sovereignty is presently disputed by Chile, Argentina and Great
Britain) would have projected an area the size of western Europe beyond the
Antarctic circle into temperate latitudes reaching as far as
Mediterranean-like climes. In the meantime Greater Antarctica would have
remained under ice in the Antarctic circle.
An area such as that described by Plato, says Flem-Ath would be the size of
Pennsylvania, with a city comparable to modern-day London. Not a bad target
for satellite photography. Concentric circles or other large geometric
features should be easily discernible through the ice.
Flem-Ath believes that in most areas, Plato should be taken at his word,
though he does suspect that there may have been some fabrications in the
story. The war between the Atlanteans and the Greeks, for example, he
believes may have been cooked up to please the local audience. In regard to
the scale of Atlantean achievement, however, he takes Plato quite seriously
and is very impressed. The engineering feats described, says Flem-Ath, would
have required incredible skill, moreso than even what we have today. As for
the notion that Plato's numbers should be scaled down by a factor of ten, a
frequent argument used to support claims that Atlantis was really the Minoan
civilization in the Aegean, he doesn't buy it. A factor of 10 error might be
understandable when you are using Arabic numbers, with a difference between
100 and 1000 of one decimal place, but in Egyptian numbering, the difference
between the two numbers is unmistakable. For him the argument is similar to
the one for a North Atlantic location, in which a modern concept has been
inappropriate-ly superimposed upon an ancient one.
So far Flem-Ath's ideas have been largely ignored by the scientific
establishment, but he believes that at least Hapgood's arguments may be
getting close to some kind of acceptance. Quite often new ideas take about 50
years to be absorbed, he says, and we're getting close to the time.
If, in fact, satellite photography and seismic surveys produce the
indications that Flem-Ath expects, what next? The ice in the region that we
are talking about is relatively shallow, he says, less than half a kilometer
and once we've pinpointed the area, it should be relatively easy to sink a
shaft and find something.
That something could be among the finest and most dramatic artifacts ever
discovered, quick-frozen and stored undisturbed for almost 12,000 years.
A prospect hot enough to melt the hearts of even the most hardened skeptics?
We shall see.