(7) I THOUGHT IT WAS EITHER NOAH OR GOD.

7-21-73

B   You’re supposed to visualize a laboratory.  You can have it anywhere you want, decorate it any way you want, but it’s supposed to have certain basic things.  A chair, a desk . . .

J   Wait a minute.  Now, let me follow you, angel.  When you talk to me about being inside the wall and all that jazz, I just don’t know what you’re talking about.

B   You visualize this laboratory. 

J   As a student of this Silve Mind Control business, you mean. 

B  Yes.  Chris counts you down, and I had no trouble visualizing it.  In the house, it’s going to be this wall, overlooking the pond.  You’re supposed to keep the south wall uncluttered.

J   This is what you were telling me before.  “The south wall, uncluttered.”  

B  We’re practicing visualizing in our own houses.  I use this wall.  Mentally I have to move the bookcase and the picture.  [To get in?]  To be able to really look at the wall. 

J    I don’t understand this.  Why do you have the wall here?

B  You use the wall to practice visualizing what you’ve been learning about mind control.  You visualize, as I told you, different kinds of fruit—[Do you visualize these things on the wall?]  Yes, hanging up, suspended in front of the wall, and then you bring them closer—[Why?]  Just for practice.  To learn how to use those lower conscious levels, to learn how to put them to work. 

      Then we went from inanimate objects to leaves that we studied ahead of time, and then we got into the alpha state and pictured them and smelled them—[Leaves? You smelled them?]—and held them against this same wall.  You have the wall change colors and picture the leaf—

J   Are you all in the class with your eyes closed, doing this?  [Yes.]  Everybody’s is doing the same thing at the same time? 

B   Yes.  Then the wall changes to black in color, and then red, then green.  Then we got up to animals.  Of course I picked Miette.    First you felt the head of your animal all over and its skull, you visualized the skull.  Then you got inside the animal and you visualized what was inside.  Do you rmember that, Miette?  We were wondering how our animals were acting at home while all this was going on.

J   See the look she’s giving you?  She knows you’re talking about her.

B   Then we visualized their brains, their livers.

J    Their elbows? 

B   This is to get in practice for analyzing what is wrong with human beings.  Next we had to invent this laboratory we’re going to work in.  Mine’s out there on that empty lot, looking over the pond.  It has a porch.  My desk has a clock, so I can see what time things happen, and I have a calendar that’s a perpetual calendar.  Some people had push-button systems.  They explained that they could push a button for past, present, and future.  My calendar is simple, you just look at it, and whatever date it’s telling you, there it is.  Like if it’s 1872, it’ll say December tenth, 1872, or whatever.

J   Your calendar does this?

B   Yes.  Why bother with push buttons?  I just know it will give me the date when I look at it, the date I’m trying to get.  Like if I want to know when somebody was born, I’ll look at my calendar.  I won’t have to push a button, it’ll be there.   

J   I see.  It’s good to know that because it helps, doesn’t it. 

B  And then we have two files cabinets—

J   Would you like something?

B   I’ll have a glass of wine.  One cabinet contains all our records for men, and the other is for women. 

I have a fireplace on the west wall and windows looking out to the east, over the pond.  And the two file cabinets are on the north wall.  You start out with this compartment or cubicle, but once you meet your counselors that come through this compartment into your laboratory—

J   Jesus!  Do you have to have—Barbara, excuse me.  [Yes?]  You have to have the other sessions that you’ve gone to, in order to have this, don’t you?  You can’t just walk in today and do this, can you?  Huh? 

B   Well, no.  I think you’d have lost too much because you had all this programming of how to get into the Alpha state.

J  Were you in it?  Did you feel you were in it?

B  I think so.  Like that dream-controlling thing worked so fantastically.  I told Chris how I had begun to have trouble again with insomnia.  He said, Are you practicing during the day, and I said no.  He said, You know what we say, five minutes once a day is good, ten minutes twice a day is very good, fifteen minutes three times a day is excellent.  The more you practice, the better this is going to work.

     What I had next to the fireplace—you have to have a place to keep medical supplies that you might need.  I didn’t know what kind of medication to stock, I’m not experienced with medications, so I—

J  You look good, you know it?  Did you sleep well last night?  [Yes.]  You look terrific.

B   So anyway, I have the cabinets, but I don’t know what’s in them.  There may be nothing in them.  Some people had things like love potions. 

J   How come they knew what was in theirs, and you didn’t know what was in yours? 

B  They said afterwards what they had in theirs.  Somebody else just had—

J   Love potions?

B   She was a nun.  She started out with wine and water, and that was all she was going to use in any treatment. 

J   No bread?  The water changed to bread, I suppose because she’s a nun.

B  Three nuns from Notre Dame were there. [Really?] But anyway, under my cabinets for the medications, I had one of those units that’s a sink, a stove, and a refrigerator, and in the refrigerator I had beer for my counselors.  I had a sofa in front of the fireplace, and I figured that my counselors, when they weren't too busy with my patients, could sit down and have a beer together.

J   What patients, honey?

B   These are the people—each one of us is going to bring in three cases tomorrow, and this is the sort of thing that we’ll be practicing.  I’m sure I’ll go on getting together with these groups later and keep practicing this. 

J   Patients are people that use this stuff? 

B  Yes.  I could bring Tony—

J  Tony who?

B  Your Tony. 

J  Why is he a patient?

B  You tell me how old he is, how long ago he lost his wife, and I’ll have written down on a card what happened to his leg and the limp.  We’ll see whether anybody is able to say, I see something wrong with his leg, this man limps, he’s had an accident.  This is what supposedly you’re able to do.  I thought maybe I’d have Florence Pinkham, who broke her hip a year ago.  I could have Floyd Rinker to see if anyone would visualize the hump on his back. 

      So then what you do is, you have these counselors, and you can have anybody you want, only Chris said you might have a preconceived idea of who’s going to walk out of this cubicle, and it won’t be who you planned it to be.  One man, who is the president of his company, was quite indignant when the janitor of his building walked out.  Why would a janitor be advising him?  He didn’t particularly like it, but it was explained to him that what you are in the physical world isn’t important.  Perhaps this janitor would prove to be, in the spiritual world, very useful and helpful.

     I decided to pick the best, Albert Schweitzer and Margaret Mead.  What happens is that the door of this cubicle opens up, and your counselors come out.  Chris said, “By the way, once you meet them, don’t do what one person did.  He used to shove them back in when he was through with them and put a padlock on the door and keep them shut in there until the next time.”  He said, Don’t do that to your helpers.  You can eliminate the cubicle after the first meeting.  You’ll just walk in and greet them.  When you’re through consulting with them, you thank them and say goodbye.

     Oh!  The second time I went to my laboratory, something materialized that I hadn’t even thought of.  I started to go in the front door, and found a ramp instead of stairs, so it’s accessible for Kathie.

{glitch in tape}

     I’d start dozing off, my head would jerk, and yet I would still hear what he was saying.  Some people did go sound, dead asleep.  And if they don’t wake up when he finishes counting at the end—

J  They never will.  

B  No, he has them programmed, so that if he taps them on the shoulder three times, they wake up by the third tap.

      You visualize your counselors waiting behind the door of the cubicle.  You start at the top with the hair, and then you can see a forehead and then a face.  I did this, and by golly, it was Albert Schweitzer’s hair.  For a minute I thought it was you—but then I thought, No, it was too white and too bushy.

J   He has too much.  It can’t be Jack.

B   And then this guy with a beard kept interjecting himself.   I thought it was either Noah or God and that this was going too far.  All I wanted was Albert Schweitzer.   The next time, the door was shut again.   I waited for the woman, and I could see Margaret Mead.  She walked out and we shook hands.  I didn’t dare tell everybody how high I’d aimed for my counselors.  One man’s counselor was a dead friend of his father’s he admired, an old family friend.  Most of them seemed to have found people that they knew.

J   What do these people do when they come out?

B   They’re there for you to consult with. 

J    But right now . . . you didn’t do anything with them today, huh?  [No.]  How much of Al did you see?  You said there was this hair.  Did you see anything else?  Did you see his face? 

B   Yes, I saw his face.  I hope I don’t have him mixed up with Rubenstein.  If I keep calling him Albert Schweitzer, he’ll know what I mean. 

J  What Rubenstein?

B   Arturo Rubenstein.  One woman said she could see the hair and the body, but she couldn’t see the face.  [That’s the toughest, I’m sure.]  Chris said, Don’t worry about it, just try to figure out who it is. 

J   Are you amazed, Barbara?

B   I’m amazed because the stories the instructor tells, you might take with a grain of salt.  It’s the stories that you hear from other people taking the course that are amazing. One girl spoke up today and said to Chris, Should I tell them what happened this morning?  He said, If you want.  She said, Well, I’ve been kind of skeptical about all this, and I was talking to the instructor yesterday, and he said, You know, I have a flash. 

J   Did you say his name is Jensen?

B   Yes, Chris Jensen.  He said, I see a friend of yours is going to Europe.  She said, No, you’re way off, I don’t know anybody that’s going to Europe.  Last night she went to bed and had a dream about a friend named Bob.  She dreamt he was out in California.  She thought, That’s ridiculous, he’s broke, he can’t be out in California.  Then she was awakened by a phone call.  She answered the phone half awake, and it was this Bob.  He wasn’t in California, but he was asking her to drive him to the airport.  She said she couldn’t drive him to the airport, she had to get up early for this course she was taking. 

J   Was this early morning?

B   Yes.  Ten minutes later, she thinks, Drive him to the airport?  She called him back and said, I’m more awake now.  What do you mean, drive you to the airport?  He said, A friend of mine is getting married in England, I hadn’t planned to go, but I’ve decided to heck with the expense, I know I can’t afford it, but I’m going to Europe.  She said she got goose pimples, it was such an uncanny thing.  She had been thinking, I really don’t want to get up this early and go to the course.  Now she couldn’t wait to jump into her clothes, have breakfast, get in the car and come to the course. 

J   Did she drive him to the airport?

B   Oh no, she didn’t have time.  But she had no idea in the world that he was going to Europe.  Let me think.  What else did some people tell us?  Oh, unusual things they’d read, like talking to plants.  There were two identical plants, for instance, that somebody experimenting put in the lobby of a building.  One said, Love me, one said Hate me, and everybody in the building knew that this was an experimental thing.  So they’d smile and say nice things to the love-me plant, and they’d scowl and say, You’re ugly to the hate-me plant.  One flourished, and the other never did very well.

      There’s a famous experiment a few years ago, where there were philodendrums—

J  That’s “o n,” angel.

B  Philo. . . philo. . . [dendrons.]  dendrons. This man was in the lie-detector business, and he wanted to hook up a polygraph machine to his philoden-drons to see if they gave any reaction when he fed them and gave them water.  He was watching the machine and looking at the plants, and he started smoking a cigarette.   He thought, I wonder what would happen if I burned one of the leaves.  He did, and there was a big reaction on the meter.  He thought, Gee, that’s interesting, I guess I’ll try it again.  But before he got anywhere near one of the leaves, the machine reacted again.  It was very agitated.  It wasn’t until he went out of the room and put the cigarette out and came back saying, I promise I’m not going to do it again, that the plant calmed down. 

     And then they did an experiment I’d read about, where they had several men walk by some plants that were hooked up to this machine.   One of the guys had some live shrimp, and there was a pot of boiling water near the plants. [Live shrimp?]  Yes.  Several guys walked by, and one of them dropped the shrimp into the water, killing them.  The plants all reacted at that moment. 

      They took the pot of boiling water away, the men went out, they came in again, and when that particular man walked by, they again reacted.  So then they used what they had learned to solve a criminal case.

J   Is this the same machine, the lie detector, or something like it?

B   Yes.  If you can believe this, Jack, an old cleaning woman was killed in this same building, and they figured it had to be an inside job because there was no sign of breaking and entering.  Somebody who worked there must have done it.  They told everybody that somebody had seen the murderer and could identify him.  They had a guy sitting next to this philodendrum . . . philodendron that had been in the room, hooked up with the machine concealed, and a man was keeping an eye on it as the people who worked in the building paraded by.  Sure enough, when one person was walking by, there was a big reaction from the plant.  The man sitting there said, “You’re the one.  I saw you commit the crime.  He couldn’t very well say, This plant says you did it.  The man confessed.

     If you can believe it, Jack.  These are the sorts of stories you hear.

J   Well, that’s very interesting, Barbara, and I’m not about to disbelieve it because—

B   It’s the sort of thing that my mother was up to her ears in.  She had all these books, believed devoutly what she read, and—

J   Did it say where this was?  This accusation? 

B  I think I could find out.  There’s a book written by this man, Backster.  [Why aren’t these things in the paper?]  They were.  [Was it in the paper?]  I don’t know about the paper, but I have read magazine articles about it.

J   A thing like this, Barbara, is really a news story.  It’s fantastic news, you know, and you think, Why don’t they play it up bigger? 

B   I think it has been in Time Magazine.  [Why don’t you ask?  Are you going to see these people again?]  There’s all kinds of literature up there that I will see. 

J   No, just ask the people, Where did they hear this story, or did they read it somewhere, or was it in the newspaper?

B  I have read about the experiment with the brine shrimp, and Backster has written a book.

Google came up with this.  bbm1-20-02} I've told you before that I was a weird kid who read books about obscure subjects.  The name Cleve Backster rang a bell in my memory.  As well it should have:  Cleve Backster is the guy who claimed a few decades back that plants had emotions. He hooked his polygraph up to a philodendron and said he found the same kind of reactions that he got from human subjects.  He went further and devised a machine that would dump brine shrimp into boiling water at random intervals.  His tests "showed" that the polygraph-attached plants exhibited "emotional" reaction to the shrimps' demise. 

{And this}       

     Having concluded fairly early that plants reacted to immediate threat as well as actual physical damage, Backster attempted to find out if plants reacted to threats and damage done to living organisms in their surroundings. In order to do this he would dump live brine shrimp at random intervals into a pot of boiling water in the vicinity of the monitored plant. The instant the shrimp hit the water the plant would react.
    Backster assumed that the death of living organisms nearby alarmed the plant as this was threatening despite the fact that the plant had no previous “relation” to the shrimp. After repeating this procedure a few times, the plant stopped reacting. It seemed as if the plants became more interested in tuning into Backster than into dying shrimp. So were Backster's reactions overriding that of the shrimp?

   To test this, Backster had an assistant purchase new plants which he did not tend to, and which were stored in a part of the building that he did not frequent. At the last moment he would attach them to the polygraph, so the plants would not form an affinity to any of the researchers. A time delay switch was used, so that the shrimp would be dumped into boiling water when no one was around. This proved successful once or twice but by the third try the plant usually “lost interest,” perhaps because it “realized” that the death of the shrimp did in no way herald its own immediate demise. In any case, it adapted to the situation fairly quickly.

{[And this}

     A few weeks now passed, during which we experimented with zapping different kinds of metals, chemical and gasses trapped inside vials. At some point, I don't remember when exactly, Backster mentioned something along the following lines:
    "Boy, are the guys down at the CIA going to be interested in you."
This came out of left field. "Why should they be?" I asked in astonishment.
    "They've always been interested in this stuff, and they're trying to replicate my plant work. I know because they've told me. I've taught a lot of them how to improve their polygraph techniques.  But they don't understand the plant learning thing, or at least won't accept it. So they think the reactions they get are just random noises in their equipment."
    I just laughed about the CIA ever being interested in my humble self. I thought it ridiculous and all so unlikely as to be nil. And even so, I thought that Backster would get tired of the experiments, and that would be that for me.
By the way, as I've been editing this chapter a very good article about Cleve Backster has appeared. See FATE Magazine, May 1996: "The Man Who Talked to Plants," by David Fickett.

B   Another thing they talked about was regressing, further and further back till you remember the day you were born and the actions of your mother.   [Supposedly you could regress to where you were years before you were born.  Too ridiculous to transcribe.]

J   If I ask a question, don’t think I’m being anything other than inquisitive about it. 

B  Listen, I’m skeptical. 

J   When you’re talking about stuff like this, it isn’t a time to be skeptical, it’s a time to be curious.

{Curiouser and curiouser.  How could I have wasted time discussing this nonsense?}

B   This might not necessarily mean that you lived before, it might mean that there were—they say that the power of the mind is incredible, we don’t even begin to use our minds.  [Right.]  And that there could be information in the dead brain cells of these people who have died that you could pick up on, like wavelengths. 

{Oh, come on!  Skipped some more nonsense}

J   Do you get tired after a full day of the course?

B   No, you really don’t, because after you get into the Alpha state, they give you a minute or two and tell you you’re going to feel as if you’ve slept for an hour.  I don’t know that I feel that good, but I don’t feel tired.  Would you like some chipped beef?            {End of tape}