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nineteenth-century seances of D.D. Hume, as much as we might like to.
3 Many said that D.D. Hume was a conjurer. Our opinion is that if he were a magician, he used sleight of hand only to augment his already extraordinary psychokinetic feats. In the same vein, charismatic healers throughout history have likely used combinations of hypnosis and stagecraft to augment their genuine healing gifts.4 Stage magicians doing mental magic, on the other hand, have a much easier tasks to perform. |
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Perhaps I should admit here that I am an amateur magician. In fact, my initial interest in psi came from my college days, when I was a performing amateur magician. Almost every magician has had the experience of standing on the stage, doing mental "magic," and suddenly realizing that he knows more about a person in the audience than his trick should have told him. For example, I was often on stage doing an effect (a trick) called billet reading: I held an envelope up to my forehead and tried to answer a question that someone in the audience had written on a slip of paper and sealed inside. In reality, I managed to get a surreptitious peek at the question earlier in the trick, and would just recite it from memory. But standing there with my eyes closed, "mind-reading" the question from a lady who wanted to know where to find her lost dog, for example, I may also have received a sudden mental picture of a large brick house with a line of trees in the front yard. Trusting the quality of this mental picture, after reciting her question I astonished her even more by describing her house. Every magician I have talked with who does mental magic on the stage has received this kind of ESP gift while performing their tricks. After I had several such experiences both on stage and in front of small groups, I became interested in the work of J.B. Rhine at Duke University, who seemed to be doing real magic without any sleight of hand. |
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One of the paradoxes of psychical research pertains to the difference between a psychic and a magician. When a stage magician enters an ESP laboratory, he is very likely to try using trickery to supplement whatever psychic ability he has. Conversely, it often happens that a magician on the stage will supplement his tricks with whatever ESP might come his way. |
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I am a good visualizer. When I close my eyes I usually see reasonably |
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