A child starts guessing my mind

When I worked with the children, I always prepared what I was going do very carefully.

First, I would decide what lesson I was going to read to them; perhaps, a lesson on some technical project, or maybe about somebody's life and work, or maybe I'd read poems and test their ability to memorize them.

I would have the children use the system of mental training I had developed to relax and enter a relaxed state of mind, similar to hypnosis but a level in which they had control and could ask and answer questions while remaining relaxed.

Then I would read the lesson to them three times, under three different conditions.

I'd read the lesson a little differently each time, perhaps with a little stronger voice one time, or a little slower pace.

And I'd make sure that I read it each time while they were at a different level of mind than the previous time. Either I would bring them out of their relaxed level of mind and then have them enter their level again so they would not be at the same level, or else I would talk to them about something else after reading the lesson one time so that they would have time to allow the mind to adjust to another level.

I always had a list of things I was going to cover, so I could evaluate our progress accurately.

A surprise

One day I had read my daughter Isabel some poems. As I got ready for the second reading, I planned to give them to her in a different order so I could determine what effect that would have on her ability to recall the information.

But when I started to read her a poem, before I could begin, she started quoting a poem to me. It was not the one I had planned to give her first, but it was the next one on the list.

When she had finished, I started to give her another poem, and again she quoted a poem to me. Again, it was not the one I had planned to give her, but the one I had planned to use after that.

She continued to quote poems to me, but was always one ahead of me, as if she knew what I was going to ask her.

It was like she was reading my mind.

I realized right away that this is what appeared to be happening, but I found it hard to believe.

I didn't believe in it! I used to see people putting on shows, pretending to read minds but actually using a code to accomplish it. I had even worked out a code system and used to do that myself. We could tell anybody anything, but that was using a code.

Yet with Isabel, there wasn't any code. It was hard to believe, but it was happening, right in my own living room with my own daughter.

Since I had read about Edgar Cayce when I was in the army and stationed near Bowling Green, Kentucky, where Cayce had lived, it made some sense to me.

It also made me think again about all the research I had done about people who claimed to have been clairvoyant or had discovered clairvoyants who could diagnose health problems, men like Dr. Elliotson and Quimby.

As I continued my research, our results also brought back memories of Christ, who also had done something like this. Almost two thousand years ago, according to the Scriptures, Christ said to his disciples "Behold, therefore, I send you prophets and wisemen," which are the equivalent of clairvoyants.

Since I had already found methods and techniques the children could use to achieve the original goals of the research, that is, to help them learn to relax and relieve stress, to increase their attention span and concentration and therefore improve their grades in school, I immediately stopped working to enhance the I.Q. factor, and started instead to see if we could enhance the guessing factor.

First, I devised experiments to see if Isabel could learn to be more accurate in guessing what I was going to say.

She became very accurate at that.

At the time, I felt that she had to be in the same room with me to be able to do this.

She became very accurate at diagnosing health problems of people in their presence.

But then one day, we discovered that we did not have to limit ourselves in this manner.

Next: Our first health case