1. Spirits join the experiment
The information field is full of highly intelligent information — divine beings — and their websites, and in our finger-reading experiments we are forever clicking on those sites. Might they find it tiresome? Might they step into the experiment themselves and throw the results into disorder? As it turns out, they do come.
On 28 December 2000, something very unusual happened during a finger-reading session with Ms. T. The first sample had the word "Jigong" (濟公) written on it. Jigong is a sacred term, and in five earlier tests of the same word Ms. T had seen either a bright light, a luminous figure or luminous characters. This time she saw 齊公, with none of the usual phenomena, as shown in Figure 1. It was as though the three-dot water radical on the left of 濟 had been wiped away, leaving 齊, before the word was passed on to her brain.
The second item, "Falun Gong" (法輪功), came out stranger still. The two characters she made out were 輪法 — reversed — and she did not recognize 功 at all. Missing a character is common enough when Ms. T reads, but she had never before reversed two of them.
The third item, "Qingshui Zushi" (清水祖師), came out as 青水祖師 — the three-dot water radical wiped from 清 once again. A misread character, or a dropped radical, is nothing remarkable on its own; what unsettled us was the run of them. As Figure 2 shows, the fourth item, 道教 (Taoism), came out as 教道, two characters reversed again. Things were getting stranger, and something had gone wrong with Ms. T's reading.
The fifth and sixth items, "Lin Mo-Niang" (林默娘) and "音觀", were also wrong — characters missing and characters mistaken. Ms. T's finger reading was clearly badly impaired. For a final check, we tried a single character for the seventh item: 佛 (Buddha). Over more than fifty previous trials with 佛 and related words, Ms. T had seen a bright light or a luminous figure every single time, without exception. This time she saw no such phenomenon at all, only the radical 人 (person). That settled it: part of her finger-reading ability had been lost.
2. Using Tantric mantras to send the outside spirits away
I stopped the experiment at once, sent Ms. T upstairs to sit in meditation, and asked her to put the question to her highly intelligent guide in the information field — the one we informally call her teacher — about what was happening. Her teacher answered: "They have come to make mischief." Certain spirits in the information field had stepped into the experiment and deliberately scrambled the results. This alarmed us considerably. How were we to deal with it? How do you ask a spirit to leave?
As it happened, a Dharma teacher was present, and she suggested writing out some Tantric mantras on paper and having Ms. T read them with her finger, in case that helped. So we carried on, as shown in Figure 3. The eighth item, "Manjushri" (妙吉祥), came out as only 妙祥 — still faulty. The ninth was the Tibetan mantra "Om Ah Hum" (嗡啊吽), with 嗡啊 written in red and 吽 in blue. This time the phenomena returned: on the screen in her mind Ms. T saw red light and blue light, which meant her finger-reading ability had come back. Sure enough, every test that followed was completely correct, as Figure 4 shows, including 佛, where the phenomena reappeared. Everything had returned to normal.
What this suggests is that when spirits from the spirit world take part in our experiments, they have considerable power to interfere with and block the expression of a gifted subject's unity of mind and matter. It made us realize that in interpreting finger-reading results, we have to treat the participation of spirits in the information field as a variable if our inferences are to come anywhere near the truth.
At last we understood why experiments in extraordinary abilities are so hard to replicate. Behind them lies a vast, intelligent spirit world beyond our control, whose inhabitants take part and sometimes make mischief. How, then, do we clear their interference? Prayer? Sutras? Incense? Holy water? Mantras?
3. With sincerity, an upright heart and a search for truth, there is nothing to fear from mischievous spirits
We later put the question to Ms. T's teacher: how should we handle interference from outside spirits? The answer was that whether they interfere depends on our intentions — so if we conduct our experiments with sincerity, an upright heart and a genuine search for truth, we have nothing to worry about.
