"Your mother is fine, don't worry" — an extraordinary ability with a positive effect

By Prof. Si-Chen Lee

1. Xiao-Xuan, who had the ability from birth

It was the last day of the spring break in early April 2002, a Sunday afternoon, and I was hurrying over to the Electrical Engineering Building with an armful of papers, on my way to the monthly finger-reading training camp for children. The idea of the camp was to gather the children who had already developed the ability once a month and spend three hours going back over the reading exercises, so that the skill would not slowly fade for want of practice at home. The azaleas at National Taiwan University were past their best by early April, though they were still drawing a few people out to look at them. On weekends the plaza in front of the department building often fills up with outside groups running events, alive with people and movement.

That day it was very quiet, probably because of the long holiday. As I reached the entrance I saw Ms. L, who works at one of the offices on campus, strolling with her son and daughter and taking in the flowers, entirely at leisure. I said hello and asked in passing, "How old is your daughter?" "Nine," her mother said. "A good age. Would you like to come and watch our finger-reading experiment shortly, and let her have a try? We're in meeting room 142." Her mother nodded.

Ten minutes after we started, Ms. L came in with her two children. The older one, Xiao-Xuan, was lively and charming, wandering around watching the other children at work. I asked whether she wanted to try. "No," she said, flatly. Twenty minutes later I asked again whether she was ready to give it a go, and this time she agreed readily — clearly, watching the other children had got to her.

The first trial took nine minutes. She saw two numbers, 35 and 27, and chose 27 because it came up more often. That was wrong; the answer was 35. The second took eight minutes. This time she had the number right, 48, but the color wrong: the sample was blue and she read it as black. The third took eight minutes, and she got it completely right — 39, in green. After three trials she had had enough, and went off around the campus with her mother and brother. Xiao-Xuan's case is a striking one. In under twenty minutes the ability was there, with no training at all. It must have been innate, and nobody had noticed it before simply because she had never sat down and tried this method of concentrating the mind on the fingers.

2. Remote viewing appears

Her mother told me afterward that she had had Xiao-Xuan practice for a little while on several consecutive evenings, and that the progress was astonishing. Within a few days remote viewing had appeared: Xiao-Xuan could identify playing cards laid face down on a table without touching them. Ms. L had had little contact with work on human potential before, so I urged her to slow the pace down, and gave her a reading list in the hope that she would understand the field better before going deeper. She later told me that she had been raised a Christian but had not been to church in a long time, and that because of Xiao-Xuan's abilities she had decided to start taking her again.

3. Seeing Jesus

Over the two months that followed, remarkable things kept happening. Xiao-Xuan and her mother are extremely close, and every day Xiao-Xuan would call to make sure her mother was safe before she could settle. One day the call did not come, which struck her mother as odd, and when she got home she asked why. Xiao-Xuan said that while she was praying she had asked how her mother was, and to her surprise Jesus had appeared in her mind and told her, "Your mother is fine, don't worry," and let her see her mother at work so that she could rest easy. So she had not called. From then on, whenever she missed her mother she only had to pray; Jesus would appear and reassure her, and she never called again. Over the year that followed, Ms. L found that this ability had a positive effect on Xiao-Xuan's life and behavior, and she grew steadily more at ease and more grateful. Before asking her daughter to do anything, she would try to have her pray first and ask what Jesus thought. She knew that God had blessed Xiao-Xuan.

Parents often ask me what the point of learning finger reading really is. Finger reading is a skill, much like sending a child to learn the piano, the violin, painting or calligraphy. It adds an accomplishment and an interest, it enriches their life, and it gives them insight well beyond the ordinary. From Xiao-Xuan's case, I know their lives will be quite unlike other people's.