By Prof. Si-Chen Lee
Most people assume that psi abilities can be summoned at will. Nothing could be further from the truth. What someone can do on a given day depends on their physical condition, their mood and how much they have been practicing. In more than twenty years of research, I have found that even someone with abilities as strong as Zhang Bao-Sheng or Sun Chu-Lin cannot walk in and immediately perform a difficult experiment. Finger reading is no different.
The first finger-reading training class
In July 1996, with the support of Prof. Ji Yue, founder of Mingshi Qigong, I ran the first formal finger-reading training class in Taiwan. He lent me his practice space and invited fifteen children from his qigong class to take part. We were short-handed, so parents came in as assistants to help record the results. By the end of the first hour of the first day, one girl — young Miss Wang — had developed the ability, bearing out what Prof. Chen Shou-Liang of Peking University had found: finger reading can be induced. Miss Wang was a fourth-grader at Fulin Elementary School at the time and had come along for the fun of it. Over four days, three of the twelve children who stayed the course developed the ability, and Miss Wang read characters correctly 55% of the time — the best result in the group. She was delighted with herself, and since it was the summer holidays she would practice a little at home when she had a moment. When I asked her back for a test in mid-August, her accuracy had dropped to 25%: the ability was still there, but fading. Once the school year started in September her workload picked up and she stopped practicing altogether. I tested her once in September and once in October, and both times her accuracy was zero. The ability had gone entirely. The following February, during the 1997 winter holidays, I invited her back for intensive training, and her reading ability returned on the very first day. This time it lasted longer: by mid-April she was up to 75%. After May, though, schoolwork left her no time to practice, and the ability disappeared again. It gradually became clear to me that finger reading is like the piano, the violin or table tennis — it needs constant practice. Use it and it grows; neglect it and it recedes.
The ability disappears, then returns
In the August holidays, after another round of intensive training brought her ability back, I suggested to her mother that she practice every day — that she drop the piano if need be in order to make room for finger reading, since this capacity would matter more over the course of her life than any other skill. Her mother took the advice. From September on, after dinner at seven each evening, Miss Wang watched half an hour of television and practiced while she watched, then went to her homework at half past seven. The results were remarkable. Her reading came on in leaps: before long she no longer needed to hold the paper at all. A slip of paper placed inside a black film canister could be read with her hand around the canister. Wrapped in a layer of aluminum foil and then put in the canister, it could still be read. Put the small canister inside a larger box, and she could still read it. Her clairvoyance could now pass through two barriers, draw the information from behind them and form an image of it in her brain. Researchers on the mainland had found that at this stage one can begin training psychokinesis — reversing the clairvoyance that draws information in so that it becomes a force sending consciousness out, doing work on objects and producing movement or deformation. In February 1998, after three days of psychokinesis training, Miss Wang duly produced an effect: she could bend a piece of wire inside a box. Three months of steady training brought her to a peak in May, when she could bend a wire into a shape.
Unfortunately, at one important experimental session she was too nervous and could not perform; the ability vanished for a time. Then she started junior high in September and began attending cram school, her interest in reading dropped off, she practiced less, and the ability kept declining. In her final year of junior high she stopped practicing altogether to prepare for the high school entrance exam, and it faded away. Our examination system really does bury people's potential.
This rising and falling turns up in every child who can finger-read. That is why every experiment has to begin with several warm-up rounds. If a child has practiced at home in the days before coming to the laboratory, the warm-up is short and they settle in quickly; if not, it takes much longer. Change the way the sample is wrapped and there is a period of adjustment, just as in table tennis, where a new paddle takes some getting used to before the feel of the stroke comes back. All of this suggests that finger reading is a skill of the brain, much like an artistic or athletic one.
Training the psychokinesis to bend a wire
By January 1998 Miss Wang's third eye could see through a film canister and aluminum foil to draw the written information from a slip of paper wrapped inside, as shown in Figure 1, so I began training her psychokinesis. A length of wire went into a film canister; she held the canister, brought the wire into her third eye, and used intention to bend it. If it would not bend, she would picture herself using a hand, scissors or pliers on it within the third eye. On 17 May 1998, under strict experimental conditions — the canister sealed with tape, the experimenters' signatures across the seal — Miss Wang spent 19 minutes trying to bend a short length of wire into a triangle. When the canister was opened, there were indeed two bends in it, though her control was not yet fine enough and the two bends were not in the same plane, lying slightly off it, as shown in Figure 2. The straight wire on the right is its shape before it went into the canister; the twice-bent wire on the left is how it came out. This does not look like a force from Newtonian mechanics; it appears to be the force of intention — nature once again showing us something mysterious.
