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Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair

Now, completely relaxed, hold your mind a blank again.  Hold it so for a few moments, then give the mental order to the unconscious mind to tell you what is on the paper you hold in your hand.  Keep the eyes closed and the body relaxed, and give the order silently and with as little mental exertion as possible.  It is necessary to give it clearly and positively, …..repeat as if talking directly to another self, then relax into blankness again and hold the blankness a few moments, then try gently without straining, to see whatever forms may appear on the void into which you look with closed eyes.  Do not try to conjure up something to see; just wait expectantly and let something come.

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair

Series twelve is marked ‘hastily done’ and she adds the general comment ‘several times saw bristles on things of different shapes, some flowers, some bristled brushes.  Saw flower, also more than once’ – and then she appends a drawing of a four leaf clover.  As it happened, this series contained a three leaf clover, and it contained another flower, and also a cactus plant – more of one kind of thing than it was fair to put in one set of drawings.  Nevertheless, Craig scored one of her successes with the cactus, setting it down as ‘fuzzy flower’

But he also provides descriptions of apparent failures, which tell us far more about the process that is happening than the successes…………

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair

I drew the head of a horse, and Craig drew a lot of apparently promiscuous lines and at various places wrote yellow, white, blue, (dark) and then a general description, ‘oriental’.  Afterwards she said to me ‘That looks like a complete failure; yet it was so vivid, I can’t be mistaken.  Where did you get that horse’?.    Said I ‘I copied it from a Sunday supplement’  We got the paper from the trash basket and the page opposite the horse contained what Craig described.  We shall not describe the several other cases of this sort of intrusion of things I did not draw, but which I had before me while drawing

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
I have referred to the fact that my wife’s drawings sometimes contain things which are not mine, but which were in my mind while I was making them, or while she was ‘concentrating’.
One of the most curious of such cases came in series twenty eight, which was after we had given up, as too great a nuisance, all precautions in the way of sealing the drawings in envelopes.  I made eight drawings, and laid them face down on my wife’s table and then went out and took a walk while she did them.  So, of course, it was easy for her to do what she pleased – and maybe she ‘peeked’ the skeptic will say.  But as it happens, she didn’t get a single one right!
Instead of reproducing my drawings, what she did was to reproduce my thoughts while I was walking up and down on the ocean front.  It seems to me that in so doing, she provided a perfect answer to those who may attribute the results to any form of deception, whether conscious or unconscious

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
My experience is that fragments of forms appear first.  For example, a curved line, or a straight one, or two lines of a triangle.  But sometimes the complete object appears; swiftly, lightly, dimly drawn, as on a moving picture film.  These mental visions appear and disappear with lightning rapidity, never standing still unless quickly fixed by deliberate effort of consciousness.  They are never in heavy lines, but as if sketched delicately, in a slightly deeper shade of grey than that of the mental canvas.  A person not used to such experiments may at first fail to observe them on the grey background of the mind, on which they appear and disappear so swiftly.  Sometimes they are so vague that one gets only a notion of how they look before they vanish.  Then one must recall this first vision.  Recall it by conscious effort, which is not the same thing as the method of passive waiting by which the vision was first induced.  Instead, it is as if one had seen with open eyes a fragment of a real picture and now closes his eyes and looks at the perception of it and tries to ‘see’ it clearly.

This forming of mental images on the internal screen of the mind is difficult to explain to someone who has not experienced the sensation, but this is a good pointer from Craig herself

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
… during the earliest experiments, I developed a headache.  I think this was due to the fact that I strained my closed eyes trying to see with them.  I mean, of course, trying to see a vision, not the card in my hand.  Using the eyes to see with is a habit, and habits are not easily overcome.  I soon learned not to use my eyes, … and this was the end of the headaches.  However, this use of the eyes in telepathy may perhaps mean more than a mere habit.  The mental canvas on which these visions are projected seems to be spread in the eyes and it is the eyes which seem to see them – despite the fact that the room may be dark, the eyes closed and the drawing on the paper wrapped in thick covering and not within normal range of the eyes.

Some additional comment is needed here.  Headaches are a frequent by-product of reattuning your brain to work better with the composer function.  It is as if hardware circuits that have never been used before are being fired up and the results can be excruciating.  I personally suffered from a headache lasting 6 hours when I first started to use these sorts of techniques.  And as she says, they go. Secondly it is not the eye functions which see the visions it is the imaging perception system.
Further confirmation that this process is being followed is provided by the fact that although the experiments were designed around only images, Craig managed to deduce some of the emotion attached to the drawing of the image. This happened on a number of occasions………………

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
You see she gets the feeling, the emotional content.  I draw a child’s express wagon and she writes ‘Children again playing but can’t get exactly how they look.  Just feel they are children’. 
Or take the following pillar [he provides a drawing] which she describes as Egyptian.  I don’t know if my pillar is real Egyptian, but it seems so to me and evidently to my wife for you note all the artistry it inspired [he provides her  figures here]
Sometimes Craig will embody the feeling in some new form of her own invention; as for example, when I draw an old fashioned cannon on wheels and she writes ‘Black Napoleon hat and red military coat’.  I draw a running fox – well drawn because I copy it from a picture; she rises to the occasion with two crossed guns and a hunting horn with a lot of musical notes coming out of it.

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
The next drawing was a heart and my wife got the upper half with what are apparently blood drops added [he provides figures here].  The above is interesting, as suggesting that whatever agency furnished the information knew more than it was telling.  For if Craig’s drawing, a pair of curves, constituted a crude letter N, or had no significance, why add the blood drops, which were not in the original?  On the other hand, if her subconscious mind knew it was a heart, why not give her the whole heart and let her draw it?

In some cases, Craig managed to reproduce a drawing – but not the drawing she had in her hand.  In effect, the drawing she had in her hand was a different picture to the one she drew, but the one she drew occurred later in the series.  Two  examples…………

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
This very dim stalk of celery drawn by me, I must admit looks more like a fish fork [he provides figures here].  Craig’s verbal description of the above reads ‘stone set in platinum; may be diamond, as points seem to be white light – at least it shines, not red shine of fire but white shine’.  How does a stalk of celery, which looks like a fish fork, come to have a diamond set in it?  You may understand the reason when you hear that three drawings later in the same series is a diamond set in a stick.

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
…. when she came to my secretary’s two drawings, she wrote ‘some sort of grinning monster’ and added an elaborate description.  Then she opened the envelope and found a roller skate with a foot and leg attached.  This naturally was called a failure; but seven drawings later in the same series came my secretary’s other drawing – a grinning monster [he provides the drawing, which is indeed a grinning monster face just a she describes it ]

There are two immediately obvious possibilities of why this occurred: 

• One or other of the composers had got the date/time stamp wrong from the bridge and gone to the wrong section of Upton’s or his secretary’s memory
• Upton or the secretary  was not concentrating on the drawing of the celery or skate at the time he made it, but thinking more about what he wanted to draw next

Let me thus take stock here.  The composer is using the ‘perception database’ of the person who did the drawing, not the drawing itself and Craig actually sees on a number of occasions the drawing actually being made – a sort of film clip.  The degree to which she is able to ‘receive’ the drawing appears to be in large part a measure of how much the perception system of the person doing the drawing was registering the act.  If the person was thinking about other things at the time or registering other images more vividly, then this aspect is imprinted in the thoughts/perceptions ‘database’ and hence on the input Craig received.  There is ‘mind’ reading going on here, except that it is not the mind being read, it is the thoughts and perceptions database – the log of what has happened – and it is not being done directly by the person’s perception function, but indirectly through the means of each composer function.  The composers are in control.
I think we need to consider the nature of this ability.  It hardly matters whether Craig managed a 30%, 50% or 70% success rate.  In fact, of 290 drawings, the number of total successes was 65, which is roughly 23%, the total of partial successes was 155 which is 53%, the total failures was 70 which is 24%.  In fact, if you consider this, this statistic is irrelevant.  The very fact Craig was able to reproduce any drawings at all is evidence enough of an unusual process.  The failures can have any number of causes once you know the mechanism of the process, but logic should tell us that Craig should not statistically have been able to come up with any successes at all, because if she had simply been drawing in a random way, the chance that her drawings and the drawings on the papers were the same must be millions to one [more].  The number of drawings Upton could have produced is virtually infinite – he could have drawn anything. Chance says it is almost impossible for anyone to come up with that same drawing.
On  one occasion, Craig produced a very accurate description of a drawing done by someone she had never met personally

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
Now I ask you, what chance do you think there is of a person’s writing a description such as the above by guess work?  To be sure, my wife had eight guesses; but do you think that eight million guesses would suffice?  And …. of a young man whom she has never seen, nor even heard of?  

Craig also provides a considerable amount of evidence for the existence of the composer as a separate function – completely separate from any sensory functions and separate from the function of perception.  Here are some comments from her.

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
Sometimes the subconscious mind or perhaps the conscious mind tries to finish the object as it has guessed it should be.  This error of allowing the conscious or the subconscious mind to finish the object is one to be careful about.  As one experiments, one realises more and more that these two minds, the conscious and the subconscious are really one, subconscious being only a disorderly store house of memories.
The third or deep mind is apparently the one which gives us our psychic phenomena.  Again I say, I do not know what this deep mind is; I use the words merely to give a name for that other thing which brings the message…………

So we might think of the sensory and memory functions and will as [very roughly] the conscious ; the perception functions [of which there are far more than Craig mentioned] are the subconscious; and her ‘deep mind’ is the composer function.
Implied in her analysis is the fact that there are aspects of the perception function that also need to be stilled in this process, the need to immediately rationalise and order and try to immediately understand…………

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
Why the subconscious should meddle, I do not know.  But it does.  Its behaviour is exactly like that of the conscious mind, which is also prone to guessing.  All this sounds fantastic – to any one who has not studied his mind.  But I tell you how it seems to me.  Maybe everything comes from the subconscious.  Maybe there is no ‘deep mind’.  Maybe the subconscious gets its knowledge of what is on the drawing directly from the drawing, and is merely blundering around, adding details by guesswork to what it has seen incompletely.   But I think that these experiments prove that this is not the case.  I think a study of them shows that a true vision comes into the subconscious, not directly from the drawing, but from another mind which has some means of knowing and sending to the conscious mind via the subconscious whatever I ask it for.  Of course I cannot attempt to prove this here.  It was one of the questions to which I was seeking an answer, and the results seem to point to the existence of a deeper mind, showing how its behaviour is quite different from that of the subconscious

Craig also very clearly and deftly describes the difference between a true vision and the ramblings of the mind in day dreaming, for example ……..

Mental Radio – Upton Beall Sinclair
..I learned from experiment… that something always came – a girl, or a steamship or the fact that I had not attended to a household duty or what not – a train of associated ideas followed. This is not a vision this is the subconscious.  This enabled me to notice, when later I got a true vision that there was a difference between the way this true vision came and the way the idle ‘visions’  - the  train of associated ideas  - came…When the true visions came there usually came with them a ‘something’ which I call a ‘hunch’.  There was of course always the question ‘is this the right thing or not?  When the true vision came this question seemed to receive an answer ‘yes’ as if some intelligent entity was directly informing me.  This was not always the case.  At times no answer came, or at least, if it came it was obscured by guesses.  But usually it did, after I had watched for it and a sort of thrill of triumph came with it…..The subconscious answers questions and its answers are always false; its answers come quietly like a thief in the night.  But the ‘other’ mind, the deep mind, answers questions too and these answers come, not quietly, but as if by inspiration, whatever that is – with a rustling of wings, with gladness and conviction.  These two minds seem different from each other.  One lies and rambles; the other sings and is truthful