Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities by Dean Radin

Abstract

"

It's only a matter of will . . . you just have to train, gentlemen." Thus the commentary of a fakir to the inquiring looks of baffled and curious medical doctors who visited him backstage after his spectacular performances. Such performances included an act where he hung himself with his unprotected chin on a swinging trapeze using a razor-sharp sword as a bar. Other acts consisted of various perforations of his body. His helpers, for example, beat two meat hooks through his shoulders and heaved him up with the help of a block and tackle. The fakir said that he is able to make his body partly or absolutely pain-free and numb by extreme concentration and autosuggestion. The newly afflicted wounds, added daily, did not bleed. He said: "If they bleed it is a warning signal. Then the suggestion isn't strong enough." All the wounds were healed the following morning and one could only see tiny little white points.  

It seems obvious what this 'story' has to do with the topic of the book under review. We learn from a person with extraordinary abilities performing actions that are commonly known in connection with East Asian religious rituals, Indian sādhus, and yogic techniques. The latter build the content framework of Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities by Dean Radin. But why this little 'story' as kind of an introduction? It should serve to point toward some particular issues concerning the book and its topic. However, it is not a 'story' taken from Radin's work but found in an issue of the German weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel from 1949,1 and it does not deal with an Indian sādhu but with German house-painter Anton Petersen who performed during the 1940s and 1950s under the stage name Carry Sunland. Although he developed interests in psychology, occultism, yoga, and spiritism in Berlin in the 1920s, he was certainly not in line with Indian sādhus and the yogic traditions, neither culturally nor with regard to his worldview or spiritually. The crucial point is: Could the extraordinary abilities of a German stage performer justifiably be compared with the siddhis, the spiritual, supernatural powers which can be acquired through certain spiritual practices? That remains an open question to me--as do some of the issues mentioned in Radin's book.