A Psychiatrist Works With Mind Control

Very deep levels of consciousness are involved in Mind Control.

Are there any dangers in it?

Jose and those close to him in directing the Mind Control organization say that the benefits of the training are not in even the smallest way offset by any “untoward side effects,” to use a medical phrase. Putting it another way, no one who has taken the course is any the worse for it, as far as Jose and his colleagues know.

One Mind Control graduate, a member of the medical profession, has put Mind Control’s safety to an acid test He is Dr. Clancy D. McKenzie, a prominent Philadelphia psychiatrist and psychoanalyst director of the Philadelphia Psychiatric Consultation Service, member of the staff of The Philadelphia Psychiatric Center, and in active private practice. He is also a long-time student of Yoga and other meditational disciplines, biofeedback, and parapsychology.

As part of his studies in these fields, he enrolled in the Mind Control course in 1970. “I wanted to see if they were actually teaching clairvoyance, as a number of my patients who had benefited from the course reported to me. I became convinced that something psychic was taking place, and I have since devoted a good deal of time and thought to investigating it further.”

Two other things sparked his interest in Mind Control: a comment made by Sigmund Freud toward the end of his career, and something that happened in a Mind Control class.

Freud had said that the most promising direction for psychotherapy to take in the future is toward mobiliza- tion of the patient’s energies. Dr. McKenzie clearly saw people in the Mind Control class using energies they never knew they had. But he saw something else in this class: “Three per- sons out of the thirty were emotionally disturbed and there was a fourth whose stability was in question. What was the reason? Did the course precipitate emo- tional illness or had they been ill when they arrived? Were my own disturbed patients who had benefited from the course merely lucky?” The most practical way to find out, he reasoned, was to test people before and after the course. The test would be to observe closely those who were the most psychologically vulnerable. He and a colleague, Dr. Lance S. Wright, professor of psychiatry at the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania, launched a study. During the fol- lowing four and a half years 189 psychiatric patients volunteered to go through Mind Control training. To make the test still more stringent, they focused an even more detailed study on those in this group who were A Psychiatrist Works with Mind Control I 125 psychotic, borderline psychotic, or who had recovered from psychosis. There were 75 of these. From their observations of the beneficial effect of the course on healthy people, the results of these tests were no surprise to Dr. McKenzie and Dr. Wright There was consistent improvement in mental health among the psychiatric patients. For those interested in the close reasoning and tight controls that guide scientific studies, here are some details. Of the 75 patients in the disturbed group, 66 were from Dr. Mckenzie’s practice. They represented 100 percent of his psychotic and borderline psychotic patients who were willing to take the course. At the outset of the study, patients were sent cau- tiously one at a time so they could be monitored closely for any HI effects, on themselves or the class. Also, they were sent during what Dr. McKenzie describes as “their more stable periods.” Later he found he could send patients during their less stable periods; four went while they were actively delusional Still later he felt com- fortable sending several disturbed patients at a time, sometimes six or more. As part of his study, he tested 58 of these patients before and after the course to see what changes it might cause. The test the Experiential World Inventory, con- sists of 400 questions designed to measure a person’s perception of reality—something like the famous Ror- schach ink-blot test but in written form. The difference between the before and after scores was impressive: 36 showed dramatic improvement in reality perception, 21 remained about the same, and 1 showed a drop. The person whose score dropped was a twenty-nine- year-old catatonic schizophrenic who—for the first time in his life—stopped taking medication and began dat- ing. “Clinically,” observed Dr. McKenzie, “he had more emotional energy and a brighter outlook following the126 training. However, the dating threw him into conflict and he became disturbed two weeks after the course. He did not require hospitalization.” All these patients, of course, had been in psychother- apy—many for a year or more—which gave Dr. Mc- Kenzie an excellent opportunity to see what actual clinical changes had taken place after the course. Here are some of his findings: One patient, a thirty-year-old schizophrenic, earlier in his life had believed he was under orders, sent tele- pathicaliy, to kill someone. Fortunately he could never find the right person. During therapy sessions after the course he was able to discuss his “delusional system” for the first time. His emotional energy was much greater, and he had a brighter outlook on life. Soon he returned to school to earn a P h D . “His ability to do so was directly related to his taking the course,” explains Dr. McKenzie. Of twenty-eight patients suffering from various types of depression (involutional, psychotic, schizo-affective, and manic-depressive), 26 felt pleasantly better after the course. The other two, who reported feeling more depressed, not only scored better on the questionnaire but, like the others, were able to work through prob- lems they had been unable to deal with before. A twenty-one-year-old woman was determined to commit suicide and was in the early stage of acute psychosis. She assured Dr. McKenzie that nothing he could do would help; she would commit suicide any- way. He recommended that she take the course. By the end of the week he was “absolutely amazed; she re- sponded better than any of the other patients had. It was one of the most dramatic remissions I had ever seen.”

She found a new calm, was more rational, and her thoughts no longer raced in quickly changing direc- A Psychiatrist Works with Mind Control I 127 tions. Just as important, most of her burden of pes- simism was lifted. In a clinical report, Drs. McKenzie and Wright say, “Hospitalization and high doses of medication could not have calmed her as much. She repeated the course two weeks later and again there was improvement. The changes were dramatic; she was better able to work in therapy over the next six months.” A year later, Dr. McKenzie found her fully recovered from her acute illness. Psychoses, of course, are severe mental disorders. Neuroses are far less severe. Of the 189 patients who sook Mind Control, 114 were suffering only from neu- msis. All of these benefited too. Summarizing their clinical findings in the aforemen- tioned paper, the doctors wrote: Those who continued to practice Mind Control after the training were able greatly to alter their lives by it, and even those who did not practice it were able to use it in times of crisis, when they had to cope with stress or had important decisions to make. For everyone it seemed to be a mind ex- pansion experience, a revelation that they could use their rnind in other ways. Group enthusiasm mounted toward the end of the course and most persons experienced a higher emotional energy. The disturbed group also showed an impressive change clinically. Only the one mentioned [the twenty-nine-year-old who had just begun dating] became more upset, and the others at least derived some benefit from the training. Many persons with flat affect [little or no emotional response] showed enthusiasm about something for the first time. There did seem to be a change in emotional en- ergy after the course and an improvement in affect. They had a more positive outlook about their128 future, and for some there was a better under- standing of their psychotic processes. The delu- sional patients were clearly less delusional after the training. There was a greater relaxation and lessening of anxiety. Patients learned to rely on their own re- sources to understand, cope with and solve prob- lems, and to be able to do so gave them more confidence. With all but one of the 189 patients benefiting from the course, Dr. McKenzie concludes that it is “more than just safe and beneficial; it can be immensely use- ful as an integral part of psychotherapy.” He now has almost all his patients take the course. Some of them shorten the length of their therapy by as much as two years with Mind Control techniques. One of these techniques, Dream Control, he says “may very well prove to be a major breakthrough in psychiatry. It is a swift and reliable way to understand and solve problems.” Trained in Freudian analysis, Dr. McKenzie sees no conflict between the way Freudians interpret spon- taneous dreams and the way Mind Control graduates interpret their programmed dreams. “The Freudian dream wish becomes the wish to have the answer,’’ he explains. However, he cautions, “It is necessary to make certain an unconscious dream wish did not supersede the conscious wish to have the answer.” A patient whom Dr. McKenzie had been treating for some time called to say she was about to be admitted to a hospital because of chest and stomach pains. He told her he wanted her in a psychiatric hospital instead. The call was no surprise; he had seen this coming for some time. Her mental condition had been worsening. In the psychiatric hospital, Dr. McKenzie told her to A Psychiatrist Works with Mind Control I 129 program a dream to answer four questions: What is the problem? Where is it? What caused it? How can I get rid of it? Here is what she dreamed: She, her husband, and their three children were driving along a winding road. I: began to snow and the car slid off the road. Soon the car was covered with snow. Her husband told her to cut oS the engine; then eight or ten people came from the city to dig them out. When they emerged from the car, their three children were gone. Just ahead, the road came to a dead end. Another road went off at a right angle into another road at a right angle, which in turn led to still another road—a superhighway, also at a right angle. As he heard her recount this dream, Dr. McKenzie suspected she was describing an intestinal tract and asked her to draw a map of the “winding road.” She did and, sure enough, the road accurately followed the course of a human intestinal tract—all in correct pro- portion. What’s more, a later medical examination found an obstruction at a spot corresponding exactly with where her car slid from the road—where the small intestine meets the large one. In other words, this wom- an’s dream (she knew almost nothing about anatomy; she is a high-school drop-out) accurately pinpointed her obstruction in a one-inch segment of a twenty-foot human intestinal tract!

Still more: The snow, according to the symbolism of her dream, was a dairy product which caused her in- testinal upset and in some way triggered the build-up of the obstruction.

Her husband’s advice to cut off the engine was— again, in symbolic form—the best advice she could get: It meant “shut off the fuel supply to the body; stop eating.”

The eight or ten persons who dug them out are, in130 dream language, the fingers of the two hands. This may represent the healing “laying on of hands” or surgery. The sudden absence of the children was wish fulfill- ment She wanted them out of the way to get more of her husband’s attention for herself. Dr. McKenzie had her transferred to a medical hos- pital because, normally, an intestinal obstruction like this calls for immediate surgery. However—armed with this understanding of her dream and with the knowl- edge, gained in Mind Control class, of the power of the mind over the body, plus the anticipation of surgery— she began to release the obstruction. An hour after Dr. McKenzde’s dream-based diagnosis was medically con- firmed at the hospital, she had freed herself of the ob- struction and no surgery was necessary. Her surgeon *as amazed.

Dr. McKenzie later learned that this woman had had surgery for an intestinal obstruction four times in the past twenty yean, and her surgeons told him that each time it had been in the same place. It appeared she had learned to produce the illness whenever there was a psychological need for it Later, this woman’s eighteen-year-old daughter came to him with a problem—she was pregnant and un- married. “What on earth should I do?” she asked. Once again he advised Dream Control to find the answer. In hex dream, a man appeared. He said, “Have the baby, wait three years, marry the man, then move out of the state.” “I couldn’t have given her better advice,” Dr. Mc- Kenzie said. “The divorce rate among teenagers is eighty percent so three years’ waiting at home was logical. The man was the right person for her, but for a successful marriage they would be better off away from home, far from parents.” In another case, Dream Control led to a totally new A Psychiatrist Works with Mind Control / 131 therapeutic technique, which saved years of therapy time. This patient’s problem was that whenever her husband was more than ten minutes late for dinner she slashed her wrists. For months Dr. McKenzie tried to explain that, while she thought she was responding to her husband’s tardiness, she was actually experiencing an earlier feeling, from childhood, when her alcoholic father would not come home. Once she understood this she would stop her wrist-slashing, but Dr. McKenzie was not getting through. The way things were going, the woman faced two more years of twice-a-week therapy. Dr. McKenzie suggested that she program a dream. Her dream turned out to be an amazingly creative one, which solved her problem overnight. She dreamed that Dr. McKenzie taped some state- ments that upset her the most She played this tape at home and recorded her reactions to it on a second tape. Then she played the second tape for Dr. McKenzie to interpret. To each of his interpretations she exclaimed, “Oh, how stupid of mel” His interpretations pointed out that she was confusing two different realities, past and present Her dream led her to understand this for the first time. She never slashed her wrists again. “This remarkable programmed dream cured the pa- ttern altogether. A three-year follow-up confirmed that she remained well,” Dr. McKenzie reported. Another patient suffered from claustrophobia, and he struggled for more than a year to get at its cause. It turned out to be an interesting one. In a programmed dream he and three other persons were in a rectangle outlined by a rope on the ground. Outside this rec- tangle, at one corner, was a smaller one, also outlined by a rope. Everyone was trying to get out of the larger rectangle through the smaller one. The significance of this dream becomes clear when you see the larger area as the womb, the smaller one as132 the cervix. Outside was a green pasture with cows (breasts). One of the patient’s companions ran toward the smaller rectangle but was stopped by an invisible bar- rier (the uterine wall). A string of tin cans was at- tached to him near his belt buckle (an umbilical cord). The patient knew that somehow he would have to get out of there, but he decided to let the others go first. It gave him a sort of nervous feeling, like giving a speech—something he knew he had to do even though it caused stress and anxiety (birth trauma)—but there was relief after it was over. The other three in the rectangle were his brothers and sister. This one dream gave him the insight he needed into his claustrophobia. What makes the dream particularly interesting is not that it takes a person back prior to birth—this is fairly common—but its reference to the “invisible barrier.’' Does this, Dr. McKenzie wonders, suggest the pos- sibility of clairvoyance prior to birth? Dr. McKenzie not only advises his patients to use Mind Control, he uses it himself to help his patients. “Some of the most amazing wisdom comes to me when I’m using Dream Control.” One night he programmed a dream about a patient in psychoanalysis, a twenty-seven-year-old man who had not dated in two years. Women were against him, “and besides, they were no good.” In his dream, Dr. McKenzie heard himself say, “It’s okay with me if you never have a heterosexual relationship.” Next time the patient complained about women, that is exactly what Dr. McKenzie said to him. It worked. The patient was stunned. Avoiding wom- en was his way of resisting treatment—now it would no longer work. Besides, he was panicked when he A Psychiatrist Works with Mind Control I 133 thought of never having a healthy relationship with a woman. That night he did. Dr. McKenzie, who has become a consultant to Silva Mind Control, continues to search for new ways to use Mind Control to improve and speed up psychiatric treatment At the same time, he is looking for ways to use Mind Control in far broader areas of medical prac- tice—in the diagnosis of illnesses. The first step in this search is to find ways of measur- ing the reliability of Mind Control’s technique of work- ing cases. After three years of research, he believes he is coming close to what he terms an “absolute research design,” one that eliminates all the variables and mea- sures only what it sets out to measure. His purpose is to find ways to put case working to medical use. Medical diagnosis sometimes involves exploratory surgery or drugs that may cause discomfort or danger to the patient—and no diagnostic technique is accurate all the time. Psychic diagnosis would pose no hazard for the patient provided its reliability can be demon- strated. This is what Dr. McKenzie is working on. The first time he tried his new research design was in a Mind Control graduate class of 30 persons. The accuracy of the results was greater than what chance would produce by 200 to one. He was encouraged, but he wanted to refine his methods even more and to ar- range for the scoring to be computerized. He checked out his plans with the statistics depart- ment of the University of Pennsylvania, and they agreed that he had indeed eliminated the variables that plague psychic research and that his measurements would be accurate. The Mind Control newsletter published drawings of two human bodies (see pages 134-35) with circles for readers to check. They were given, as in case work, the134 A Psychiatrist Works with Mind Control I 135 IMPORTANT: The purpose of this experiment is to cor- rectly detect the location of the abnormality or illness. Please limit your activities to detection so as not to affect the illness during the experiment. InstrHctionss

1. Debbie Veccio is 23 years old and lives in Miami, Flor- ida. She has a medi- cal problem that you may be able to help. Please go to your Mind Control level and picture or imag- ine Debbie, with a desire on your part to locate her illness. When you think you have located her ill- ness, fill in ONE circle only on di- agram A, nearest where you sensed or guessed it to be. CASE A Important: If you fill in more than one circle per diagram, your answer will be disqualified. Allow at least 10 minutes to elapse be- fore going on to case

B. 2. Cynthia Cohen is 21 years old and lives in Miami, Flor- ida. She has a medical problem that you may be able to help.

Please go to your Mind Control level and picture or imagine Cynthia, with a desire on your part to locate her illness.

When you think you have located her illness, fill in ONE circle only in diagram B, nearest where you sensed or guessed it to be. Because the nature of this experiment involves detection only, do not send corrective healing until…

CASE B136 name, age, sex, and location of two persons who were ill. What they were not given, what Dr. McKenzie himself did not know, was the nature of the illnesses. The Florida physician who gave him the cases was to reveal this only after results were in.

Doing two cases rather than one is central to the new research design. This permits Dr. McKenzie to weed out all the guesses. For example, if patient A but not patient B had an injury to the left ankle, any circles checked on patient B’s left ankle would be guesses.

If 5 readers guessed B’s left ankle, it is reasonable to assume that the same number would be guessing A’s.

Suppose 50 readers checked A’s left ankle. Dr. McKenzie would substract 5 from this number as guesses and conclude that 45 were operating psychically. The computer would then measure the statistical signifi- cance of the results.

For this to work, the two cases must be different. If they both had injured left ankles, this method of weed- ing out the non-psychic answers could not be used.

The Florida physician goofed; he supplied two cases which, it turned out, had injuries to the same area of the body. Dr. McKenzie had to change his plans and study the results some other way. Instead of comparing case A with case B, he compared the number of correct responses with the next-largest number of responses. Although the computer told him the results could have happened by chance only once in almost a billion times, he still does not consider his experiment conclusive because his research design could not be followed.

There are many more facets to his design than are outlined here, and he has conducted many other experiments that produced what he terms “statistically significant results.” His entire project is so significant that we will surely hear more about it when he has refined his technique even more. Instead of simply having them check a circle to indicate the location of an illness, he will give Mind Control graduates lists of medical ailments to check, thereby providing specific diagnosis.

“These preliminary studies,” he said, ‘‘point toward high levels of statistical significance. I am not ready, though, to draw conclusions from them. A lot more painstaking work is needed. If later studies are equally encouraging, we may have a way of putting psychics to work to help physicians in their diagnosis in ways even more reliable than those being used now. This just could turn out to be a medical breakthrough. It’s too early to say for sure, but that’s what I’m working toward.”

Mind Control’s Research Director, J. Wilfred Hahn, a biochemist and former president of Mind Science Foundation, shares Dr. McKenzie’s hopes. “Ever since the nineteenth century, when the scientific method was brought to bear on psychic research, uncontrolled (sometimes unknown) variables left questions hanging over the findings. Whether Dr. McKenzie achieves a medical breakthrough is, as he says, yet to be deter- mined. But I believe he has already achieved a breakthrough in his research method. From all the data he gathers, he can concentrate the psychic responses—he can eliminate all the garbage, leaving only what he wants to study, just as a chemist studying a single trace element in water can eliminate the water and all other elements except the one he wants to study.”