Chapter One

Your Weird and Wonderful Mind

What would you do if you had a squiggy grey jelly in a round container about the size of a football? You could of course scare your friends with it by getting them to touch the wet slimy jelly. Supposing the jelly talked to you though; supposing it created full surround virtual reality worlds you could explore, did your homework for you, designed a supersonic aeroplane, or cried - what would you do with it then?

Sitting inside your head, your brain is just such a pearly-white jelly-like substance that is the visible body of your mind. It appears quite small if you look at it. If you explore it in the right way though, it is bigger than all the sky with all the stars and all the planets and space. Because a healthy brain has about ten billion nerve cells working in it, and each little cell can connect with the other cells, your brain can make more patterned interconnections than there are atoms in the universe. The number of these connections is much bigger than ten billion.

Let me make this big number a little clearer. If you wrote the number one on a piece of paper, you would then have to stick not just one metre of paper strips together to hold all the noughts after the one, not even a thousand kilometres of paper, but ten million kilometres of zeros! That means your brain can do a lot more than you usually ask it to do!

The potato you ate yesterday remembers your address today!

We often take for granted some of the most astounding facts about our everyday life. They seem so normal we barely notice them. But just think, the potatoes or rice you ate yesterday, is today capable of sitting and laughing at a television program. When you digested the food you ate, in some way that is truly astounding it transformed into your movements, and feelings, and being able to do maths and enjoy a video. Not even the brainiest person in the world has been able to make a robot or creature that can eat potatoes and change them into the ability to read this book. If we can already do that amazing thing, what else might we be able to do?

Little Brain – Huge Mind

Your experience of remembering things, laughing, enjoying television and knowing who you are is called your mind. So we are going to explore your amazing, unbelievable, wonderful mind. We are going to roam around in the lives of people who do things with their mind that some people do not believe possible. Solomon Shereshevskii for instance remembered everything that ever happened to him – even the number-plate on the car that passed him on the road twenty years ago. Yes it’s true!

Djuma was reared by wolves in Russia because his parents were killed when he was a baby. What do you think his mind is like?

Those are the easy ones. Eileen Garret was able to hold an object and look into its past, describing clearly the people who used it and their life and surroundings. Edgar Cayce could apparently look into another person’s body, even when they were at a great distance. Hadad could heal people of serious illness, even when they were not present.

You have an amazing mind too

Even though you probably have two arms, two ears, and are like other people in many ways, some things about you are completely different,. You are unique. Not only is your body slightly different in such ways as your fingerprints, but also your mind is different and special. There may be things some of your friends can do that you can’t. If you think about it and test yourself though, you will find you have skills and abilities they do not. To explore some areas of your specialness, we will try out some of the secret methods people with amazing minds have used in practising their unusual skills. Some of the things we will learn are how to remember things easily; how to quieten the body and melt fears; how to move beyond our eyes and ears to sense things; how to let the body tell us what it knows; how our body can heal itself, and many more.

Get ready for the journey into mind

So get ready to meet some really interesting people. They will help you discover something of the miracle it is to be human, and some of the amazing things you are capable of. What these interesting people did in various ways questions some of the ideas many people have about our mind, what it is capable of, and what the limits of human ability are. Their lives suggest we are much more wonderful than is often thought, and are part of a limitless and eternal existence.