A PATH TO PEACE -
"Egyptian fakir," Dr. Tahra Bey, gave rather a ghastly show of his powers to some doctors and jour- nalists recently. But I think the attitude of a part of the audience was more unpleasant than anything the fakir showed us. .
When he drove a knife through the skin of his throat, or when an eminent surgeon put a bodkin (that may not be the medical name, but it looked like a bodkin) right through the fakir's forearm, women turned away in horror and one of them fainted. A journalist near by me said it was " disgusting," and went out to have a drink at the expense of the management. Why did these people come to see experiments, whose object it is to prove that pai,n is an illusion, if they are so mentally enmeshed in illusion and if their imagination is so uncontrolled that they sicken at the sight of the illusion of suffering ? Part of the audience made me ashamed of Western civilization, with its physical puerilities and mental arro- gance. At the same time, there is no doubt that the per- formance is unsuitable for the public stage. The public would neither appreciate it nor understand it ; indeed, it would do nothing but feed the sadistic instincts of what I hope is a minority.
And yet Dr. Tahra Bey has a real message to give to the West. If he only convinced half a dozen of the hundred doctors present at the seance his work may have good results. New ideas of value to mankind rarely come to us panoplied and fully armed, ready to fend for them- selves in the world. Our doctors will have to clothe and equip this three thousand year old physiological psycho- logy of the East with their own scientific formulae.
There is no doubt in my mind that Dr. Tahra Bey is of the order of those Aryan Melchizedeks who evolved the various systems of Yoga. Technically he is a Sufi, I sup- pose, but spiritually he follows a branch (Gathasthayog) of that lofty philosophy of the Vedas of whose teachings Max M011er, Schopenhauer and Swedenborg said that their dissemination would one day produce a spiritual Renaissance in Europe. As a student of these subjects for twenty years, as a disciple moreover along similar but less professional lines than the fakir's, I can affirm that there is nothing either in Yoga in general or in the Sufi doctrine in particular that need disturb the faith or injure the mental balance . of any Western inquirer. On the contrary, control of breath and nerve-reactions will bring peace where no peace was, and new energy- to slaves of wrong thought and wrong nutrition. Here, in Dr. Tahra Bey, is a Christian Scientist in excelsi.s. He says there is no pain (" La douleur est une opinion"). He sticks two skewers through his tongue and another through both cheeks, offers to let the doctors cut him about as they will, and when the knife-blade enters his flesh, his pulse registers not a throb the more. But at will he can accele- rate his heart beats. These things he does beyond shadow of doubt. Whether it be true that he can heal his wounds by speeding up his circulation I do not know.
" You don't feel pain if you don't think about it," said the fakir in his soft but very audible French. " Yesterday I saw a little girl who had fallen down and scratched her arm. She didn't stop playing but went on running about, so that her abrasions healed quickly. I do the same with my wounds. My body really belongs to- me—all of it— heart, digestive tract, nerves. I can repair any damage in my tissues. I can also slow down my pulse and go into a profound and restful slumber, which indeed is more like hibernation than sleep."
• ._No doubt doctors will say that in cases of hysteria they have seen a similar anaesthesia. But have they ever seen control such as Dr. Tahra Bey's ? I observed him very carefully, comparing him with teachers I have worked with in India and elsewhere. The Fakir had the same powerful ,neck, the same. deep lungs, the same poised rhythm of walk, the same level eyes as those Brahmins of the Ganges side, our Aryan cousins of a remote antiquity.
_There is no particular mystery about anything that the fakir does. He. claims only to have educated his ego, so that he has obtained full domination over the physical body and over his states of mind. In half a . minute he can throw himself into a trance. After some invisible breathing exercises he presses the pneumo-gastric nerves on each side of his neck, turns the tip of his tongue back into his throat and becomes " dead to the world." In this state he can be buried alive for periods up to six hours. This experiment was demonstrated to us at the Scala the other night for ten minutes. Now ten minutes is longer than a man of even abnormal lung power can hold his breath. Houdini, for instance, who has wonderful breath control, can remain under water for only five minutes.
Of what use are these demonstrations ? The reader must judge for himself. The fakir has dramatized for us the soul's struggle for control of our physical nature. Our body has a right to health. Can we win it for ourselves ? Are pills, massage and artificial light more than make- shifts ? As Dr. Dorsey says in Why We Behave Like Human Beings, evolution depends on our " capacity to modify and delay reactions according to experience.", That is exactly what the fakir does.
F. YEATS-BROWN.
Previous page
