Recently a moment from my childhood has come back to memory. It took me back to long ago stagnant eighties of the last century. How old was I then? Seven… or eight. I recalled a thunder-stormy night, huge dark clouds were looming over the houses and were darting thunders to the earth. First I was standing behind the door at the balcony and gazing at the threatening darkness but then I wanted to open the door and say to those clouds:
– Wo-o-h clouds! Come on, let it thunder stronger! You are so high above me and I am so far! I am not afraid of you!
…And at this very moment there was such a deafening thunderclap that I got frightened and immediately ran out of the balcony, closed the door and stood wondering if… if it… had been the clouds… which attended my words? Or is it my imagination? After all, it would be strange to think that a cloud can “hear” a man… The thunder-storm already ceased but I still could not calm down. I was afraid to simply look out of the window. Finally, I took courage in my hands and returned to the balcony squinting at the sunset light and inhaling the fragrance of the freshly squeezed clouds. “No, certainly not, – I thought – the clouds cannot take offence at me, it must have been a mere coincidence”. At this very moment I’ve had a feeling that someone poked me in the chest with an invisible finger threateningly: do not you dare joke with such a tremendous power…
As a child, I used to love books. First I would look them through. Large colourful pictures illustrating fairy tales for children and curved lines of letters, especially of capitals. Later, however, when I learned to read I would spend a lot of time scanning the lines and drawing in my imagination the cloudland pictures.
Once when I was housecleaning I came upon a book which was there behind the bed. It was a big heavy book, not like other ordinary books. Seemingly it differed from all others I’ve ever seen in my life by its impressive size. “What might it be about?”, I wondered leafing through the book. It turned out that among other things the book talked about the so called thought broadcasting and the belief that objects, plants, animals and people are capable of exchanging information. The book gave some vague explanations of how all this was possible and what kind of exercises a reader was supposed to do to verify its reliability. To be sure, I wanted to study all those schemes and pictures in the book to understand how the reader could get it right.
I tried to reproduce some experiments that were given in the book but none of them brought the desired results. I continued reading till I reached a chapter which kindled my interest notably. It talked about the possibility to communicate with one’s subconsciousness (it was claimed by the book’s author) by getting information from an instrument called pendulum (an object suspended from a rope held in a hand). I read about how to ask questions to the pendulum and receive answers from it – from “yes” or “no” to simple questions to full explicit sentences to be made by connecting separately standing letters. I remember a picture which illustrated a sequence of those letters. The picture resembled a hand fan with its each segment having a written letter on it. The pendulum was supposed to show (swinging) which letter is to appear next in the answer. I made a pendulum as implied by the book, bent over the picture the way a graphic man was bending in it and asked my question… Nothing came of it. The pendulum did not even swing. I reread the chapter again and again to consult about how precisely a hand should be held and the subconsciousness should be turned to, but… nothing came of it…
“Ha ha ha, – I laughed to myself – well, of course, it is impossible. The book is a bluff which the author created to attract readers’ attention and make money off it”.
Yet, I have looked through that book a few more times rereading the pages about the pendulum… What was there that I liked so much? Why could I not tear myself away from those pictures with a focused man in them? Years later I would read many other books where authors described the “communication” with the subconsciousness through a pendulum. Some of those authors would say that one could “make a deal” with a pendulum, that a pendulum was kind of a guide to the “Earth’s field of knowledge”, the “forces of light” and would describe how one should ask questions, thank for the received answers and many other things. Looking back, I can say: at that time all those things seemed to me unusual, contrary to the rules of nature, and I liked reading about it indeed but over time since I failed to gain any results in practice the interest I had in books dealing with the pendulum has dissipated.
