My students are all used to my standard saying about the world we create with our own amazing minds. If I say, “What you think….” there will often be a chorus that adds the rest, “…is what you see, and what you see is what you get.” Some of those who know the saying have also put it into use to alter their lives along the lines they desire. My posting about that was on November 20th.

There is a corollary, and it is as true as any statement can be, and continually verified by personal experience…What you expect is what you see. Let’s look at it for a while.

Joseph Chilton Pearce, the world-renowned expert on child development, once described an experiment that shone a brilliant light into the area of human prejudice. Subjects were presented with a TV monitor on which a picture of some common object gradually appeared, a few dots at a time, rather like a Polaroid picture developing.

Subjects were timed according to the first moment at which they correctly identified the object on the screen. As you would expect, the right brain dominants did very well, were very speedy, and took very few guesses to get it right. Then a twist was applied to the experiment, and EVERYONE who was in the group that had the additional step was affected in the same way.

The additional step was this: as soon as the subject made the first guess at what the object was going to be, the experimenter jeered at the idea as ridiculous, “How could anyone think this was going to be a cow!” sort of thing. In EVERY case where the guess was resisted verbally the subject took up to twice as long to see that the object wasn’t what they first suggested. Even when it was 75% an airplane they could still see the cow, because their idea had been ridiculed and opposed.

What does this experimental data do to the naïve concept that staunch Republicans can persuade equally staunch Democrats about anything? Not to mention Jews and Arabs, psychics and materialists, war lovers and war haters. What does it do to the concept of debate and discussion as a means of arriving at truth?

The scientists of course will smugly opt out of the human race at this point and say that it couldn’t happen to them. All they have to do is experiment and read their instruments, and there is the answer. Actually, exactly the same thing applies to scientists as to everybody else. What they see is often just what they want to see. And here is a fascinating bit of science history to demonstrate this. Remember it when some scientist says that your visions are hallucinations, and your intuition is unscientific and therefore is in some way erroneous.

Here is the story. It starts in Merrie Olde Englande where some degree of eccentricity is tolerated. In Cambridgeshire in England there is a stretch of canal. In some places it is dead straight and a six-mile dead-straight section of it is between two bridges.

In 1838 a Mr. Rowbotham made a series of experiments over a period of nine months. He made observations of marks on one bridge from the other, using a telescope. He did this because he believed that the Biblical version of Earth as a disc was correct, and that therefore there should be no evidence of curvature when he viewed one bridge from another.

He found that objects on one bridge were not perceptibly lower than those on the other. Therefore there was no curvature. Therefore the Earth was flat as Moses apparently thought. He traveled all over England with the remarkable energy that the one issue person often displays, lecturing about the fact that the Bible was right and the geologists were wrong.

His book, Zetetic Astronomy was used as a basis to found the Zetetic Society. By 1870 it had lots of members, and one of them, a John Hamden, offered a reward of 500 English pounds to any defender of orthodox geology who could do the same experiments and demonstrate curvature. The very famous Alfred Russell Wallace, who has the credit with Darwin for the natural selection theory of evolution, accepted the offer.

He and a flat-earther named Carpenter both did the same experiments. Wallace concluded curvature, Carpenter concluded flatness. The scientific referee gave the prize money to Wallace, and the Zetetic Society immediately sued, because it was clear to them that Wallace MUST have cheated to get his results.

The court said that the scientific material did not come under the law, but the wager did. It was not actually a binding legal contract, and since Carpenter and Hamden did not accept Wallace’s measurements they could have Hamden’s money back.

Carpenter was not content with that and went on a rampage for justice, bitterly persecuting Wallace as a cheat and a liar, by letters and speeches for sixteen years. Wallace eventually sued for relief from this person, and Carpenter went to jail for a year. As soon as he was out he started again.

As Robert Anton Wilson said, “We haven’t see anything like this missionary zeal since James Randi’s hellfire and brimstone Crusade against Uri Geller.” Randi is the stage magician who thinks that all "psychic phenomena are hallucinations or fakery." Uri Geller is the Israeli who bent spoons on TV and had half the children in the country doing the same. This widely reported psychic phenomena affronted the Great Randi, as he calls himself professionally and he began a campaign to prove Uri a fake. I just say this; some of my ten year old students bent spoons with Uri. Straightforward fact to me.

Carpenter emigrated to America in the end and continued to preach the Flat Earth Theory over here.

In 1901 an orthodox experimenter repeated the experiments and reported his results in a paper for the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Being orthodox, he reported that there was curvature. But the Zetetic Society was still alive and strong, and this time their experiments were recorded by a photographer. There was no curvature.

Well maybe you thought that there were only two options, flat or convex. But that’s because you probably didn’t know about Cyrus Teed. Cyrus, like his cousin Joseph Smith, of Mormon Church fame, had a remarkable imagination and a tendency towards what some call spiritual experiences.

One night in October 1869 he was working in his alchemical laboratory using the latest electrochemical methods. He reports that he was visited by the Goddess, who told him that he had been chosen to resolve the unfortunate conflict between science and religion. So She gave him the true picture of the universe, which of course, was quite different from all the others.

Cyrus then realized that the whole universe was in fact solid rock. We on Earth live in a little hollowed out space in this rock, and all the stars and heavenly lights are actually reflections from light source on Earth. Cyrus got his ‘facts’ together, marshaled his arguments, changed his name to Koresh, which is Hebrew for Cyrus, and set out to preach the new gospel. He soon acquired several thousand followers. They named a city in Florida after him, and thought that Koreshianity would soon replace Christianity and its patriarchal fictions. There are still Koreshites apparently. In 1995 they were still sending their newspaper to libraries.

Now Koresh was right about the Goddess coming back at least, but just because someone recognizes that the Goddess exists doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s not a nut. Therefore it isn’t necessarily so, as Koresh preaches, that we all live in a hollow Earth, and that Blacks and Whites must unite against the Chinese, because the Goddess said so.

Back now to the ‘scientific experiments.’ A follower of Koresh named Morrow invented an instrument called a Rectilineator, which measured curvature more accurately than the cameras and telescopes used in England. He and Koresh worked for over a month on a 2 mile long section of the Florida coastline. They tested for flatness, ( Bible folk), convex curvature (orthodox geologists), and concavity, (Earth as a bubble in a rock).

They measured concavity. According to their scientifically measured results we live inside a bubble about 8000 miles in diameter, and inside a hollow in the rock that forms the rest of the universe. Probably this scientifically validated theory is news to you.

From all this we conclude that the instrument that reads all the instruments is a human nervous system, and it sees what it thinks should be there, unless something really startling occurs so that the brain has to do a reframing job.

Having worked in the British Society for Psychical Research with people as fundamentally materialist as the Great Randi, I know that some people are actually immune from any data that hurts their comfort zone. Nothing gets through that could do that. It's all lies or hallucinations. Remember that you psychics. Randi can't do it, and can’t see it, therefore you are frauds. Or Randi, who is a fine stage magician figures out a way to get the same effect, therefore everyone else is also using trickery.

Something like a situation not so long ago when a famous celebrity, whose wife seemed to have had a fatal accident, was seen heading for the Mexican border in a white car of a well known make, named after a horse. He had thousands of dollars in cash, and a false beard with him. The conclusion that his brilliant defense lawyer reached after considering this behavior was that the prosecuting attorney was a racist.