14) Psychical Radionics

World transforming innovations are not always welcomed with jubilation. A 1926 report on Abrams' techniques by the International Hahnemanian Committee had this to say about innovation. "In 1878 a London newspaper called the telephone a great American humbug, and said it was far inferior to the old and well established system of speaking tubes. Daguerre was put in jail because he said he could reproduce the face of a man upon a tin plate, and Marconi was considered an idle dreamer when he proposed the wireless transmission of sound and speech."

Following the death of Dr Abrams, the world of Radionics exploded into psychedelic panoply of inventors, theories and devices. Each had an individual understanding of what was taking place in their work. For every new approach, there was a unique set of tools and practices. Each discovery stimulated the design of more appliances. These devices encouraged different interpretations of the underlying forces involved. There were more terms and more disagreements about approach and methodology. Even the facts became subject to doubt, as Radionics became evermore a self-referential system where observation and interpretation were reduced to completely subjective criteria. Despite all, including legal and institutional persecution, Radionics continued to thrive.

The only explanation outside of pure self-deception or outright fraud lay in the possibility that, in throwing open the mind to technological enhancement, reality itself began conforming to individual expectations and experiments. Fraud and self-deception no doubt played a significant role in the development of radionic and other early medical technology. Not much has changed in fact. Open any paper today and you will likely find reference to tobacco or pharmaceutical litigation derived in part from false claims and abused medical procedures.

Even the outside possibility that the placebo effect makes a significant contribution to radionic cures cannot outweigh the documented stories of the many individuals helped or fully healed of debilitating illnesses. Success is the one element in the hundred year history of Radionics that has kept it thriving today throughout the world. Throughout this time, numerous radionic cures have resisted the establishment’s claim of fraud or self-deception.

The possibility must be considered that many of the competent Radionics inventors and practitioners actually did accomplish what they claimed. They used their unusual instruments to enable their minds to alter reality outside their body. Or perhaps the device allowed the user to circumvent the assumption that they couldn’t act in this manner. As Dr Tiller put it, perhaps Radionics was only “training wheels for the mind.”

By the last quarter of the 20th century, radionics was still firmly in the grip of 19th century occult thinking, at least in some quarters. In Britain, David Tansley, D.C. is credited with introducing the knowledge of Eastern philosophies into Radionics. A sculptor and horticulturalist early on, he received a diploma from the Los Angles College of Chiropractic in 1965 and subsequently returned to England to begin his practice.

While in California, Tansley had studied at the Ananda Ashram where he became aware of the ‘subtle anatomy of man’, an Eastern theory by which disease is said to originate from subtle, etheric bodies nested within the physical. These etheric bodies contain localized energy vortexes, termed ‘chakras’. Once Tansley had learned of Radionics through the British Radionics Association, he felt confident that radionic balancing should be applied to these pre-physical subtle bodies as well as the physical one. Once Eastern mystical philosophy and medicine was firmly incorporated into the more scientifically leaning methodologies like chiropractic and radionics, what we now refer to as “New Age” healing and metaphysics were born.