Sixth Sense by Tom Lethbridge

© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

What possible connection can there be between the pendulum (this ball on a length of thread), the operator, and the results he is able to obtain? Please remember that I am not in the least credulous. I doubt everything I seem to find out and, after a run of successes, which appear to be completely convincing, I often go back to the very beginning and doubt the whole thing once more.

But always I find that the thing works and, if it works with material objects, it is hard to doubt that it is telling the truth with matters which are less substantial. If it tells the truth about where a truffle, a beetle, a nail, a bead, a pin, a bit of glass, or a lump of lead lies hidden, surely it also tells the truth when it says that a pebble has been used by a male slinger.

To get a clearer view we must lengthen our range and include many more facts. In particular I must discuss rates. Now, as a result of several years of experiment, I have worked out a considerable table of these rates and published quite a lot of them. [2] But the list is far greater now. It seems that each element has its rate and that each compound has a rate for each element in its composition. If one is to make a comparison with ordinary physics, it appears probable that each rate is that of a particular kind of atom. But this is only true of material objects. Non-material things have rates also.

A rate on the pendulum, that is the length of cord from the point of suspension between the operator’s fingers to the top of the pendulum bob, is equal to the radius of a circle around the object being investigated. You can demonstrate this by walking towards the object until the pendulum gyrates and noting the point at which this occurs. It takes little time to work out the circle. This circle can also be shown to be the base of a pair of tall thin cones, ascending and descending vertically.

We are assuming that this biconical arrangement around an object is some kind of field of force. It may be an electro-magnetic field of force, or it may be something we do not yet know. These bicones may always be around the object, or they may only be induced on a straight ray through the object when it is subject to contact with a force from the operator. The operator need not necessarily be human.

Many forms of animal life, perhaps all of them, seem to be able to contact the rays, but only on the given rate. It seemed probable, for example that the cat’s whiskers act like divining rods. So I decided to try and find out their co-ordinates in our pendulum code. There is more work in this that anyone might think, for not only have you to rate the whiskers but you have to find out to what thought forms these co-ordinates also belong.

Diagram of a cat’s face to show the rates of its whiskers as indicated by the pendulum: 10"=heat and light; 16"=sex; 20"=living things and man; 24"=mammals.

Actually the cat has at least four sets of bristles. The longest and furthest back have a rate of 16-inches for sex, which is not a surprise. The next group is on 20-inches. Man comes on this rate, with love and life. The smallest and farthest forward of the group is on 24-inches. On this rate you also find mice. Finally its eyebrows are on 10-inches. On 10-inches you also find heat, explaining surely how a cat knows with unerring certainty where to find the warmest spot in the house.

These four groups of bristles seem to explain a cat’s vigorous sex life; its fondness for mankind; its passion for mice and its love of warmth. This can hardly be chance or coincidence, but looks like a carefully planned arrangement. If you were asked to describe the characteristics of a cat, surely these four would come high on your list.

There are other ways of using the pendulum, which do not entail using the rates and may be more efficient for finding buried treasure, or a cure for constipation; but the rate method is the simplest. When dealing with an unknown subject, the simpler the method is the more chance there should be of finding out what is going on.

It seems clear from the start that some kind of mental selection must take place. It is used because the five bodily senses - sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell - are not adequate to do what the pendulum does. A sixth sense has to be employed. In general, science, being based on the use of only five senses, has for this reason deliberately avoided a study of what might be revealed by a sixth.

But this is as blind an outlook as saying there is no picture on a television screen, because such a picture could not be projected in such a way that it passes long distances through walls and people to be reassembled and viewed in your sitting-room. Even the most brilliant Greek philosophers would have found it hard to credit this phenomenon.

The sixth sense is far easier to understand than this, and moreover has been a commonplace piece of knowledge for thousands of years. It is difficult to see how anyone could believe in any of the greater religions of the world, without realizing that there must be a sixth sense, and furthermore that this sense is outside some of the restrictions which govern the other five.

All through this book we are dealing with matters which are evidently perfectly simple to the sixth sense, but incredible to the others. It therefore seems highly probable that this sense is not located in the body, but can be made available to it. To the sixth sense the slinger has just slung his pebble. To the other five it happened two thousand years ago.

To the sixth sense a fossil sea-urchin, which has been dead a hundred million years, still reveals to the pendulum what sex it had at that time. There is no time to the sixth sense. It is in the fourth dimension, or on another plane of living. But this side of the problem is theoretical and must wait for a while. The pendulum rates are our present concern.

'A foolish and perverse generation seeketh for a sign,’ said Jesus and added, ‘There shall be no sign given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas.’ In other words, it is folly to bother about insisting on proof when confronted with obviously adequate testimony. If a thing works, it works. There is no need to prove that it works.

The man who spent his life trying to prove that thought existed and in the end decided that perhaps some thought existed somewhere, should really have been confined in a mental home and taught some kind of more reasonable occupation. Do you need proof that a torpedo can explode when it sinks a great ship? Of course not. So why should you need proof when a water-diviner finds water. He can do so. You can see the water he finds. What is all the fuss about?

I have worked out a table of rates for many inorganic substances. There is no need to describe it all again. The rate for elements, which I have at present found, range from 5.5-inches, that of phosphorus, to 32.5-inches for nickel. I have not found all the rates for single elements and do not intend to try to do so. That is a job for someone else. I am trying to get to the root of the whole subject and not construct a table of weights and measures.

It is also possible to show that an inorganic compound possesses two or more rates. Perhaps they indicate the construction of a molecule from two or more atoms. But I do not think so. There is no compound rate for the two or more elements. There is no comparison between our rates and a table of atomic weights. The rates may be rates of vibration to which we tune in with the pendulum. But this in turn does not appear to be the right answer. How, for instance, would you propose to find the rate of vibration for thought or sex?

My discovery of the sex rates was accidental. Having found that the rate for gold was 29-inches, I went out to try to find gold. Instead, after much difficulty, I found that the gold rate was attached to a beetle larva. By remembering how a gold ring suspended from a thread was often used to detect the sex of an unborn infant, it was suggested to my mind that perhaps what I had found was the femininity of the beetle caterpillar.

It was easy to show by tests with living male and female animals that this was the correct answer. The rate for gold and female sex are both the same and 29-inches. Here you leave the inorganic world for another. A caterpillar of a female beetle can be located by the use of a pendulum. It has a rate, perhaps its vibrational rate, which can be detected underground and also at a distance. No one is surely going to say that this can be done by any of the five normal senses. The male rate has been found too. It is 24-inches and the same as the rate for diamond. You can test these rates with your friends and animals.

Having once begun to find rates for these intangibles, it was not difficult to devise ways of discovering others. Thought appeared as 27-inches and memory as 7-inches. A rate for what appears to be life was common to all living things and all fragments of things once living, animal or vegetable, 20-inches. There also seemed to be a rate for dead things at 40-inches. Heat and light, colour and points of the compass all could be shown to have their distinctive rates.

Gradually a picture begins to emerge and a plan began to show at the back of it. The clue had been noticed already when I wrote ESP, but it is far more obvious now. As I said in that book, I should never have noticed it at all had I not been working in inches. Centimetres, an unnatural scale in any case, would never have given away the secret.

For it appears that the human body is built to fit the scale, which now begins to be visible. Its measurements, the inch derived from the thumb, the yard derived from a stride and so on, all find their place in a master plan. Man is the size he is because the plan was already there and he was built to fit it.

Of course I began by tabulating such rates as had been discovered. But a table as such is not particularly helpful. As I studied the table, a rather remarkable feature caught my eye. Certain basic concepts were found together at 10, 20, 30 or 40 inches:

All these were of such importance that it seemed obvious to me that I was dealing with some completely fundamental plan. It could be no accident that, with a table beginning at 0 and ending at 40, each 10-inch rate should carry with it so many matters of vital consequence. Some intelligence must have constructed the scale and fitted everything into it. I looked at what I had found in astonishment. It seemed quite impossible to believe that so simple a thing as a pendulum could tell such a remarkable story.

The rejected study was giving the evidence, which all other studies had failed to produce. Materialists were materialists simply because they could not observe a basic plan behind the other studies.

Was I imagining the whole thing? Did some layer of my own mind produce the whole gamut of rates? Everything might be a fantasy. But it could not be a fantasy. The concrete objects produced from beneath the earth by an application of their own particular rates were plain for all to see. And many people had watched me find them. No it could not be a fantasy. Therefore it must be fact.

Furthermore it was not the Earth’s magnetic field which gave rise to the whole system of rates. You can take your prismatic compass, lay off the line to magnetic north on the ground, point at it and swing the pendulum. The pendulum just goes on swinging backwards and forwards. But if you make the concrete allowance for compass deviation and point to true North, the pendulum gyrates at once. Therefore, if the Earth has any say in the arrangement of these rates, it is the Earth’s mass which determines them and not its magnetic field.

Here we get into even more difficult problems; but we will do no more than notice them now. Is everything, man, beast, bird, fish, tree, and rock directly under control by the Earth itself? Does the Earth arrange how they shall be formed and how they shall develop? Is the Earth, as some have believed, itself a living organism with great intelligence? Are we in fact simply cells in the Earth’s structure, just as the cells in our own bodies are each one individual?

To these questions, the answer for the moment appears to be that some great intelligence has evidently devised a scale, a framework perhaps, in which everything is controlled by rays appreciable to a sixth sense by means of a pendulum. This framework is arranged in relation to the Earth’s mass and not to its magnetic field. Magnetism, in fact, has a rate of its own, not the same as electricity at 20 inches, but very near it. The magnetic rate appears to be 20.25 inches. It is not one of the cardinal points on our compass-rose of rates.

I plotted out this compass-rose, the term for the circular card on which the sailor observes the bearing of the head of his ship in relation to magnetic north. I had four cardinal points, North 40-inches, East 10-inches, South 20-inches, West 30-inches. There were 40 divisions on the rose; not 360 or 32 as on the mariner’s compass. If you plot the rates in any other manner, say 36 or 32 divisions, it will not fit.

And there I stuck in my thinking for a very long time. What qualifications had I for getting on even as far as this? The only hope you have of finding anything out in a new subject of this kind is to admit to yourself that you know nothing. It is perhaps comforting to know that nobody else knows much anyway.

Diagram to show relationship between the pendulum rates and the magnetic scale. The outer circle gives the pendulum rates in inches

Having the four cardinal points of North, South, East and West; Air, Earth, Fire and Water; Black, White, Red and Green, or whichever series of four we like to choose, it is a simple matter to draw out our compass-rose of 40 segments. On to this can be marked all our known rates in their correct positions. Other pairs of opposites at once become apparent.

At 32.5 inches we went outside the range of any inorganic substance whose rate had yet been found. But when attempting to obtain a rate for Evolution, I seemed to get it at 36 inches, which is the opposite of the 16-inch rate for dung and dung beetles, which we have discovered earlier in this book. I think both these rates are probably correct and if so that for Evolution takes on a considerable significance. What is Evolution but a step forward? A step forward is 36 inches. An attempt to study the 16-inch rate suggested that it referred to regression.

I have no confidence in what appears to hang on the 36-16-inch rates. But, suppose you take this scale to be the foundation of all earthly happenings, then Death is 40 and full Life is 20. Suppose you think of this, not in inches, but in years.

At 40 man dies; at 20 he is in his full vigour. This is not comprehensible now, because man lives much longer than he used to do. In a hunting community, in which the earliest form of man found himself, he seldom lived much longer than 40 years; because, after that age, his reactions became too slow to avoid death from the fangs, claws, horns, or stroke of the tail of the beasts he hunted in order to feed himself.

The Eskimos, who I have seen in West Greenland, were the most cheerful people I have ever met. Yet they seldom lived over the age of 45 years. We know why they did not do so. The men grew too slow to cope with hunting the white bear, the walrus, or even the grey seal. They were killed by the polar bear’s mighty paw, or their kayak was smashed to splinters by the walrus.

Suppose there is some sense in what I have been saying; what happened at 16 years? Why then surely man and woman had become fully and vigorously involved in sex and, instead of being evolving mental beings, reverted for a time at least to the more animal side of their nature. So too when this side had been satisfied and worked out, at 36, they began to wonder what life was all about and some of them started to climb up the ladder of mental evolution.

This idea of mine may be the purest nonsense. But nevertheless it has some observation to make it worth consideration. The 40-year life span may have been the one originally designed, by whatever intelligence devised the whole original plan, to be that of man himself. Life for early man was always so hard that 40 years was quite long enough. It is now so soft that man does not wear out so quickly.

To me at any rate it seems that all development may have been designed to fit into this 40-divisional scale. It was perhaps no more than a blue-print and now the time scale has nearly doubled. Man has passed the 36 mark again and is lifting himself slowly higher.

But one cannot help noticing how many men and women stick in their evolution at about the age of 36. Unless they pass this mark, then their minds appear to be dead at 40. I have more than once heard artists say that they will have to do all their best work before reaching this age. It is nonsense of course. Caesar was 45 when he began to make his great career. Before that he was just a smart ‘man about town’. In all this kind of research one has at times to be one’s own guinea-pig. Where would Jung have got had he not used his own dreams in his studies?

The Romans, who were very astute in many matters, enlisted a man for thirty years as a soldier. That is they probably took him at 16 and retired him at 46. Then they settled him on a small-holding. In our great days we did the same. Thirty years was the reasonable life for a man in an exacting service.

But, unlike the Romans, our time-expired man got no grant of land. The English were always a nation of shopkeepers. After the Napoleonic wars there were no pensions for the returning Peninsular veterans. Only the landowners did their best to look after them, by putting them on to build walls round their parks, and other unnecessary works, which would bring them in some kind of income.

That soulless machine, the bureaucratic state, did nothing. The modern idea of the equality of man was impressed on the younger sons of those who had wealth and power by the bloodstained decks of the battleships of Trafalgar and the storming ladders of Badajos.

Endnotes

[1] Source: Chapter 3 of A Step in the Dark by T.C.Lethbridge; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967, ISBN 0-71001-741-3 with some short sections omitted. [Ed].
[2] See Lethbridge’s Rates Table on page 2. Source: Appendix to The Monkey’s Tail - a study in evolution & parapsychology; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, SBN 7100 6598 1.