We have all known people who seem to attract bad luck; the kind of people who happen to jump out of the way of a moving object, only to be hit by another. The people of primitive tribes say that a person who experiences continual misfortune is accursed, we would describe them as accident prone.
Our explanation implies that proneness to accident arises from an individual’s own clumsiness or nervous tension. Such people all to often seem to suffer from other people’s carelessness or plain undeserved misfortune. Yet we still have the feeling that there is some unseen force which cruelly seems to single out its victims.
Take the case of Marie Lambert. In Japan, 1928, she bought a statuette of a half naked fat man seated on a cushion. She recognised the figure as Hotei, the Japanese god of luck. Unfortunately, though, the statue seemed to cause strange ailments to befall all that owned it.
Back on the cruise ship Marie and her husband examined their purchase closely. The statue seemed to be skilfully craved out of ivory; the only visible imperfection was a small hole on the underneath. The Lambert’s concluded that the statue must have been craved out of elephant’s tusk and the hole, therefore, indicated where the root had been removed.
The statue seemed to be one of those bargains that tourists can only dream of. However, the next 12 days were agony for both the Lamberts who were inflicted with toothache. Yet the ship’s doctor, after examining them, could find no possible explanation for their pain.
Within a few days Mr Lambert contracted a fever the chief symptoms of which were pain in every joint. While Marie, still plagued with toothache called the dentist for a consultation his drill slipped and drove straight through the nerve of her tooth.
The Lamberts’ pain continued until a fellow passenger, interested in ivory, asked if he could borrow the statue to show his wife. Only then Lambert’ suspicions aroused when, after a pain free night, the statue was returned.
The man told the Lambert’s how he and his wife had spent a terrible night due to excruciating toothache. The Lamberts suddenly realised that their toothache only occurred when Hotei was in the room. Mrs Lambert wanted to throw the statue overboard but her husband refused, afraid that whatever was causing their pain would take revenge and roy every tooth in their heads.
Instead, he took it to an Oriental art shop in London and showed it to the Japanese shop manager who offered to buy it. The Lamberts agreed to part with the statue but refused to accept any money, explaining their troubles.
Curious, the manager sent for an old man, expert in Japanese customs, who examined the statue and said it was a temple god. He explained that in the East these statues were give a ‘soul’ - the small medallion hidden inside - which accounted for the small hole in the statue's base.
The old man placed the god in a shrine and spoke a few holy words while lighting an incense stick. This, he believed, would put the soul of the statue to rest. The Lamberts left the shop, never to return.
The story seems bizarre, even for those of us who have supreme faith in the occult. But there is a theory which may go some way to explaining it. Could it be that some kind of thought energy or biological e;electricity had impressed itself into the statue, rather like a fingerprint?
If this theory seems unacceptable, it may be because we tend to no longer think in terms of negative psychic forces. Or perhaps it was all a coincidence? Or were the Lamberts accursed?
There are some people who believe there is a connection between a person’s personality and ill-lick. Perhaps such an individual has a negative attitude to life a certain explanation that life will always deal him/her an unlucky hand, no matter what he does.
This then raises the question of whether the accidents are somehow triggered by a person’s subconscious attitude. We know that the mind is a powerful tool and, the more we learn, the more it suggests that thought-fields may be much more influential than we would like to believe.
Can thought-fields impress themselves into objects., rather like a magnetic or static electricity does and create the same kind of pattern that an electrical field can produce on a tape recording? Or do inanimate objects really poses souls, ones that seem to last the test of time?
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