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Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 3 (of 6) Part 2

Note 69 — PRINCE AHMAD AND THE FAIRY PERI-BANU.[63]

Richard Francis Burton translation

Amongst Eastern peoples, and especially adepts, the will of man is not a mere term for a mental or cerebral operation, it takes the rank of a substance; it becomes a mighty motive power, like table-turning and other such phenomena which, now looked upon as child’s play, will perform a prime part in the Kinetics of the century to come. If a few pair of hands imposed upon a heavy dinner-table can raise it in the air, as I have often seen, what must we expect to result when the new motive force shall find its Franklin and be shown to the world as real “Vril”? The experiment of silently willing a subject to act in a manner not suggested by speech or sign has been repeatedly tried and succeeded in London drawing-rooms; and it has lately been suggested that atrocious crimes have resulted from overpowering volition. In cases of paralysis the Faculty is agreed upon the fact that local symptoms disappear when the will-power returns to the brain. And here I will boldly and baldly state my theory that, in sundry cases, spectral appearances (ghosts) and abnormal smells and sounds are simply the effect of a Will which has, so to speak, created them.

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