4. Utopia

4. Utopia

       We cannot escape from various pains as long as we live in this world. Physical pains and mental distress are always close by. When anxiety weighs heavily on our mind or we are overwhelmed by grief, we found solace in imagining another new world without any pain. That is a fantasy of heaven. Such longing appears almost all mythologies and legends. There are a lot of idyllic imagination from ancient times that people enjoy great happiness and pleasure in unexplored island or uncharted land which is guarded from being discovered by the barrier of nature or the saving grace of god. For example, Arcadia in grease, Shangri-La in James Hilton’s novel, El Dorado, Avalon in the romance of King Arthur, Atlantis, Agartha, Zipangu in The Travels of Marco Polo, etc. Such places are called “utopia”.

              Illustration for the 1516 first edition of Utopia

　　　　“Utopia” was coined by Thomas More (1478 – 1535).  He connected grease words “ou” and “topos”. The former means “no” and the latter means “place”. However most people think utopia as a peaceful paradise, utopia originally means an inhuman regimented society in More’s book “Utopia”. He satirized the then European society in the book.

        In the West, ancient people thought that there was paradise somewhere in mountain and there was peaceful island from beyond the sea. And after the expedition by Alexander the Great, because of the influence of many strange things from the East a lot of utopian fiction travel journal was written by many European writers. The thought that there was somewhere paradise definitely different from this painful society didn’t go out unless Europeans were cornered into inland and lost the connection with the ocean by advancement of Muslims. Imagining opposite situation from now became the way of social criticism and satire, political principles, constructional plans, and literature.

      Depiction of the tale on a painting from the Long Corridor, Summer Palace, Beijing

         In the East there are a lot of story about utopia. But they are different from those of the West. The characteristics of the stories about utopia in the East are that people can go there without difficulty by an accident. One of the most famous Chinese utopian stories is The Peach Blossom Spring written by Tao Yuanming (365 – 427). The story is that a fisher went up to a river and he found the hall to a peaceful village. The inhabitants told they had escaped from war. He enjoyed staying there for few days. After he returned his village, he tried to go there again but he couldn’t. Why he couldn’t go there again is paradise is not in this world but in our recesses of the mind. Because he seek utopia outside, he got more and more lost the way.   

         Thomas More’s utopia is not fantastic society but socialist nations as the result of effort by common people. On the other hand, in The Peach Blossom Spring people gave up the realization of ideal society.

 reference: ユートピアの幻想（川端香男里）

　　　　　　　　桃源郷　中国の楽園思想（川合康三）　　　

3. Levitation

3. Levitation

In this time when flying the speed of sound is common, it may be ridiculous to say human have a capacity of floating in the air without any vehicles and tools. But we have a lot of stories about the phenomenon that people floated in the air by the power of something spiritual. Though there is no field researching this phenomenon strictly, this phenomenon levitation is very interesting even now. Ancient people who have the world view quite different from the current rationalism accepted, studied and even used the mysteries power that causes levitation.

 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Ignatius of Loyola

  It seems that there is a close connection between levitation and religion. There are many examples about it. Ignatius of Loyola was always suspended in the air thirty centimeter to the ground for his meditation. All believers who floated in the air feel a kind of religious ecstasy. Therefore it can be thought levitation is secondary phenomena caused by leaving the mind from the body and reality. Of course this phenomenon is not limited to the case of Christian. But Christian thought levitation by pagan magic or itself as a satanic phenomenon. So they prohibited their believers from studying about levitation.  

                     D.D.Home






                              levitation at Ward Cheney's house

If levitation happens without any physics causes, it is natural to think levitation can happen by psychokinesis. Spiritualists succeeded to Christians. One of the most famous spiritualistic medium, Daniel Douglas Home (1833 - 1886), he was willing to show a lot of people including royals and celebrities his spiritual power such as shaking a house, floating a table, causing smell or chill, playing accordion without touching and floating himself in the air. In July 1871, he performed a spiritual agency at Ward Cheney's housein London. He got trance and floated in the air while sitting down. He went out to the outside through the window and came in through another window. The room was third flour and eighty five feet to the ground. Thereafter he tried and succeeded again and again in front of a large number of people including scientists. Sir William Crookes, British scientist (1832 - 1919), started to research Home’s strange power. Crookes was these days one of the most famous scientist because of finding thallium and inventing a new vacuum tube. But he couldn’t find any trick and explanation of that phenomenon. And Home had never been charged as a fraud in public. Thereafter many psychical researchers tried to explain Home’s phenomenon. But there is no good explanation even now. 
                                               　　

Listening to such strange stories, we cannot help feeling the weakness of present science and that we live in between rationalism and experimentalism.

 reference: 英国心霊主義の台頭（Janet Oppenheim　 和田 芳久　訳 ）
　　　　　　　フェノメナ （J. ミッチェル、R. リカード、 村田 薫）