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| Swami Vivekananda |
Another time I was in the city of Hyderabad in
India, and I was told of a Brâhmin there who could produce numbers of things
from where, nobody knew. This man was in business there; he was a respectable
gentleman. And I asked him to show me his tricks. It so happened that this man
had a fever, and in India there is a general belief that if a holy man puts his
hand on a sick man he would be well. This Brahmin came to me and said,
"Sir, put your hand on my head, so that my fever may be cured." I
said, "Very good; but you show me your tricks." He promised. I put my
hand on his head as desired, and later he came to fulfil his promise. He had
only a strip of cloth about his loins, we took off everything else from him. I
had a blanket which I gave him to wrap round himself, because it was cold, and
made him sit in a corner. Twenty-five pairs of eyes were looking at him. And he
said, "Now, look, write down anything you want." We all wrote down
names of fruits that never grew in that country, bunches of grapes, oranges,
and so on. And we gave him those bits of paper. And there came from under his
blanket, bushels of grapes, oranges, and so forth, so much that if all that
fruit was weighed, it would have been twice as heavy as the man. He asked us to
eat the fruit. Some of us objected, thinking it was hypnotism; but the man
began eating himself — so we all ate. It was all right.
He ended by producing a mass of roses. Each flower
was perfect, with dew-drops on the petals, not one crushed, not one injured.
And masses of them! When I asked the man for an explanation, he said, "It
is all sleight of hand."
SOURCE:
The Complete Works of Vivekananda,
Volume-2 [The Powers of the mind]
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