Chapter 10: Epilogue
After
Max’s death, the basic courses were continued by Isabel and Sandra Stein,
who had attended his courses for many years. They
spent one or two days together at Sandra’s house, at Northwood, Middlesex
each week, immersing themselves in the course notes and practising the presentation
until they felt themselves to be proficient. Together,
they ran the classes at Chesterford Gardens for two years. Sandra
continued to hold the courses at her home until her untimely death in 1993;
she also gave lectures in biofeedback and as a healer visited hospitals and
healing centres.
Max’s special evening for his long-term students, the Thursday group,
also continued with various members offering their special skills - notably
Sydney Crawford, Pamela Jones, Niki Honore and David Annersley.
The basic courses then continued with Isabel and her partner, Peter Staples,
initially at Chesterford Gardens and then at several other venues. The “Awakened
Mind mobile unit” of the Maxwell Cade Foundation, i.e. with the instruments
neatly transported in crates, has given biofeedback courses in many centres
- in North Wales, Northumbria and Devon and in different countries - in Holland
at the Humaniversity and also in Spain. Courses
and presentations have been given with me at the Healing Arts exhibitions,
the College of Psychic Studies, the National Federation of Spiritual Healers
and the Institute of Complementary Medicine.
The Maxwell Cade Foundation
Ideas for perpetuating Max’s work began to surface after his death. Finally
the impetus for forming the Maxwell Cade Foundation came from Geoff Jukes
and Jeannette Obstoj, who met the legal costs of setting it up. Both
believed they had benefited profoundly from Max’s teaching and, in June
1985, they wrote to Isabel offering to set up a charitable trust to look
after future activities relating to his work. This
trust and foundation would support the continuity and development of Max’s
ideals, ideas and work. Max’s
writings and also tapes of his talks remain in safe keeping.
To set up the foundation, references were needed from his peers. Here
are quotations from some of them:
Sir
George Trevelyan, founder and president of the Wrekin Trust:
Maxwell Cade, his wife and his colleague Geoffrey Blundell came to many
of our Wrekin Trust courses and demonstrated the instruments they had evolved
through their research.
At a time when meditation has come to play so great a
role in personal transformation, the possibility of scientific assessment
of brain rhythms can be of the greatest value. I am convinced that Maxwell
Cade’s work and research is of scientific value and of profound interest. This
research takes a very important place in the movement for alternative therapies
and a new lifestyle. It will
make a real contribution to the emergence of a new vision and way of living.
CD
Curling, former Sub-dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of London
(Kings College):
I
regard the research and development carried out by Maxwell Cade in the
area of biofeedback as being of great importance. When
I gave a course in the University of London on the Control of the Internal
Environment, I was able to use some of his techniques and results. The further exploration of the boundaries between physics
and psychology is likely to be important to the health of the community
as well as to the advancement of knowledge in areas recently re-illuminated
by new discoveries in physics. I
therefore wish to give my wholehearted backing to the foundation so that
his work may be continued and his high hopes given practical expression.
Dr
Ann Woolley-Hart MSc, MB, BS:
Max Cade’s work was unique. From his knowledge of Western psychology,
Eastern philosophy and of electronics, he created a biofeedback training
system for self-awareness and self-realisation.
In the more advanced courses, further training was given
to bring out the innate creativity in people and to reshape their lives
and regain their health. Many, many people, including myself, owe a debt
that is hard to repay. He gave us confidence in ourselves and showed us
the way forward in times of personal difficulties.
We live in times of crass materialism. Max gave us another
dimension of awareness. Now that he has died, it would be a catastrophe
if his work were to die with him. I learnt much from him myself which I
have in some small degree been able to pass on to those who consult me.
Somehow this work must be continued and this can best
be done as a separate foundation, free from the paraphernalia of existent
institutions. Surely it speaks for itself that those who knew Max and worked
with him are prepared to spend time, effort and money to continue what
he started.
In 1989, trust status was granted after a lot of hard work by Isabel
Maxwell Cade and Peter Staples. A
first newsletter appeared in July 1990. Some
of Max’s papers have been made available:
- The Anatomy of Meditation
- The Silent World
- Biofeedback and the Higher
States of Consciousness
The
address of The Maxwell Cade Foundation is: c/o 2 Old Garden Court, Mount
Pleasant, St Albans, Herts AL3 4RQ, United Kingdom.
The
Future
The
essence of Max’s work can be captured in the ancient dictum “know
thyself”. He was the perhaps
the first “electronic guru” – someone using machines in the
service of self-knowledge with the potential of leading to the state he called
the Awakened Mind.
While many have used biofeedback methods in particular applications,
he was the first to have sufficient experience of traditional teaching to
be able to confidently use a machine to check whether his subject had actually
experienced the altered state of consciousness that he was trying to impart.
The recognition that stress and emotional conflict can greatly affect
our health means that Max’s work can now take its rightful place in
the health aspects of complimentary medicine. Within
the business community, stress managers benefit from the objectivity of biofeedback
machines to improve efficiency. Complementary
therapies are now being examined within the medical community. As
Professor Nixon at London’s Charing Cross hospital says: “After
a heart attack, recovery depends more on what is happening in the patient’s
head than his body.” As
Max put it: “Biofeedback is limited only by the imagination of the therapist.”
In Britain, with my nephew Neil Hancock, I have formed a new company,
Biomonitors Ltd. Neil is especially
skilled in digital and computer techniques and this has resulted in an improved
version of the Mind Mirror with enhanced facilities. With a new four-channel version being developed it will be
possible to study, for example, the relationship of the occipital brain rhythms
to those measured from the frontal lobes.
Before Max’s death, we had already made some tentative studies using
two separate Mind Mirrors but found we needed a combined display so that
patterns would be more easily recognised and compared. Other
EEG machines are now being produced using many channels which can show for
example the movement of alpha over the whole brain as a representation on-screen.
A problem arises here because when you have more channels there is so
much information that it is an impossible task to make sense of it; some
way of reducing the complexity of this data is needed; assumptions have to
be made which will almost certainly hide information of value. Knowing
how much we have gleaned looking only at the occipital lobes using two channels
makes the task of adding two more channels over the frontal lobes seem daunting. The thought of even more channels is very intimidating.
Also new is a meter that shows the ESR and temperature reading together
on a small screen. With this
instrument, I want to include a course based on Max’s introductory courses
and this would earn money for the foundation.
Peter Staples also has not been idle. When Audio Ltd could no longer
produce the Omega 1 due to high production costs, he designed and produced
the Discovery ESR and Therapist’s meters. The latter includes the equivalent
of the old Omega 2 which shows small changes in ESR (often referred to as
GSR), the old Omega 1 and the temperature meters.
Anna Wise continues to develop Max’s work in America. Her
book The High Performance Mind, published in 1996 in hardback, is now available
in paperback. Max’s ideas
are the basis but it also shows how she has digested them and developed them
in her own way.
Anna feels it is an honour that she was asked to contribute a chapter
to a book edited by Joe Kamiya, who is considered to be the father of biofeedback
in America when he discovered in the 1950s that the alpha wave could be controlled
by feedback. This book, A Comprehensive
Textbook of Applied Pyschophysiology, Biofeedback and Related Behavioural
Medicine (publication date not yet decided) will finally place Max’s
work within the academic framework among the great EEG theorists and practitioners
in America.
What of the future? The
idea of the Mind Mirror and the State 5 pattern has entered the zeitgeist
of our times. It got very wide publicity from a chapter in Michael Hutchinson’s
book Megabrain which probably reached a million copies in paperback and referred
to “the legendary Mind Mirror”. All
the other chapters of this book were devoted to machines that provide some
sort of brain stimulation, which is now big business in America. Undoubtedly
these methods do give some kind of experience but what is the guidance, training
or philosophical background that enables one to “grow” from these
experiences?
There have been may other references to the Mind Mirror patterns in magazines,
books and articles. We can be
sure that the idea will continue to grow. I, for example, want to incorporate
them into fractal patterns to make a dynamic meditation image. What
of virtual reality, where the images can be made to appear in space in front
of us? I can imagine this leading
both to both very banal travelogue images and to very fundamental teaching
on the nature of the mind.
Finally, from Max’s gravestone:
A source of inspiration to many
The dew drop slips into the shining sea