Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [71]
Regardless of his growing reputation, he felt embarrassingly compelled to conceal his background from publishers E. P. Dutton when they issued his 1919 treatise, The Mystery of Space. The writer feared that no critic or editor would take seriously a black metaphysician. Schomburg, in a personal letter marked confidential, informed a colleague, “Browne doesn’t want to be advertised, not even his publisher knows his identity.”
Browne’s book—an inquiry into hyperspace, mathematical theory, and unseen dimensions—would today be called “new science” or “quantum theory.” In it, Browne posited that matter and space are products of the one truly limitless resource: the human mind. He surveyed ideas from Egyptian geometry to the thought of Kant to argue that mind is the ultimate reality. On March 14, 1920, New York Times critic Benjamin De Casseres, in a sometimes irritatingly self-regarding review that probably failed to attract many readers to Browne’s book, called it “the greatest of all latter-day books on space,” a work by “a mathematician, a mystic and a thinker, one who, endowed with a tremendous metaphysical imagination, never lets go any point of the threads of reality.”
The same Robert T. Browne would later earn the loving gratitude of his fellow inmates in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II when he used metaphysical visualization techniques, similar to those preached by Garvey, to keep them from starvation in a tropical prison. Browne worked as a purchasing agent for the U.S. Army in the Philippines. After Japan invaded in late 1941, Browne was rounded up with thousands of other Americans living in the islands and thrown into the infamous internment camps, first at Santo Tomas and later at Los Baños. Unspoken Japanese policy was to allow prisoners to slowly starve to death. While inmates were free to go about their daily business fairly unimpeded, they were given threadbare provisions and left to care for themselves on whatever they could barter, grow, or manage to purchase from the world outside. As the war dragged on, malnutrition and starvation set in. Similar to the withering physical decline of most prisoners, Browne dropped from a robust 212 to 120 pounds.
For everyone, food became an obsession, and Browne sought to help fellow inmates with the one tool he had to offer: training in mind-power techniques and other “Esoteric Christian” methods. “See the orange and taste it,” taught Browne. “Feel its nutrients going into your body and making you stronger.” He instructed internees to collect recipes wherever they could find them and to concentrate on the individual ingredients, using their mind as a nourishing force.
According to historian Christopher Paul Moore in his remarkable recovery of Browne’s history in Fighting for America: Black Soldiers—the Unsung Heroes of World War II, the mystic philosopher became the unlikeliest of prison heroes.
Of all the courses and lectures taught by the teachers among the internees, none seems to have had more impact on the camp’s population than Browne’s mind-power techniques.… Browne’s philosophy spread throughout the camp and may have actually helped defer or at least delay some of the intense psychological pain associated with malnutrition and starvation. The visualization technique became a camp phenomenon.
In February 1945, Browne and more than two thousand prisoners were liberated from Los Baños in a historic airborne raid. He returned home to the United States and was welcomed by New York’s African–American Amsterdam News on August 11 as a “famous mathematician, philosopher and author” who had survived Japanese imprisonment for three years until he and his fellow prisoners were “miraculously rescued” by paratroopers. Aside from an allusion to Browne lecturing internees on “Oriental Philosophy” and “the newer physics,” no mention