A biologist stabbed in the leg while lecturing on mental telepathy says he doesn't think his comments disturbed his assailant because the man was already disturbed and his English was too poor to understand much.

Rupert Sheldrake said in an e-mail that as he finished his talk at La Fonda on April 2, stepped down from the stage and began talking to listeners, he felt a blow to his left thigh. "I looked down at my leg, and to my astonishment saw the handle of a dagger sticking out of my trousers," he wrote. "Without thinking, I pulled it out: the blade of the bloodstained weapon was about five inches long and an inch wide.

"I felt my trouser leg wet with blood, and I pulled my trousers down. Every time my heart beat, a fountain of blood spurted from the wound in my thigh about four inches into the air."

Hirano Kazuki, 33, of Yokohama, Japan, remains in the Santa Fe County jail in lieu of a $200,000 cash bail on charges of aggravated battery and assault with intent to commit murder.

According to a police report, Hirano asked in "broken English" for a lawyer as he was being arrested. The report says Sheldrake said Hirano told him before his address that "people were using telepathy to speak to him."

A statement of probable cause says Hirano tripped as he tried to stab Sheldrake in the chest and stabbed him in the left thigh instead. Guy Micklethwait, an Australian rugby player attending the conference, subdued Hirano by throwing him into the air and pinning him to the floor.

As he was being led away by police, according to the statement, Hirano said, "I stabbed him because I was drunk."

District Attorney Henry Valdez said last week that he has not decided how to pursue the case because Sheldrake, as well as some of the witnesses from other countries and states, might not be able to return to Santa Fe to testify against Hirano. (Japanese surnames traditionally come before given names.)

Valdez originally said he is in no rush to have Hirano indicted because the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has an immigration detainer on the Japanese man. The detainer was placed against Hirano "pending an investigation into whether he was subject to removal," said an ICE spokeswoman who said the detainer was dropped Thursday because ICE determined Hirano was admitted to the United States under the Visa Waiver Program.

Sheldrake is a London biologist known for his research into telepathy. He says one of the most common examples of telepathy is being able to guess with more than random success who is calling on the telephone. Sheldrake's theory of "morphic resonance" holds that a collective memory in plants and animals serves as a medium between present and past organisms and often is labeled as instinct.

News of the incident in Santa Fe quickly became international news. The New Mexican's Web site recorded more than 18,000 "hits" on the story of the stabbing — more than any other story so far in 2008.

When he was stabbed, Sheldrake was talking about how thoughts can be transferred from one person to another. This was the last major event at the 10th international conference on Science and Consciousness. Three days later, Sheldrake had recovered enough to join two other speakers at the Lensic Performing Arts Center at an event called "Election Year: A Festival of Optimistic Voices."

Since leaving St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, where he had surgery to remove a blood clot and repair a severed quadriceps muscle, he has been staying at the Santa Fe home of Larry Dossey, a Dallas physician whom Sheldrake has known for years. Sheldrake left Thursday for Tucson to speak at a conference — "Toward a Science of Consciousness" — at the University of Arizona, and will return to the United Kingdom on Monday.

In an e-mail to The New Mexican, Sheldrake said Hirano spoke to him earlier in the conference, saying he was hearing voices. "He was obviously in distress," he wrote. "But no one anticipated that he would turn violent."

Sheldrake said USA Today was not accurate in reporting Hirano was disturbed by his lecture on the "extended mind." "He was disturbed anyway," he wrote. "In any case, his English was probably too poor to understand much of what I said. The fact that I was speaking in the final session of the conference may have had more to do with it — if he was going to do something spectacular, this was his last chance."

Others have different ideas.

Regina Jensen, a Santa Barbara, Calif., psychologist who attended the Santa Fe conference, said Sheldrake's lecture on eye-conduct might have been too arousing for someone in "a reptilian mode." "Too much of modern life drives people into what we have come to call our reptilian brain, namely the million-year-old part of us which, under stress, takes over with automated survival behavior," she wrote in an e-mail.

Jensen said the media, political activities and society in general can overload a person's system with stimuli that cannot be released appropriately and can force a person to revert to survival reflexes such as anger and rage.

"Under direction from this archaic part of our brain, our behavior does not seem human any more, but indeed, reptilian: with staring eyes and unemotional, unemphatic reflex behavior," she wrote. "Many of our politicians and officials clearly function from automated behaviors ... as exemplified by their bullying body postures, reptilian eye stares and unfeeling, inhuman responses."

Roxanne Sumners, who works in a hospice and raises peaches in Austin, Colo., near Delta, said she had noticed Hirano earlier because he was wearing a dirty coat and did not participate in the interactive exercises in workshops. When Sheldrake finished his lecture, "I saw that dirty coat moving toward him fast," she said, and instinctively moved toward Sheldrake who, though wounded, calmly took off his jacket and lay on the floor. She said she put her hand over his wound to stop the spurting blood. "I don't even know why I did it," she said. "Sometimes, you play the drum. Sometimes, the drum plays you."

Another eyewitness, who did not want to be identified, said while someone got Sheldrake a drink of water, others performed reiki on him as they waited for paramedics to arrive. The Japanese technique of relaxation and healing involves "laying on hands" to regulate "life force energy," according to the International Center of Reiki Training.

Sheldrake said reiki and "Healing Touch" practitioners continued to work on him in the hospital, "leaving me feeling as if I were floating like a feather." He said he feels no anger toward Hirano, but is "pleased that he is locked away and unable to harm anyone else."

Sumners said she feels for Hirano's family. "They're suffering too, and it's just such a crazy thing," she said. "The world sometimes is a very difficult place."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.