Michael Prescott's Blog

A new book from Charles Tart, a blog, and more

Someone forwarded me an email sent out by distinguished parapsychologist Charles Tart. I don't think Dr. Tart would object to my posting the bulk of it here:

My most important book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together has just been published.  Too many people in modern life suffer uselessly by denying and repressing their spiritual desires and experiences because they think science has proven that all spirituality is nonsense or crazy.  This book is intended to help them by showing that, using the best kind of science in the field of parapsychology, this materialistic denial of the spiritual is not actually scientific, it’s a dogmatic denial that’s factually wrong, based on a rigid, dismissive philosophy of materialism.  People sometimes show the kinds of qualities we would expect a spiritual being to have when tested in the best kinds of scientific studies.  You can read more about the book at the bottom of the first page on my archival web site, http://www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/. 
 
Many of you know I’ve been putting my more interesting and readable research papers on the web at http://www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/.  This includes realistic career advice for those who want to study consciousness and related areas like parapsychology.  There are also links to the more reliable sites on parapsychology, and a place to sign up for my “Studentnotices” list.
 
Studentnotices is a list you can sign up for to get occasional – from once or twice a month to several times a week – email notices about things that I think are of interest to people interested in the nature of mind and the human spirit.  I may describe interesting new books I’ve seen, conferences coming up, and my scheduled lectures and workshops. 
 
Finally, I’ve been working as a scientist in these areas for more than 50 years, now, and while it’s a deep part of me, I’m tired of sharing my knowledge only in this formal way.  So I’ve started a blog, where I write not simply as a scientist but as a spiritual seeker, a teacher, a professor who built and uses his own little bulldozer, a former martial artist, etc., etc., kind of the “full spectrum Charley Tart” instead of just “Professor Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.”  I’ve started it by posting transcripts from one of my classes on mindfulness and meditation, and an interesting discussion is already going on as people respond to some of that material.  You can go to the blog from the first page of my http://www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ site or directly from http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/. 

Slouching toward Stupidville

A friend of mine kindly sent me a link to this New York Times news story about the growing popularity of vampires in film, TV, books, and fashion.

  

 

 

Example of chic vampire fashion, via the New York Times.

 

 

Sample quote from the Times article:

 

"The vampire is the new James Dean," said Julie Plec, the writer and executive producer of The Vampire Diaries, a forthcoming series on the CW network ...

 

Reading this, I was reminded of that old Chinese curse: "May you live in stupid times."

 

At least I think that's how it goes.

 

In possibly related news, through a complex series of unforeseen circumstances entirely outside my control, I wound up in possession of the latest copy of People magazine. I preface my remarks this way in order to explain and/or justify the embarrassing fact that I was reading People. Which I think should be called Peephole.

 

Anyway, their "Books" section (who knew Peephole had a Books section?) features a thriller about an ex-Amish woman who has become the chief of police in an Amish community and must track down a serial killer who is targeting the Amish.

 

I realize this has nothing to do with vampires, but the connection is, it sounds stupid also.

 

It will probably be a bestseller, just like all those vampire books. Maybe the next trend will be Amish vampires. Or how about an Amish vampire on the trail of forbidden mysteries about Jesus?

 

I no longer understand the world I live in. The only thing that keeps me sane is TV sitcoms. They may be stupid, but at least they are (sometimes) funny. When stupid reality shows take over 100% of network programming, I will truly be a stranger and afraid in a world I never made.

 

Speaking of stupid entertainment, here's a BBC report from 2005 that just came to my attention via the moronic commenters at Ace of Spades. It starts off promisingly enough:

 

Spectators cheered as entire Cambodian Midget Fighting League squared off against African Lion

 

The fight was slated when an angry fan contested Yang Sihamoni, President of the CMFL, claiming that one lion could defeat his entire league of 42 fighters.

Sihamoni takes great pride in the league he helped create, as was conveyed in his recent advertising campaign for the CMFL that stated his midgets will "... take on anything; man, beast, or machine."

This campaign is believed to be what sparked the undisclosed fan to challenge the entire league to fight a lion; a challenge that Sihamoni readily accepted.

Sadly events soon take a turn for the worse:

The fight was called in only 12 minutes, after which 28 fighters were declared dead, while the other 14 suffered severe injuries including broken bones and lost limbs, rendering them unable to fight back.

The presumably chagrined fight organizer explained "he felt since his fighters out-numbered the lion 42 to 1, that they '… could out-wit and out-muscle [it].' "

Evidently a slight miscalculation.

This tragic and stupid event was brought up in the context of a current important news story from Fox News:

Two Mexican Midget Wrestlers

Killed by Fake Prostitutes

 

MEXICO CITY —  Mexican authorities say two professional wrestlers found dead in a low-rent hotel in the capital may have been drugged to death by female robbers.

Autopsies are being performed on the two midget wrestlers, one of whom went by the name "La Parkita" — or "Little Death" — and wore a skeleton costume in the ring. The other was known as "Espectrito Jr."

Authorities say two women were seen leaving the men's hotel room before the bodies were discovered.

Prosecutor Miguel Angel Mancera said Wednesday that gangs of female robbers are experienced at using drugs to knock men out and rob them, but they may have used too strong a dose.

That may have been because of the wrestlers' small stature, although larger men have also died in similar crimes.

The moral I take from all this is twofold: First, we live in a stupid world of ongoing stupidness and stupidity.

 

Second, it's dangerous to be a midget. It is especially dangerous to be a midget who engages in professional fighting of any kind. If you simply must be a fighting midget, do your best to avoid lions and prostitutes.

 

And vampires.

 

And the Amish, probably.

 

Happy Fourth of July.

 

=======

 

Update, July 4: Kristofer in comments has alerted me to the fact that the lion story is a hoax. It never happened. The whole thing was a joke that got out of hand.

 

Is it wrong of me that I feel just a little bit disappointed?

 

The purported "BBC news story" did seem rather poorly written, but I assumed it was the work of a Cambodian stringer with an imperfect grasp of English.

 

Given this new information, I may have to revise the twofold moral of my post. Actually, the first half - that we live in a stupid world - remains true, and my own stupidity in believing the lion hoax merely confirms it. But the second half needs to be rethought.

 

I would now say that if you are a professional fighting midget, you should definitely avoid prostitutes, but lions may be okay.

Okay, now I feel old

Really old.

"Did my dad ... really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?"

I wonder what this kid would think of an eight-track player. Or a phonograph.

Bones

Interesting news: the skeletal remains of the Apostle Paul may have been found in a tomb beneath the Basilica of St. Paul. Oral tradition had named this church as the site of Paul's tomb; now carbon dating has confirmed that the bones are from the appropriate time period.

A.N. Wilson's article (linked above) is a bit melodramatic and relies heavily on the chronology of Acts to reconstruct Paul's life. I tend to agree with Garry Wills that Acts is not a very reliable guide, and that Paul's letters, considered apart from Acts, tell a somewhat different story.

The discovery lends credence to the tradition that Paul was martyred in Rome during the anti-Christian backlash following the great fire that destroyed most of the city. The emperor Nero blamed Christians in order to counter rumors that he'd started the fire himself.

Incidentally, this event is the origin of the expression, "Nero fiddled while Rome burned." Nero fancied himself a great actor, singer, and master of a stringed instrument called a cithara. Though it is doubtful that he actually played the cithara while the city burned, people did resent his obsession with entering theatrical competitions instead of attending to his job.

Back to the article: Another point of interest is the possibility that a fresco found on the walls of the catacombs may be an accurate likeness of Paul. The linked article has a couple of photos of this fresco, which seems to be in good condition. (Note that the first photo does not show the fresco in question; it is seen in the two that follow.)

Of mice and men

Reuters reports on a promising innovation in cancer therapy, which has yielded 100% survival rates among cancer-stricken mice. 

The therapy, published in the latest Nature Biotechnology journal, sees mini-cells called EDVs (EnGenelC Delivery Vehicle) attach and enter the cancer cell.

The first wave of mini-cells release ribonucleic acid molecules, called siRNA, which switch off the production of proteins that make the cancer cell resistant to chemotherapy.

A second wave of EDV cells is then accepted by the cancer cell and releases chemotherapy drugs, killing the cancer cell.

"The beauty is that our EDVs operate like 'Trojan Horses.' They arrive at the gates of the affected cells and are always allowed in," said [Dr. Jennifer] MacDiarmid.

"We are playing the rogue cells at their own game. They switch-on the gene to produce the protein to resist drugs, and we are switching-off the gene which, in turn, enables the drugs to enter." ...

The Nature report said the mini-cells were "well tolerated with no adverse side effects or deaths in any of the actively treated animals, despite repeated dosing."

Human trials will start next week in Australia. Could this be the beginnng of the end for cancer?  

Should I switch to a new hosting service?

I'm getting an increasing number of complaints about comments that don't show up, or show up briefly and then disappear - sometimes to return later, other times to be gone for good.

TypePad has had these problems before, but the issues seem to be getting worse.

Think I should switch to a new hosting service? The only one I've had any experience with is Blogger, which caused me problems a few years ago. Maybe it's better now.

Any suggestions, or should I just stick with TypePad and hope they eventually fix the problems?

"Myers" on reincarnation

It seems that whenever the topic of reincarnation comes up on this blog, some rather intense conversations ensue. People clearly have strong feelings about reincarnation; some loathe the idea, while others are quite comfortable with it.

Of course, it doesn't help that mediums have conveyed decidedly mixed messages on the subject, with some saying everyone reincarnates dozens of times, others saying only certain people reincarnate, and still others insisting no one reincarnates!

If we take mediumship seriously, we have to wonder why there are such large discrepancies over such an important issue. One answer could be that reincarnation works differently for different people, and that it's more complicated than standard theories would suggest.

This is the approach taken by the communicator purporting to be F.W.H. Myers in Geraldine Cummins' book Beyond Human Personality (text online here). I've written about "Myers' " views on the etheric double in the two posts that immediately precede this one. What "Myers" says about reincarnation is also of interest. The excerpts below are taken from Chapter 4.

========

I am quite clear that those human beings who live almost wholly in the physical sense while on earth, must be reborn in order that they may experience an intellectual and higher form of emotional life. In other words, those human beings I have described as "Animal-man" almost invariably reincarnate.

Some of the individuals I have designated by the term, "Soul-man," also choose to live again on earth. But metempsychosis does not involve a machine-like regularity of return. I have not noted any evidence of a continual progression of births and deaths for any one particular soul. I do not for a moment believe that the individual returns a hundred times or more to the earth. This is indeed, a wrong assumption. There may, of course, be certain exceptions which you are more likely to meet with among those primitive beings who seem incapable of aspiration -- of desire to rise above their physical nature. But the majority of people only reincarnate two, three or four times. Though if they have some human purpose or plan to achieve they may return as many as eight or nine times. No arbitrary figure can be named. We are only fairly safe in concluding that, in the human form, they are not doomed to wander over the space of fifty, a hundred and more lives.

They do not, it may be suggested, gather any proper share of experience from the few earth existences that are thus allotted to them. But provision has been made for the ignorance that is necessarily incurred through the whole span of lives covering but a fragment of typical experience.

Beggar, jester, king, poet, mother, soldier. I mention only six of the varied roles that would seem to provide lives entirely different in condition and in kind ...

However, it is well to be agreed that, even if we run the race of life on earth six times, we touch but on the fringe of human experience. We have obtained only a certain discipline. We have not plumbed the depths or scaled the heights of being; we have not covered all the space of human consciousness, of human feeling. Yet I can assure you that until we have harvested many times the fruits of lives spent on earth we shall not, save in exceptional cases, live on the higher planes beyond death.

It is not necessary for us to return to earth to gather into our granary this manifold variety of life and knowledge. We can reap, bind and bring much of it home by participating in the life of our group-soul. Many belong to it and these may spread themselves in their journeys over past, present and future ...

Through our communal existence I perceive and feel the drama in the earthly journey of a Buddhist priest, of an American merchant, of an Italian painter, and I am, if I assimilate the life thus lived, spared the living of it in the flesh.

You will recognize how greatly power of will, mind and perception can be increased through your entry into the larger self. You continue to preserve your identity and your fundamental individuality. But you develop immensely in character and in spiritual force. You gather the wisdom of the ages, not through the continual "Sturm und Drang" of hundreds of years passed in the confinement of the crude physical body, you gather it through love which has a gravitational pull and draws you within the memories of those who are akin to your soul, however alien their bodies may have been when they were on earth,

This existence within the memories of others is a form of experience scarcely understood by human beings. The soul resembles a spectator caught within the spell of some drama that is strange to its actual life. It does not therefore suffer or indeed thrill with the joy that direct physical experience would offer it of such a period in time. It perceives, however, all the consequences of acts, moods, thoughts in detail in this life of a kindred soul and so it may -- though feeling and emotion are now of a very different coinage and kind -- in this communal group-state, win the knowledge of all typical earth existences, of all the fundamental phases of being when the intelligence is bound to the flesh, the captive of the five senses and the brain with its myriad cells.

I do not write as one having authority. This little sketch of the soul's journey in relation to earth, is written out of my own experience and knowledge. It cannot, by any means, be said to be the last word on the subject. I am prepared to admit errors if I meet any souls of a wider experience than mine who can demonstrate effectively and beyond a doubt that the transcendental materialism of the early Theosophists is a sound and true doctrine, that the recurring cycle of births and deaths for one soul, goes on and on through many centuries, perhaps for a very long time ....

There is no set law concerning reincarnation. At a certain point in its progress, the soul reflects, weighs and considers the facts of its own nature in conjunction with its past life on earth. If you are primitive, this meditation is made more through instinct -- a kind of emotional thought -- that stirs up the depths of your being. Then the spirit helps you to choose your future. You have complete free will but your spirit indicates the path you should follow and you frequently obey that indication.

Bear in mind that the power behind each human being is imagination. It preserves the past in the form of memory, and unless temporarily fixed in a mould of its own making, is creating in the present, adding to itself, taking away from itself.

Recognize always the power for fresh creation that is inherent in each center of consciousness. In that power lies the hope of man's future, however low the level of his spiritual life.

The student of the journey of the soul will therefore perceive infinite variety if he considers the travels even of his comrades in the world after death -- the passing and re-passing over the frontiers, the existence in the physical and in the etheric state. For each soul differs from all other souls. No two are the same in character and nature. Their creative fancy will invariably produce variety, difference.

This being so, there can be no law which covers the whole field of conscious life in connection with the theory of reincarnation. The dogmatists, when faced with this problem, had better remain silent, folding their hands in reverence for the Divine Mystery which has, in its creation, ordained that those centers, the souls of living things, shall each in their varied ways find their road home to God, to that blissful, and ever creative life contained within the Cosmic Imagination.

A soul that, for the first time, enters a material body is, usually, related spiritually to some member of its Group and, so close is its relationship, it may take on the karma of the older soul. The latter has, perhaps, experienced four or five incarnations on earth. It is not yet wholly purified, has not gained all the terrestrial experience necessary to its spiritual evolution. It acquires it, however, in two ways: (1) through its entry into the group-memory, the conditions of which I have described: (2) through its psychic connection with a young soul which takes up the karma, takes on the pattern created by its previous earthly life or lives.

It will be recognized then, that it is bound psychically to this kinsman who is, indeed, in part its creation and so it is a witness of the earthly career of this traveller and its own spiritual life is enriched thereby. 

========

In this post, Michael Tymn talks about the group-soul idea, including "Myers' " discussion of it in Cummins' earlier book The Road to Immortality. Referring to the mediumship of Maurice Barbanell, Tymn quotes the spirit entity Silver Birch as saying, "... there are what you call ‘group souls,' a single unity with facets which have spiritual relationships that incarnate at different times, at different places, for the purpose of equipping the larger soul for its work."

Tymn goes on:

Silver Birch also likened the soul to an iceberg in which one small portion is manifesting and the greater portion not manifesting.   He apparently was referring to what others have called the "Higher Self," the "Greater Self," or the "Oversoul" ...

However, he stressed that the individuality of the "facets" within the Group Soul is maintained.

The double, continued

(Update, June 23: This post was considerably amended to correct some mistakes I made in describing the activity level of the double during earthly life, a problem pointed out by Zerdini in comments.)

My last post concerned the idea of the etheric double, a duplicate body that takes over for us when our earthly body dies. The idea was presented in some channeled material produced by Geraldine Cummins in her book Beyond Human Personality.

Of course, the idea of a double - astral body, soul body, etc. - is hardly new. It dates back at least as far as ancient Egypt. According to the Egyptians, each person was born with a ka, or twin. One Web site says:

It was thought that the creator god Khnum created a person's Ka when he created the person on his potter's wheel. The Ka then followed the person like a shadow or double all through life, but when the person died, the Ka returned to its heavenly abode.

Other sources (like this one) say the ka remained in the tomb, rather than going to heaven. In any event, it was conceived of as a double or twin of the human being, and was represented as an exact duplicate in Egyptian art. (More about the ka here.)

Variants of the idea of the "double" are found in other traditions, such as the kama rupa of Theosophy, the perispirit of Allan Kardec's writings, and the subtle body of many religions.

For Christians, the most famous description of the subtle body is the one given by St. Paul in First Corinthians 15:35-50. Paul calls it the resurrection body:

³⁵But someone may ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?" ³⁶How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. ³⁷When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. ³⁸But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body ....

 ⁴²So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; ⁴³it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; ⁴⁴it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body ....  ⁵⁰I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.  [New International Version, via Bible Gateway]

As presented in Cummins' book, the etheric double is a secondary body through which the mind/soul operates. The double serves as an interface between the mind/soul and the physical body. As "Myers" says,

But the soul has to work through the medium of the double and never directly commands matter. Always there is this unifying body which comes between the self and his outward appearance in the material world.

The double is active at all times, but is independently active - i.e., functioning independently of the physical body - only on certain occasions, such as when the physical body is asleep or comatose. The rest of the time, the etheric body is closely entwined with the physical body.

The etheric double is not merely superficially identical to the physical body. It is said to contain all the same organs, vessels, nerves, and so forth, including, of course, an etheric brain. While the mind/soul may have difficulty operating through an aging, damaged, or defective physical brain (even with the etheric double as an interface), no similar difficulties would be encountered in operating through the etheric brain directly, since the etheric form is free from the effects of age, injury, or illness. Thus, the dying person feels himself reborn in a body that is a duplicate of his earthly body, but without earthly weaknesses and flaws - a body that is familiar, yet different; his own, yet new.

A post I published earlier this year contains an "eyewitness account" of the separation of an etheric double from the physical body, as reported by the clairvoyant Andrew Jackson Davis. Here's part of what I wrote back in March:

-------

John DeSalvo's worthwhile albeit regrettably brief book Andrew Jackson Davis: The First American Prophet and Clairvoyant contains some interesting material on the 19th century medium.  One chapter recounts Davis's experience in a hospital when he observed two dying men. Davis reported that he saw, clairvoyantly, the entire dying process. His description matches up pretty well with accounts collected by Robert Crookall in his books on death and dying, such as Intimations of Immortality.

Observing one of the unconscious patients, Davis wrote,

There was, at first, a broad, ribbon-shaped current arising from the epigastrium. As it ascended, it separated, and expanded into a sort of fleecy steam-cloud, about three feet above the bosom, in the air where the effulgent elements assumed the form of an inverted pyramid with a turbinate envelope, which was, by a strong psychical cord, attached to the solar ganglia, a sort of linea alba tube.

The inverted pyramidal cloud gradually assumed an oval shape externally, amid, internally, a representation of the perfect ellipse, approximating to a globular form, and with a throbbing sun-bright nucleus, which seemed like the germ-cell from which, in a few moments, the miracle would be wrought of an immediate incubation, rapidly resulting in the production of a full-formed and indescribably perfect angel man!

An illustration commissioned by Davis shows a luminous oval cloud issuing from the supine patient's midsection and head. Though two cords are shown connecting the cloud to the patient, the idea seems to be that there is only one cord (the "broad, ribbon-shaped current"), which begins at the solar plexus and then gradually moves up to the head.

Once the cloud is fully formed, the patient's spirit flows through it "with lightning rapidity and vividness," forming a full-sized replica of the patient's body, starting with the head and working downward. In the illustration this body is shown still inside the now-expanded cloud, hovering vertically over the patient in a standing position.

Before the outline of the immortal head was visible, I observed that the cloud-like appearance of the emulations, as a whole, manifested several remarkable innate movements. There were vertical motions, upward and downward; lateral motions, like an anchored balloon, from side to side; then rotatory or gyrating motions, like a spinning-top immediately before losing its momentum. These various graceful motions completely subsided, and the whole became absolutely still, when the formation had advanced sufficiently to unfold the head and bust.

It was remarkable, the perfect progressiveness manifested in each succeeding stage of development. The two men patients were leaving the earth together, with only a few feet of airy space between; yet they were as absolutely without consciousness of each other's existence as though they were departing with the earth's entire diameter between them. In reality, there was no self consciousness in either during the metamorphosis. One was being born (or, in earthly words, one was dying) about an hour in advance of the other; which interesting difference gave me, as a medical student an opportunity to classify the successive stages of the marvelous process.

Davis goes on to say that the spirit, once separated from the body, enters a bright light and emerges in a heavenly environment surrounded by departed loved ones.

-----

If the "Myers" communication in Beyond Human Personality is accurate, then what Davis saw was not an original formation of the etheric double but its re-formation after separating from the physical body.  The etheric double, which previously served mainly as the interface between the mind/soul and the earthly body,  becomes the only vehicle through which the person's mind/soul operates,  now that his earthly vehicle is defunct.

In comments, both Michael Tymn and Zerdini give additional examples of such "eyewitness accounts." Such accounts are fairly common; here are a few cases collected by William Barrett.

The idea of the etheric double seems to address the issue of how the mind/soul can continue to be individuated and distinctly personal when the physical brain is no more. It has a long pedigree and has won acceptance in many cultures, and is a persistent part of modern spiritualist communications.

Of course, one might argue that the double is some sort of Jungian archetype, and that it crops up so persistently in so many places merely because it is a symbol hardwired into the human psyche. Maybe so.

Or maybe "Myers," Davis, and sages throughout history have known what they were talking about, and there really is a spirit double that continues to receive our consciousness after we pass on. 

The double

I've been reading Geraldine Cummins' 1935 book Beyond Human Personality, which bears on some of the issues discussed on this blog recently.

Cummins was a medium who produced several purportedly channeled books. The most famous and most evidential of these is Swan on a Black Sea, often cited as one of the best examples of channeling.

Decades before Swan, Cummins produced two books allegedly dictated to her by the deceased psychical researcher and psychological theorist F.W.H. Myers. The first was titled The Road to Immortality; the second, Beyond Human Personality. Both of them, as well as some of Cummins' other books, can be read online here.

In quoting this material, I don't mean to endorse all of its claims. I don't know if Cummins was in communication with Myers or not, though her track record as a medium was very good. I don't know if her unconscious mind altered whatever communications she may have received. I don't know if Myers - assuming he was the communicator - was correct in his understanding of these esoteric matters. And it's worth noting that some of "Myers' " claims have not stood the test of time. For instance, he makes much of the ether, a substance thought by an older generation of physicists to pervade the universe. Today's physicists have discarded the theory of the ether, though there are occasional attempts to revive it in modified form.

Still, much of what "Myers" had to say dovetails with other material provided by channelers, psychics, and mystics. For me at least, it has a ring of truth.

What follows is a series of excerpts from Chapter 3 of Beyond Human Personality, beginning with the subsection headed "Human Personality and Survival."

======

It is true that when friends meet they build up the structure of each other, they create one another; they deepen and extend character, color the framework that has seemed bare and inexpressive and generally achieve a picture or creation of the self, that varies with the company.

I am, therefore, perplexed as to the use of the term "Personality" in relation to survival. It may be as elusive and ephemeral in the superficial sense, as images in water ...

"The state of existing as a thinking, intelligent being," such is the meaning of the word personality, if we follow the ruling of the dictionary. Unfortunately, many materialists would alter its signification and demand of personality not merely thought and intelligence; but the material attributes of face, features, figure and gesture. They would declare it to be an expression of the physical organism. For them, the physical structure alone is real. When, therefore, the student of psychical research argues with a materialist on the subject of the survival of human personality, the two are usually at cross purposes; the materialist maintaining that the personality does not continue when life no longer animates the body.

This argument rests upon an unsatisfactory basis. It is necessary, indeed, that a definition of this important word should be made once more. For it is the very kernel of the dispute between the protagonists of temporary and eternal life ...

[T]he state of existing as a thinking, intelligent being, does not necessarily imply physical characteristics. It may imply, however, association with a body. For that, in human thought, is suggestive of a presence which can react upon another presence or appearance. Therefore, when discussing the survival of human personality, the student should discard the idea of any bodiless creation. He should endeavor to imagine the possible conditions that prevail.

It is conceivable, he would argue, that there is a body vibrating at a slightly higher rate of intensity which accompanies the human being from birth till death -- a body invisible to the eye, which receives the soul or conscious intelligence during sleep -- a body which, at all times, acts as intermediary between the intellect, imagination and the physical shape.

Having accepted, as an hypothesis, this etheric shape, it would be well to describe it by the word "double" or, "unifying mechanism." For it is, in construction, just as automatic in its responses as the physical shape. Further, this double is in the likeness of the visible manifestation of the man. So similar are they in appearance, they might be described as twins if they could be visualised together. The double, indeed, reflects the impressions of its companion, receives the memories registered by the senses and imprints those impressions on its brain-substance, which connects it with the mental representations that are, indeed, the very stuff of memory.

It will be recognized therefore, that the word "double" in part expresses the meaning of this finer mechanism which serves the mind and bears the burden of communication between the higher centers and the physical brain. Actually, in order to complete the meaning, the word "unifying" seems essential, for it conveys the purpose of this etheric mechanism -- namely, that it serves to unite, to correlate, to harmonise, to bring together all the working parts of the human being.

On this basic structure the student may build up his arguments when he engages the materialist in discussion. He can account, for instance, for loss of memory in the ageing man or woman, by the fact that the soul can no longer effectively impress the deteriorating physical brain. The machine is too worn to be responsive. On the other hand, the memory of the individual is retained and registered very fully in the unifying body. This body does not imitate its companion and gradually decay as the years pass. In my previous book I have called it the "husk," for it contains and shelters the nascent manifestation which is to be eventually the body of the soul in the world after death.

During the whole of a man's life, this potential expression of personality is forming in the etheric womb, is growing during the span of twenty, fifty, seventy years, whatever may be the term of his sojourn on earth ... 

Two, three or more discarnate souls as a rule assist the dying man, freeing him from that level of consciousness on which he dwells when he walks the planet Earth ...

The task of those beings, who attend upon the dissolution of the physical shape, requires considerable skill. They must gently sever the web that holds the double to the broken frame. In the case of illness they gradually break the threads, taking them one by one so that the soul meets with no sudden shock that might inhibit progress in the coming life for a time ...

During sleep, this body [i.e., the etheric double] receives the soul and feeds the physical shape with life units, with nervous force, and resembles in every particular the human form. All the organs are similar, and it is indeed as an image or reflection in a glass. But it vibrates with greater intensity; and when a man's life draws to a close the subliminal self commences its work of developing the etheric shape within the double. This again will resemble the man as he appears to his friends; but it will be in the prime of life, or will image youth, particularly if a man passes from the physical plane before he reaches his three score years and ten ...

The double holds the physical body within its grip and is a power for integration. Even when the human being sleeps and the former no longer occupies the material shape the latter is controlled by a fine web, by certain threads and two cords which unite it to its finer semblance.

Mind does not merely communicate through the mechanism of the brain. It is in indirect contact with other physical centers such as the ductless glands, the solar plexus and the sacral plexus. But the soul has to work through the medium of the double and never directly commands matter. Always there is this unifying body which comes between the self and his outward appearance in the material world ...

Now, when the ordinary man is fully awake, his unifying body rests within the physical shape. The two forms fit into each other and pervade each other exactly. But, as soon as a man becomes drowsy, the double tilts outwards; and one who can see with the inner eye will perceive a pale form which has, perhaps, half emerged from the actual material body. If a shock or noise rouses its owner, instantly it slips back within the physical manifestation of the individual.

Emotion may be said to be a force that is of an electrical type and can radiate outwards from the human being. The ductless glands are primarily related to the emotional nature and may be called the emotional brain. The soul, working through the double, affects these glands and they in their turn can change the chemical composition of the blood. When the mind fails to function adequately through the channel that connects it with a certain gland the character of the individual alters, and strange abnormalities occur. These are sometimes due to some weakness in the double, or, on occasions, to a fault in the soul when controlling mind. Usually, the soul should be held responsible for the vagaries of the glands, for inadequate or excessive secretions ...

[I]f the hypothesis of this subtle mechanism be accepted; if it be the medium between the soul and the brain, then an extension of the meaning of the word "personality" has to be made. For necessarily this other part, this delicate construction, affects and influences by its nature the outward appearance and shape, all that expresses the personality. The swift and sluggish mentalities may and do act thus because of the character of the channel through which mind operates. That is to say, the double can be a blocked filter, or it may be clear of all obstructions and perfectly convey the messages from the higher centers of the soul.

[Geraldine Cummins, Beyond Human Personality)

Of two minds

In the comments thread of my post Rovin', I tried to develop the idea of "dual loci of consciousness" - the notion that our personality or self is, in some sense, divided. This is a tricky notion and I don't claim to have thought it through in all its details and implications. What follows are some excerpts from two books that may help make the idea a little clearer.

We start with the 2001 reissue of F.W.H. Myers' 1903 magnum opus Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. The book includes a forward (originally published in 1961) by Aldous Huxley. Rather poetically, Huxley writes:

Is the house of the soul a mere bungalow with the cellar? Or does it have an upstairs above the ground floor of consciousness as well as a garbage-littered basement beneath?...

[Myers] knew, of course, that the cellar stinks and is alive with vermin; but he was more interested in what goes on in the rooms (ordinarily locked) above street level -- in the treasures of the piano nobile, in the far-ranging birds (and perhaps even angels) that come and go between the rafters of a roofless attic that is open to the sky ....

His account of the unconscious is superior to Freud's in at least one respect; it is more comprehensive and truer to the data of experience. It is also, it seems to me, superior to Jung's account in being more richly documented with concrete facts and less encumbered with those psycho-anthropologico-pseudo-genetic speculations which becloud the writings of the sage of Zürich.

The point, then, is that Myers' conception of the self is of a rather narrow range of conscious awareness abutted on both sides by a much wider spectrum of unconscious activity. This unconscious activity can involve dark, repressed, socially unacceptable content (corresponding roughly to Freud's theory of the unconscious); but it can also involve elevated, luminous, intellectually significant content, which is the source of the inspiration obtained by artists, scientists, seers, and other creative minds.

In the first chapter of his book, Myers quotes Thomas Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man:

My personal identity ... implies the continued existence of that indivisible thing which I call myself. Whatever this self may be, it is something which thinks, and deliberates, and resolves, and asks, and suffers. I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and asks, and suffers. My thoughts and actions and feelings change every moment: they have no continued, but a successive existence; but that self or I, to which they belong, is permanent, and has the same relation to all succeeding thoughts, actions, and feelings which I call mine.

In contrast to this traditional outlook on the self, Myers then quotes Theodule Ribot's Les Maladies de la Personnalite as an example of the more modern attitude:

The conscious personality is never more than a small fraction of the psychical personality. The unity of the Ego is not therefore the unity of a single entity diffusing itself among multiple phenomena; it is the coordination of a certain number of states perpetually renascent, and having for their sole common basis the vague feeling of our body... the Self is a co-ordination.

Myers writes:

Here, then, we have two clear and definite views, apparently incompatible the one with the other. The supporters of the view that "The Self is a co-ordination"... have frankly given up any notion of an underlying unity -- of a life independent of the organism -- in a word, of a human soul. The supporters of the unity of the Ego, on the other hand, if they have not been able to be equally explicit in denying the opposite view, have made up for this by the thorough-going way in which they have ignored it.

Myers sees his own work as a way of reconciling these two views, by acknowledging the multilayered nature of the self, while still maintaining its essential unity as a "human soul" that can survive death. He goes on:

The "conscious Self" of each of us -- the empirical, the supraliminal Self, as I should prefer to say -- does not comprise the whole of the consciousness, or of the faculty within us. There exists a more comprehensive consciousness, a profounder faculty, which for the most part remains potential only so far as regards the life of earth, but which reasserts itself in its plenitude after the liberating change of death....

The conception is one which has hitherto been regarded as purely mystical; and if I endeavor to plant it upon a scientific basis I certainly shall not succeed in stating it in its final terms or in the best arguments which longer experience will suggest. Its validity, indeed, will be impressed upon the reader only by the successive study of the various kinds of evidence which this book will set forth.

Myers' term for the unconscious is the subliminal self, which comprises both the "higher" and "lower" aspects of consciousness - the attic and the basement, in Huxley's metaphor. This subliminal self does not operate independently of the supraliminal (conscious) self; the two work together, and the boundary between them is fluid.

I do not by using this term [subliminal Self] assume that there are two correlative or parallel selves existing always within each of us. Rather I mean by the subliminal Self that part of the Self which is commonly subliminal [i.e., which is normally outside of conscious awareness]; and I conceive that there may be, not only co-operations between these quasi-independent trains of thought, but also upheavals and alternations of personality at many times, so that what was once below the surface may for a time, or permanently, rise above it. And I conceive also that no Self of which we can here have cognizance is in reality more than a fragment of a larger Self.

We find that the subliminal uprushes -- the impulses or communications which reach our emergent from our submerged selves -- are often characteristically different in quality from any element known to our ordinary supraliminal life. They are different in a way which implies [a] faculty of which we have had no previous knowledge, operating in an environment of which hitherto we have been wholly unaware. This broad statement is of course the purpose of my whole work to justify.

In his long book, published originally in two volumes, Myers considers such phenomena as split personality, hypnosis, and dreams, in order to establish that we do have both a supraliminal and subliminal self, and that the two work together in myriad subtle ways - that they are, in fact, parts of a larger whole. He then uses psychic phenomena, including mediumship, to suggest that the supraliminal and subliminal selves merge after death, leading to a wider awareness, while retaining the same essential personality.

Now let's look at some excerpts from Michael E. Tymn's book The Articulate Dead - specifically Chapter 14, which summarizes Lady Florence Barrett's 1937 book Personality Survives Death. (Barrett's book is long out of print and hard to find, and I haven't read it.)

Florence Barrett was the wife of Sir William Barrett, a distinguished physicist and psychical researcher, perhaps best known for his seminal work Death-Bed Visions (text online here). As Michael Tymn notes, Florence was an impressive person in her own right - "an obstetric surgeon and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine [and] Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women." After her husband's death, she began receiving purported messages from him through the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, and after careful investigation eventually concluded that the messages were genuine.

Of interest to us now are the deceased Sir William's views on consciousness. Tymn tells us:

Discussing the "soul body" or what he preferred to call the "etheric body," Sir William said that while we are in the flesh the subconscious locates itself in the etheric body, while the consciousness resides in the physical brain. When there is complete cooperation between the two, we have perfect sanity, perfect health, and a greater measure of happiness and wisdom because through the etheric body one reaches out to the source of inspiration and life.

To put this explanation in Myers' terms, we would say that the supraliminal self "resides in the physical brain," while the subliminal self "locates itself in the etheric body." Cooperation - what Myers calls coordination - between the two leads to sanity, health, happiness, and wisdom. By implication, a lack of cooperation or coordination will lead to increasingly negative consequences - deterioration of sanity and health, increasing unhappiness, lack of wisdom. Note that Sir William's "subconscious," like Myers' "subliminal self," is the means by which we access higher spiritual truths and creative inspiration.

Sir William explained that when we pass over, the conscious and subconscious join and make a complete mind, a mind that knows and remembers everything [i.e., everything experienced during one's earthly life]. However, when he slowed down his vibration to communicate with [the living] only a portion of his mind could actually communicate....

"I cannot come with and as my whole self, I cannot," Sir William said, going on to explain that he was unable to make his fourth-dimensional self exactly the same as the third and that he often lost his memory of things when communicating but then remembered them when he returned to his spirit state.

Again, this fits in well with Myers' conception. Upon death, the supraliminal and subliminal selves merge to "make a complete mind." But the "whole self" cannot communicate through the physical brain of the medium, just as it could not express itself through Sir William's own brain when he was alive. Only a relatively narrow spectrum of consciousness, corresponding to the conscious mind or supraliminal self, can operate through a physical brain.

Of course, it could be argued that since Lady Barrett was undoubtedly aware of Myers' work, the medium simply read her own thoughts and reflected them back to her. But if we accept "Sir William's" communications as genuine, then we have an endorsement of Myers' theory from someone who is presumably in a position to know!

If what we might call the Myers-Barrett hypothesis is correct, then there are two separate but closely related aspects of consciousness - the conscious mind (the supraliminal self), which processes information via the brain, and the subconscious mind (the subliminal self), which operates through the etheric or soul body. The mind associated with the etheric body is vastly greater in its range of memory, knowledge, and insight, but unfortunately the mind associated with our physical brain can tap into only a small part of this mental content. But the subliminal self continues to operate in the background and can influence the conscious mind, especially if we attune ourselves to it; the result can be bursts of inspiration, and a general feeling of well-being and spiritual harmony.

After death, when the etheric body has separated from the physical body, the subliminal self comes into its own, rising to the level of full conscious awareness, and our mentation is correspondingly enhanced. The limitations of the physical brain are cast off, and we shed any impairments to the conscious mind brought about by defects of the brain.

I hope this clarifies the idea of "dual loci of consciousness," though I realize I've barely scratched the surface of this complex and fascinating topic.