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.

Comments

[Vitor]

About Frederic Myers there is a new book:

http://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Longings-F-W-H-Victorian-Search/dp/1845401239

Frederic William Henry Myers: "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death"

free download

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28human%20personality%29%20AND%20creator%3A%28myers%2

[Kevin]

This seems to me an excellent direction to pursue, Michael, as it contains the possibilities which allow for explanation of my own personal experiences: the "self" comprised of a complex interaction of multiple aspects which cannot be simplified into the "conscious/subconscious" dichotomy. Since my twenties, when I first encountered the involuntary images which suddenly appeared before my mind's "eye" without conscious initiation or input (and which I've long since made manifest in my paintings), I've been only too aware of the intricate multifold which we attempt to signify with the unitary appellation of "I". I recall you've written of essentially the same experience when composing a novel. Having acquired Myers' book(s) on CD included in the purchase of the required read "Irreducible Mind" from Amazon (for those who haven't, follow Vitor's well-offered link above for a gratis [and voluminous] read), I found myself responding spontaneously to Myers' multi-level/multi-room house approach, whereas Freud always seemed stuck in the basement (and ENJOYING it, interestingly) and Jung, while more intriguingly expansive, dragged along too much mystical baggage. Though I'm certainly aware that our initial reactions can, at times, mislead us, I cautiously "believe" that this direction of inquiry has the best likelihood of bringing us closer to the true destination we've been seeking.

[Barbara]

Not sure I quite understand this supraliminal and subliminal stuff. Is it the same as
supraliminal: the ego-id complex, gradually built as we grow up to form human personality;
subliminal: the soul perpetually informing and interpreting from above?

[Michael Prescott]

"Is it the same as ...?"

Myers developed his theories independently of Freud, so I'm not sure there's an exact parallel. My reading is that the subliminal would include what Freud called the id (lower aspects of consciousness), but would also include higher aspects of consciousness. Both the basement and the penthouse, in other words - with supraliminal consciousness serving as the ground floor between the two.