Michael Prescott's Blog

Book review: The Hidden Whisper

By now we've all heard of hybrid cars, but ... a hybrid book? The Hidden Whisper, by J.J. Lumsden, is just such an animal. It's part novel, part nonfiction. Pages 1-241 tell a fictional mystery story about an apparent poltergeist haunting near Tucson, Arizona. Pages 243-325 present the technical background to the story -- nearly 70 pages of detailed endnotes plus a 15 page bibliography. The endnotes cover a diverse array of subjects, including dream studies,  Zener cards, the autoganzfeld, meta-analysis, poltergeists, PK, EVP, precognition, cold reading, Kirlian "auras" (debunked), synaesthesia, NDEs, DMILS, remote healing, and OBEs.  

The author is himself a parapsychologist. One Web site (in a very positive review of the book) describes him as "a UK-based parapsychologist, who did his postgraduate studies at the Edinburgh’s ... Koestler Parapsychology Unit."

The concept of combining fiction and nonfiction in this way isn't entirely new. Michael Crichton did something similar in State of Fear, which criticizes global warming alarmism.

Perhaps it's because I've become a bit jaded about fiction lately, but I found the nonfiction part of The Hidden Whisper more intriguing than the mystery tale. Lumsden does a first-rate job of summarizing the evidence for a variety of paranormal phenomena (though he doesn't say much about mediums or reincarnation), while also giving due acknowledgment to skeptical objections. There's a lot of good info here.

I had mixed feelings about the novel itself. Before continuing, I should say that I'm a very critical reader when it comes to popular fiction, which is one reason why I don't read too much of it anymore. So take my complaints with a grain of salt.

On the plus side, the basic plot is interesting and the denouement is both surprising and satisfying. The lead character, a British parapsychologist (naturally), is engagingly drawn. The paranormal information is woven pretty naturally into the storyline. There are some nice moments of humor, and a good sense of place.

The main negative, for me, was that the book dragged in many spots, with too many dialogue scenes and not enough actually happening. It lacks what literary agent/story analyst Donald Maass calls "line by line tension" -- the subtle, hard-to-achieve quality that compels the reader to keep turning pages late into the night. Indeed, I think the author would benefit from reading Maass' Writing the Breakout Novel, a book recommended to me by a writer friend. Though I've published 20 novels, including a few minor bestsellers, I still learned a lot from Maass's book. (Whether what I've learned will enable me to get published again is another story. The book industry is in seriously bad shape.)

A couple of other, more minor things bothered me about the fictional portion of The Hidden Whisper. The American characters often talk like Brits, using British syntax. Words are capitalized when they shouldn't be, quotation marks are sometimes missing, and there are other errors that a good copy-editor should have caught. I know this sounds nit-picky, and it is, but I notice stuff like that.

Some of these flaws are probably attributable to the fact that the book was published by a very small press. As small presses become more ubiquitous and the big publishing houses continue their inevitable decline, I expect to see more of this kind of thing.

Overall, I would recommend The Hidden Whisper as a good introduction to the field of parapsychology, but more for the lengthy nonfiction supplement than for the novel itself. However, taste in fiction is very subjective, and your mileage may vary. And in the age of such dubious fare as TV's Medium and Ghost Whisperer, it's certainly good to see an accurate and serious fictional presentation of an investigation into the paranormal.

Wolfgang Amadeus Myers

Suppose you were reading a review of a new book about classical music. The reviewer doesn't think too highly of the book, though his objections are rather vague. Then you get to this paragraph:

One major aim of the book is to pay tribute to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, an 18th century composer. His works are incessantly praised by the authors, and one of his operas is even enclosed as a CD. I have a couple of Mozart CDs on the shelf of my entertainment center, but I haven't listened to them. I confess that until now I never differentiated Mozart from various other lackluster and boring musicians of the Classical Era. Apparently I was unfair: Mozart seems in a different league. For one thing, he was evidently a child prodigy of sorts, and he received a great deal of acclaim in his lifetime and even afterward.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I came across a paragraph like this, my reaction would be, "How the heck did this guy ever get hired to review a book on classical music, a subject he obviously knows nothing about?"

Of course, this is a purely hypothetical example. Nothing like this could possibly happen in real life.

Or could it?

Consider an except from "The Soul of the Gaps," a review of Irreducible Mind, by Edward F. Kelly & Emily Williams Kelly et al, which appears in the magazine Skeptic (2009, Vol. 15, No. 1, p. 75). The review is online here. I learned of it only because Vitor Moura kindly sent me a copy.

The reviewer, Sebastian Dieguez, writes:

Indeed, one major aim of IM is to pay a dithyrambic tribute to Frederic W.H. Myers, a largely forgotten hero and pioneer of psychical research in England. His 1903 magnum opus Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death is incessantly praised in IM and is even enclosed as a CD. I have an abridged version of this book on my pseudoscience shelf, but I confess that until now I never differentiated it from other pompous and boring compendia of weird anecdotes, ghost stories and wacky theories from the turn of the century. Apparently I was unfair: Myers seems in a different league. For one thing, he was among the first to have theorized about what would be later known as "the unconscious." However, the reason Myers is now forgotten in non-occult circles is that Human Personality is replete with ghost stories and mediums of all sorts, which understandably has obscured the few interesting insights that could have been found in there.

So here we have someone hired by a professional journal to review a book about parapsychology, and, prior to reading the book, he apparently had only the vaguest idea of who F.W.H. Myers was, and had never read anything by him or about him. Oh, he did own Myers' book, but he had never troubled to, you know, look at it.

If this is so, then it's exceedingly unlikely that the reviewer knows much of anything about the early years of parapsychology, since even the most cursory study of the subject would quickly bring Myers' name to the forefront.

That means the reviewer presumably knows little or nothing about the decades-long investigations of Leonora Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard, little or nothing about the early work of the Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart, little or nothing about the work of Oliver Lodge, William Barrett, Richard Hodgson, Charles Drayton Thomas, William James, and their colleagues.

Is a person like this really qualified to review Irreducible Mind?

I'm sure the editors of Skeptic would say he is, and they would probably point to Sebastian Dieguez' biography:

Sebastian Dieguez worked for a time as a clinical neuropsychologist and is currently a graduate student at the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience of the Brain Mind Institute, at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. He investigates the neural correlates of bodily awareness and self-knowledge, as well as a number of obscure neuropsychiatric syndromes. He has written on varied topics such as disorders of the body schema, cursing in aphasia, the neuropsychology of empathy, near-death and out-of-body experiences, and is a regular contributor to Cerveau & Psycho, the French edition of Scientific American Mind.

I agree that these impressive and notable credentials amply qualify Sebastian Dieguez to review a mainstream book on neuroscience, one that accepts the materialist paradigm popularized by Dennett, Pinker, and others. But Irreducible Mind is not a mainstream book. Its entire purpose, as stated by the authors, is to confront, challenge, and overturn the assumptions of mainstream neuroscience. It relies on decades of research showing various kinds of anomalous results that call the materialist paradigm into question. This research falls mostly under the umbrella of parapsychology.

Any given reviewer may disagree with the book's thesis, of course, but if it is to be an informed disagreement, then the reviewer needs to be familiar with the evidence that is cited - that is, with the work of parapsychologists over the past century or more. If a reviewer dismisses this entire area of research as "weird anecdotes, ghost stories and wacky theories," has not read the major works on the subject, and has no knowledge of major figures in the field, then he is simply not qualified to deal with this particular book. 

The fact that Dieguez hasn't read Myers' book doesn't prevent him from remarking casually on "the few interesting insights that could have been found in there." How does he know there are only a few? Well, the same way he knows that all paranormal phenomena are nonsense. He just knows. He has some books on his shelf, doesn't he? Okay, he hasn't read them, but he doesn't have to. He knows.

Lacking the ability to address the authors' specific claims, all the reviewer can do is dismiss Irreducible Mind in its entirety by saying that, at 800 pages, it relies on "sheer quantity of information" to make its case.

That's right. The problem with Irreducible Mind is that it contains too much information.

Or, as the Emperor Joseph II once put it: "Too many notes, Mozart."

And we all know how history has treated that review.

====

Update, July 30: Sebastian Dieguez responds at some length in the comments thread. Among other things, he says he actually does know a lot about Myers but pretended not to for dramatic effect.

Through the looking glass

In my last post, I summarized the first part of chapter 12 of Kenneth Ring's book Life at Death (1980). This time I'll provide some excerpts from the remainder of the chapter, in which Ring deals with the later stages of a near-death experience. These later stages include traveling through a dark tunnel toward a bright light, encountering a spiritual presence, having a life review, and entering a paradise-like realm, which he calls "stage V" of the experience. (In the quoted material, all emphases are in the original text.)

Ring believes that these

stages of the core experience can be understood as initiating a transition from a state of consciousness rooted in "this-world" sensory impressions to one that is sensitive to the realities of another dimension of existence. When consciousness begins to function independent of the physical body, it becomes capable of awareness of another dimension -- let us, for ease of reference, simply call it for now a fourth dimension. Most of us, most of the time, function in the three-dimensional world of ordinary sensory reality. According to the interpretation I am offering, this reality is grounded in a body-based consciousness. When one quits the body -- either at death or voluntarily, as some individuals have learned to do -- one's consciousness is then free to explore the fourth-dimensional world.

These aspects of the core experience can be interpreted in scientific terms if one uses some of the postulates of holographic theory...

It has been proposed by Karl Pribram, the well-known neurosurgeon and holographic theorist, that the brain itself functions holographically by mathematically analyzing interference wave patterns so that images of objects are seen. "Primary reality" itself is said to be composed of frequencies only. Different cells of the brain respond to different frequencies, and the brain functions like a frequency analyzer, breaking down complex patterns of frequencies into their components. These frequencies are then converted into our familiar object world by a process analogous to the illumination of an interference pattern by a laser beam.

Let me pause here to say that this explanation highlights one of the problems I have with the holographic theory. To me, it seems problematic to say that the brain essentially creates our world of physical objects when the brain itself is a physical object. If physical objects don't exist in the absence of a brain, and if the brain itself is a physical object, then we seem to be caught in a chicken-and-egg dilemma. The problem might be solved if we were to assume that consciousness, rather than the brain, is the actual "frequency analyzer." Ring himself seems to move closer to this position later in the chapter.

At any rate, Ring continues:

To make the connection between near-death experiences and holographic theory, we must emphasize the properties of what Pribram calls the frequency domain -- the primary reality composed of frequencies only. Of this realm Pribram has said:

The frequency domain deals with density of occurrences only; time and space are collapsed. Ordinary boundaries of space and time, such as locations of any sort, disappear ... in a sense, everything is happening all at once, synchronously. But one can read out what is happening into a variety of co-ordinates of which space and time are the most helpful in bringing us into the ordinary domain of appearances ... [S]ome of the mystical experiences people have described for millennia begin to make some scientific sense. They bespeak the possibility of tapping into that order of reality that is behind the world of appearances ... Spiritual insights fit the descriptions of this domain. They're made perfectly plausible by the invention of the hologram.

Returning to NDEs, Ring writes:

I assume that the core experience is a type of mystical experience that ushers one into the holographic domain. In this state of consciousness, there is a new order of reality that one becomes sensitive to -- a frequency domain -- as time and space lose their conventional meaning. The act of dying, then, involves a gradual shift of consciousness from the ordinary world of appearances to a holographic reality of pure frequencies. In this new reality, however, consciousness still functions holographically (without a brain, I must assume) to interpret these frequencies in object terms ...

Access to this holographic reality becomes experientially available when one's consciousness is freed from its dependence on the physical body. So long as one remains tied to the body and to its sensory modalities, holographic reality at best can only be an intellectual construct. When one comes close to death, one experiences it directly. That is why core experiencers (and mystics generally) speak about their visions with such certitude and conviction.

Ring proceeds to analyze specific elements of the near-death experience in terms of the holographic theory. Drawing on the work of holographic theorist Itzhak Bentov, he explains the movement along a tunnel as indicative of a change of consciousness:

The tunnel or darkness is an intermediate or transitional zone occurring between levels of consciousness. It is as though one's awareness is "shifting gears" from ordinary waking consciousness to a direct perception of the frequency domain. The gap in time while this shift is being effected is experienced as movement through (a dark) space. What is actually "moving," however, is awareness itself -- or mind without the body -- and what it is moving "through" is the gateway to holographic, or four-dimensional, consciousness.

The bright light, in Ring's view,

represents the "light" associated with the state of consciousness one enters after death. At this level of consciousness -- where we are no longer constrained by the sensory systems of the physical body -- we are presumably sensitive to a higher range of frequencies, which appear to us as light of extraordinary brilliance and unearthly beauty. In many traditions, this is spoken of as the light of the "astral" world or plain, and it is said that, for most people, this is the realm to which one "goes" after death. Of course, there is no way of providing acceptable scientific evidence for such statements, but it is perhaps the least noteworthy that virtually every description that purports to convey a sense of the "the next world" depicts "a world of light."...

In this context, it might also be recalled that holographic theory also postulates a primary reality defined as a "frequency domain." One can wonder whether one level of this frequency domain might correspond to what has traditionally been called the "astral plane."...

[NDE researcher Raymond] Moody spoke of a "being of light," and though none of our respondents used this phrase some seem to be aware of a "presence" (or "voice") in association with the light ...

I submit that this presence/voice is actually -- oneself! It is not merely a projection of one's personality, however, but one's total self, or what in some traditions is called the higher self. In this view, the individual personality is but a split-off fragment of the total self with which it is reunited at the point of death. During ordinary life, the individual personality functions in a seemingly autonomous way, as though it were a separate entity. In fact, however, is invisibly tied to the larger self structure of which it is a part ...

This higher self is so awesome, so overwhelming, so loving, and unconditionally accepting ... and so foreign to one's individualized consciousness that one perceives it as separate from oneself, as unmistakably other. It manifests itself as a brilliant golden light, but it is actually oneself, in a higher form, that one is seeing ...

The higher self, furthermore, has total knowledge of the individual personality, both past and future. That is why, when it is experienced as a voice, it seems to be an "all-knowing" one (to use the phrase of one respondent). That is why it can initiate a life review and, in addition, provide a preview of an individual's life and events. At this level, information is stored holographically and is experienced holographically -- simultaneously or nearly so. In fact, the life review is a holographic phenomenon par excellence.

From here, Ring looks at the "decisional crisis" in the near-death experience -- the point when the individual must decide to return to Earth (or when it is decided for him).

If the higher self does indeed have total knowledge of the individual personality, both past and future, that knowledge must include the "programmed" time of death for the personality. Thus, when an individual is told that he is being "sent back" or that "his time has not yet come," this presumably reflects the "life program" of that person's life.

Ring acknowledges another possible interpretation of the being of light -- namely, that it is a guardian angel. He concludes, however, that what people regard as a guardian angel may, in fact, be a higher self, which the individual merely perceives as entirely separate from himself.

Ring goes on:

It may be helpful to make explicit one further aspect of the core experience that is easily understandable in holographic terms. I have in mind the perception of time and space ... The modal near-death experience is one in which the concepts of time and space have no meaning. This is precisely what we should expect if the experience takes place in a holographic state of consciousness.

He quotes Carl Jung's description of an NDE he experienced around the age of seventy:

I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which present, past and future are one. Everything that happens in time had been brought together into a concrete whole. Nothing was distributed over time, nothing could be measured by temporal concepts ... One is interwoven into an indescribable whole yet observes it with complete objectivity.

From here, Ring proceeds to the "last stage of the core experience," which "seems to fulfill the promise implied by the encounter with the brilliant golden light." His analysis is worth quoting at length:

Here one appears to move through that light and into a "world of light." At this point, the individual perceives a realm of surpassing beauty and splendor and is sometimes aware of the "spirits" of deceased relatives or loved ones.

What is this world?

In holographic terms, it is another frequency domain -- a realm of "higher" frequencies. Consciousness continues to function holographically so that it interprets these frequencies in object terms. Thus, another "world of appearances" (just as the physical world, according to holographic theory, is a world of appearances) is constructed. At the same time, this world of appearances is fully "real" (just as our physical world is real); it is just that reality is relative to one's state of consciousness ...

[This world] is often characterized as a world of "higher vibrations."

That such talk isn't a mere metaphor was suggested by the comment of one of our respondents, who, in attempting to describe the music of this realm, likened it to "a combination of vibrations ... many vibrations." Of course, music does consist of vibrations, but it isn't ordinarily spoken of in that way. Such observations again hint that those near-death survivors who reach this stage are responding directly to a frequency (vibratory) domain of holographic reality ...

I believe that this is a realm that is created by interacting thought structures. These structures or "thought-forms" combine to form patterns, just as interference waves form patterns on the holographic plate. And just as the holographic image appears to be fully real when illuminated by a laser beam, so the images produced by interacting thought-forms appear to be real.

There might appear to be a serious imperfection in this holographic analogy: The pattern produced on the physical holographic plate is, after all, only a meaningless swirl. It only becomes coherent when a coherent beam of light (that is, a laser) is used to illuminate the swirl. What, then, is the equivalent of the laser in the stage V realm?

The logic of my speculations seemingly leads to a single conclusion: It is the mind itself. If the brain functions holographically to give us our picture of physical reality, then the mind must function similarly when the physical brain can no longer do so. Of course, it would be much simpler if one merely assumed, as some brain researchers (for example, Sir John Eccles and Wilder Penfield) appear to have done, that the mind works through the brain during physical life but is not reducible to brain function. If the mind can be supposed to exist independent of the brain, it could presumably function holographically without a brain. If one is not willing to grant this assumption, one would seem forced to postulate a non-physical brain of some kind that operates on this "astral" level. At this point, we would have passed over the limit of tolerable speculation. In my view, it is preferable merely to assume that sensorylike impressions at this level are functionally organized in a way similar to sensory impressions of the physical world, that is, holographically.

If we can assume this (leaving the question of the "mechanism" open), then the attributes of stage V would fall neatly into place. Since individual minds "create" this world (out of thoughts and images), this reality reflects, to a degree, the "thought-structures" of individuals used to the world of physical reality. Thus, the "forms" of the stage V world are similar to those of physical world. However, since this is a realm that is also (presumably) composed of minds that are more clearly attuned or accustomed to this higher frequency domain, those minds can shape the impressions of the "newly arrived." The holographic result -- an interaction of these thought patterns -- thus tends to create a "higher gloss" to the perceived forms of this realm -- that is, they are experienced in an enhanced way. One is tempted to say that what is seen is, at least at first, largely determined by pre-existing schemata of near-death survivors, but that how (finely or beautifully) it appears is influenced primarily by minds used to that frequency domain ...

Presumably -- and this is an admitted and obvious extrapolation -- as one becomes increasingly accustomed to this holographic domain and to "how it works," the correspondences between the physical world and this realm grow increasingly tenuous. Eventually one would suppose that an individual's consciousness would become anchored in the four-dimensional reality of the holographic domain and the familiar structures of our world would be radically changed there in ways we can only surmise.

The holographic interpretation can obviously also be used to account for the perception of "spirit-forms," a common feature of stage V experiences in deathbed visions. Just as object-forms are, theoretically, from a holographic point of view, a function of interacting mind patterns, so, too, are encounters with "persons" in "spirit bodies." Such "entities" are, then, the product of interacting minds attuned to a holographic domain in which thought alone fashions reality.

At this point, Ring considers the phenomenon of hellish near-death experiences. Although he believes these experiences to be relatively rare, he thinks they are genuine. He notes, however, that in some cases a hellish near-death experience becomes more pleasant as it continues. He writes:

In my view, what is happening in these cases is that the individual is "passing through" a lower frequency domain (although he may occasionally -- temporarily -- "get stuck" there). This domain is also a holographic reality and is organized in precisely the same way as the realm we have already considered. The principal difference is in the nature of the minds that are interacting to create this reality ...

In my opinion... the near-death survivor is usually kept from having a direct awareness of this realm, just as, for perhaps different reasons, he usually has no recall for his "return trip." Hell may exist as a "lower frequency domain," but most near-death survivors never seem to encounter it and, if they do, only a tiny fraction seen to "get stranded" there. What may happen after the initial stages of death -- something this research cannot speak to -- remains an open question.

I think Ring's discussion constitutes a very useful and important summary of the "holographic" aspects of an NDE. Note, however, that most NDErs do not experience the sense of oneness with the universe that a few, like Carl Jung, have described. For the most part, the "holographic" aspects of the typical experience are limited to the life review, in which the events of a lifetime are perceived all at once and yet separately, in a way that language cannot adequately express.

It would appear that merging with the universe -- or with reality as a whole -- is an experience that awaits us some considerable distance down the line, if at all. For the typical person, the next life would seem to be a world of thought-forms similar to earthly reality, in which one still has a body, a personality, a particular set of memories, etc.

Note Ring's speculation that eventually one's consciousness would become acclimated to the holographic realm, at which point the environment would start to lose its resemblance to earthly life. This fits in well with channeled material, such as Geraldine Cummins'  The Road to Immortality, which asserts that the continued evolution of consciousness leads one progressively further away from the "plane of illusion" (i.e., the "paradise" environment).

If the holographic view is correct -- and it is, of course, only a hypothesis, as Ring repeatedly points out -- then it seems to me that it is not the brain, but rather consciousness itself, that must serve as the "frequency analyzer." Or we might speculate that the brain of the "etheric double" (discussed last time) performs this function. The exact mechanism remains unclear, and this is one of the weaknesses of the hypothesis.

In any event, Ring's summary of the holographic model and its relevance to afterlife studies is probably the best I've seen, at least in short form. People interested in this approach to the subject may want to seek out Ring's books, and also The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot.

Double, double, toil and trouble

In comments, Art suggested that I read (or actually reread) Chapter 12, "Beyond the Body," in Kenneth Ring's 1980 book Life at Death: a Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience. I took his advice and found the material very interesting. What follows is a summary of the first part of the chapter.

Ring begins by looking at the early stages of a near-death experience -- the apparent separation of the person from the physical body. He writes,

I believe that what happens when an individual is near the point of apparent death is a real, and not just a subjective, separation of "something" -- to be specified shortly -- from the physical body. It is this "something" that then perceives the immediate physical environment and then (in subsequent stages of the core experience) goes on to experience events outside of the time-space coordinates of ordinary sensory reality.

He suggests that the sense of peace and absence of pain typically described by NDErs are consistent with what we would expect if the experiencers "are free from all body-based cues."

But is the experiencer disembodied, or does he have a new body? Ring considers both possibilities, finding evidence for each. Some accounts suggest a disembodied consciousness, while others indicate the existence of a "second body of some kind." Employing a commonly used term from esoteric studies, Ring calls this second body "the double."

He goes on:

According to [Raymond] Moody, most of his respondents, while subjectively out of their physical body, found themselves to be "in" another body. Typically, however, his interviewees found it difficult, if not impossible, to describe this body. It is, of course, weightless and invisible [to the living], but sometimes it seems to have a human shape and is capable of at least visual and auditory perception. Moody remarks that this second body is usually characterized by such terms as a mist, cloud, vapor, energy pattern, or the like. He felt that the term that best epitomized its quality was the spiritual body ...

On the other hand, most of our respondents [i.e., people interviewed for Ring's book] implied or stated that they were not aware of a second body, but rather felt as though it was simply "themselves" or "their mind" that was conscious while out of the body ...

From these several sources, then, about all we can conclude is that the perception of a second body -- the double -- is sometimes reported by persons having an out-of-body experience, but it is by no means always the case ...

This conflict in testimony could be seen as problematic, but as we'll shortly see, there is a fairly easy way of resolving the two kinds of accounts.

In the meantime, still pursuing the elusive double, Ring looks at descriptions of the dying process provided by people who allegedly could observe the formation of  this second body. (Incidentally, the medium Andrew Jackson Davis gave a similar report, which I quoted in this post, with a follow-up here.)

Ring quotes a nineteenth-century missionary's account of the Tahitian belief that at death

the soul [is] drawn out of the body, whence it was borne away, to be slowly and gradually united to the god from whom it had emanated ... The Tahitians have concluded that a substance, taking human form, issued from the head of the corpse, because among the privileged few who have the blessed gift of clairvoyance, some affirm that, shortly after a human body ceases to breathe, a vapour arises from the head, hovering a little way above it, but attached by a vapoury cord. The substance, it is said, gradually increases in bulk and assumes the form of an inert body. When this has become quite cold, the connecting cord disappears and the dis-entangled soul-form floats away as if borne by invisible carriers.

After this, Ring quotes two accounts presented by Robert Crookall, which dovetail neatly with the Tahitian view. Here's the first one:

Estelle Roberts described her husband's transition. "I saw his spirit leave the body. It emerged from his head and gradually molded itself into an exact replica of his earth-body. It remained suspended about a foot above his body, lying in the same position, i.e., horizontal, and attached to it by a cord to the head. Then the cord broke and the spirit-form floated away, passing through the wall ...

And here is part of the second account, in which a physician, R.B. Hout, described the death of his aunt:

My attention was called ... to something immediately above the physical body, suspended in the atmosphere about two feet above the bed. At first I could distinguish nothing more than a vague outline of a hazy, foglike substance. There seemed to be only a mist held there suspended, motionless. But, as I looked, very gradually there grew into my sight a denser, more solid, condensation of this inexplicable vapor. Then I was astonished to see definite outlines presenting themselves, and soon I saw this foglike substance was assuming a human form....

As I watched the suspended Spirit Body, my attention was called, again intuitively, to a silverlike substance that was streaming from the head of the physical body to the head of the spirit "double." Then I saw the connection-cord between the two bodies. As I watched, the thought, "The silver cord!" kept running through my mind. I knew, for the first time, the meaning of it. This "silver cord" was the connecting-link between the physical and the spirit bodies, even as the umbilical cord unites the child to its mother...

The cord was attached to each of the bodies at the occipital protuberance immediately at the base of the skull. Just where it met the physical body it spread out, fanlike, and numerous little strands separated and attached separately to the skull base. But other than at the attachments, the cord was round, being perhaps an inch in diameter. The color was a translucent luminous silver radiance. The cord seemed alive with vibrant energy. I could see the pulsations of light stream along the course of it, from the direction of the physical body to the spirit "double." With each pulsation the spirit body became more alive and denser, whereas the physical body became quieter and more nearly lifeless ... By this time the features were very distinct. The life was all in the astral body... the pulsations of the cord had stopped... I looked at the various strands of the cord as they spread out, fanlike, at the base of the skull. Each strand snapped ... the final severance was at hand.

It's obvious that these accounts -- and many others like them -- agree on the essentials, even if there are discrepancies in some details. (And perhaps there are not any greater discrepancies here than in various accounts of birth, since, as any obstetrician will testify, not all births follow an identical procedure.)

If we are to give credence to this evidence, we seem drawn to the conclusion that a second body is formed (or re-formed) as part of the dying process, and that the soul or spirit or life force -- my terms, not Ring's -- uses this second body as a vehicle when the physical body is no longer functional.

After some qualifying remarks, in which he makes a few too many concessions to critics of parapsychology for my taste, Ring attempts to formulate a theory on the basis of these accounts. Here's where he offers a solution to the apparent contradiction between the two types of accounts.

Recall that some people sense or see themselves in a second body, whereas others do not. The clairvoyant visions I have cited, however, all suggest that the formation of a second or duplicate body takes time, that it does not appear all at once. If that is so, then it becomes understandable why only some people would feel that they were "in" such a body; presumably those who fail to report such perceptions were at an earlier stage of the dying process, a pre-second body stage, to be exact. Whether this alleged second body is actually an objective reality (albeit in another set of dimensions to which some clairvoyants are presumably sensitive) or is nothing more than what esotericists call a "thought-form" (that is, a mind-created reality in the physical space-time with which we are all familiar) is a question that we must leave unanswered. It may even be that it is not a terribly helpful way of phrasing the alternatives....

Not only is there a high level of agreement across independent witnesses concerning the formation of a spirit double at death, but their descriptions accord, on the whole, very neatly with the accounts provided by near-death survivors themselves! That is, both the external perspective of the witness and the direct testimony of the individual close to death converge on what is occurring during the initial stages of death: There is a splitting-off process that takes place during which one's center of self-awareness is freed from the constraints of the physical body.

Ring admits that most NDErs, even those who report being in a second body, do not describe the formation of the body in detail. Some who are "caught up in this extraordinary process" may not be in a position to note the details. Others may not have gotten "far enough into the experience" to observe the second body's formation.  Even so, Ring has turned up one case in which an NDEr does report the formation of the double in great detail. The case, incidentally, long precedes the popularization of NDEs by Raymond Moody in the 1970s.

It is the case of "A.S. Wiltse, a medical doctor, who nearly died of typhoid fever in 1889. Wiltse obtained sworn depositions from the witnesses, including his own position, concerning his medical condition and the actions that took place during his coma." Wiltse reported:

I passed about four hours in all without pulse or perceptible heart beat as I am informed by Dr. S.H. Raynes, who was the only physician present. [During that time] I came again into a state of conscious existence and discovered that I was still in the body, but the body and I had no longer any interests in common.

With all the interest of a physician, I beheld the wonders of my bodily anatomy, intimately interwoven with which, even tissue for tissue, was I, the living soul of that dead body. By some power, apparently not my own, the Ego was rocked to and fro, laterally, as a cradle is rocked, by which process its connection with the tissues of the body was broken up ... I felt and heard, it seemed, the snapping of innumerable small cords. When this was accomplished, I began slowly to retreat from the feet, toward the head ... As I emerged from the head, I floated up and down and laterally like a soap bubble attached to the bowl of a pipe until at last I broke loose from the body and fell lightly to the floor, where I slowly rose and expanded into the full stature of a man. I seemed to be translucent, of a bluish cast and perfectly naked ... As I turned, my left elbow came in contact with the arm of one of two gentlemen, who were standing at the door. To my surprise, his arm passed through mine without apparent resistance, the severed parts closing again without pain, as air re-unites. I looked quickly up at his face to see if he had noticed the contact, but he gave no sign.

It appears, then, that both external and subjective reports largely agree on the proposition that consciousness leaves the physical body at or near the point of death, and that a second body receives this consciousness.

Ring sums up his conclusions so far.

On the basis of the separation hypothesis ... I do endorse the proposition that consciousness (with or without a second body) may function independently of the physical body.

Finally, there is the so-far-neglected issue of the "mechanisms" underlying the separation of consciousness (or the double) from the physical body. An answer to this question could only take us into the wilds of esoteric speculation, where I have no wish to roam ... For me, it is sufficient to postulate that a separation can take place. Just how it occurs is a problem I must leave to scientists more imaginative and daring than I.

To account now for the later developments of the core experience we will have to go beyond the approach of parapsychology and employ a different but compatible framework, based, in part, on an emerging paradigm in contemporary scientific thought: holographic theory.

We'll take up this part of Ring's account next time.

On the road

Since 1997, I've been intensely interested in spiritual issues -- the whole question of the "meaning of life" -- why we're here, what it's all about, and whether it matters. I've tried different paths with differing degrees of success.

One of the routes I explored was "nondualistic mysticism," a venerable tradition in both East and West, but probably more commonly associated with Eastern religions. Though I've read some books on Buddhism, my main exposure to this way of thinking comes from the popular writer Eckhart Tolle, who's become something of a cultural phenomenon, especially after being embraced by New Age diva Oprah Winfrey.

Tolle offers some valuable insights and is no doubt correct in many of his criticisms of the ego-driven modern world. The meditative techniques he describes so well can be quite helpful in shutting down the stream-of-consciousness babble of the mind and providing some much-needed "inner peace."

That said, I must add that I don't find Tolle's overall philosophy or worldview very satisfying. For me at least, it seems to lead to a certain lassitude, a feeling that nothing matters much or at all; and this feeling slides pretty easily into a depressed state of mind. I'm sure many of Tolle's admirers are not depressed, so this may just be a personal quirk of my own. Nevertheless, it's enough to keep me from adopting the Tollean perspective.

Another thing turns me off Tolle, as well -- namely, the fact that his viewpoint doesn't seem to match up very well with the information provided by mediums and near-death experiencers. For Tolle, the personality is an artifice that will dissolve upon death -- yet mediumistic communicators emphatically state (and demonstrate) that personality persists after death. NDEs usually indicate the same thing; it is rare that a near-death experiencer reports losing the sense of self in a transport of mystical oneness, though occasionally such claims are made. For the most part, NDErs (like those who come through mediums) seem to remain who they were during life, but with access to a different perspective that gives them new insights. I can't see any reason to discount all this evidence, some of it very compelling, simply to adopt the Tollean viewpoint -- a viewpoint that strikes me as enervating and dispiriting anyway.

Of all the major world religions, Christianity is the one I've looked into most thoroughly. I went through a period when I was reading a good deal of New Testament scholarship and Christian apologetics. Much of the apologetic material is quite sophisticated, but I can't shake the feeling that the same kinds of arguments could be employed just as easily to prove the truth of any other faith tradition.

Moreover, any belief system that depends ultimately on ancient texts is problematic. Who can say if the texts are accurate, or if the events they described took place at all? I don't doubt the historical reality of Jesus, and I think he was probably "resurrected" in the sense that his etheric body was seen by his followers. I even think it's possible the tomb was empty, and the earthly body vanished in some miraculous way. And I've read enough about the Shroud of Turin to think that it may be a genuine relic, preserving Jesus' image at the time of and this event. (Yes, I know about the carbon dating, but see here for more on the story.)

So I am obviously very sympathetic to Christianity and to claims for the extraordinary nature of Jesus. Still, I think his story has probably been somewhat misinterpreted. To me, he was -- or is -- a spiritual master of the highest order, someone whose insights, teachings, and powers were far beyond those of nearly all other people. But I don't think he was infallible, omniscient, omnipotent, or part of a triune deity.

Actually, Jesus' teachings have something in common with the messages received by some mediums. It has often been noted that mediumistic communicators, in trying to deal with earthly problems, can be rather impractical -- suggesting solutions that would work in an ideal world but not in the world as it is. In particular, many of these spirits seem to have lost their understanding of money and the role it plays in human life. Jesus' teachings strike me in somewhat the same way -- lofty, idealistic, powerful, but not altogether practical. It is easy enough for a spirit, or a spiritual master, to advise us not to fret about money -- "the lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin" (Matthew 6:28) -- but in our practical day-to-day lives financial considerations can be pretty darned important. We can't actually live like the lilies of the field, but it seems that those persons, incarnate or discarnate, who reach a certain level of spiritual advancement have trouble relating to the practical problems that dog the rest of us.

In any event, I take the story of Jesus as the (imperfect and embellished) record of an advanced spiritual teacher who, after his death, was able to manifest himself to his disciples -- many of whom were probably chosen for their latent psychic abilities in the first place. A complicated theology arose out of this episode as those followers and others who came after them tried to make sense of it, but this theology, overlaid with both traditional Hebrew and neo-Platonist formulations, may be more misleading than helpful.

If I don't go in for traditional Western religion, as represented by Christianity, or for the Eastern mystical tradition, as represented in popular form by Tolle, then just what is my belief system at present? I would have to say that of the various worldviews I've looked at, spiritualism -- the movement that began in the 19th century and enjoyed its heyday during the First World War -- is the one that most appeals to me. That's not to say there isn't a lot of nonsense in spiritualism -- of course there is. There have been fraudulent and self-deluded mediums, and there are inconsistencies in messages received even by genuine mediums. But when we strip away the doubtful or discredited mediums and look at the essence of what the best mediums had to say, I think we find a a worldview that is largely consistent with itself and with the best evidence from other sources, such as NDEs, OBEs, IADCs, and Stevenson's reincarnation research.

The worldview of spiritualism essentially holds that "we are spiritual beings having a physical existence." (The quote is from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I don't think he was a spiritualist in the sense in which I'm using the word, but his statement sums up spiritualism very nicely.) Spiritualism doesn't deny the existence of physical reality with all its travails and challenges, but it does say that this phase of our existence is temporary and serves a purpose. The purpose is for us to learn certain lessons -- lessons that vary from person to person depending on the individual's stage of spiritual growth. Reincarnation is part of the plan, though the details are a bit murky and -- according to some communicators -- impossible for the earthly mind, bound by space and time, to fully comprehend.

There are heavens and hells -- more precisely, different planes of spiritual existence -- but these too are temporary. What we may think of as heaven or paradise is not a final destination but more like a way station, a place to rest, recuperate, and recharge the spiritual batteries before continuing to new challenges and opportunities. (In this respect, it is interesting to recall the cryptic saying attributed to Jesus, "In my Father's house are many mansions" [John 14:2]. The word incorrectly translated as "mansions" actually means "resting places" or "way stations.")

Those who've done their best to be good and decent in their earthly lives will make the journey faster than those whose cruel and malicious behavior has stunted their spiritual growth. The worst offenders will have to undergo a change of heart and sincere repentance and atonement, perhaps throughout several incarnations, before moving on. But no one is left to languish in misery forever, even if that misery is self-inflicted.

This sort of thing is rather abstract, but I've found that some of spiritualism's claims can be tested in a private, introspective (and necessarily subjective) way. Spiritualist teachings emphasize that we all have one or more spirit guides available to help us, if we only ask. I've found that if I put myself in a suitably relaxed frame of mind -- an almost trancelike state similar to the hypnagogic stage that precedes sleep -- and address a specific question to a (vividly imagined) "spirit guide," I can receive meaningful answers that clear up the question very satisfactorily to me. Some of the insights I've received via this method have been enormously helpful, and I've come to rely on it whenever I'm faced with a problem or a dilemma. Am I "merely" accessing otherwise hidden portions of my own mind? Possibly, but even so, this would not contradict spiritualism, which places great importance on the "higher self" ordinarily concealed from our view. To me, the crucial point is that the method works. Understanding exactly how it works is less important to me than actually being able to use it.

Some people say rather indignantly, "I've never sensed any spirit guides or guardian angels. I've never met any beings like that!" A question to ask would be: "Have you ever tried to meet them?" Some ideas can be tested only by personally seeking the answer with an open mind. The person who insists there is no spiritual world because "I've never seen it," when he has never actually looked, is like a person who insists there's no such thing as music because "I've never heard it," while he resolutely holds his hands over his ears.

Spiritualism can be criticized on various grounds; advocates of more traditional religions call it shallow, while those inclined to mysticism call it crude. Both camps seem to regard spiritualism as simplistic, almost childish, and there is some justice in this criticism. But then, many great truths have a disarming simplicity, an almost childish quality. The Golden Rule, probably the greatest moral truth ever enunciated (and one found in many traditions around the world), is simple enough that even a child can grasp it. Its very simplicity is the key to its power.

Besides, might we not expect the ultimate truth about our spiritual nature to be consistent with the thoughts and feelings of childhood? Childhood is when we are probably more closely in touch with our spiritual side than at any later time. Arguably the fairy-tale, happily-ever-after quality of some spiritualist messages is a point in their favor. Children may enjoy fairy tales precisely because they are young enough to dimly recall -- and yearn for -- the kind of heaven that such stories re-create. Perhaps Jesus was alluding to something along these lines when he said that only by becoming childlike could one be ready to enter "the kingdom of heaven."

At any rate, of the approaches I've investigated, spiritualism remains the most compelling to me. I don't think it is the whole truth, but I do think it takes us closer to the truth than ancient texts or Zen-like mindfulness (though these approaches, too, have their place).

Of course, we all have to travel down our own road -- and your mileage may vary.

Book review: The Secret Life of Genius

I just finished reading The Secret Life of Genius: How 24 Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds, a new book by John Chambers. Previously I'd read the same author's highly interesting volume Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World, which recounts a series of séances held by Hugo and his family when they were exiles on the Isle of Jersey. I expected Chambers' latest book to be much the same -- a study of spiritualistic experiments and investigations carried out by other famous people.

In fact, however, the new book offers a little more variety. The 24 figures profiled in its pages had many different ways of interacting with or being influenced by "spiritual worlds." In a couple of cases, I wasn't sure I saw the "spiritual" connection at all. Chambers' account of Jules Verne, for instance, does a good job of suggesting that Verne was an overgrown adolescent boy, but I didn't see any evidence of a particularly spiritual worldview. His account of Ben Jonson makes it clear that the famed Elizabethan-Jacobean playwright did his homework when writing about alchemy, but Jonson was known as the sort of person who did his homework when writing about any subject; I'm not convinced he had any special, personal interest in alchemy.

Most of the examples are considerably more clearcut. They range from sages and seers - Nostradamus, Madame Blavatsky, and guru Sri Yashodo Ma - to famous writers with an interest in the occult - Goethe, Blake, Mary Shelley, Balzac, Tolstoy, Yeats, and of course Hugo - to other noted figures whose connection to paranormal interests is more oblique. The latter include H.G. Wells, who may have had a near-death experience in his youth that provided material for some of his later writings; Winston Churchill, whose meat-and-potatoes spirituality served him well throughout his life; and Harry Houdini, the nemesis of physical mediums, whose crusade to unmask them all as frauds may have been driven by a deep-seated desire to believe in after-death communication.

I particularly like Churchill's commonsense approach to the subject. Discussing his years as a soldier in My Early Life, he wrote:

I found that whatever I might think or argue, I did not hesitate to ask for special protection when about to come under the fire of the enemy: nor to feel sincerely grateful when I got home safe for tea. I even asked for lesser things than not to be killed too soon, and nearly always in those years, and indeed throughout my life, I got what I wanted. This practice seemed perfectly natural, and just as strong and real as the reasoning process which contradicted it so sharply. Moreover the practice was comforting and the reasoning led nowhere. I therefore acted in according with my feelings without troubling to square such conduct with the conclusions of thought....

I came across a French saying which seemed singularly apposite. [He quotes Pascal's epigram, "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."] It seemed to me that it would be very foolish to discard the reasons of the heart for those of the head. Indeed I could not see why I should not enjoy them both. I did not worry about the inconsistency of thinking one way and believing the other. It seemed good to let the mind explore so far as it could the paths of thought and logic, and also good to pray for help and succour, and be grateful when they came.

This is the kind of thing that resonates with me. But there are other conclusions and inferences drawn by Chambers' parade of spiritual seekers that strike me as less meaningful. One theme, recurring especially in the later parts of the book, is that spirit entities are somehow dependent on the living for their sense of self and perhaps for their very existence, and that spirits -- and even God himself -- are desperately seeking answers from us through their contact with the living.

This idea is part of the huge mass of purportedly channeled material produced by the Pulitzer prize-winning poet James Merrill and his partner David Jackson -- material incorporated into Merrill's 500-page poem The Changing Light at Sandover. (It was also suggested to Carl Jung in some strange occult experiences, mentioned below.)

The material produced by Merrill and Jackson constitutes a kind of alternate history of the world, recounting the rise and fall of other races prior to the human race, including a species of batlike creatures who are now, apparently, trying to communicate with us. There is even an alternate version of human history, in which the pharaoh Akhnaton perishes after building "a fifty-foot-high rock-crystal pyramid" meant to harness "the power of the sun" - a technological feat that goes horribly awry.

Needless to say, there is no record in any standard history books of such developments. It all sounds most bizarre, and even Merrill himself says he maintains "an attitude of perfect ambivalence toward the spirits."

Chambers seems to take such communications altogether more seriously than I would. He also takes seriously the large number of channeled messages purportedly arising from extraterrestrials, a subject that comes up in his study of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing. Lessing wrote a five-part series of science fiction novels sketching out the idea that Earth is under the protection of an advanced race of aliens from "the Canopean and Sirian galactic empires." Chambers writes:

Lessing can take her place in the proliferation of information being channeled these days through mediums on Earth ostensibly from aliens scattered around the universe. This "alien literature" can be strikingly rich. Most of these channeled ETs share a message that locates humanity within a vast intergalactic network of spiritual evolution. They say they are converging on earth to give our species a necessary boost to the evolutionary process. The alternative to taking this giant stride forward (which must be done quickly) is the disappearance of humanity.

Chambers gives examples of such channeled material from the work of Patricia Pereira, Darryl Anka, and Ken Carey. One of the problems, however, with such messages is that they contradict each other, as Chambers acknowledges:

An overall examination of material channeled from aliens (at least fifty mediums have books out) reveals that alien worldviews divide up into two distinctly different camps. One group ... describes our Milky Way galaxy as teeming with hundreds of millions of different sentient planetary life forms; the others say its representatives are not exactly aliens but more like angels, come to help us Homo sapiens, whose planet, Earth, is the only one inhabited by a sentient species in the entire Milky Way galaxy ...

Does this mean that, insofar as the two camps thoroughly contradict each other, we can't take anything these aliens say seriously, that everything they say is a figment of the medium's imagination?

Chambers addresses this question by suggesting that "our experiences of channeling aliens and our perceptions of them are also necessarily filtered through our subjectivities. Ken Carey is an Evangelical Christian, and Evangelical Christians are taught to believe that humankind is the only species in our galaxy."

I would suggest a different explanation, not only for the "alien" communications, but for those received by Merrill and Jackson, as well. Many mystical traditions, not to mention modern spiritualist teachings, tell us that there are both lower and higher spiritual entities. The lower entities tend to be earthbound by nature. They hover around the earth plane, sometimes attaching themselves to vulnerable humans and making mischief. They also like to communicate false or misleading messages. Even when trying to communicate what they see as the truth, their understanding is so limited that whatever they tell us is likely to be wrong.

In this respect, it may be relevant to note that Merrill and Jackson received all their communications via the Ouija board, an instrument notorious for its propensity to attract low-level, earthbound, mischievous or malicious entities. Perhaps it is not entirely a coincidence that the communicating entities in that case described themselves as batlike creatures. Traditionally, batlike creatures are seen as devils. And devils may be nothing more than confused or ignorant low-level spirits interfering with human affairs.

To the extent that the various communications from "aliens" and "bat-creatures" are genuine, and not the product of the various mediums' subconscious minds, the communications probably reflect nothing more than the bewilderment and hostility of undeveloped spirits. It's interesting to note that one of Merrill and Jackson's communicators became so hostile to them (rudely ordering them around) that they temporarily stopped using the Ouija board. I doubt that a genuinely advanced being would behave this way.

I also greatly doubt that God needs human beings to supply him with the answers to his questions. Merrill and Jackson, according to Chambers, came to this peculiar conclusion:

The more they pondered this, the more it seemed to the two that the shape of God -- his very existence -- must be dependent on the feelings and thoughts of mankind as a collectivity. It was not that Homo sapiens "made up" God. It was that God was Pure Being, and dependent on our imagination for his very shape and form.

Mustn't this also be true for heaven?

The question of heaven comes in because Merrill and Jackson's communicators claimed that if the human race obliterated itself, then the spiritual worlds themselves would cease to exist. Thus the continued existence of "heaven" depends on the continued existence of life on Earth.

Chambers adds:

In Zürich in 1916, the spirits of the dead had milled forlornly around C.G. Jung, besieging the forty-one-year-old psychiatrist standing bewildered in his living room for answers to their questions. They knew nothing, the spirits said -- neither who they were, nor where they were, nor even if God existed.

This experience prompted Jung to formulate the theory that God is not conscious of himself, and that "all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil" of evolution had as its end the manifestation of consciousness via the brain -- a solution "found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge."

Jung's point of view reminds me in some respects of the theory of "biocentrism" presented by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman in a recent book, which I discussed here. But is it possible that "the spirits of the dead" Jung witnessed (assuming they were not a hallucination) were low-level, earthbound spirits, and that their ignorance and confusion were a direct result of their undeveloped condition? Jung never seems to have considered this possibility, though it is consistent with much mystical lore and many mediumistic messages.

Incidentally, I was surprised that the chapter on Jung made no mention of his near-death experience in 1944*, which presents a far more positive view of the afterlife, including the promise that "I would receive an answer to all [my] questions" - a viewpoint considerably differemt from that of the spirits who "knew nothing ... neither who they were, nor where they were, nor even if God existed." Again, it would seem reasonable to conclude that some spirits have answers and some don't, and the ones who don't are not the ones we should be listening to.

A similar objection might be made to Norman Mailer's claim (recounted in Chapter 22) that he heard the voice of God. In an exceedingly odd episode, Mailer was eating a donut in a late-night diner when he heard God tell him to get up and leave without paying. With some reluctance, Mailer obeyed the instruction. He later theorized that God sometimes needs people to break the rules, and developed a rather elaborate theory of God as a besieged deity at war with the Devil. It seems more likely to me that if there was any paranormal element to Mailer's experience, the voice he heard was that of a low-level spirit, not God.

Perhaps the best advice one might give to Mailer, Jung, Merrill, and others like them is found in 1 John 4:1:

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

In quoting this passage, I don't mean to suggest that only messages consistent with Christian orthodoxy can be accepted as genuine (though this is the point of the quote in context). I simply mean to say that not all channeled messages are created equal. Some are products of the subconscious and may be sheer confabulation; some may be pulled telepathically from other people's minds and reproduce their assumptions and prejudices; some may reflect the influence of low-level spirits, who are often confused, ignorant, or hostile; and some undoubtedly reflect a more advanced discarnate consciousness that genuinely desires to teach us, though it is still not infallible.

There is, I think, a great deal of chaff in such messages, and relatively little wheat. Sifting is necessary.

Whatever one thinks of the conclusions reached by some of the figures profiled in Chambers' book, The Secret Life of Genius is a consistently fascinating and provocative look at an underappreciated side of human creativity, showing that a fascination with "spiritual worlds" is not so much an aberration as, in many cases, a defining attribute of the inquiring mind.

----

*Art, you should read this. It's kind of "holographic." Note especially Jung's reluctance to return to a "three-dimensional" world of "boxes." Quoting Jung: "For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box. And now I should have to convince myself all over again that this was important!"

The mystery of "cheating things that are not cheats"

In his 1909 book The Survival of Man, Oliver Lodge recounts some séances in which the deceased F.W.H. Myers apparently communicated. In one of the most intriguing and puzzling communications, "Myers" spoke of some earlier sessions and complained:  

I could not say it, but they were translating like a schoolboy does his first lines of Virgil - so terribly confused and inaccurate. But somehow I could not help it. It was not me communicating, yet I saw it going on.... I can only think the things, and false things may creep in without my knowing it.

The medium's spirit control, "Nellie," then added in explanation:

He said it was not he, but neither was it fraud. He does not want you to stop the phenomenon, he wants to study it. You are not to say it was wrong and get it stopped. He likes to watch the somnambulistic thing at work. It is not he that is doing it, and yet he is looking on. He does not see how it is worked, but he finds this more interesting than the genuine communications. He did not rattle the curtains either ... but it was not cheating, and he does not want you to make them think that they are cheats. He does not know how it is worked, but he is studying and he thinks it will help a great deal if he can understand how the cheating things that are not cheats are done ...

He says he is finding out how honest non-phenomena are to be accounted for. Apparently dishonest phenomena are phenomena of extreme [interest] apart from the spirit which purports to be communicating.

Lodge adds this comment:

Whatever their origin, these words do, in my judgment, represent the truth about a good many of these phenomena - that is to say, that they are not precisely what their surface-aspect implies, yet neither are they fraud. [All quotes from p. 310.] 

This is certainly confusing. How can there be "cheating things that are not cheats"? And what can this possibly mean: "He said it was not he, but neither was it fraud"? And who or what is "the somnambulistic thing at work" - the entranced medium or the communicating entity?

A possible answer to all these questions is provided in a book called The Astral Plane, by C.W. Leadbeater. The book is a Theosophist manual published in 1900. It can be read online at Project Gutenberg.

Before going on, I should say that I'm not a Theosophist and have many doubts about that movement, including the career of its charismatic founder, Madame Blavatsky. Famed psychic investigator Richard Hodgson debunked Blavatsky rather damningly, though Blavatsky's defenders continue to dispute Hodgson's findings. In any event, I would not take any Theosophical theory at face value. There is a great deal of jargon and rococo complication in Theosophy, with all sorts of detailed hierarchies of spirits and planes of existence, as well as a complex account of reincarnation that does not seem to fit very well with the best empirical evidence, such as Ian Stevenson's cases. (If I understand it correctly, Theosophy holds that a vast amount of time must elapse between earthly incarnations, while Stevenson's cases - involving children who spontaneously recall a past life - typically indicate a very brief interval between lives.)

Still, there are probably elements of truth in Theosophy. What interests me about this particular idea is that it dovetails nicely with the "Myers" comments quoted above.

In a section called "The Shade" (in Part 2 of the larger section called "Inhabitants"), Leadbeater tells us that lower and more degraded portions of the astral body may be left behind as the soul advances:

Thus comes into existence the class of entity which has been called "The Shade"—an entity, be it observed, which is not in any sense the real individual at all (for he has passed away into Devachan [a higher plane]), but nevertheless, not only bears his exact personal appearance, but possesses his memory and all his little idiosyncrasies, and may, therefore, very readily personate him, as indeed it frequently does at séances. It is not, of course, conscious of any act of impersonation, for as far as its intellect goes it must necessarily suppose itself to be the individual, but one can imagine the horror and disgust of the friends of the departed, if they could only realize that they had been deceived into accepting as their loved one a mere soulless bundle of all his worst qualities. Its length of life varies according to the amount of the lower Manas [mental function] which animates it, but as this is all the while in process of fading out, its intellect is a steadily diminishing quantity, though it may possess a great deal of a certain sort of animal cunning; and even quite towards the end of its career it is still able to communicate by borrowing temporary intelligence from the medium.

Leadbeater is not saying that all mediumistic communications are of this type; elsewhere he talks about how the actual deceased person can reach his loved ones through a medium at times. But according to the Theosophical view, mediumistic communications "frequently" do involve the discarded lower parts of the self, which have an autonomy that persists for a time.

If there is any truth to this theory, it might make sense of the puzzling "Myers" communication conveyed and reported some years after Leadbeater's book was published. The Shade would be communicating in the persona of the deceased person, yet would not actually be that person. The resultant communication would not be from Myers, but "neither would it be fraud." The communicator and its work would be a "cheating thing that is not a cheat." And "the somnambulistic thing at work" would presumably be the Shade, an ongoing (though decaying) fragment of the deceased person with an independent but limited existence. 

All this would seem to be precisely the kind of anomaly that "Myers" would enjoy investigating, since it would offer significant insights into the makeup of the astral body and its gradual progress to higher planes.  So maybe that's what he was talking about.

Incidentally, Richard Matheson makes use of a similar idea in his worthwhile fantasy novel What Dreams May Come, a book that recounts the adventures of a newly deceased person in the afterlife. At one point, the narrator is appalled to realize that a medium is in touch with his disintegrating astral shell or husk, rather than with his true self. Powerless to do anything about it, he can only observe in frustration. This scene reminds me of the "Myers" message: "I could not help it. It was not me communicating, yet I saw it going on." The difference, though, is that in Matheson's book, the astral shell has no mental powers and is merely inert - a sort of mindless zombie.

I, Claude

Here's an interesting excerpt from Claude's Book, by L. Kelway-Bamber, which can be read online in PDF form. The book, published in 1919, purports to be the channeled communications of a young man who died in the First World War. The communications were received by Gladys Osborne Leonard, one of the most famous and most thoroughly tested of all mediums.

In the penultimate chapter of Part I, "Claude" discusses astral bodies and thought-forms:

You want to know the difference between "Astrals" and "Thought-Forms?" They are quite different and by no means interchangeable terms, though people often speak as if they were, for the latter is only a "picture" and not a "spirit" at all.

There are two kinds of "Astrals" (so called because they are functioning on the "Astral" plane). First, there are the spirits existing there in their Astral bodies, which are made out of actual atoms. The Astral, though fine in comparison with the physical body, is still coarse (for it is only undeveloped people who are not spiritually evolved who live on that sphere). There is a great difference between it and the bodies of those on the third sphere....

The second kind of Astral is a spirit connected with a physical body, and functioning temporarily only on the Astral plane, while its earth-body sleeps or is unconscious. It looks much the same as the other, but its body is actually different, for it has an astral "husk" only, much on the same principle as the temporary body made for a materializing spirit at a séance, and like that composed of astral atoms consolidated.

These astral atoms collect round the aura of a developed man, and on his soul emerging (as I have already described to you) from the centre of his body, these atoms close round his spirit and form a "husk" or covering to protect it in its travels.

He could not function in his real "astral" body, for that is not complete; it is not complete for a curious reason. It is this: that a certain amount of the material that makes his astral body is not available while he is connected with his physical body, for it goes to make the vital cord or connection between his travelling spirit and his stationary body, which is only severed at death (for the severing means death).

After this has occurred, of course, no cord being then required, this material is available for his astral body, and so he no longer requires to borrow astral atoms to protect himself; his spirit is sufficiently clothed, being  complete.

As I am not in the Astral I find it difficult to tell if a person is in their permanent astral body or not.

This accounts too for the difficulty a clairvoyant sometimes has in being able to say if a person is in or out of their physical body permanently....

A "Thought-Form" is a picture, a thought-photograph, projected through the atmosphere by some one, but the recipient would have to mentally "develop" it, as it were, in order to see it; by that I mean they would have to be thinking of the sender at the right moment, and in the right way. Space is nothing, for it takes no longer to think four or five hundred miles than into the next room. So if you are in the right mental condition you can see a thought-form; it's only a picture in the atmosphere.

This explains certain things; for instance, visions of Christ to the dying. Hundreds on the battlefields may see Him individually and spontaneously. If He is projecting His thought to all who are lying there, all who are attuned in mind can and may be able to see Him. Just as when a ship at sea sends out a wireless message or a call for help, it is not confined to one receiver, but is open to all ships and receiving stations which are suitably attuned. So all who are suitably attuned and harmonized can receive thought pictures, impressions, and inspiration. This explains also how various people in widely separated places may simultaneously be "inspired" by one individual....

Now as regards a so-called "ghost" haunting a particular spot. If it is a persistent haunt that has continued for many years, even for centuries, it is almost certainly a thought-form and not a spirit; for it is very unlikely that any spirit would be so unfriended as to be permitted to go on in this aimless and unhappy manner indefinitely, for as soon as any one desires help here it is forthcoming.

What happens is this. Certain events (probably tragic), which are felt very intensely by the participators at the time, leave a very clearcut and well-defined picture in the atmosphere, and at first for a short time the actors in the scene may return in spirit to the spot, and by thinking over what happened revivify and intensify that thought picture.

Ordinary people then come to that place knowing its history, and some may see the "ghost," and they see it because they are psychic and unconsciously psychometrize the atmosphere, and so mentally develop the picture that is there, and so constantly renew the image, which thus becomes almost permanent. Yes, I know it does seem difficult to realize, but it also applies to "feeling" as well as "seeing" past conditions; thus a medium feels pain and discomfort when describing the illness of any one. The medium is psychometrizing the condition connected  with the spirit while it was a body, and not the spirit itself.

I say this because I have been told and have noticed myself that spirits are surprised on returning to earth to hear themselves described with symptoms of disease they have almost forgotten they ever suffered. For instance, your father, who "died" over thirty-five years ago, here is in perfect health, yet whenever he returns to earth the mediums describe him as having a cough, and discomfort in his chest; that was true when he passed over (he died of pneumonia), but of course is totally unlike his present condition.

Another man I know, who had some very painful disease which affected one leg, tells me he gets quite angry when he hears it described now, as he no longer feels it at all even when he returns to earth-conditions, and yet the mediums describe it most accurately, and one might imagine he was still in suffering instead of in perfect health!

As I said, I find this interesting, and it has a certain internal logic and self-consistency, as well as being consistent with other such reports. Still, we shouldn't assume that communicators like Claude are infallible. His book ends with a prognostication about the post-WWI world that sadly proved inaccurate:

I know sometimes things look depressing, but I solemnly promise you there is a silver lining to this dark cloud. Men in the old days worked for individual progress; in future the ideal will be to work for others, for the good of the whole and the improvement of the community.

I am told the sacrifices of this war have not been in vain; that a purified England will result. There will be a spiritual revolution; people will try to face truth, to drop some of the shams that are now used to veil it. Perhaps present events do seem to you like a "dark tunnel," but I see the sum shining at the end of it, and I know there has never been a crisis in the world's history which has held so much certainty of ultimate good arising.

Far from leading to a spiritual revolution, the First World War led directly to the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust. And even today, signs of a spiritual revolution remain, at best, faint and indistinct.

Of course, the first excerpt is a description while the second is a prediction. Presumably, predicting the future is more difficult than describing known facts, even to those on "the third plane."

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/. 

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.