Michael Prescott's Blog

The Book of Life

Rereading a little more of Chris Carter's book Science and the Afterlife Experience, I came across a quotation from Geraldine Cummins' The Road to Immortality, which allegedly channels F.W.H. Myers. Myers is talking about "the cruel man" and his immediate fate after death. At first, such a person is in a state of confusion, a kind of mental and existential fog, until he ...

faces up to his own misery, to his vice; and then the great change comes. He is put in touch with a portion of the Great Memory… the Book of Life. He becomes aware of all the emotions aroused in his victims by his acts… No pain, no anguish he has caused has perished. All has been registered, has a kind of existence that makes him sensible of it once  he has drifted into touch with the web of memory that clothed his life and the lives of those who came into contact with him on earth.

Two things struck me about this passage. First, it dovetails nicely with near-death experiences in which the person undergoes a life review. Note that "Myers" does not merely say that the cruel man sees the events of his life flash by, but that he experiences the pain that he has caused in others. This subjective involvement in the experiences of the people whom one has affected is a key feature of the life review. And yet the life review was not commonly known before 1975, when Raymond Moody's Life After Life was published. Cummins' book was published originally in 1932. 

The other thing that struck me is the way "Myers" phrases things:

He is put in touch with a portion of the Great Memory ... the Book of Life ...

All has been registered, has a kind of existence that makes him sensible of it ...

Drifted into touch with the web of memory that clothed his life and the lives of [others]. 

What the "Myers" communicator seems to be saying is that the cruel man does not telepathically access the memories of his victims in the sense of probing their minds, but instead accesses something akin to the Akashic Records, a comprehensive database in which all experiences are recorded and preserved. This is the "Great Memory, the Book of Life," in which "all has been registered." This information "has a kind of existence" - presumably not quite the kind of existence that we are familiar with, but some form of existence nevertheless.

The deceased person becomes "sensible of" this information when "he has drifted into touch with the web of memory that clothed his life" - a peculiar and provocative way of phrasing it. It is almost as if "Myers" is saying that there is a matrix or cluster of information ("a web of memory") associated with each particular consciousness (i.e., "that clothed his life"), that this information cluster is part of a vastly larger information database, and that under the right circumstances an individual consciousness can access relevant parts of this information - information pertaining directly to him or to those with whom he has come in contact. Having accessed the information, he can then experience subjectively what the information means, including its emotional content. 

Other interpretations are no doubt possible, but this interpretation, at least, would seem to be in line with the idea that information is preserved indefinitely, independent of any particular consciousness, and that the information acquires meaning or "life" only when it is associated with a particular consciousness - somewhat in the same way that a hologram can be constructed out of the raw data of interference patterns only when a focused beam of light is projected through those patterns.

I can't help thinking of a quote from Stephen Hawking, taken from his book A Brief History of Time:

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Perhaps it is consciousness (the "I-thought") that breathes fire into the equations (the raw data) and "makes a universe."

Lest we forget

Recently I came across some comments on a skeptics' message board impugning the mediumship of Leonora Piper. Some of these comments, I felt, showed a lack of familiarity with the details of the case. One point in particular stuck in my craw.

A skeptic pointed out that an investigator had asked Mrs. Piper, while she was in trance, what the word Lethe suggested to her. She replied with a string of words that did not directly define or describe the river Lethe - which, in Greek mythology, is the river from which spirits drink in order to erase their earthly memories before being reincarnated. Since Piper's reply did not directly answer the question, the skeptic concluded that she had said nothing of interest and that the Lethe case could be dismissed.

But this is far from being true. The Lethe case is extremely interesting and valuable, so much so that Chris Carter devotes an entire chapter to it – titled "The Lethe Experiment" – in his outstanding book Science and the Afterlife Experience.

I won't attempt to summarize Carter's entire treatment of the case here. After all, he spends more than 25 pages on it. But I do want to address the question of whether Mrs. Piper's response contains any interesting information.

The question asked by the researcher, G.B. Dorr, was "What does the word Lethe suggest to you?"

The first reply - produced in writing - was: "Lethe. Do you refer to one of my poems, Lethe?"

The purported communicator was F.W.H. Myers, who was a poet of some repute and an expert in the classics. Dorr, however, did not believe that Myers had written any poems on the subject of the river Lethe, so he found the answer meaningless. 

As Chris Carter tells it, 

Dorr answered in the negative, and pressed the communicator for an answer, getting in response some disjointed words, including "Winds," "Greece," and then:

... It is all clear. Do you remember Cave? 

Dorr: I think you are confused about this. It was a water, not a wind, and it was in Hades, where the Styx was and the Elysian fields. Do you recall it now?

Myers: Lethe. Shore - of course I do. Lethe Hades beautiful river - Lethe. Underground. 

Thinking the medium was growing tired, Dorr shortly afterward closed the sitting. As Mrs. Piper came out of her trance (a period called the "waking stage"), she said the following:

Sybil - Olympus - water - Lethe - delighted - sad - lovely - mate. -

Put them all together …

Entwined love – beautiful shores …

Warm – sunlit – love.

Lime leaf – heart – sword – arrow

I shot an arrow through the air

And it fell I know not where

Mrs. Piper then described a vision of a woman in the air with a bow and two arrows.

(For a fuller excerpt of the material produced at this sitting, see this Google Books entry.)

It is true that on the surface this appears to be so much gobbledygook. But it's worth remembering that at this stage of the investigation of Piper's mediumship, the cross correspondences were already underway. In these elaborate experiments, complicated messages were conveyed piecemeal through a variety of mediums. Accordingly, the investigators were on the lookout for similar puzzles that might crop up in the communications.

The next day, Dorr again met with Mrs. Piper. This time the ostensible communicators were Richard Hodgson and F.W.H. Myers. Here is part of the transcript, quoted by Carter:

Hodgson: Now Myers feels a little distressed because he thinks you did not quite understand his replies to your last question ... he did give you one or two replies which he and I both fear you did not understand.

Dorr: No, it wasn't clear. I worked over the sittings yesterday till nearly midnight, trying to straighten things out.

Hodgson: Let Myers explain what he thinks you did not grasp.

Myers: I wrote in reply to your last inquiry Cave – Lethe.

Dorr: I asked him whether the word Lethe recalled anything to him.

Hodgson: He [Myers] replied Cave – Banks – Shore … He drew the form – a picture of Iris with an arrow.

Dorr: But he spoke of winds.

Myers: Yes, clouds – arrow – Iris – Cave – Mor MOR Latin for sleep Morpheus – Cave. Sticks in my mind can't you help me?

Dorr: Good. I understand what you're after now. But can't you make it clearer about what there was peculiar about the waters of Lethe?

Myers: Yes, I suppose you think that I am affected in the same way but I am not. [emphasis in original]

The two sittings, taken together, make it clear that Myers is attempting to create another puzzle to be solved by the researchers. Instead of simply defining Lethe as the river of forgetfulness, Myers' answers range over a variety of other topics. Yet we know he could have defined it, because his last answer ("I suppose you think that I am affected in the same way") shows that he understands the central issue of forgetfulness.

What was the point of such a puzzle? SPR researchers at the time were divided over whether Piper's communications came from deceased persons or from her own subconscious mind by way of telepathy. Had Myers simply defined Lethe, giving the standard definition found in any textbook, the answer would have been of little interest. It could always be argued that Piper, even though she had almost no knowledge of the classics, might have come across the term at some point and remembered it subconsciously; or that she had obtained the information from Dorr's mind or from the mind of some other living person. A standard, boilerplate definition of Lethe could be picked up almost anywhere.

Instead, the "Myers" communicator answered in a complex way that required analysis and research to decode. But once the message was deciphered, the particulars that he listed were shown to relate to the living Myers' interests and classical training in a distinctive way.

The researcher who unraveled the case was J.G. Piddington. Piddington knew that, in life, Myers had been a great admirer of the Roman poet Ovid, author of the Metamorphoses. In reading the Metamorphoses, Piddington found the story of Ceyx and his wife Alcyone in Book 11. This immediately piqued his interest, because in the waking stage of the second sitting with Dorr, Mrs. Piper had reported seeing Myers "writing on the wall … C [a pause] Y X." And at the next sitting, the entranced medium wrote the letters CYNX. Naturally, then, the name Ceyx in Ovid caught Piddington's attention.

The story, in condensed form, is as follows:

King Ceyx died at sea. Iris, goddess of the rainbow, was dispatched from Olympus to visit Somnus, god of sleep, and to instruct him to send a dream messenger to Ceyx's wife Alcyone, daughter of the god of Winds. Iris traveled over a rainbow to reach Somnus' cloud-shrouded Cave of Sleep, from which issued the river Lethe. Having received Iris' message, Somnus chose his son Morpheus to deliver the news to Alcyone. The distraught widow ran to the seashore and tried to drown herself, but was transformed into a kingfisher and reunited with her husband. (Adapted from Carter, following Gauld and Piddington)

Remember that Dorr's question was "What does the word Lethe suggest to you?" This is a more open-ended question than simply asking for a definition. What the word apparently suggested to Myers was the story of Ceyx and his widow, a story that includes the following elements, all mentioned in Mrs. Piper's sittings: 

Ceyx
winds
Greece
Olympus
cave
Lethe
shore
entwined love
Iris
bow
clouds
Morpheus
sleep
sad
mate

Chris Carter sums up:

As an expert in the classics who had studied Ovid in detail, Myers would have been familiar with Ovid's description of the cave as the source of the river in Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alcyone, in which the rainbow goddess Iris visits the god of sleep.

Was the story sufficiently well known that Piper or Dorr might have been familiar with it? If so, it could have been pulled from Mrs. Piper's subconscious or from Dorr's memory (via telepathy). Neither Piper nor Dorr had read Ovid. Piddington found only two books besides Metamorphoses that included all the necessary details. Piper had never read either of those books (her bookshelves were searched and her daughters questioned in order to confirm it). Dorr had read one of the books, Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, in childhood, but remembered almost nothing about it.

Still, perhaps Dorr subconsciously retained the memory, and Mrs. Piper accessed it? The sticking point for this hypothesis is that several additional communications from Myers during the same period touched on stories told in Books 10 and 11 of Metamorphoses - stories that are not connected with each other in Bulfinch, or indeed in any source that Piddington could find, other than Ovid. 

There's another wrinkle. Chris Carter tells us: 

Three out of the four stories told in Metamorphoses X and XI to which "Myers" alluded are also alluded to in three consecutive stanzas of one of Frederic Myer's poems; and Piddington found that the order in which the allusions emerge in the trance and in the poem are the same.

The allusions in question were to Iris, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Pygmalion. They emerged spontaneously in that order in the trances: Iris on March 23 and 24, Orpheus and Eurydice on March 30, and Pygmalion on April 6.

So we can see that, if any known mind were ever likely to think of these specific stories, in this particular sequence, it would not be the mind of G.B. Dorr, much less that of Mrs. Piper. It would be the mind of F.W.H. Myers. 

Other elements of the communications were decoded, as well. For instance, in the waking stage of her first trance, Mrs. Piper mentioned Sybil. The classical scholar Myers would have known that the Sybil (a prophetess) was Aeneas' guide during his visit to the underworld, which included a stop at the river Lethe. 

The Lethe episode is actually more complex even than this, involving further experiments conducted by Oliver Lodge in England, working with the medium Mrs. Willett. The messages that came through Mrs. Willett were at least as interesting and evidential as the product of Mrs. Piper's sessions. Unfortunately, I can't present the full case in a relatively brief post.

Even so, I hope I've shown that Mrs. Piper's answers were not meaningless or random, and that they did bear directly on the question of what the word Lethe would have suggested to Myers. 

Oh, one more thing. Recall that Myers' initial response to Dorr was "Do you refer to one of my poems …?" Dorr found this answer meaningless because Myers had not written any verses about Lethe. 

Except, as it turned out, he had. In a long poem called "The Passing of Youth," Myers wrote: 

... God to the innumerous souls in great array
To Lethe summons by a wondrous way
Till these therein their ancient pain forgive 
Forget their life, and will again to live.

Linkapalooza!

A few links of possible interest on a Sunday afternoon.

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Dean Radin, noted parapsychologist and author of The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds, has a new book out called Supernormal. Here's the publisher's description: 

Can yoga and meditation unleash our inherent supernormal mental powers, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition? Is it really possible to perceive another person's thoughts and intentions? Influence objects with our minds? Envision future events? And is it possible that some of the superpowers described in ancient legends, science fiction, and comic books are actually real, and patiently waiting for us behind the scenes? Are we now poised for an evolutionary trigger to pull the switch and release our full potentials?

Dean Radin, Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and bestselling author of The Conscious Universe, presents persuasive new experimental evidence for the existence of such phenomena. He takes us on a thrilling scientific journey and challenges outdated assumptions that these abilities are mere superstition. Focusing on Patanjali's mysterious Yoga Sutras -- 2,000 year-old meditation practices believed to release our extraordinary powers -- Radin offers powerful evidence confirming that sometimes fact is much stranger, spookier, and more wonderful than the wildest fiction.

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Brian Whitworth, a computer scientist who has written some fascinating essays on "the virtual-reality conjecture," has put out a new essay in beta form (i.e., it's unfinished but available for comment). It's called "The Matter Glitch." 

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I've been reading an online edition of Volume 2 of On the Cosmic Relations, by Henry Holt (1914). Chapter 34 (the first chapter in this volume) offers extended excerpts from Richard Hodgson's report on Mrs. Piper. After the drubbing that Hodgson took in connection with the Dean Bridgman Conner case a few posts back, it's interesting to read his own words and see how judicious and professional he seems to be. In person he may have been different, but in print he does not come across as excitable or emotional. 

Hodgson is mainly interested in dealing with the "secondary personalities" theory of Mrs. Piper's mediumship. He had been sympathetic to that interpretation in his earlier researches, but has now moved away from it, and he gives his reasons at length. 

Hodgson sums up: 

The persistent failures of many communicators under varying conditions; the first failure of other communicators who soon develop into clearness in communicating, and whose first attempts apparently can be made much clearer by the assistance of persons professing to be experienced communicators; the special bewilderment, soon to disappear, of communicators shortly after death and apparently in consequence of it; the character of the specific mental automatisms manifest in the communications; the clearness of remembrance in little children recently deceased as contrasted with the forgetfulness of childish things shown by communicators who died when children many years before, – all present a definite relation to the personalities alleged to be communicating, and are exactly what we should expect if they are actually communicating under the conditions of Mrs. Piper's trance manifestations. The results fit the claim.

On the other hand these are not the results which we should expect on the hypothesis of telepathy from the living. That persons who must be assumed on this hypothesis to be good agents otherwise, should fail continuously and repeatedly with certain persons as "communicators"; that first communicators of a clearer type should show, especially when themselves professedly directly communicating, the peculiar strangeness which they do even to experienced agents who are familiar with the modus operandi of the communication; that there should be a special temporary bewilderment shown in cases immediately after death and that this should be followed in a few days by a comparatively complete clearness in various cases where there is no assignable change in the agent (unless it were a diminution of his telepathic power); that there should be specific mental automatisms which suggest, not the mind of the supposed agent, or the mind of the supposed percipent, but the mind of the "deceased" person; that memories of little children recently deceased should have a special telepathic agency, – such results we have no reason to expect from what we know or have reason to surmise concerning telepathic action between one incarnate living person and another.

Further there are certain kinds of successes with particular communicators connected with their knowledge and recognition of friends, shown most notably in the case of G.P., but exhibited to some extent by others also … which suggest the recollections and continued interest in personal friends living which we should naturally expect from the alleged communicators themselves, but for which there seems to be no adequate cause in Mrs. Piper's percipient personality.

In general, then, we may say that there are on the one hand various limitations in the information shown through Mrs. Piper's trance, which are prima facie explicable on the assumption that it comes from the alleged communicators, and for which we can find no corresponding limitations in the minds of living persons; and on the other hand, that there are various selections of information given in connection with particular communicators, which are intelligible if regarded as made by the alleged communicators themselves, but for which discrimination there is no satisfactory explanation to be found by referring them to Mrs. Piper's personality.

To rephrase the above: Recently deceased communicators typically have trouble communicating unless assisted by a more experienced communicator; but with practice, they develop greater skill. Those who suffered a long debilitating illness prior to death are more likely to be confused and disoriented in their first communications, but often improve later. Different communicators will come through with varying levels of clarity even when addressing the same sitter; since neither the medium nor the sitter has changed, why should some communicators consistently do better than others if their messages are the product of telepathy with the sitter? Communicators show an active interest in people and events that were important to them in life, but which are of no special importance to the medium. Finally, young children come through with consistent clarity, supposedly because their thoughts are easier for the spirit control to interpret; again, if the messages are telepathic, why should one class (age group) of communicators be reliably better than another? 

As I said, this is only a summary; see the chapter for the details. 

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I've patched together two essays out of some of my blog posts. They're now on my website. 

"The Diamond" talks about a meditative exercise that was meaningful to me. 

"N-Space, M-Space, and Consciousness" is a compilation of various posts on ultimate reality as information processing and consciousness. 

There's nothing new here; I just wanted to put the material into essay form. 

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In case anyone missed it, Greg Taylor of The Daily Grail posted a brief article (with many links) about the scandals in organized skepticism. 

By the way, Greg's forthcoming book Stop Worrying ... There Probably Is an Afterlife, is excellent - probably the best general introduction to the subject that I've read. 

Esquire's ace in the hole

Here's an excellent article by Robert Mays on Esquire's recent debunking of Eben Alexander's bestselling book Proof of Heaven. (Thanks to commenter MitiL for providing me with the link.)

The article speaks for itself, and I urge you to read it. It covers the major allegations made against Alexander, including the claims that he was not in a real coma, that his condition was not as serious as he made it out to be, that the Dalai Lama impugned his credibility, and that he has a history of malpractice suits.

Mays even takes the trouble to refute more trivial claims, such as the contention that Alexander's family members could not have seen a rainbow on the day when he emerged from his coma. 

He shows that the Dalai Lama's comments were grossly misrepresented; that the coma was indeed real and that Alexander accurately described his condition; and that having performed more than 4,000 surgeries, Alexander has faced a few suits (as I presume most surgeons have in our litigious society), but without any evident misconduct on his part. 

Some of these mischaracterizations can be chalked up to simple incompetence; possibly the Esquire reporter didn't bother to read the appendix to Alexander's book, which consisted of a doctor's testimony on Alexander's medical condition; and possibly the reporter missed the passages in the body of the book where Alexander himself mentioned that, even while in a coma, he was occasionally sedated to inhibit the muscle spasms racking his body (a fact that apparently led Esquire to label the coma "medically induced"). 

Other errors are less easy to understand. The Dalai Lama's comments are available in full on video, and though his English is imperfect, his meaning is more than clear. Moreover, as Mays points out, Alexander was the Dalai Lama's invited guest, and it would hardly make sense to invite Alexander to an event in order to publicly humiliate him. 

With regard to the malpractice issue, I think No One summed it up well in a comment on the previous thread:

Most surgeons will experience malpractice suits of the course of a 25 year career. Things go wrong during surgery because surgery is risky and patients/surviving family get upset and look to blame and/or smell the opportunity to make a quick buck. Most plaintiff's attorneys will allege tampering with medical records. Dittrich [the Esquire writer] neglects to mentions this fact or to demonstrate that Alexander is outside the norm in this regard. He is hoping that the reader is ignorant of the facts of the context and will be swayed by the seemingly appalling "facts" he presents.

What is the motivation behind such an article? I'm only guessing, but I'd suggest that the good people at Esquire simply could not believe that Alexander's story was legitimate. It was too cornball, too hokey, too feel-good to be real. Besides, it wasn't scientific - i.e., it didn't fit the narrative favored by the smart set: that human beings are insignificant accidents in a meaningless cosmos. They already knew the story had to be false, so anything that seemed to falsify it had to be true. 

There's a blurry line between cynicism and malice, a line brilliantly explored in Billy Wilder's great film Ace in the Hole, which just happens to concern an unprincipled journalist who destroys people's lives in pursuit of a byline. A case can be made that Esquire crossed that line. We can hope the magazine will issue a retraction and apology - but I wouldn't count on it.

More on Mrs. Piper

To gain a little more insight into the Dean Bridgman Conner case discussed in the previous two posts, I reread Chapter 5 of Michael Tymn's Resurrecting Leonora Piper, the book whose review, by Alan Gauld, got the ball rolling in the first place. The chapter shed some additional light on the question of Mrs. Piper's purported mind-reading abilities and the Conner case in general (although the Conner case is not specifically mentioned in the text).

To deal with the mind-reading issue first, here are some incidents recounted by Tymn that would seem to count against conventional telepathy (as opposed to super-ESP):

[G.P., the George Pellew spirit control] brought up a discussion he had had with Katharine, the Howards' 15-year-old daughter, about God, space, and eternity. As neither Hart nor Hodgson, who was also in attendance and taking notes, was aware of any such discussion with Katharine, this information, later verified as fact, clearly fell outside the scope of simple telepathy ...

[One sitter, identified as "Mrs. M," stated in connection with Mrs. Piper's automatic writing:] "… Perhaps the most convincing thing is the accumulation of little touches of personality which make the sitting so real to me, but which it would be impossible to reproduce in print. Peculiarities of expression in the writing and of manner in that wonderfully dramatic hand of Mrs. Pipers. Anyone who has had a good sitting with Mrs. Piper will know exactly what I mean.… The behavior of the hand when it is controlled by my husband or my brother is as distinct and as characteristic of the two men as anything of the kind could possibly be." ...

At another sitting, when the Howards were not present, Hodgson asked G.P. if he could visit the Howards' home and report back by the end of the sitting what they were doing. [G.P.'s report turned out to describe what the Howards had been up to a day earlier. Despite this quirk of time, the observations were detailed enough to be convincing.] ...

As a further test of telepathy, Mary Howard brought three pictures to a sitting and asked G.P. to identify them. G.P. correctly identified [the first two pictures]. Mary Howard ... then showed a third picture, which G.P. could not identify. In fact, G.P. had never seen it. Had Mrs. Piper been reading Howard's mind, she should have been able to identify it, unless, of course, she could also read Mary Howard's mind relative to the test, and her subconscious was aware and devious enough to know that it was more important to show ignorance than it was to identify the location in the picture ...

[Another sitter wrote:] "Mamma and I one Christmas exchanged rings. Each had engraved in his gift the first word of his favorite proverb. The ring given me I lost many years ago. When Mamma died a year ago, the ring I had given her was, at her request, taken from her finger and sent to me. Now I asked Mrs. Piper 'What was written in Mamma's ring?' And as I asked the question I held the ring in my hand and had in mind only that ring. But I had hardly got the words from my mouth [when] she slapped down on the paper the word in the other ring." [emphases in original]

In various ways, these incidents count against "simple" mind-reading. The Pellew control was able to describe a conversation with Katharine unknown to anyone present; was able to reproduce the personality and mannerisms of the deceased, when there is no evidence that mind-reading as such can facilitate such impersonations; was able to see what people not present at the sitting had been up to; was able to identify pictures known to the living Pellew but unable to identify a picture unknown to him; and gave the inscription in a different ring from the one that the sitter was concentrating on. 

Naturally, these examples could be multiplied at great length. The bottom line is that straightforward telepathy between Mrs. Piper and someone sitting with her seems to be ruled out in many cases.

What, then, accounts for the failure of the spirit controls to provide accurate information in the Conner case? Several answers are suggested by the material in Chapter 5 of Resurrecting Leonora Piper, even though the Conner case is not directly addressed.

Mike Tymn writes: 

"Mrs. M" added that there was a big difference in the quality of the sittings. At some sittings, nearly everything had meaning to her, and on other days it was pretty much meaningless. She concluded that the poor sittings were on days when either she or Mrs. Piper was not feeling particularly well.

In this connection, it is worth noting that Mrs. Piper's health was known to be poor during much of the period when the Conner case unfolded. For some months she stopped giving readings altogether.

Besides variations in the medium's health, there is also the inherent problem of controlling the medium's organism. The G.P. control is quoted as writing: 

You to us are more like as we understand sleep ... and in order for us to get into communication with you, we have to enter into your sphere, as one like yourself asleep. This is just why we make mistakes as you call them, or get confused and muddled, so to put it.

The same kind of message has come through other mediums. It appears to be a commonplace of mediumship – especially trance mediumship – that the communicators must lower their vibrations (whatever that means) and enter a trancelike state themselves, in which they are more prone to confusion. 

In another message, G.P. writes about the "light" of the medium, which makes communication possible: 

Upon the amount and brightness of this 'light' ... the communications depends. When Mrs. Piper is in ill-health the 'light' is feebler, and the communications tend to be less coherent. It also gets used up during a sitting, and when it gets dim there is a tendency to incoherence even in otherwise clear communicators. In all cases, coming into contact with this 'light' tends to produce bewilderment, and if the contact is continued too long, or the 'light' becomes very dim, the consciousness of the communicator tends to lapse completely.

So it appears that even lucid communicators can become incoherent when the light fails or "if the contact is continued too long." Note that the issue of the medium's poor health comes up once again.

Beyond all this, there appeared to be a difficulty with lower-level spirits getting into the mix. This seems to have been partly a consequence of the decision to encourage automatic writing as the preferred means of communication. G.P. himself said that the "light" associated with the medium's hand was brighter than that associated with her speech. Communicating via the hand was therefore easier. But the downside, also indicated by G.P., was that the very attractiveness of the light associated with the hand could serve to draw in lower level spirits who would gum up the works.

Tymn writes: 

As more and more communication came by way of the hand, either directly or assisted by G.P., Phinuit's job became that of "gatekeeper," holding back "earthbound spirits" who were attempting to use the "light." Sometime in 1895, the quality of the messages began to deteriorate and there were indications that more and more earthbound spirits were able to get through the "gate" and control Mrs. Piper.

Shortly afterward, "Rector told Hodgson that Piper's organism was weakening and needed a rest." This was the occasion of poor health which resulted in Mrs. Piper being sidelined for several months during the Conner case.

Some of these earthbound spirits were said to have tried to impersonate the legitimate controls. Tymn tells us:

On June 8, 1897, G.P. warned Hodgson not to accept anything further as coming from him, apparently suggesting that it might be an earthbound spirit posing as him ... Nevertheless, G.P. apparently continued as an assistant to Rector [another control] for a number of years, at least until 1904.

If we match this up as best we can with the timeline of the Dean Bridgman Conner affair as indicated in Phlipott's book, we get the following.

February 21, 1895: Conner goes to a hospital in Mexico.

Mid-March, 1895: Conner dies in the hospital.

"Some months after": Connor's father has a dream indicating that the young man is still alive.

"Sometime in 1895": the quality of Mrs. Piper's mediumship deteriorates, and impostors start to crop up.

Late 1895/early 1896: The case is brought to Mrs. Piper.

Spring (?), 1896: Mrs. Piper stops giving readings because of ill health and declining results. 

Spring, 1896: The preliminary investigation in Mexico, by Prentiss Dodge, is completed.

October, 1896: Mrs. Piper resumes her sittings.

First half of 1897: Philpott investigates. 

June, 1897: The Pellew control says that no further communications attributed to him should be trusted.

Regrettably, Philpott is not always clear about the timeline, obliging me to make educated guesses about some of these dates. Still, the general thrust of the timeline is clear enough. It indicates that the Conner case took place during a time when Mrs. Piper's mediumship was in a state of transition and confusion. The decline in the quality of the sittings was sufficiently obvious to require her to take an extended rest. Worries about low-level spirits, some of whom impersonated either historical figures or the established spirit controls, were expressed. 

If we look at the matter in this light, the case may be a bit less baffling. One of the points brought up by Alan Gauld in his review was the presence of an extremely dubious spirit character who claimed to be Julius Caesar, though spelling his name "Caezar." This fits in pretty well with the idea of mischievous or malicious earthbound spirits carrying out impersonations.

But how could established controls like G.P. vouch for such an obvious pretender? Two possibilities present themselves. 

The first possibility is that the "G.P." who vouched for Caezar was himself an impostor, the sort of fake that the real G.P. warned about not too long afterward.

The second possibility is that G.P. was fooled by the imposter because, having lowered his vibrations and entered a dreamy trance state in order to control the medium, he had become susceptible to suggestion, much as hypnotized subjects become highly suggestible. 

This idea of the suggestibility of a quasi-hypnotized spirit control may also shed some light on the erroneous communications scattered throughout the Conner case. I think Philpott is entirely correct in assuming that Mrs. Piper (or a spirit control) was unwittingly reading the minds of the sitters in order to draw out detailed factual information. But if the spirit control was the one who was unwittingly engaged in this "simple" telepathy, and if his mental acuity had been compromised by the trance state required for mediumistic communication, then the control simply may not have realized what was going on. In his highly suggestible, quasi-hypnotized state, G.P. (or Phinuit, Rector, et al.) accepted this information without grasping its source, and, like any hypnotized patient, proceeded to confabulate on the basis of these suggestions.

The Conner case, in other words, may have resulted from: the declining health of the medium, which compromised the communications; the use of automatic writing, which attracted low-level spirits and impersonators; the trance state of the legitimate spirit controls, which diminished their mental acuity and rendered them suggestible to subconscious telepathic influences; confabulation on the part of the spirit controls, consistent with their quasi-hypnotized state of mind; and perhaps the emotional investment of Richard Hodgson himself, which only served to further confuse the situation and encourage the unconscious construction of an elaborate fantasy.

Cool story.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/07/angel-crash-missouri/2630227/

Hodgson's choice

I ended up reading the Philpott book about Dean Bridgman Conner right away. (A link to the complete text is found in the comments thread of the last post.) It's a good, quick read and sheds valuable light on Mrs. Piper's mediumship. Philpott establishes convincingly that Piper's spirit controls produced a raft of false information about the supposedly kidnapped Conner, who actually had died of typhoid fever just as the authorities originally reported.

At the same time Piper also provided accurate and detailed information about Conner's itinerary prior to his death, the part of the hospital in which he died, and the view from a certain specific vantage point in Mexico. All of this, however, could have been obtained telepathically from the sitters, with the possible exception of the hospital room in which the young man died (a fact not necessarily known to anyone present at the seances). Philpott concludes that in this case, Piper's mediumship can be explained in terms of "mind reading," rather than spirit communication.

Overall, he makes a strong case and deserves credit for his indefatigable investigation, which consumed five months, and for his judicious approach to a controversial subject. Perhaps most important, he challenges the standard view of Piper's chief investigator, Richard Hodgson, as a cool, capable, objective researcher. Philpott sees him, at least in this instance, as decidedly emotional, obsessed with using the Conner case to prove spiritism to the world, and so personally committed to Piper's mediumship that he would explain away or simply refuse to face any facts that called the spiritist hypothesis into question.

Unfortunately, I suspect there's a lot of truth in this. Hodgson does seem to have become caught up in the excitement of "the new revelation" (in Arthur Conan Doyle's phrase) at the expense of his detachment and scientific rigor.

I do have a quarrel with one of Philpott's claims, though. He says that Hodgson was convinced that a successful resolution of the Conner case would prove spiritism to doubters once and for all. Possibly he did believe this; but I'm not convinced. Surely someone as well versed in the super-psi argument as Hodgson must have been - or as any member of the SPR had to be - would have realized that even the dramatic rescue of young Conner from his supposed Mexican captors would still be compatible with super-psi. After all, proponents of super-psi would simply argue that Mrs. Piper had used her wide-ranging telepathy to read Conner's mind while he was in captivity, or had used clairvoyance to spy on him in his prison cell. The Conner case could no more have disproved super-psi than any other case, since super-psi, by its nature, is not disprovable.

Maybe Hodgson was too excited by grandiose fantasies of worldwide acclaim to perceive this rather simple point; but I think it is more likely that Philpott (who shows little grasp of the super-psi argument) is misinterpreting Hodgson's position here.

Philpott's more important point is much harder to dispose of. To what extent was Piper's vaunted mediumship based on reading the minds of her sitters? It may well be true that telepathy played a larger role in the proceedings than Piper's most vigorous champions (then and since) would allow.

Still, there are arguments against mind reading as an all-inclusive explanation. One that occurs to me offhand involves Piper's spirit control "George Pellew," who successfully identified thirty out of thirty-one friends and relatives known to the living Pellew. Yes, Piper could have read the minds of those thirty and determined their connection with Pellew. But the thirty-first case is more problematic. That particular sitter had been a child when the living Pellew last saw her; since then, she had grown up. Accordingly the Pellew control did not recognize her until he was prompted. But if Piper could read the sitter's mind, why wouldn't "Pellew" have recognized her immediately?

I suppose we could speculate that Piper's subconscious was so crafty, it deliberately avoiding recognizing the sitter in order to undermine the telepathy argument. But this seems like an overly elaborate charade, even for a subconscious that is going to great lengths to fool the conscious mind.

Other examples are possible, of course. Perhaps the best that can be said is that Piper's mediumship was a mixture of telepathy and spirit communication, as may in fact be true of all mediums.

And it would be well to keep in mind that Richard Hodgson may not always have been the supremely competent and clinically impersonal investigator he is so often made out to be. In aligning his reputation and his life's work so decisively with Mrs. Piper, he in effect made the choice to become her apostle, rather than her inquisitor. That choice is understandable - but it may have been wrong.

 

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Such stuff as dreams are made on

The current edition (Vol.77, No. 912) of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research includes a generally positive review of Michael Tymn's book Resurrecting Leonora Piper – a book I liked a lot. The reviewer, Alan Gauld, is best known for his meticulous study Mediumship and Survival, which takes a close look at some of the best documented mediums and examines the competing theories of spirit communication and super-psi (or super-ESP).

Although Gauld likes Tymn's book in many respects, he does object that it doesn't deal with the "the quite numerous cases in which one of the best-evidenced and most plausible communicators claims to have met with one of the most implausible ones and to be much impressed by him, thus tying the genuineness or otherwise of the two together."

As an example, he tells the story of Dean Bridgman Connor, a young man who was reported to have died in Mexico. After his father dreamed that Dean was still alive, Mrs. Piper was brought into the case, "with the result that for a good part of 1896 agents of the family were guided by Phinuit and G.P. [two of Mrs. Piper's spirit guides] from hospital to hospital and prison to prison in the south of Mexico seeking but always supposedly just missing the elusive Dean. Other spirits were co-opted into the search. Meanwhile the Piper controls in Boston repeatedly assured Dean's relatives that he was still alive. This story unfolded over many sittings, mostly still unpublished. But the following year an enterprising and level-headed journalist who took up the case was able to prove conclusively that Dean had died as originally reported …"

Not only was the entire chase a waste of time, but some of the spirits who allegedly participated lacked all credibility. One of them was announced to be Julius Caesar, still clad in his "helmet, armor and sword," though spelling his name Caezar in written communications. Gauld asks, "Under such circumstances could any of these interlinked communicators possibly be supposed 'genuine'?" If "Caezar" was a fictional persona of Mrs. Piper's subconscious, couldn't G.P. (George Pellew) be equally fictional? Yet Pellew is often cited as one of the best-attested discarnate figures to come through Mrs. Piper's mediumship. 

It's a fair point. On the face of it, the whole story certainly does sound like an absurd confabulation, or, at best, like super-psi run amok. And the same could be true of many of the personalities that crop up in mediumship - especially the spirit controls used by trance mediums. Many of them do seem "preposterous" (Gauld's description of Mrs. Piper's "Imperator") and silly - like Mrs. Piper's early spirit control "Chlorine," supposedly an American Indian girl, or Mrs. Leonard's flighty spirit control "Feda," or the innumerable Indian chiefs, buccaneers, and notable historical figures who appear in the record. 

All of them could be no more than false personas created by the medium's subconscious. But in light of some of the things we've been discussing recently on this blog, another possibility presents itself.

If we assume that the self consists of pure awareness that is in some way entangled with a particular information matrix, then there seems to be no reason why Imperator or any of the others could not begin as an idea – a sort of thought-form – and then acquire autonomy as awareness became attached to that thought-form. This notion, by the way, is consistent with the channeled material attributed to Jane Roberts's Seth. (I believe it has also been suggested by Matt Rouge in some of his comments here.)

In other words, the line of demarcation between an authentic "spirit" and a "subpersonality" of the medium may not be as clear-cut as we would like to think. The subpersonality, given sufficient substance by the accretion of detail, and serving as a point of attraction for the I-thought of pure awareness, might possibly become a "spirit" in its own right.

Perhaps something like this happened in the famous case of Philip, "the imaginary ghost." As recounted by Owen and Sparrow in Conjuring Up Philip, a group of Canadian experimenters invented a wholly imaginary historical figure named Philip, then sat in séances until an entity purporting to be Philip showed up, announcing himself by raps and table movements. The phenomena were reported over a number of sessions and were documented by multiple witnesses. At one point, one of the sitters rather recklessly informed Philip (with whom the sitters were communicating via a system of raps) that he was merely a fictional persona; the raps abruptly ceased, and it took a sustained effort to get them started again.

Adherents of the super-psi theory naturally cite the Philip case as good evidence that so-called spirits may be only manifestations of the collective unconscious of the sitters. Spiritualists counter that the entity calling itself Philip may have been a low-level, earthbound spirit attracted to the séances, just as mischievous spirits are said to be drawn to Ouija boards.

The thought-form idea offers another explanation. Perhaps Philip began as a thought-form generated by the collective minds of the sitters, but at some point acquired a degree of autonomy as the I-thought was attracted to it. In this case, Philip was both a thought-form and a spirit, or perhaps he inhabited a borderland between the two states.

The same might be true not only of Imperator, Rector, and the other rather high-flown spirit controls who dominated Mrs. Piper's later séances, but also of the enigmatic Dr. Phinuit, whose earthly existence could never be verified despite a search of the historical records. Perhaps other spirit controls, such as Chlorine and Feda also began as thought-forms and acquired reality as they developed.

It's interesting in this connection to note some early communications purportedly from the deceased F.W.H. Myers, as described by physicist and psychical investigator Oliver Lodge in his 1909 book The Survival of Man. Lodge quotes "Myers" as complaining about some earlier seances:  

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 ...

The medium's spirit control then explained to Lodge:

He [Myers] 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. [Emphases added.]

Is it possible that Myers, who was well known to the investigators and mediums, existed in part as a thought-form in their minds, and that this thought-form acquired a degree of autonomy, thus "becoming" a sort of pseudo-Myers or Myers doppelgänger, while the real Myers looked on in helpless fascination?

Perhaps there's no truth to any of this. It certainly could sound like special pleading - a far-fetched notion intended to explain away discrepancies in mediumistic communications. Still, there's a certain imaginative appeal (at least) in the notion that we can spin off our subpersonalities into autonomous children, who then go out into the world and leave us, their parents, behind.

And of course, it all raises the question: Are we the same kind of spin-offs? Did we ourselves begin as thought-forms, and acquire a personal identity only when we had achieved a certain level of reality?

It's enough to make us think that Shakespeare's Prospero was right: 

                                   We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on; and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. 

I-thought, therefore I am

Lately I've been thinking a lot about something that one of our frequent commenters, Matt Rouge, said a while back in one of the comments threads. He said – and I hope I'm remembering this correctly – that the basic stuff of physical existence is information, while consciousness is the "I-thought" associated with any particular matrix of information. 

As I understand it, this means that what we call the self is a combination of our memories, observations, experiences, bodily form, inherited traits, environment, and all other relevant elements of our particular physical reality (this is the "information" part) and the I-thought, which is pure awareness. 

The awareness alone would not yield a sense of self, because it would not be differentiated from anything. On the other hand, the physical elements on their own would not yield a sense of self because there would be no awareness, including self-awareness. Only the dynamic interaction of the two can yield the "spiritual being having a physical experience" that we think of as our "self." 

Now, this raises an interesting question. When we speak of the I-thought, are we talking about a single undifferentiated awareness that simply attaches itself to different data matrices and achieves the semblance of individuation? Or are we talking about a constellation of separate I-thoughts? 

Moreover, is there a cutoff point -- a point on the evolutionary scale at which the I-thought no longer applies? Do lower animals, or insects, or microscopic organisms, or individual atoms, or electrons have an associated I-thought, or does the I-thought come into play only when an organism has achieved a certain level of complexity? How widespread is awareness? 

I don't pretend to have the answer to these questions. But they're interesting to think about. Here is my best guess -- subject, as always, to reevaluation.

I'm guessing that the I-thought is ultimately a single undifferentiated whole. It might be imagined as a very powerful, never-ending current of air sweeping across a field. Set up on this field is a series of pipes parallel to the flow of air. The air rushes through these pipes and produces a variety of different tones depending on the circumference, length, and material of each pipe. Each tone is unique, but it's all the same air. And while the air is momentarily divided into separate pathways as it travels down the pipes, it recombines as a single current once it leaves the pipes.

To put this in more spiritualist terms, we could imagine awareness, as such, as a vast unity that is temporarily divided and subdivided into individual expressions. These individual expressions are real, but they are not the ultimate reality. Of necessity, awareness narrows in order to be expressed in individual terms. At some later point in the process, it widens again. This does not necessarily mean that individuality is lost. The tones, once sounded, may persist forever. After all, time as we know it probably does not apply to the realm of pure consciousness, so anything that exists may be said to exist perpetually.

(Actually I think the pipes metaphor would be more accurate if we think of a vast system of ramifying pipes, similar to the roots of a tree, with the air flow being divided and subdivided and sub-subdivided as it explores the whole system. To change the image, the "higher self" may be like a series of nested dolls, and our particular level of awareness at any given time is just one part of the series.) 

The metaphor of air and pipes makes me think of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in the Gospel of John, the most mystical of the four canonical Gospels. 

Jesus replied:
In all truth I tell you,
no one can enter the kingdom of God
without being born through water and the Spirit;
what is born of human nature is human;
what is born of the Spirit is spirit.
Do not be surprised what I say:
You must be born from above.
The wind blows where it pleases;
you can hear its sound,
but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.
So it is with everyone who was born of the Spirit.
(John 3:5-8, New Jerusalem Bible translation)

Whether or not this rather obscure passage has anything to do with the notion I'm discussing here, I like its poetic appropriateness.

But how pervasive is the I-thought? Does everything, even a subatomic particle, have a degree of awareness? This idea would be in line with the philosopher Liebnitz's theory of monads. And at least it spares us the chore of trying to figure out what the cutoff point might be between sentient and non-sentient entities. On the other hand, there does not seem to be any evidence of awareness on the part of the simplest elements of physical reality.

Perhaps the simplest answer is that there is some degree of awareness to anything that exists, but in the case of an electron, that degree of awareness is so minuscule that it is hardly noticeable. Even in the case of a white blood cell or an amoeba, awareness may be present in only the most attenuated form. We could work our way up the scale to insects, which seem to have a kind of hive mind or group of awareness, and eventually to the higher animals. It's a possibility, anyway. The weakness of this kind of answer is that it's unfalsifable -- if awareness in the simplest entities is so rudimentary as to be undetectable, then we can never know if it's there or not. 

Is there any practical value to looking at things in this light? I think there is, and it involves enhancing our empathy for our fellow human beings and perhaps for other living things, as well. I'll give a specific example. A few years ago, back when I was still watching cable TV news shows, I saw an interview with a member of the Black Panthers. This fellow was extremely hostile and belligerent. He seemed to be poorly educated and capable of expressing himself only in terms of angry threats. His mind, it seemed to me, was a simmering stew of violent images and impulses. I took an immediate dislike to him, and found myself feeling something like contempt.

Later, however, I engaged in a little meditative exercise in which I tried to see things from his point of view. This was not easy, because his whole mindset seemed so alien from my own. But as I thought about it, I realized that the differences might not be so great, or at least the gulf might not be insurmountable. If I had grown up in his environment, I would have learned that only people who threaten and intimidate are likely to survive. I would have been surrounded by poverty and hopelessness, and would have developed an abiding fury at the perceived injustices of society. I would have had little or no opportunity to get a decent education, while peer pressure would have encouraged me to disrespect teachers, cut class, and roam the streets. Add to this the very real possibility that my mother used drugs or alcohol while I was gestating in the womb, thus diminishing my mental capacity from the onset, and suddenly it became very hard to imagine myself being anything other than this Black Panther, had I been in his place.

The differences between us, in short, had just about everything to do with physical factors, and little or nothing to do with consciousness or awareness as such. The same I-thought, bound up in these two very different matrices of data, would produce very different expressions, just as the same current of air, passing through two differently shaped pipes, would sound very different tones.

So it may actually be true that the I-thought, or pure awareness, is the same for all of us, and only the associated information matrix makes us different from each other. And an acknowledgment of this fact can serve to break down the barriers that appear to divide us.

-----

P.S. By the way, this viewpoint may possibly shed light on split-brain patients. After the commisurotomy, the I-thought becomes separately associated with each cerebral hemisphere. Since the hemispheres had been connected previously, they will share many of the same personality traits, based on earlier experience. But henceforth they will develop along separate paths. One might think of air rushing through a single pipe that then divides into two pipes. Again, the system is constantly ramifying in a complex network, but the "air flow" is ultimately the same air.