Michael Prescott's Blog

Sad news

I'm sorry to say that our longtime commenter Bruce Siegel passed away this week. 

As I understand it, Bruce, who was in his seventies, had suffered from serious cardiovascular problems since at least 2016. 

Though I never met Bruce, I got to know him online through his many comments here and through occasional emails. After his book on precognitive dreams came out, we sometimes exchanged stories of possibly precognitive dreams we'd had. Most of mine, for some reason, involved animals — scary ones, like sharks.

I reviewed Bruce's book here. Bruce also maintained a blog of his own.

One of his last emails to me touched on the work of Stanislav Grof, who had influenced Bruce profoundly. He quoted Grof in The Cosmic Game: "The divine does not create something outside of itself, but rather by subdivisions and transformations within the field of its own being ... The various manifestations of evil are expressions of the energy that makes the split-off units of consciousness feel separate from each other. Since the divine play is unimaginable without individual protagonists, the existence of evil is absolutely essential.”

Then he added:

I love that last insight! It’s really all we need to know about suffering: without the dark side, there is no separation, no individual actors. You and I go back to Oneness. Ecstatic, but after a while, boring (evidently).

Good luck, Bruce, in the next phase of your adventure. I'm sorry we won't have you with us anymore. 

 

 

Book review: Conan Doyle for the Defense

Conan Doyle for the Defense, by Margalit Fox, tells the gripping story of Oscar Slater, a German-born Jew who was arrested in Glasgow  for the brutal murder of an elderly, wealthy woman, Marion Gilchrist. Sentenced to death, Slater won a reprieve at almost the last minute when his sentence was changed to life imprisonment at the notorious Peterhead Prison, where convicts labored in all weather to hack out chunks of granite to build a breakwater. For 18 years Slater suffered at Peterhead, until – almost miraculously – he found himself released and eventually exonerated in a second trial. His good fortune was due largely to the efforts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had already made a name for himself as an amateur detective capable, at times, of the same feats of ratiocination that characterized his most famous fictional creation, Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle* was brought into the case soon after Slater's conviction and quickly became convinced of his innocence. He wrote a scathing book on the subject, but changed few minds. Years later, a personal message from the convict – smuggled out in the form of a rolled-up scrap of paper hidden under a paroled convict's dentures – convinced Doyle to renew his involvement in the controversy. This time he was assisted by an intrepid journalist, William Park. Together the pair put out a new book on Slater that succeeded in rousing the public.

There seems little doubt that Slater was the victim of a frame-up by the police and the courts. Originally the police pursued him after hearing that he had hocked a diamond brooch at a Glasgow pawnshop; a diamond brooch was missing from Miss Gilchrist's personal effects. They quickly learned, however, that the pawnshop brooch was not the same one, and moreover, it had been hocked nearly a month before the Gilchrist murder. Doyle scathingly wrote,

Already the very bottom of the case had dropped out. The starting link of what had seemed an imposing chain, had suddenly broken … The original suspicion of Slater was founded upon the fact that he had pawned a crescent diamond brooch … It was not the one which was missing from the room of the murdered woman, and it had belonged for years to Slater, who had repeatedly pawned it before. This was shown beyond all cavil or dispute. The case of the police might well seem desperate after this, since if Slater were indeed guilty, it would mean that by pure chance they had pursued the right man. (emphasis in original)

Nevertheless, authorities continued to see Slater as the prime suspect, for no evident reason beyond an unwillingness to admit they'd made a mistake. Slater's conviction ultimately rested on eyewitness testimony that had changed markedly between the night of the murder and the day of the trial, months later. A competent defense attorney would have brought out these damning changes of memory, but Slater's lawyer fell down on the job. Slater's fate was sealed by the instructions given by the presiding judge, who told the jury:

About [the defendant's] character … there is no doubt at all. He has maintained himself by the ruin of men and on the ruin of women. And he has lived in a way that many blackguards would scorn to live …

I use the name "Oscar Slater." We do not know who that man is. His name is not Slater … He is a mystery … We do not know where he was born, where he was brought up, what he was brought up to, whether he was trained to anything. The man remains a mystery as much as he was when this trial began … A man of that kind has not the presumption of innocence in his favor which is … a reality in the case of the ordinary man.

Most of this was simply untrue. By the time of the trial, Slater's birth name (Oscar Leschziner) was known, as were the circumstances of his early life.

The judge's instructions point to one reason why the police were so keen on Slater as a suspect, even in the absence of any tangible link between him and the crime. Slater was widely seen, not without reason, as a shady character. He had used multiple aliases, of which the name Oscar Slater was one; others included Otto Sando and A. Anderson. He had told his neighbors he was a dentist, but this was not true, and his actual source of income was unknown. It was rumored that he was a gambler and loan shark and, less plausibly, a pimp who used his own common-law wife as a prostitute. Beyond all this, he was a foreigner and a Jew in an age when xenophobia and anti-Semitism were rampant.

In the book, Fox  does her best to broaden the scope of the story by relating the Slater case to conflicting trends in the police methodology of the era – on the one hand, the analysis of physical characteristics as evidence of criminal tendencies, an approach pioneered by Cesare Lombroso**, who believed that certain physiognomical features, such as a protruding brow or sloped forehead, correlated with "primitive" personality types; and on the other hand, the scientific study of the crime scene and the subtle physical clues it might afford. Naturally, she disparages the first approach, which has no adherents today, while celebrating the second approach, which served as the foundation for modern forensic criminalistics of the CSI type.

The trouble is that the Slater case doesn't serve as a very good illustration of either point. Slater was not suspected by the police, or arrested or convicted, because of his physiognomy, except perhaps in the limited sense that he looked "Jewish." He was suspected for entirely different reasons, as mentioned above. Moreover, forensic criminalistics did him no favors; the highly regarded criminalist who testified at his trial misstated the evidence left at the crime scene so badly, and made so many questionable or even absurd inferences, that he was instrumental in securing a guilty verdict. Among other things, he insisted that a small, fragile hammer found in Slater's possession could have been the murder weapon, while ignoring a chair in the murder victim's room, the legs of which were spattered in blood. The extensive damage done to Miss Gilchrist was obviously the result of being battered by the chair, which was in fact the conclusion of the first doctor on the scene. But the criminalist never even mentioned the chair or the doctor.

In any case, Doyle was for the most part refreshingly untouched by the prejudices of his era, though Fox occasionally tries to paint him in a less flattering light. Quoting Doyle's account of the trial that exonerated Slater, Fox claims that "his description is suffused with the Victorian idea about the link between physiognomy and character." I don't see it that way. Doyle describes Slater's lawyer as "a Pickwickian figure. His face is as pink as a baby's, and a baby might have owned those eyes of forget-me-not blue. A little heavy the face, but calmly and fresh-complexioned withal, redeemed from weakness by the tight, decided lips." As for Slater himself: "It is not an ill-famed face nor is it a wicked one, but it is terrible nonetheless for the brooding sadness that is in it. It is firm and immobile and might be cut from that Peterhead granite which has helped to make it what it is." I see no pseudoscientific theories of physiognomy in this description. It is simply a case of a literary man writing (quite ably) in the somewhat florid style of the time.

What comes through most clearly in Conan Doyle for the Defense is Doyle's basic decency and dogged determination to clear a man of a wrongful conviction, even though he had no personal acquaintance with the man and clearly held a low opinion of him. For Doyle, the fact that Slater was a disreputable fellow, even a rogue, did not mean that he could be abandoned to the hellish confines of Peterhead prison for life if he had been denied an impartial hearing. Doyle devoted months of strenuous effort, on and off over a period of two decades, to freeing Slater, even paying most of the cost of Slater's defense in his second trial. (Slater's refusal to defray any of the costs even after he had been awarded a 6000-pound settlement by the state upset Doyle's sense of fair play and brought their association to an acrimonious conclusion.)

Doyle's implacable commitment to justice, undimmed after nearly twenty years of involvement in the case, is readily apparent in his introduction to the book written by William Park (published by Doyle's own company, the Psychic Press). Doyle writes,

It is certain that the case of the alien German Jew, who bore the pseudonym of Oscar Slater, will live in the history of criminology as a miscarriage of justice of a character very unusual in the records of our Courts. There is not one point of the evidence which does not crumble to pieces when it is touched …

I fear very little can be done for Slater. Who can restore the vanished years? But his name may be cleared, and possibly some small provision be made for his declining years … Above all, for the credit of British justice, for the discipline of the police force, and for the teaching of officials that their duty to the public has to be done, a thorough public inquiry should be made into the matter … Only when this has been done will the public mind be at ease … It is indeed a lamentable story of official blundering from start to finish. But eighteen years have passed and an innocent man still wears the convict's dress. (emphasis in original)

You might wonder how Doyle's interest in psychic phenomena figures in the book. The answer is, it scarcely figures at all, because Fox is clearly somewhat embarrassed by it. She prefers to see Doyle as a rationalist and a humanist, and for her, his devotion to spiritualism does not fit this picture. She writes:

On questions of spiritualism, it is clear that Conan Doyle's ardent personal longing eclipsed his scientific acumen. By the 1920s, he had come to believe almost unreservedly in ghosts, fairies, and the reality of life after death.

This is not entirely unfair. Doyle did embarrass himself by his overly enthusiastic embrace of some paranormal claims, most notoriously in the Cottingley fairies fiasco, as well as by defending rather obvious frauds like the Davenport brothers. Still, it would be more correct, I think, to see Doyle's steadfast defense of the essential truths of mediumship and life after death, not as a contradiction of his behavior in the Slater case, but rather as another instance of that same behavior. Just as he became convinced of Slater's innocence and insisted on broadcasting this opinion to the world regardless of the world's indifference or hostility, so he likewise, once convinced of the immortality of the soul, never ceased to proselytize for "the new revelation," as he titled one of his books. The same courage, tenacity, and independence of thought that defined his approach to Oscar Slater also defined his approach to spiritualism.

The book includes an amusing anecdote excerpted from a biography of Conan Doyle written by Russell Miller in 2008. Miller writes:

At Windlesham [Doyle's home], Conan Doyle became accustomed to receiving hate mail [about his spiritualist stand], most of which he disregarded, but there was one particularly vituperative letter, dated 16 December 1919, from Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's former lover and a relatively recent convert to the Roman Catholic church: "Sir, What a disgusting beast you are with your filthy caricatures of 'Christ.' The proper way to deal with such a man as you would be to give you a thrashing with a horse whip."… Douglas accused Conan Doyle of promoting spiritualism for the sake of money and notoriety, "in short for the same purposes and with the same flat-footed low persistence as you worked your idiot 'Sherlock Holmes' business." He went on to prophecy that Conan Doyle's "blasphemous ravings" would bring a "dreadful judgment" on him and signed himself "Yours with the utmost contempt." Conan Doyle replied the following day, with a masterful and succinct dismissal: "Sir, I was relieved to get your letter. It is only your approval which could in any way annoy me."

----

* Margalit Fox refers to Sir Arthur as Conan Doyle throughout, explaining that he took the name Conan as part of a double surname. Some other writers refer to him as Doyle, treating Conan as a middle name. Fox is no doubt correct, but I'm accustomed to calling him Doyle and it's a hard habit to break.

** Cesare Lombroso, in addition to his now-discredited work as a physiognomist, was also known as a pioneering figure in psychical research.

1876

It's hardly news that many Americans are nervous about the upcoming election, not merely because of uncertainty about who will win but, more profoundly, because of fears that no clear winner will be determined.  

With mail-in voting to be used on an unprecedented scale, there are questions about the timely delivery and the accurate count of the ballots. Phalanxes of attorneys have already lined up on both sides to challenge decisions made by local electoral boards. There seems to be a real danger that some states will be unable to certify a slate of electors in time to meet the deadline for the Electoral College vote, in which case the election would be referred to the Congress, with the House of Representatives choosing the president and the Senate choosing the vice president.

Complicating matters still further is the fact that it's the newly elected House and Senate that are supposed to make this choice, yet it's unclear how the newly elected bodies can assemble if critical ballots remain in dispute. If the Congress manages to work around this issue, the House will choose the president by a vote of state delegations. At present, Republicans control 26 state delegations, giving them the advantage in the current House, though not necessarily in the post-election House. If no president can be selected by Inauguration Day, the Speaker of the House assumes the duties of acting President of the United States. And there are many more complexities and uncertainties.

It would be one thing if all this drama were to play out in an atmosphere of calm deliberation, but – to put it mildly – that seems unlikely. Instead we can probably expect a wave of demonstrations, many turning violent.

To get some idea of what we may be in store for, I recently read Fraud of the Century, by Roy Morris, Jr., which covers the contested election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. It's an exhaustively researched, generally compelling narrative that perhaps offers a glimpse into the events of the next few months. 

The election took place eleven years after the end of the Civil War. Antagonisms were still strong on both sides. Racism remained widespread and not at all covert. South Carolina politician Edmund Rhett said openly that the goal of his policies was for blacks to "be kept as near to the condition of slavery as possible, and as far from the condition of the white man as is practicable." Florida governor William Marvin told blacks to return to the plantations where they had been enslaved and "call your old Master – 'Master.'"

In response to such attitudes, the government in Washington had imposed federal troops on the South to protect the civil rights (and the lives) of the black population — the defining feature of the policy known as Reconstruction. Southern whites increasingly chafed under this de facto martial law, and many Northerners had grown weary of policing the region.

The Democratic Party, which had been the party of secession, continued to represent the interests of Southern whites, though some canny Democrats were making inroads with black voters. These inroads were made a bit easier by the widespread corruption of Ulysses S. Grant's presidential administration. Sordid scandals involving patronage and kickbacks had led to resignations and indictments, and had made the hapless Grant a figure of ridicule and contempt. 

Corruption was by no means limited to the Republicans. The most notoriously corrupt politician in America was a Democrat, the famous Boss Tweed of New York's Tammany Hall. Morris writes, "With his diamond stick pins, loud checked suits, ruby shirt studs, and bowler hats, the corpulent Tweed was the walking embodiment of big-city corruption." The scale of Tweed's misdeeds is legendary. Morris focuses on the erection of the New York County courthouse, which took ten years to complete:

The building, which was supposed to cost $250,000, wound up costing the city nearly $14 million … Carpenters were paid $2.1 million for $30,000 worth of work; a Tammany Hall [crony] named Andrew Garvey received $1.9 million to plaster the building …; the furniture bill was $1.6 million, including $179,729 for three tables and forty chairs; and the bill for carpeting the courthouse was a staggering $4.8 million – enough to carpet the entire city.

Both Hayes and Tilden ran against corruption and in favor of reform. Tilden in particular had bona fides in this regard. He had been one of the leading voices against Tammany Hall and was instrumental in sending Tweed into exile (eventually followed by extradition and prison).

The presidential campaign was ugly and vicious, as is usual in American politics. The Republican-leaning Chicago Tribune described Tilden as "weazened, and shrimpled, and meanly cute. There is nothing about the man that is large, big, generous, solid, inspiring, powerful, or awakening. He's a small, lazy, odorous, ungainly, trickling stream, winding along and among the weeds ..." and so on.  His masculinity was questioned because he was a lifelong bachelor. The political cartoonist Thomas Nast frequently depicted him wearing a skirt. More worryingly, some of Hayes's supporters adopted the tactic of "waving the bloody shirt" – reminding ex-Union soldiers of the wounds they'd won in battle ("Soldiers," Robert G. Ingersoll would declaim, "every scar you have on your heroic bodies was given to you by a Democrat") and exhorting them to "vote as you shot." The attacks went in the other direction as well, of course. One Tilden supporter urged the candidate to pose the question, "Did Hayes shoot his mother in a fit of insanity?"

On election night, it appeared that Tilden had won by a slim but unassailable margin. Republicans, however, immediately focused on three key southern states: South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. They asserted that widespread suppression of the black vote in those states had allowed Tilden's victory. Teams of strategists from both parties descended on the states to oversee the certification of the ballots. Though undoubtedly there was some suppression of the black vote, Morris argues that it was insufficient to account for Tilden's margins of victory (I gather that other historians disagree). In any case, hard-working Republican operatives were able to cloud the issue sufficiently that the outcome in all three states remained unresolved.

The general atmosphere of these deliberations was extremely disheartening for believers in democracy. After witnessing some of the behind-the-scenes activities, onetime Union general and Republican politician Lew Wallace, today best known as the author of Ben-Hur, wrote his wife,

I scarcely ever passed a week under such depression of spirits. It is terrible to see the extent to which all classes go in their determination to win. Conscience offers no restraint. Nothing is so common as the resort to perjury, unless it is violence – in short, I do not know whom to believe. If we win, our methods are subject to impeachment for possible fraud. If the enemy win, it is the same thing exactly – doubt, suspicion, irritation go with the consequence, whatever it may be.

This forecast proved accurate. There was never any chance that the eventual winner of the election would be respected by the losing side.

Ultimately, four states submitted multiple slates of electors to the Electoral College. North Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana each offered at least two different slates, reflecting ongoing disputes over whether Hayes or Tilden had carried the vote. A fourth state, Oregon, posed a different  dilemma; the state had gone for Hayes by an indisputable margin, but one of the Hayes electors had been retroactively disqualified for being a federal employee, and there was a question of what to do with his single electoral college vote. Should it be awarded to Hayes anyway, or should it go to Tilden, whose elector had received the next-largest number of votes? The matter was more critical than it might appear; Tilden already had a confirmed total of 184 electoral votes, leaving him just one vote shy of the presidency. Should the orphaned Oregon vote go his way, he would be inaugurated. 

To resolve these issues, Congress agreed to set up two electoral commissions, later merged into one, comprised of eight Republicans and seven Democrats. The Republicans' one-seat advantage on the commission – a somewhat accidental result of the selection process – proved decisive, as the commission ruled in favor of the Republicans in all four states. By receiving all the disputed votes, including the one in Oregon, Hayes was able to edge out Tilden, 185-184.

The transparently partisan rulings of the electoral commission left the public feeling cheated. The new president was quickly dubbed "His Fraudulency" and "Rutherfraud" Hayes. Although Hayes overcame this bad beginning and ended his single term in office (he did not run for reelection) as a reasonably popular figure, his reputation was forever marked by the dubious circumstances under which he attained power. 

Hayes's election is often framed as the result of a "corrupt bargain" in which Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction in exchange for some limited but crucial Democratic support. Morris argues that this is an oversimplification. He points out that the North had already grown frustrated with overseeing the postwar South, and that the policy of withdrawing federal troops would have been implemented no matter who was in power. He also thinks the last-minute "bargain" has been oversold and amounted to little more than a ratification of the inevitable. In any event, Reconstruction did end with Hayes, and for nearly a century Southern blacks were left without federal protection and were reduced to the states of second-class citizens as whites implemented Jim Crow laws and turned a blind eye to lynchings and mob action. 

Returning to our present circumstances, it's somewhat reassuring to see that violence in the turbulent post-election atmosphere of 1876 was kept to a minimum. True, there was an assassination attempt against Hayes (an assailant, never apprehended, fired a gun at him through a window of his home), which was hushed up at the time to avoid exacerbating tensions. Even so, the widespread civil unrest that might have been expected did not arise. This was mainly due to the forbearance of Hayes and Tilden, both of whom made every effort to prevent large assemblies that might degenerate into riots. It was also due to the prudence of President Grant, who made sure that Washington, DC, was protected by federal troops to prevent any attempt to seize the White House by force. 

Another factor was Tilden's principled decision to abide by the law. Some of his more hotheaded advisers pressed him to take the oath of office in defiance of the electoral commission and set up a parallel government. Tilden steadfastly refused, saying simply that he had "no warrant of authority." Had he taken their advice, he could have been arrested as an insurrectionist and even shot. The potential consequences are appalling. The country would have risked a resumption of the Civil War. 

Needless to say, the United States survived the contested election of 1876. There was no mass uprising, no confrontation between protesters and federal troops, no parallel government that might have prompted divided loyalties on the part of the military. Hayes was peacefully succeeded by another Republican, James A. Garfield. Garfield, in turn was assassinated six months into his presidency, but the killing had nothing to do with ideology; the assassin was a mentally ill low-level political operative incensed at not having been appointed ambassador to France. 

Looking ahead, it's possible that November's election will be so one-sided (in either direction) that there will be no serious dispute over the outcome. I hope so. Regardless of who wins, I would rather have a blowout that silences all doubts than a squeaker that encourages recounts, litigation, protests, and possibly a spiraling descent into chaos.

If we're not so lucky and we end up with a replay of 1876, we can only hope that the moderation and good sense shown by Hayes and Tilden in restraining their supporters and adhering to constitutional norms will be shown by both of our contemporary presidential candidates and their advisors.

Somehow I'm not optimistic, but when it comes to human nature, I never am.

---

P.S.  If you're interested in reading Fraud of the Century, I recommend purchasing the print edition, rather than the Kindle ebook. The Kindle is poorly formatted; most of the chapters have the text centered so that it runs down the middle of the page. This makes it almost impossible to read. I don't know if ebook editions other than the Kindle suffer from the same formatting issue, but they might.

Coming soon: The Far Horizon

Despite the paucity of my posts lately, I haven't been entirely idle. I finally got around to writing my book on the afterlife, which I call The Far Horizon: Perspectives on Life Beyond Death. 

I was planning to self-publish this short (45,000-word) book and maybe sell a handful of copies. But when I announced it on Facebook, a helpful Facebook friend, Maryam Ebadi, contacted Jon Beecher, who runs White Crow Books, the well-known niche publisher of paranormal titles. Jon was interested in handling the book and got in touch with me. We had a very friendly FaceTime chat—one of the few times I've ever used FaceTime—and agreed to do the deal.

So the upshot is that The Far Horizon will come out in both paperback and digital editions through White Crow, probably within the next three months or so.

Here's the blurb I wrote for the book when I was planning to self-publish. It gives you the gist:

THE FAR HORIZON

Over the past century and a half, a wealth of evidence has emerged that is consistent, at least, with the hypothesis of life after death.

• Near-death experiences
• Deathbed visions
• Mediumship
• Apparitions
• Past-life memories, and memories of a between-lives state

Yet even those who are inclined to take this evidence seriously may struggle to make sense of it. How can the idea of an afterlife be integrated into our everyday experience? How can we connect the seemingly nebulous notion of postmortem survival with the hard, tangible reality of life on earth?

Through metaphors, images, and analogies—illustrated with dozens of documented cases drawn from the literature of parapsychology—this book suggests ways of looking at life beyond death, not as a baffling anomaly, but as a logical extension of our experience of reality here and now.

The hope is that we can learn to see reports of an afterlife as something more than mere ghost stories … and to sharpen the focus of our gaze on The Far Horizon.

———

The book offers four main metaphors or "models" of the afterlife, all of which have been discussed on this blog:

1.  the virtual-reality simulation model
2.  the spectrum of frequencies model
3.  the Flatland model; and 
4.  the diamond model.

There's also a concluding chapter that examines the meaning and purpose of it all. 

Although my focus is not on "proving" postmortem survival, the various models are illustrated with case studies that serve as evidence. I have to say that most of the material (both the models and the case histories) derives from posts I've already published on this blog, which is how I was able to put to the book together pretty quickly. However, it's not just a compilation of blog posts. I extensively rewrote most of the content and structured it into what I hope is a coherent presentation.

One thing I discovered when rereading old blog posts is how many typos there are. I never realized there were so many. Oh, well. You get what you pay for, and this blog is free. The book will cost money, but it will also be professionally proofread.

Cheers! 

 

Pleroma is where the heart is

Over the years, I've tried reading various examples of the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, but usually without much success. The problem is that these fifteen-hundred-year-old codices, which were found buried in a large clay jar, are in poor condition, with many illegible or missing words. A typical translation might go something like this:

Then So[fia] came [down] from the Pleroma ((and)) enter[ed] ... (words missing) ... Upon which, ((she)) ascended, taking [with her] the ((divine?)) light [that] ... (two lines missing) ... from above. 

I made that up, but it gives you the idea. I've sometimes wondered why somebody doesn't try to produce a more reader-friendly translation accompanied by actually helpful notes.

Well, somebody did. The Secret Book of John: The Gnostic Gospel, translated and annotated by Stevan Davies, is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in reading these texts without undue mental strain. I'm not saying it's an easy read, but it is far more lucid than other translations of Gnostic documents I've seen, and the accompanying notes are enormously helpful.

The Secret Book of John, known technically as the Apocryphon of John, lays out many of the basic motifs of Gnosticism's complex mythology. The text, like many Gnostic works, is overcomplicated and frequently confusing. It has clearly been revised and amended many times, with marginal and interlinear notes incorporated in inconsistent ways. More than one tradition is preserved in the document, and these traditions sometimes contradict one another. The Gnostics had a tendency to indulge in elaborate cosmologies, which can confuse rather than elucidate their main points. Finally, part of the purpose of the text was to assist exorcists and healers in expelling demons from the body; accordingly, it provides long lists of the demons responsible for each individual body part, which make for extremely tedious reading.

Before proceeding, we may want to pause to consider the implications of that last detail. We like to think of the Gnostics as sophisticated thinkers, and in many respects they were. Still, it's worth remembering that these people (or at least some of them) believed that all human ills were attributable to demons, and that any given ailment could be cured by naming the appropriate demon. If a patient reported pain in the big toe of his left foot, it was critically important for the healer to call out the demon Phikna, who was responsible for the toes of the left foot, and not Miamai, who lorded over the toenails, or Boabel, whose jurisdiction covered the toes of the right foot. Naming the wrong demon was tantamount to medical malpractice.  

It was, in short, a very different world from our own, and we ought to be wary of accepting any of this ancient knowledge just because it is very old. Lots of ideas are very old, and also very wrong, and even outright silly.

Anyway, if we want to know just what the Gnostics believed about God and humanity, we can find it in The Secret Book of John, which seems to have taken pride of place among the Nag Hammadi books, being reproduced three times in three separate codices, each time as the first chapter. But to make it as clear as possible (admittedly, its inherent ambiguities mean that it can never be entirely clear), we need to strip away the complications to produce a more streamlined and accessible narrative.

My attempt to do so goes something like this:

In the beginning there was God, who was pure awareness. At some point God developed the capacity of self-awareness, which means that he (the masculine pronoun is used for convenience) was able to view himself as an object. In effect, he had split himself in two – God and the image of God. Each new mental faculty innovated by God created an additional split. Eventually a full range of mental faculties developed, each of which could be conceptualized as a separate being in its own right – not a material being, since we are dealing purely with the realm of thought and (arguably) thought-forms – but a mental operation that could be carried on with or without the cooperation of the rest of God's mind.

This complete range of God's mental capabilities is known as the pleroma, which means something like "the fullness of God's mind" or "God's mind in full." The pleroma is peopled (one might say) by a cast of characters corresponding to the various mental processes and functions of God's mind.

All was well until one of the mental faculties, Wisdom, decided to attain self-awareness for herself. (In Greek, the word for wisdom is Sophia, and so Wisdom is construed as feminine.) This was a mistake. Operating independently, without the rest of the pleroma to assist her, Wisdom was unable to create true self-awareness. Instead she gave birth to a misshapen, incomplete mental faculty, a kind of miscarriage. This abysmal creation was dubbed Yaldabaoth.

Ashamed of her error, Wisdom removed her unwanted child from the pleroma altogether, placing him in a lower sphere, cut off from God. Totally isolated, Yaldabaoth not unnaturally acquired the idea that he was the one and only God. He created a host of demons to serve him – such demons (archons) being immaterial thought-forms or objectified aspects of his own mentality – and arrogantly declared, "I am a jealous God and there is no God but me!" (As Davies points out, this is the Gnostics' subversive reworking of Exodus 20:3-5.)

Wisdom, repenting of her actions, confessed all to God. The pleroma, now acting together, took steps to undo the damage. God's mind-in-full generated a perfect thought-form of the first human being and displayed it to Yaldabaoth and his minions. Dazzled by this vision, Yaldabaoth was moved to re-create the human thought-form in his own sphere. But he could bring it to life only by breathing some (or all?) of his divine power (inherited from his mother Wisdom, who inherited it from God) into the human form he had made. Next, the pleroma bestowed insight on this newly animated human thought-form (by now named Adam), reminding him of his divine origins and encouraging him to ascend to the pleroma where he belonged. By ascending, Adam would take God's divine spark of power with him, leaving Yaldabaoth and his demons powerless, which was the pleroma's plan all along.

The plan, however, hit a snag. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Yaldabaoth began to fear that his own creation, potentially more powerful than himself, would turn against him and destroy him. He realized that if Adam abandoned him, the divine light would be gone and Yaldabaoth's sphere would be left in darkness.

To keep Adam from escaping, Yaldabaoth saw to it that he forgot his divine origins altogether. Moreover, Yaldabaoth and his demons encased the human thought-form in matter, concealing the divine spark under layers of physicality.

This is the first appearance of matter in our story. Throughout all the previous action, we have been dealing only with mental faculties and thought-forms. Now, at last, there is a material being occupying a material world.

The purpose of matter, then, is to imprison the divine spark and prevent it from rising out of the lower realm ruled by Yaldabaoth and into the pleroma, where it can attain its proper destiny as part of God's mind-in-full. Humans dimly sense their divine origin and destiny, but have forgotten it and cannot find the spark of God buried in the "tomb" of the material body.

What has happened since that day is essentially a struggle between Yaldabaoth and his demons on the one hand, seeking to keep human beings forgetful and trapped, and the pleroma of God seeking to awaken us to the true knowledge – gnosis – of our origins and set the stage for our ascent to divine status.

As I said, the full document is more complicated. Among other things, it retells various stories in Genesis, such as the temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden of Eden, putting a very different spin on them. For instance, the Tree of Life in the garden is, in the Gnostic version, more like a tree of death intended to keep humanity tethered to the earth. Davies translates this poetic description of the tree:

Its root is bitter
Its branches are dead.
  Its shadow is hatred
  Its leaves are deception
The nectar of wickedness is in its blossoms.
  Its fruit is death
  Its seed is desire
It flowers in the darkness
  Those who eat from it are denizens of Hades
  Darkness is their resting place.

As we've seen, the God worshiped throughout the Hebrew Bible is recast by Gnostics as the villain of the piece, a false god, an ignorant and malicious god, who wants to keep humanity in subjection, while the true God occupies an altogether different and infinitely more exalted sphere.

Whatever else we can say about it, the Gnostic vision offers a creative solution to the problem of evil in the world. Instead of the convoluted arguments offered by orthodox theologians to explain how an omnipotent and beneficent God can permit so much wickedness and suffering, the Gnostics simply declare that we've been worshiping the wrong god all along, and that the wickedness and suffering are features of this false god's ignorance and viciousness. Naturally, this point of view did not endear them to the early Christian "heresy-hunters," who attacked them with relish and who, after attaining political power, largely exterminated them.

Reconstructing the Green Book

Back in 2007, I wrote a post about the book The Open Door, by Theon Wright, which had been recommended by a reader. I described the book as

the detailed record of experiments in automatic writing carried out by Wright's parents, Nella and George, and later by Theon's brother Stowell and by Theon himself. The unusual thing about these experiments is that little effort was made to obtain verifiable evidence of identity, the usual procedure in mediumship, particularly in the days when Wright's parents were at work. Instead, the focus was on obtaining wisdom, what the Wrights called the Philosophy of Self, essentially a version of nondualistic mysticism in which the development of one's higher Self contributes to the overall development of Cosmic Consciousness.

To be honest, I've mostly forgotten the book by now, but I recently received an email from Paul Smith, who said that he became fascinated with The Open Door after reading my post. He told me, 

The attraction of the book’s message is that it marries in a single vision a monistic idealist metaphysics of the emanation of the Divine Source into creation and the subsequent return of that creation to its Source to a cosmological understanding of human becoming that encompasses both incarnate and posthumous existence. 

He added that he had undertaken a project based on the book's contents:

I have completed a reconstruction from The Open Door of what Theon Wright’s father assembled, bound in green leather and called The Green Book, which forms, in essence, a course of instruction in essential metaphysics, very much along the lines of Advaita Vedanta or similar non-dualist teachings, as delivered – as close as I can presently determine – from a discarnate being, once bodily human, who has realized the Self.  The content of the included reconstruction should be more or less identical to that of the actual “Green Book”, barring the absence of personal family matters, but without the attempt at subject ordering of the actual volume, which is now lost.  I did write to Theon Wright’s son, George Wright, a few years back in an attempt to obtain a copy of the actual Green Book, but never received a reply.

He sent me his reconstruction of the apparently lost text, but as I explained in my reply, the material was too long for a blog post, and there could be copyright issues associated with reproducing so much of The Open Door's text, even though the book is long out of print. Appreciating these concerns, Paul has chosen to put up his reconstruction of The Green Book on ScribD, while, he tells me, continuing to try to contact the copyright holder(s). 

Readers who are interested in channeled literature, especially literature that focuses on philosophical issues rather than proof of identity, may want to check out this very interesting project. 

Book excerpt, part four

The fourth and last excerpt from a chapter of my book, currently in progress.

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A natural question at this point would be: How do we know that the experiences of Mrs. Crans and Dr. Wiltse are not hallucinations? In fact, if it’s true that consciousness processes our perceptions according to mental categories, how can we be sure that any of our experiences are not hallucinations? How can we trust our perceptions at all?

A thoroughgoing skeptic would say we can’t, but not one actually tries to live by this dictum. In practice, we do accept our perceptions as accurate — or at least accurate enough — most of the time. Yet we’re aware that we can be fooled by optical illusions or by mental changes brought on by drugs, illness, or injury. Our practical method of determining what’s true is mainly based on consensus. If you’re the only one who sees an elephant galloping down the freeway, you may be imagining it. If other people see it too, you’re on safer ground. This is the value of what is known in parapsychology as veridical experiences — experiences that can be independently confirmed by the reports of others.

In the case of Mrs. Crans, we have two veridical components. One is her accurate description of Charley’s room, 1500 miles from where she rested, as confirmed by Charley himself. The other is her description of her late daughter’s appearance and actions, again seconded by Charley. Adding credibility to the account is that Charley reported the spiritual visitation even before receiving Mrs. Crans’s letter.

In the case of Dr. Wiltse, we have the statements of his doctor and other witnesses, which Wiltse took the trouble to collect after the fact, verifying his description of the people present in the room and their behavior. He even obtained sworn depositions from some of them. An additional factor is Wiltse’s medical condition; the attending physician reported that Wiltse was so deeply comatose, he showed no response to a needle thrust deeply into his flesh at various points throughout the lower part of his body. Even ordinary mental processes should not be possible in such a condition, let alone the detailed observations that Wiltse reported.

Finally, there’s the issue of commonality between his report and many others. If one explorer returns from an unknown continent and makes a report, we may be skeptical; if dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other explorers unconnected with each other deliver similar reports, we are entitled to accept the basic truth of what they’re saying, even if there are some discrepancies and variations among their separate experiences.

If Wiltse were the only person ever to report leaving his body when critically ill, closely observing the deathbed scene, or finding himself in a spirit world, we might chalk up his account to mere fancy. But his is only one of countless reports, some of which are even better attested. Despite differences in the experiences that have been related, enough common elements have emerged to form a recognizable pattern. These elements include:

• Disconnecting both emotionally and literally from the body, often with the parallel development of a “soul body” that can hover in air and pass through solid objects, and which may be connected to the physical body by a cord.
• Observations of one’s environment, typically with greatly enhanced perception.
• A frustrating inability to communicate with the living.
• A feeling of health, relief, and “exuberance.”
• Transition to a different plane of reality, accomplished by rapid flight.
• An earthlike quality to this other reality (a road, flowers, trees).
• A barrier blocking further progress.
• A cloud or a bright light that somehow embodies a higher intelligence, which communicates telepathically with the experiencer.
• A choice to remain or return, based on whether or not one’s work on earth is complete.
• The sudden resumption of life in the physical body, often accompanied by surprise and disappointment.
• A compelling need to relate the experience.

All these elements are present in Wiltse’s account. Other common elements in NDEs, not seen in the Wiltse case, include:

• A transition through a tunnel or other passageway.
• A reunion with departed loved ones, who communicate telepathically.
• An encounter with a religious figure (or more than one), usually consistent with the experiencer’s personal belief system or background.
• A comprehensive review of one’s life, in which the experiencer feels the direct impact his actions had on other people, for better or worse.
• Sometimes, a temporary merging with the higher intelligence (which may or may not be identified as God), in which the meaning of life and the purpose of existence are grasped in a way that is instantly clear but, later, almost impossible to communicate.
• Lasting changes in one's personality, behavior, and philosophy. 

Some patterns seem to be cultural in nature. Western NDEs often involve a choice, as in the Wiltse case. NDEs in India typically exclude the idea of choice or a personal mission that must be completed on earth, and instead present the person’s brush with the afterlife as a kind of clerical mistake, a bureaucratic mishap. Often a different person of the same name was scheduled to die that day, and some angelic bumbler picked up the wrong person!

Do I think clerical mistakes of that sort really happen? No. Nor am I convinced that the experiencer has a genuine choice about whether or not to resume earthly life. (Dr. Wiltse’s choice proved illusory; his choice to remain was not respected, and he was required to go back anyway. This is not uncommon.) And I’m dubious of encounters with iconic religious figures like Jesus or the Virgin Mary, which constitute a minority of NDE reports.

In all these cases, I think a narrative is constructed that can make sense of the situation in terms the person can understand. The experiencer, temporarily caught between “frequencies,” having made only a partial transition from one level of consciousness to the next, lacks the ability to fully process and interpret what’s happening to him. Any familiar-seeming and superficially logical interpretation may be sufficient to get him safely through the experience and back on firmer ground. (Think of the invisible hands that Dr. Wiltse imagined carrying him through space. The “hands” helped make the experience intelligible to him.)

Moreover, I suspect that interpretive issues like this are extremely common when dealing with the liminal state — a state in which we’re tuned in to more than one frequency at a time. In that condition, we’re receiving new and unfamiliar input, but we have yet to develop the mental categories and concepts to process it. In such cases, we inevitably fall back on familiar narratives and familiar (even comforting) imagery to fill in the gaps. This point will become more important as we go along.

Book excerpt, part three

Part three of the excerpts from a chapter of my book (in progress). Originally I planned to break up the chapter into three parts, but the last part of the chapter proved rather long, so I'm going to extend this series of posts with a fourth excerpt. 

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Here’s a case of a different kind, also covered by F.W.H. Myers in the same book [Human Personality ...]. The case was reported by a medical doctor, A.S. Wiltse of Skiddy, Kansas, who in 1889 contracted typhoid fever and entered a coma. Though close to death, he ultimately recovered. When he awakened, he startled those who were attending him by insisting on relating an unusual experience “despite all injunctions to be quiet.”

Eight weeks after “the day [he] died,” Wiltse wrote a lengthy paper about it, which was published in the St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal, November, 1889, and in the Mid-Continental Review, February, 1890. [The case is also covered in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, volume 8, page 180.]

At the end of his paper, Wiltse wrote, “There are plenty of witnesses to the truth of the above statements, in so far as my physical condition was concerned. Also to the fact that just as I described the conditions about my body and in the room, so they actually were. I must, therefore, have seen things by some means.” Later, he obtained sworn depositions from some witnesses.

So what is it exactly that happened to Dr. Wiltse? Let him tell us:

I passed about four hours in all without pulse or perceptible heartbeat, as I am informed by Dr. S.H. Raynes, who was the only physician present. During a portion of this time several of the bystanders thought I was dead, and such a report being carried outside, the village church bell was tolled. Dr. Raynes informs me, however, that by bringing his eyes close to my face, he could perceive an occasional short gasp, so very light as to be barely perceptible, and that he was upon the point, several times of saying, “He is dead,” when a gasp would occur in time to check him …

I lost, I believe, all power of thought or knowledge of existence in absolute unconsciousness. 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 interest in common. I looked in astonishment and joy for the first time upon myself – the me, the real Ego, while the not-me closed it up on all sides like a sepulcher of clay.

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 … I watched the interesting process of the separation of soul and 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. After a little time the lateral motion ceased, and along the soles of the feet beginning at the toes, passing rapidly to the heels, I felt and heard, as it seemed, the snapping of innumerable small cords. When this was accomplished, I began slowly to retreat from the feet, toward the head, as a rubber cord shortens …

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 I at last broke loose from the body and fell lightly to the floor, where I slowly arose and expanded into the full stature of a man. I seemed to be translucent, of a bluish cast and perfectly naked. With a painful sense of embarrassment, I fled toward the partially opened door to escape the eyes of the two ladies whom I was facing, as well as others who I knew were about me, but upon reaching the door I found myself clothed, and satisfied upon that point, I turned and faced the company. 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, only stood and gazed toward the couch I just left. I directed my gaze in the direction of his, and saw my own dead body. It was lying just as I had taken so much pains to place it, partially upon the right side, the feet close together and the hands clasped across the breast. I was surprised at the paleness of the face. I had not looked in a glass for some days and had imagined that I was not as pale as most very sick people are …

I now attempted to gain the attention of the people [in the room] with the object of comforting them as well as assuring them of their own immortality. I bowed to them playfully and saluted with my right hand. I passed about among them also, but found that they gave me no heed. Then the situation struck be as humorous and I laughed outright.

They certainly must have heard that, I thought, but it seemed otherwise, for not one lifted their eyes from my body. It did not once occur to me to speak and I concluded the matter by saying to myself: “They see only with the eyes of the body. They cannot see spirits. They are watching what they think is I, but they are mistaken. That is not I. This is I and I am as much alive as ever.”

I turned and passed out at the open door, inclining my head and watching where I set my feet as I stepped down on to the porch.

I crossed the porch, descended the steps, walked down the path and into the street. Then I stopped and looked about me. I never saw that street more distinctly than I saw it then. I took note of the redness of the soil and of the washes the rain had made. I took a rather pathetic look about me, like one who is about to leave his home for a long time. Then I discovered that I had become larger than I was in earth life and congratulated myself thereupon. I was somewhat smaller in the body than I just liked to be, but in the next life, I thought, I am to be as I desired …

“How well I feel,” I thought. “Only a few minutes ago I was horribly sick and distressed. Then came that change, called death, which I have so much dreaded. It is past now, and here I am still a man, alive and thinking, yes, thinking as clearly as ever, and how well I feel; I shall never be sick again. I have no more to die.”… I discovered then a small cord, like a spider’s web, running from my shoulders back to my body and attaching to it at the base of the neck in front …

[After losing consciousness for a second time] I again awoke [and] found myself in the air, where I was upheld by a pair of hands, which I could feel pressing lightly against my sides. The owner of the hands, if they had one, was behind me, and shoving me through the air at a swift but a pleasant rate of speed. By the time I fairly realized the situation I was pitched away and floated easily down a few feet, alighting gently upon the beginning of a narrow, but well-built roadway, inclined upward at an angle of something less than 45 degrees …

[After a walk up the road] I saw at some distance ahead of me three prodigious rocks blocking the road, at which sight I stopped, wondering why so fair a road should be thus blockaded, and while I considered what I was to do, a great and dark cloud, which I compared to a cubic acre in size, stood over my head. Quickly it became filled with living, moving bolts of fire, which darted hither and thither through the cloud. They were not extinguished by contact with the cloud. I could see them as one sees fish in deep water.

I was aware of a presence, which I could not see, but which I knew was entering into the cloud from the southern side. The presence did not seem, to my mind, as a form, because it filled the cloud like some vast intelligence… Then from the right side and from the left of the cloud a tongue of black vapor shot forth and rested lightly upon either side of my head, and as they touched me thoughts not my own entered into my brain …

The following is as near as I can render [these thoughts]:

“This is the road to the internal world. Yonder rocks are the boundary between the two worlds and the two lives. Once you pass them, you can no more return into the body. If your work is complete on earth, you may pass beyond the rocks. If, however, upon consideration you conclude that … it is not done, you can return into the body.” …

[After reasoning it out, I decided] “now that I am so near I will cross the line and stay.” So determining I moved cautiously along the rocks [and] advanced [my] left foot across the line. As I did so, a small, densely black cloud appeared in front of me and advanced toward my face. I knew that I was to be stopped. I felt the power to move or to think leaving me. My hands felt powerless at my side, my head dropped forward, the cloud touched my face and I knew no more.

Without previous thought and without apparent effort on my part, my eyes opened. I looked at my hands and then at the little white cot upon which I was lying, and realizing that I was in the body, in astonishment and disappointment, I exclaimed: “What in the world has happened to me? Must I die again?”

This 1889 case has much in common with recent NDEs, showing that the phenomenon is by no means a new development, although advances in medical technology have made it more common. If we look at Dr. Wiltse’s account from the standpoint of changes in frequency, we can say that, as his body failed, he experienced a shift of consciousness following a period of blackout. In his altered state, he no longer identified with the physical body (“I was still in the body, but the body and I had no longer any interest in common”). As he became accustomed to this new condition, his altered perceptions generated a new reality for him – a spirit body, one that suited his mental image of himself by being healthier (and taller!) than the body he’d left, and even being appropriately dressed to spare him embarrassment.

Like Mrs. Crans, or like any earthbound spirit, he could still see the living people around him, even though they could not see him. His perception of physical reality appears to have been enhanced (“I never saw that street more distinctly than I saw it then. I took note of the redness of the soil and of the washes the rain had made“). He also saw a threadlike cord running from his spirit body to his physical body. This feature is pretty frequently observed in both NDEs and OBEs; it seems to be the mind’s way of representing a continued, as-yet-unbroken connection between the two levels of consciousness and reality.

Dr. Wiltse was not through with his shifts in consciousness. He again suffered a blackout, and awoke to an impression of traveling at speed, as we saw with Mrs. Crans. It is noteworthy that he conceived of being held by hands but didn’t see any. The impression of being carried in that way was presumably his mind’s interpretation, a holdover from his habitual state of consciousness, in which gravity cannot be defied without some explanation. This second shift of consciousness brought him to a still higher level, visualized as being high in the sky, and allowed him to perceive a spiritual realm with many features in common with those reported in more recent NDEs — a path, a barricade, a being of light that communicates telepathically and presents the experiencer with a choice.

Also as is frequently the case in other NDEs, the choice does not seem to have been entirely genuine, because even after Dr. Wiltse chose to remain in the afterlife, he was still impelled back into the body.

I would argue that this entire experience of a spiritual realm, barricade, and “vast intelligence” is every bit as real as your experience of reading this book right now. It is simply a different level of reality accessed by a different level of consciousness. It is a different set of perceptions, which allows for a different experience of reality, and which is made possible by a different “fine-tuning” of your mental state. The elements are both familiar and unfamiliar. There are a road and boulders and a cloud, all of which we might experience on earth, but there are also strange flashes of light and a telepathic communication from a seemingly divine intelligence. We are still at some halfway point between familiar reality and a higher, unfamiliar reality. The barricade or boundary represents the threshold to a further adjustment of consciousness that would allow for a different and presumably less familiar experience.

Note also that Dr. Wiltse experienced yet another blackout at the conclusion of his adventure. When he came to, he was back in the body – in other words, his consciousness had reverted to its familiar frequency, and his reality had similarly reverted to the set of perceptions and mental categories he was accustomed to. His reaction was not at all unusual in such cases; he was disappointed, even distressed, at having enjoyed a glimpse of an expanded consciousness (and a wider reality), only to be “dialed back” to the limitations and imperfections of ordinary subjective existence. ...

Book excerpt, part two

This is the second of a three-part series of excerpts from one (first-draft) chapter of the book I'm working on.

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You’ll notice that many of the cases I cite (though by no means all of them) are pretty old, dating back to the early 20th century or even to the 19th century. There are two reasons for this. One is that I simply find these old cases interesting. The other is that modern cases can be dismissed by skeptics on the grounds that people today have been influenced by paranormal TV shows and movies. For instance, if someone today reports a near-death experience, a skeptic may say that near-death experiences are so widely known in popular culture that the person probably just picked up the idea and imagined the whole thing. This objection carries less force if the near-death experience took place more than a hundred years ago, long before the term “near-death experience” had even been coined, and long before medical resuscitation had become as common as it is now. We will look at just such a case shortly.

First, let’s look at an out of body experience that took place in April 1880. It is reported by F.W.H. Myers in his book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (pages 200-201, abridged edition). The narrator is a Mrs. Crans, whose daughter had died a few months earlier, leaving her son-in-law a widower. She tells us:

After lying down to rest, I remember feeling a drifting sensation, of seeming almost as if I was going out of the body. My eyes were closed; soon I realized that I was, or seemed to be, going fast somewhere. All seemed dark to me; suddenly I realized that I was in the room; then I saw Charley [the son-in-law] lying in a bed asleep; then I took a look at the furniture of the room, and distinctly saw every article – even to a chair at the head of the bed, which had one of the pieces broken in the back … In a moment the door opened and my spirit-daughter Allie came into the room and stepped up to the bed and stooped down and kissed Charley. He seemed to at once realize her presence, and tried to hold her, but she passed right out of the room about like a feather blown by the wind … I told [several people] my experience, and the following Sunday I wrote, as was always my custom, to my son-in-law, Charley, telling him of all my experience, describing the room as I saw it finished.

It took a letter six days to go from here to Dakota, and the same length of time, of course, to come from there [to] here; and at the end of six days judge of my surprise to receive a letter from Charley telling me thus: “Oh, my darling mamma Crans! My God! I dreamed I saw Allie last Friday night!” He then described just as I saw her; how she came into the room and he cried and tried to hold her, but she vanished. Then at the end of six days, when my letter reached him, and he read of my similar experience, he at once wrote me that all I had seen was correct, even to every article of furniture in the room, also as his dream had appeared to him.

Mrs. Crans lived in New York, while Charley Kernochan lived in Central City, Dakota. (The Dakota Territory was not split into the states of North and South Dakota until 1889.) Her out-of-body experience therefore involved a visitation to a place approximately 1500 miles away. But again, distance seems to be one of those mental categories that are not found when tuning in to an altered state of consciousness.

What can we say happened here? In her restful state, Mrs. Crans seems to have undergone a change in the level of her consciousness, which she perceived as “a drifting sensation … almost as if I was going out of the body.” (Remember that changes in perception, and therefore in the kind of reality we perceive, accompany changes of consciousness.) She experienced a sensation of speed, which is very common in such cases; think of the well-known “tunnel phenomenon” in near-death experiences. It’s not necessary to believe that she was literally flying like Superman, only that with her mind temporarily cleared of the limiting concepts of gravity, distance, and physical laws and constants, she was able to follow her thoughts without obstruction. Her thoughts led her to her son-in-law’s room, which she perceived accurately – in fact, it seems that she perceived it with supernormal clarity, noting every detail of the furniture in what was presumably a dark environment. This kind of heightened perception is another feature often reported in out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, and again probably relates to the alteration of consciousness that dispenses with limiting mental categories. Some people who’ve reported a near-death experience have said that they experienced 360° vision, and a few persons who were born blind have even reported visual perceptions during an NDE. As their consciousness shifts to a higher “frequency,” the nature and method of their perceptions necessarily will shift also.

It may seem odd that Mrs. Crans could see the room so clearly and yet could also see her “spirit-daughter.” How could she see entities from two different realities – physical reality and spiritual reality – at the same time? Again, the frequency idea (with an analog tuner) comes in handy. Remember “ghosting”? It’s possible to hover between two frequencies, picking up both signals simultaneously. In this case, it appears that Mrs. Crans was in just that state of mind. She could perceive physical reality – in fact, more clearly than usual – but she could also perceive the spirit form of her daughter. Or think of the movie crossfade. At or near the halfway point, elements of both scenes will be visible together.

Such a state of mind may actually be pretty commonplace. There are many reports of so-called earthbound spirits who have not made a full transition to the spiritual plane. They are said to wander the earth, able to perceive living persons and also some spirits. Like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, they may not even know they are dead until some helpful spirit or medium communicates this fact to them. And even after hearing it, they may not believe it. These are people who really have gotten “stuck” between frequencies and are hovering in a kind of limbo, a confused state from which they emerge only with difficulty.

As far-fetched as all this may sound, it’s not inconsistent with what we might expect if something like the frequency idea, in combination with Kantian epistemology, is true. We would expect any shift in consciousness to be accompanied by a shift in the nature of our physical reality; and we would expect that there could be an overlap between different levels of consciousness and therefore different planes of reality. We might also expect that physical death would initiate such a shift, and that some of those shifts could be temporarily incomplete. ...

Book excerpt, part one

With the blazing speed and singleminded determination of a roving garden slug, I'm moving forward with my nonfiction book on the afterlife. I don't expect it to be a long or especially challenging book, but it's taking time to organize the material and think it through. This post is the first of three excerpts that make up an early chapter. Parts two and three will follow at intervals. 

This isn't a final draft, but it gives you some idea of what I'm working on. I'm sure there are typos and other mistakes. 

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There are many possible models and analogies that can be used to interpret these [afterlife-related] phenomena. I’m going to use several, but the one I’ll emphasize is the frequency model.

Imagine a radio with an analog tuner — a dial that moves smoothly through a spectrum of frequencies. You can set the dial at a certain frequency, and that becomes the “reality” channeled by your radio. If you move the dial to another frequency, you “channel” a different reality. Some frequencies will come in strong and clear, while others will be faint and distorted. If the tuner is stuck between frequencies, you may get overlapping signals. You may hear jazz with a faint background of rap.

If it were a television instead of a radio, picking up analog signals via an antenna, you might encounter the phenomenon of ”ghosting.” This happens when faint ”ghost images” from one station are superimposed over clearer images from another station.

To me, the idea of a spectrum of frequencies, which we can tune in to, which can overlap, and which can be imperfectly received, is a pretty good analogy for the paranormal phenomena we’ll be looking at. I’m not saying that this model is literally true, only that it serves as a helpful illustration.

The radio tuner is not the only analogy we can use. Another is a motion-picture dissolve or crossfade. This type of scene transition involves fading out on one scene while fading in on another. The tail end of the first overlaps the opening frames of the second. Examining the frames individually, you can see two sets of images occupying the same space with varying degrees of clarity. At the exact midpoint of the transition, the images from each scene are equally bright and clear. At other points, one scene or the other will dominate, with the less visible scene reduced to a kind of ghost image. Moving from one “frequency” to another is similar to making a scene transition in which the old, familiar scene gradually fades away while a new, unfamiliar scene takes over.

We need a name for this transitional state — the series of frames that make up the crossfade, or the series of intermediate frequencies that make up the space between broadcast stations. It is neither entirely physical or spiritual (in the colloquial meaning of each term). It’s the borderland between two distinct kinds of experience, incorporating elements of each in varying degrees. Some people have used the term “imaginal” to designate this ambiguous territory. Rod Serling called it the Twilight Zone.

I think of it as the liminal realm. Liminal means “relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.” The liminal realm is the world of dreams, apparitions, out-of-body experiences, and past-life memories. It’s also the space in which psi operates — telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and retrocognition, and psychokinesis. It’s closely bound up with our subconscious (or superconscious) mind, the nine-tenths of the iceberg submerged below the level of consciousness at any given time. F.W.H. Myers called this larger consciousness “the subliminal self,” meaning it’s just below our threshold of awareness, but to keep our terms consistent, I’ll call it the liminal self.

More important than terminology is the nature of the relationship between the liminal realm and the liminal self. I suggest they’re two halves of the same coin, or two aspects of the same experimental reality. To move from the physical world toward the spiritual world requires an adjustment of consciousness and an adjustment of the things that consciousness perceives. The “frequencies” of matter and of consciousness are ultimately one and the same.

This viewpoint isn’t as radical as it may sound. It has a long pedigree, going back to ancient mystical traditions and, more recently, to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Kant thought deeply about the nature of reality and the mind’s ability to access it. He concluded that there are two kinds of reality: the noumenal realm, the true reality, which exists beyond time and space; and the phenomenal realm, our perception of reality, which is bounded by mental categories (including time and space) that create an internally consistent logic and order. We cannot perceive the noumenal realm directly; we can only infer its existence intellectually.

Some modern thinkers dispense with the noumenal realm and focus only on the phenomenal realm. Like Kant, they doubt the human ability to perceive reality; but unlike Kant, they doubt there is any true reality underlying our distorted perceptions. But it's hard to see how our perceptions can be distorted unless they are distortions of something. Kant's bisection of the world into the noumenal and phenomenal realms is probably as close as we can get to understanding what reality is all about.

In more modern terms, the noumenal realm may be conceived of as a realm of pure information, roughly equivalent to the binary code that runs a computer, while the phenomenal realm is a realm of images, equivalent to the graphics that appear on a computer screen. To the naive computer user, the graphics are the computer’s reality, while a more sophisticated user understands that the graphics are only iconic representations of an underlying information processing system. We see and manipulate the icons on the screen, while largely unaware of the algorithms operating behind the screen to create and control those icons.

From a Kantian perspective, the mind-body problem is largely resolved, because everything physical that we observe, experiment, and interact with is an interpretation or reconstruction of the mind. The mind imposes categories of time, space, mass, energy, color, size, etc. on a noumenal reality that has none of these properties. The physical world (including the body) is a series of perceptions processed by consciousness. It is impossible to receive any impression outside of consciousness — impossible, that is, to access an unprocessed, unfiltered reality.

This does not mean that reality is entirely subjective, random, and arbitrary. Here is where the importance of the noumenal realm comes in. Like the binary code running a computer, the noumenal realm establishes the ground rules for the images (icons) that we perceive. Imagine many different people playing a computer game on different terminals all hooked up to the same CPU. The images on each screen would be created just for that screen and for that user, and might vary according to the screen resolution and dimensions, the color and brightness settings, and any special individuating factors (e.g., the point of view would be different for each user playing a first-person shooter game); but the binary code would be the same for all.

We each look at reality from inside our own mindset, our own particular (and subjective) set of assumptions and predispositions, and yet our perceptions have their ultimate origins outside of us, as information in the noumenal realm. Moreover, our consciousness itself at any given level has built-in categories that ensure that the perceptions we generate will be broadly similar and will follow the same general rules.

Shifting from one frequency to another would involve a change in consciousness, and that this change, in itself, would entail changes in the world as we perceive it. Since all perception is bound by Kantian categories of consciousness, any change in consciousness, with a change in the associated categories, will change our perceptions. And since we know reality only as “what we perceive,” reality itself will inevitably change as our consciousness changes.

In short, our consciousness and our reality (in the phenomenal sense) go hand in hand, and a change in one necessarily involves a change in the other. As we tune in to a different frequency, we're adjusting our consciousness and simultaneously adjusting our perceptions in order to receive a different kind of reality.

To be clear, I don't think that as we transition out of the physical world, we go into Kant’s noumenal realm. Noumenal reality is the ultimate mystery, comparable to Nirvana in Buddhism or the Godhead in the Christian mystical tradition. Merging with the noumenal marks an end to all transitions and evolution, an end to the phenomenal world (the world of appearances, incarnations, and struggle) altogether. The shifts in mind and being that we’ll focus on here typically involve much more modest changes — a shift from one level of phenomenal reality to another. Think of it as advancing to the next level of a video game. The rules may be different, the images new, the rewards greater, but you’re still playing the game. 

I’ve used words like world, realm, and plane to describe these different realities, but this language may imply a dualistic view of an unchanged consciousness moving through various environments like a sightseer on a bus tour. It would be better to spotlight the fact that consciousness itself is constantly changing along with the environment it perceives. For that reason, I prefer thinking in terms of a state or condition: a person moves from the physical state into the liminal state. In each case, it is a state of mind as well as a state of being.

Suppose you have an out-of-body experience. You perceive yourself leaving your own body and hovering over it. You may perceive yourself now making use of a different body, one not restricted by gravity or distance. This ”spiritual body” or “etheric body” or “astral body” — I'd call it the liminal body — may be younger and healthier than the physical body you’re accustomed to. And it can travel wherever your thoughts take you, in virtually no time at all.

Now, have you actually, physically left your body? Has some sort of spirit body really floated out of your physical form? Or are you only visualizing this experience?

I would say that your consciousness has found a way to tune in to a different frequency. As it does, you lose your emotional and intellectual connection with the body you perceive in your ordinary state of consciousness, and become aware of, or manifest, a new body better suited to the state of consciousness you’re occupying right now. This “new” (liminal) body is not really new; it has been available to you all along; but you were not aware of it because your consciousness was restricted by certain mental categories (like gravity and distance) that it has now at least temporarily cast off. As long as you are in this altered state of consciousness with its altered categories of perception, you will perceive and identify with this less-familiar body. The liminal body will be your reality, just as your physical body is your reality when your consciousness is in its physical mode.

The tuning from one frequency to another, then, is a matter of changing your level of consciousness and your concomitant level of perception, which directly alters the reality that is real for you in that moment. You ease out of the physical state (of both mind and being), into the liminal state, an ambiguous condition that offers both familiar and unfamiliar perceptions and experiences.

As we go forward, we’ll see how useful it can be to think of paranormal things in this way. It’s by no means a complete explanation, nor is it the only helpful “model” we can use, but it will serve to clarify many points that might otherwise seem obscure.

Let’s apply this approach to some specific cases ...