Embodied minds: Sommer excerpt #12

Exotic and strange as distinctions of parapsychological capacities of embodied minds from the agency of discarnate spirits may appear to most moderns, they are hardly new. Such ideas were in fact at the heart of mainstream Renaissance natural philosophy and related Neoplatonic currents, which centred around notions of a ‘world soul’, in which individual minds were thought to be embedded and intrinsically interconnected with the material world on a basic ontological level. This was also the cosmology of early modern science icons including Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Francis Bacon. In 1605, for example, Bacon noted that parapsychological cognitions needed to be distinguished according to the ‘input source’: In his discussion of psychic phenomena occurring near death and in altered states, from which we briefly quoted in Part 1, for example, Bacon divided ‘natural divination’ (divinatio naturalis) into ‘primitive’ divination – parapsychological capacities of the embodied mind – and divination by ‘influxion’ – veridical input from disembodied spirits.206

Far from being refuted during the supposedly linear growth of scientific knowledge, it would again be fair to say that such holistic cosmologies were squarely written out of history by figures like Huxley and du Bois-Reymond, along with striking continuities of associated ‘paranormal’ beliefs held by members of intellectual elites. Notions of a ‘world soul’ would be preserved in major philosophical systems of German idealism, a worldview which grounded much of late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century science. These idealist frameworks were notably formulated by F. W. J. Schelling, J. G. Fichte and later G. W. F. Hegel – all of whom were convinced of the reality of ‘paranormal’ phenomena, especially those reported to occur in mesmerist trance and other altered states.

For example, Hegel’s leading philosophical antagonist was Arthur Schopenhauer, who still agreed with Hegel that “He who nowadays doubts the facts of animal magnetism and its clairvoyance is not to be called incredulous, but ignorant”. Schopenhauer also studied reports of spirit apparitions, which, however, he did not interpret as evidence for personal survival, but as indications of dramatized expressions of an impersonal and unconscious ‘world will’. Similar notions were at the roots of the famous Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann, who adopted Schopenhauer’s comparisons of biological instinct with clairvoyance, and who was a major German critic of spiritualism.

Gustav T. Fetchner

One scientifically eminent contemporary of Hartmann who also subscribed to the notion of a ‘world soul’ was the aforementioned Gustav T. Fechner, whose works would increasingly come to inspire William James’s philosophy. And it is hardly an accident that James’s fellow psychical researcher Frederic Myers was a trained classicist. In fact, Myers’s coinage of ‘telepathy’ in 1882 – as well as his invention of the word ‘subliminal’ – was more than informed by his studies of ancient Greek mystical to Renaissance natural philosophical and German idealist traditions. While Skeptics typically portray Myers as a haplessly naïve and uncritical spiritualist, his early work in fact seemed to directly undermine the idea of spirit agency, which provoked rather fierce attacks by actual spiritualists.

Rather than through isolated investigations of anomalies directly suggestive of survival only – verifications of ‘spirit identity’ in mediumship and apparitions – Myers tried to strengthen the scientific case for survival by constructing a model of the self, in which undisputed psychological and properly parapsychological phenomena did not face each other as irreconcilable, but were continuous. For the case of mediumship, for example, Myers argued that properly scientific research in this area

will not be difficult only, but impossible, – it will lead to mere confusion and bewilderment – if it be undertaken without adequate preliminary conception of what our own personalities, our own intelligences, are in reality and can actually do. The most ardent Spiritist should welcome a searching inquiry into the potential faculties of spirits still in the flesh. Until we know more of these, those other phenomena to which he appeals must remain unintelligible because isolated, and are likely to be obstinately disbelieved because they are impossible to understand.

This quote is from Myers’s review of James’s Principle of Psychology, where we find a general conception of mediumship which James himself had adopted from Myers. Somewhat oversimplified, this methodological maxim roughly goes like this:

Even veridical cases of mediumship should initially be approached as non- pathological instances of multiple personality. A medium is simply someone with a disposition to go into a self-induced trance, during which expectations by a sitter wishing to communicate with a deceased loved one are unconsciously acted out. Rather than actually ‘channelling’ the spirit in question, the entranced medium, uninhibited by the habitual control of self-consciousness, constructs a ‘split personality’, persuasively camouflaging as the expected ‘spirit’ by accessing a cosmic mental nexus, in which the minds of all beings (living and dead) are constantly connected below the threshold of everyday conscious awareness.

A similar approach was applied in the SPR’s aforementioned early studies of veridical ‘hallucinations’, which Myers conceptualized as exceptional, dramatized telepathic eruptions of subliminal mental interconnectedness into conscious experience. One of the spiritualists who had absolutely no use of all this new talk about subliminal minds and divisions of the self was the ‘other Darwin’, Alfred Russel Wallace. But instead of attacking his fellow countryman Myers, he singled out Carl du Prel, a German author who proposed similar ideas. Never mind that du Prel – the most prominent German- language theorist of the unconscious mind before Freud, who once called du Prel “that brilliant mystic” – was a devout spiritualist himself, as he reminded Wallace in his reply.

At a time when the medical and psychological mainstream still regarded hallucinations and trance states as clear signs of mental degeneration, Myers and colleagues at the English SPR, William James in the US, and du Prel in Germany belonged to the most vocal figures who disputed such blanket diagnoses. Their insistence on more discerning diagnostics would in fact place them firmly against the grain of medical orthodoxy even before they discussed properly parapsychological phenomena. Regarding divisions of the self, for example, du Prel argued that rudimentary forms of non-pathological multiplicity already occurred in ordinary dreams:

If in dream I sit at an examination, and do not find the answer to the question put by the teacher, which then my next neighbor, to my great vexation, excellently gives, this very clear example shows the psychological possibility of the identity of the Subject with the contemporaneous difference of persons.

Approaching spiritualism using such minimalist conceptions which were continuous with ordinary psychological knowledge, Myers and James initially viewed trance mediumship as a more pronounced instance of such dramatized dream monologues. For example, on the height of her career Mrs. Piper occasionally gave up to three communications simultaneously, each hand writing a message from a different ‘spirit’, while a third would coherently address another sitter in the room.  Spiritualists viewed such dramatic instances as self-evident spirit communication even when messages were not veridical. However, Gurney, James and various psychologists were able to demonstrate similar multiple automatic action in hypnotized subjects, while experiments in telepathy between the living through automatic writing likewise suggested striking parallels without the need to invoke spirits.

And it is in this context that early Piper investigators came to believe that her first prominent ‘spirit control’, a personality calling himself ‘Phinuit’, was not a spirit, but a fragment of Piper’s own mind: Not only did ‘Phinuit’ fail to produce evidence supporting his claim that he was the spirit of a certain French doctor. While he did often provide highly specific veridical information about ‘spirits’ other than himself, Phinuit and other trance personalities would also often make absurd statements reminiscent of confused ramblings of a sleepwalker. One example is the often-cited claim by the ‘spirit’ of Sir Walter Scott that there were monkeys in the sun, a statement the reasonably well- educated medium would not have made in the waking state. On another occasion, the entranced Mrs. Piper grabbed the arm of the chair she sat in, correctly identifying it as belonging to a deceased aunt of Lodge’s, but stating it was part of a church organ.

Another strong indication that Phinuit was indeed a partition of Mrs. Piper’s own mind was the fact that he would sometimes shamelessly ‘fish’ for information, trying to tease out responses from sitters which might help to improve his performance. These and other instances – for example, Phinuit sometimes making up ludicrous excuses for giving blatantly false information – only reinforced the impression that the entranced Mrs. Piper, through the vehicle of ‘Phinuit’, was unconsciously responding to investigators’ expectations like a hypnotic subject, compelled to satisfy sitters by furnishing them with ‘information’ no matter how. Principal Piper investigators frequently discussed these and many other signs as fundamental hurdles for the spirit hypothesis. At the same time, they still struggled to make sense of the wealth of impressive veridical information provided by Phinuit and other supposed ‘split personalities’ of Mrs. Piper, which they preliminarily pigeonholed as ‘telepathy from the living’.

One of several early examples which appeared to far outstrip such an interpretation, however, was reported by Oliver Lodge. When he hosted Mrs. Piper during the first series of experiments in England, a personality claiming to be the son of Mr. Rich, head of the Liverpool post office, was purported to communicate. The only other sitter present was a friend of Lodge’s, whom he had introduced to Piper using a pseudonym, but who was still addressed by his actual name. Moreover, while Lodge and his friend faintly knew Mr. Rich, neither were aware that his son had died. The communicator then urged Lodge and his friend to pass on a message to Mr. Rich, expressing worry over his wellbeing and claiming among other things that he had recently suffered from dizziness and saw himself forced to retire.

Lodge decided to bite the bullet and convey the message to Mr. Rich as requested, who confirmed these and other details. Moreover, Rich said that he took the loss particularly badly because of an estrangement with his son shortly before his unexpected death a few months before the sitting. Considering how he should explain Piper’s veridical impersonation of his dead son to Mr. Rich in terms of telepathy from the living, Lodge wrote:

the only thought-transference explanation I can reasonably offer him is that it was the activity of his own mind, operating on the sensitive brain of the medium, of whose existence he knew absolutely nothing, and contriving to send a delusive message to itself!

This is by no means one of the most striking cases, and there are countless others, reported and analyzed in often painstaking detail, in studies of many other mediums. Moreover, the case of Mr. Rich already gives us an idea of the intimacy of many communications. In fact, a frequent complaint by James in his writings and private letters to friends was that sitters frequently did not consent to a publication of some of the most striking veridical material because it was too private and personal.

A much more complicated case of mediumship strongly suggestive of survival were the so-called ‘cross-correspondences’, beginning in 1906. On the face of it, this appeared like a concerted long-term effort from the ‘other side’ by deceased SPR personnel – including Gurney, Myers, Henry Sidgwick and Hodgson – to prove their continued existence through mediums distributed across three continents. These included Rosalie Thompson, ‘Mrs. Forbes’ (the wife of Judge Raikes), Mrs ‘Willett’ (Mrs Winifred Coombe-Tennant), and Margaret Verrall and her daughter Helen in Britain; Mrs. Piper in the US; and ‘Mrs. Holland’ (Rudyard Kipling’s sister Alice Fleming) in India. Prompted by the supposed spirits of Myers and colleagues, each medium conveyed pieces of a literary jigsaw puzzle, whose individual parts were meaningless in themselves, but assumed significance when assembled according to directives of ‘Myers’ and fellow spirits.

An often-cited critique of the cross-correspondences has interpreted them as a result of chance-coincidence. However, the author only used a small fraction of these literary fragments, while ignoring said ‘directives’ by ‘Myers’ and other supposed spirits, which in themselves contained many rather specific, veridical aspects. The most recent and comprehensive account and painstaking analysis of published and previously unpublished primary sources has clearly shown that chance coincidence is a rather inadequate explanation for the bulk of the messages: “Whatever the source”, Trevor Hamilton has argued, “the scripts were not passive inert structures that did not answer back”. ‘Myers’ and other communicators regularly gave explicit instructions in which order to assemble the pieces of the puzzle, gave hints of interpretations, and provided an overall strong impression of a conscious, deliberate direction and monitoring of the process from the outside.

William James and other critical mediumship researchers increasingly acknowledged that telepathy and clairvoyance of the living seemed insufficient as an explanation of subtle aspects of the ‘trance drama’, which were often lost in the printed records. Even the most seasoned and cautious sitters would often admit to be impressed not only by veridical bits of information specifically matching a certain deceased individual, but especially the way in which it was conveyed – vividly displaying a deceased person’s unique mannerisms, tone of voice, characteristic humor, and so on.

In his final comprehensive study of Piper’s mediumship, James once again admitted to struggle with what he called the “rubbish of trance-talk”, which we briefly addressed above. At the same time, he strongly doubted that a medium’s subconscious ‘will to personate’ plus telepathy was a sufficient explanation. If telepathy from the living was all there was, James argued, it should “play an entirely passive role – that is, the telepathic data would be fished out by the personating will, not forced upon it by desires to communicate, acting externally to itself”.

Some of the strongest impressions of such an external ‘push’ often only emerge from a close study of certain details in the original records. Boston psychiatrist Walter F. Prince, an authority in the study of multiple personality disorder, provided a vivid example of the apparent discrepancy between a medium’s ‘will to personate’ and a supposed spirit’s ‘will to communicate’ in an account of his investigations of Mrs. Chenoweth. There, a ‘spirit’ claiming to be Prince’s deceased mother tried to identify herself by mentioning an event in Prince’s childhood, a visit to a neighbor who owned a young calf (colloquially a ‘bossy’) which young Prince had been fond of. Here’s an excerpt from the stenographic records of communications from Prince’s supposed mother:

“We went to a neighbor’s to see a pet Bunny” – pause – “pet Bunny BB Bunny” – pause – “No, it was a pet Bunny BB Bunny B” – long pause – (medium moans) “Milk – a small cow Bossy”.

Prince, who stated there was no plausible way for the medium to be aware of the event from his childhood through conventional means, comments:

Who can doubt that someone or something intended “Bossy” [...] from the first? Else why did the communicator stop at Bunny every time and begin again, express dissatisfaction, pause as though pondering what was the matter or how to remedy it, experience emotion which extorted moans from the medium, and finally say ‘small cow’ as though to avoid the word beginning with B? If two minds were engaged in the process, the second receiving from the first, we can see how this second, call it [...] the medium’s subconscious, would, when the ‘pet B-‘ was reached, conceive the picture of a rabbit and cling to the preference for some time despite the efforts of the first mind to dislodge it.

In short: The stammers in the communication suggest signs of a struggle by the spirit of Prince’s mother to enforce her own memory against the medium’s immediate association with the letter B.

By far the strongest evidence for personal survival along these lines available by 1939 has been provided by German philosopher Emil Mattiesen. Discussing findings of English, American, French, Italian and German psychical research throughout his three volumes of fine-grained analysis of such important formal aspects of mediumistic impersonations, as well as apparitions, Mattiesen identified what he called a “center of activity”, arguing that

a complete theory has to explain not only where the expressed knowledge comes from, but also determine the origin of the drive that weaves both into a lively personation, which as such bowls over the sitter as persuasive.

Similar views were also expressed by perhaps the last scientifically eminent figure to sit with Mrs. Piper, American psychologist Gardner Murphy. Following an intense study of the literature on mediumship, Murphy likewise concluded that it was “the autonomy, the purposiveness, the cogency, above all the individuality, of the source of the messages, that cannot be by-passed”.

Finally, another class of mediumistic case reports also more than suggests a ‘push’ from the ‘other side’ instead of a ‘pull’ from the living: well-documented cases in which a ‘spirit’ who was completely unknown not just to the medium, but to all sitters, initiates communications. While Lodge and his friend in the Rich case cited above, for example, were aware of the existence (though not of the death) of Rich’s son, cases of so-called ‘drop-in communicators’ are defined by the perfect strangeness of a ‘spirit’, whose deceased biographical counterpart is eventually identified only through its own veridical statements. Here, motivations to produce impersonations are typically difficult to ascribe to the medium or any of the sitters, but more plausibly to a deceased man or woman whose communications seem driven by their own motivations.

There are close equivalents of ‘drop-in’ cases in studies of apparitions, some of which seem even more suggestive of spirit agency than so-called ‘Peak-in-Darien’ cases, where a person thought to be alive appears, and is later found to have died before the ‘hallucination’ occurred. The most striking and recent counterpart of ‘drop-ins’, however, is to be found in certain cases of the reincarnation type. Here are some of the most impressive and well-documented features:

·  Reported past-life memories by young children are narrated repeatedly and with strong emphasis;

·  Specific names of persons, places, etc. are given, which eventually lead to the discovery of the child’s supposed previous personality (PP);

·  Social standing and profession of the PP is acted out in play;

·  Claimed memories engender family conflicts, due to ambiguity of family

membership;

·  Sexual precocity and gender dysphoria in cases where the PP belonged to the opposite biological sex;

·  Display of unlearned skills not plausibly acquired in the present life, including basic foreign language skills, procedures associated with a profession, etc.;

·  Unusual behavior and idiosyncratic traits corresponding to the PP, including phobias, aversions, obsessions, and penchants;

·  Alcohol and drug addictions that were manifest in the PP;

·  Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which do not seem to match any events in the child’s current life, but to specific circumstances in the remembered PP’s life, often their mode of death; and not least:

·  Birthmarks, differing in etiological features such as size, shape and colour from conventional birthmarks, and other bodily abnormalities, including severe deformations. Often resembling actual scars and lesions, they significantly correspond to wounds involved in the death of the PP as shown by autopsy reports and other evidence.

Puzzling psychological and behavioral reincarnation evidence, especially children’s substance addictions seemingly out of nowhere, and phobias and full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms corresponding with remembered causes of death, is occasionally discussed even in conventional medical and psychology journals. Together with the physical evidence – specific lesions which mirror typically fatal wounds of a PP – they strongly point to the carrying-over of affects and other compulsive elements of personality from one life to the next. And while cases of birthmarks and lesions may appear especially odd and inexplicable, even they seem continuous with phenomena of conventional biomedicine: Shortly after World War 2, for example, the Lancet reported the case of a traumatized army officer, on whose body marks or imprints would spontaneously appear, resembling ropes with which he had been tied up during war. Other cases reported since then have involved similar spontaneous reappearances during psychotherapy of signs of physical abuse.

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.