Inversion of the Classical Treatment [top]
IF I were attempting a discussion of the Problem of Survival in the classical
manner, I should proceed as follows. I should begin by marshalling the evidence
for survival, with examples, in ascending order of cogency. I should then - or
perhaps concurrently - discuss the alternative hypotheses by which it might be
explained away; in particular, I should pay great attention to Telepathy and its
ramifications, aided maybe by a little clairvoyance and precognition, carefully
considering whether any combination of these is sufficient to account for all
the evidential facts, or whether there is a residuum not to be explained in this
way. And I should end with a piece of judgematical fine writing in which I
should nicely weigh the pros and the cons and conclude that, on balance, the
weight of evidence justifies a provisional belief in man's survival of death.
If I did my work well, the reader would be left with his belief in survival
somewhat strengthened, or his disbelief somewhat weakened, as the case might be;
but in either event (unless he were an immovable extremist) he would feel
himself to be holding a somewhat undecided opinion on a quite definite issue.
I do not propose to adopt this course, partly because I have not the space
available to give even an outline of the evidence, but mainly because I consider
this kind of attitude to be exactly the inverse of the proper one. The proper
attitude, I consider, is not one of doubt as to a definite issue, but of virtual
certainty on an indefinite issue; that is to say, I have (humanly speaking) no
doubt at all that, in some sense and in some degree, man survives death; but I
am not at all sure about the sense and the degree, or about what survival means
or how permanent it is. I shall try to explain this somewhat cryptic utterance
below.
Any one who has studied the subject knows (and no one who has not is entitled to
express an opinion) that the evidence for survival is extremely copious, and
that some of it is extremely strong. Much, of course, is very bad - so bad as to
be barely worth considering and it unfortunately happens that most belief in
survival, other than that derived from religious faith or blatant wish-thinking,
is based on evidence of the worst type, such as is obtained at uncritical and
emotion-ridden spiritualist séance; but this naturally does not impair the value
of the better varieties.
These range from the simple and circumstantial evidences of identity - items of
information, etc., known to the supposed 'spirit' communicating, but not to the
medium or automatist - to the exceedingly complicated cases, such as Cross
Correspondences and Literary Puzzles(1) to which members of the Society for
Psychical Research have devoted years of patient and highly critical
scholarship.
(1) The essential feature of this type of
evidence is that fragments of a complex communication are given through two or
more carefully isolated automatists, which only 'make sense' when put together;
or sometimes not until a clue is finally given by the ostensible originator of
the communication. A degree of apparent planning and purposivity is often shown
which it is difficult to attribute to any secondary personality of an
automatist, and still more so to a combination of such personalities.
For details the reader must consult the Proceedings of the Society; but
excellent summaries are given in H. F. Saltmarsh's Evidence of Personal
Survival from Cross-Correspondences, Mrs. Richmond's Evidence of Purpose,
and Kenneth Richmond's Evidence of Identity, all in Bell's Psychical Experiences
Series.
I think there can be no doubt at all that this mass of evidence is totally
inexplicable on the basis of knowledge acquired in normal ways by the
automatists and mediums concerned. This is generally agreed among students of
the subject, and discussion has almost entirely centred on the question of
whether it can be explained by telepathy in sufficiently complex ramifications.
Some of it obviously can be. If I go to visit a medium, it is inevitable that
the ideas of death and bereavement should be fairly prominent in my mind, and
these will be associated with others connected with deceased friends and
relatives and their history and circumstances; thus the 'idea of death', etc.,
will be quite competent to act as a K-idea between me and the medium in the
ordinary way, so that her 'control' personality may well pick up and reproduce
as an evidential 'message' some item known to me and more or less characteristic
of some deceased friend. I need not go into details.
To account for the more complex cases on these lines will evidently be very much
more difficult, and many students have thought it virtually impossible. They may
be right, but my own strong opinion is that discussion on these lines is bound
to be inconclusive. If we assume the possible operation of telepathy and
precognition, as we certainly must, I think it will be found literally
impossible even to devise, let alone obtain, evidence which would be completely
invulnerable to a suitable combination of the two. In other words, I think it is
almost complete waste of time to try to form an opinion about whether survival
is a fact in nature by a process of pitting the evidence in its favour against
the alternative explanations afforded by telepathy, etc. This is not to say that
the evidence is valueless, or that the labours of those who collected it were in
vain. On the contrary, I think that it has been immensely valuable in directing
our attention to all kinds of problems, and that, like the 'spontaneous
phenomena' discussed earlier, it will prove still more valuable as a source of
information when we come back to it with greater understanding and a revised
perspective. My contention rather is that the perspective implied in this
frontal assault on the problem is, in fact, all wrong, though it was natural and
indeed inevitable in the circumstances in which the subject developed.
My point is this - that to argue about whether the evidence for survival is
explicable in terms of telepathy, etc., is to put the cart before the horse, to
strain at the gnat after swallowing a gigantic camel, or any other metaphorical
cliché you prefer. Roughly speaking, survival is a spectacular issue, but not a
crucial issue; it is telepathy that is crucial though it may not be spectacular.
Lightning is spectacular, but it was the attractive properties of rubbed amber
which broke across the frontiers of the push-and-pull mechanical world and
opened up that of electro-magnetic phenomena generally; and it is the fact of
telepathy (unless you can explain it in physical terms - which you can't) that
breaks across the frontiers of the physical world and opens up the psychical.
I do not think I would care to go so far as to say that to establish telepathy,
which is physically inexplicable, automatically implies survival, though it
certainly breaks the backbone of the essential argument against it, namely, that
there is no 'reality' other than the physical. But if the association theory of
telepathy and the psychon theory of mind be accepted, survival of some sort
becomes at least an entirely legitimate supposition. We have already seen that
sensa and images (psychons) are the most 'real' things we know, for it is only
by them that we know anything at all; the facts of telepathy and precognition
show that they are not subject to the limitations of matter, space, and time as
are material entities; hence, since physical law is irrelevant, there is no
reason to suppose - but if anything the contrary - that dissolution of the body
necessarily involves dissolution of the corresponding psychon system.
Thus, apart from acting as a source of information about survival (which is very
important), the function of the evidence on the subject is not to demonstrate
that survival does occur against a contention that it cannot, but rather to
indicate whether it does actually occur in a context such that it perfectly well
may. That is to say, given telepathy (particularly on my view of it), it is no
longer a matter of arguing about the possibility of survival and considering
telepathy as an alternative; for the occurrence of telepathy has itself ensured
the possibility, by bursting the ring-fence of matter and energy within which
materialists have sought to confine us. I think this will become a little
clearer when we have considered the next aspect of the subject that I wish to
discuss.
The Meaning of 'Survival'
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As I have already implied, it is all too commonly taken for granted that there
is no doubt about what we mean when we affirm or deny the proposition that mall
survives death, and our doubts are reserved for the question of whether it is
true; whereas my own view is that doubt should be concentrated on its meaning
rather than on its truth.
We are too apt to assume that when we ask, "Has Jones survived death?" we are
asking the same kind of unambiguous question as when we ask, "Has Jones survived
shipwreck?", and I do not think that this is by any means necessarily the case.
The question about surviving shipwreck is quite unambiguous, because we know
from experience that (quibbles about 'suspended animation', etc., apart) bodily
survival in such circumstances is a yes-or-no, all-or-none affair; there is no
half-way house between survival and non-survival - the man is either alive or is
drowned. But we have no such empirical experience to guide us in the matter of
the mind's (or 'soul's') survival of the death of the body; and in demanding a
yes-or-no answer we may be demanding what cannot be given.
As I have pointed out elsewhere(2), it may be that when we ask, "Does man
survive death, or is he annihilated?" we are posing to nature an impossible
question proceeding from a too-naive application of analogy, and that there is
in reality no true antithesis of the kind we assume. To condense from the
lecture just referred to: If we ask, "Is an electron a wave or a particle?" we
think we are asking an unambiguous question, for we are familiar enough (we
would say) with the properties of particles and of waves, and there would seem
to be no possibility of confusing the one with the other. This is because, in
everyday life, we invariably find certain properties of particles accompanied by
all the others - and the same, of course, for waves - and we assume that these
concomitances must be universally true, so that all can be inferred when some
are noted. "But Nature cares nothing for such inferences, and when we ask her,
'Is an electron a wave or a particle?' she can only return the somewhat
disconcerting answer, 'Neither - but both!'" It is at least possible that to pose
the question, "Does man survive death, or is he annihilated?" may be to express
a similar false antithesis, and that Nature's answer may similarly be, "Neither
- but both!"
(2) Cf. also Saltmarsh.
The essence of the whole matter, I think, is that we cannot give a yes-or-no
answer to the question, "Does man's mind survive death?" unless we conceive of a
mind as a kind of indivisible unity which must either survive as a whole or
perish as a whole; and, as we have seen, an 'indivisible unity' is quite
certainly the one thing which a mind, on any theory, most emphatically is not.
We must accordingly resign ourselves to the prospect of our inquiries yielding,
in principle, no more than conditional, or graded, or quantitative answers.
Stability of the Psychon System as the Determinant of
Survival
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To bring this long preamble to a close and get to the heart of the matter. The
mind is a psychon system, and the question of whether any particular mind
survives death is one of the stability of that system under post-mortem
conditions, notably as regards the sudden cutting off of the normal influx of
sensa occasioned by the incidence of physical stimuli on the sense organs. This,
it seems to me, is a purely technical problem of the same essential character as
the stability of astronomical systems, chemical molecules, or radio-active
atoms, and capable of solution by the same kind of methods.
Note here that we have already surmounted, without even noticing it, the most
formidable of all the obstacles that confront the survivalist, namely, that of
saying what it is that survives when the body perishes - it is the psychon system.
The same real entities which we have found so useful in discussing telepathy,
apparitions, secondary personalities, etc., now form the basis of our views on
survival. It is true that, in a sense, we are but exchanging one sort of
difficulty for another; but those that now confront us are of a relatively
familiar kind, inasmuch as they are concerned with the behaviour of entities
with known (or postulated) properties related in specified ways. That is to say,
they are problems to which appropriate mathematical methods can, in principle,
be applied; and wherever this is the case we can feel assured that progress will
not be very long delayed.
The kind of way in which these problems will have to be tackled is as follows:
We shall start by assuming the existence of entities (psychons) having no
relevant property other than that of associability, and the strengthening of
this by repeated co-presentation. We shall then see whether certain simple
phenomena, such as the forgetting curve, can be successfully deduced from these
assumptions. If they can, well and good, and we will go on to other deductions
and test these against the facts in their turn; if not, we shall alter, or
possibly add to, our assumptions till we have found a set which works so well
that we may be reasonably sure they are correct and that we have not omitted any
of importance. We shall next try to define what we mean by 'stability' in this
context - which should not be too difficult - and inquire what kind of system
will possess it, if composed of entities having the properties we have thus
assumed and tested. This inquiry will evidently have to include the effect on
the system considered of any linkages it may have with other systems, just as a
study of the stability of, say, a planet and its satellites would preferably
include consideration of the effects likely to be produced by the close passage
of another planet or system. Finally, we shall check up our conclusions with
whatever observational data are available.
It would naturally be worse than rash to anticipate the results of such
inquiries; but I think it is legitimate, if only as a matter of interest, to
indulge in a certain amount of speculation as to the kind of way they are likely
to work out - on the even stricter understanding than usual, if possible, that the
views suggested are no more than conjectural. On the other hand, I think it is
not difficult to indicate possibilities which, if not particularly gratifying,
are at least more plausible on general grounds - that is to say, more consonant
with what we know of natural phenomena as a whole - than those advanced by the
extremer spiritualists on the one hand or the orthodox religionists on the
other.
Broadly speaking, I should expect to find that close-knit and well-integrated
systems of large numerical extent (i.e., composed of large numbers of manifoldly
inter-related and closely associated psychons) will prove to be highly stable,
and vice versa; but I will defer for the moment the question of what is likely
to happen in the case of loosely-knit and ill-integrated systems. Given such a
well ordered system, e.g., that of a normal adult, I should expect that at the
moment after death it would be very much the same as at the moment before it.
The actual process of dying may be supposed, it is true, to introduce a certain
number of more or less characteristic sensa and images, but I find it difficult
to suppose that these will, in general, have very much effect on the system as a
whole. After all, most of us experience fairly severe illnesses or accidents at
one time or another, and may even be knocked unconscious, and so forth, without
suffering any very profound disturbance of the mind. Probably the surprise or
shock of realizing that one is dead will be the most serious factor in the
majority of cases.
This supposition accords well with (for what they are worth) many communications
which stress how the deceased person 'could not believe he was dead', 'felt just
as he did before', etc. Its natural implications, followed up without undue
regard to romantico-religious fantasy, are not without interest. If you are
killed while doing something in which you are intensely interested, your mind
will be full, as we say, of that activity-that is to say, the images
representing it will all be much more closely linked with your contemporary
sensa than will those representing activities, etc., of lesser interest. But -
and this is very important - it is clear that the brake normally applied by the
influx of sensa from the physical world, which usually hold our noses so
distressingly hard against the mundane grindstone, will be suddenly taken off;
so that there will be nothing by which to check our fantasies - at any rate in
the first instance. Thus, whatever we imagine will be 'real' to us until we
learn to recognize it as imagination.
Probable Effects of Perseveration
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This enables us to understand the apparently ridiculous statements of a crassly
material character which have so often stirred the mockery of the critics.
Consider, for example, the classical example in the late Sir Oliver Lodge's
Raymond. The ostensible communicator(3), Sir Oliver's son killed in action
during the last war, declared that soon after his death he was taken along and
given "a whisky and soda and a cigar". This remark, published by Sir Oliver with
characteristic honesty and courage, was greeted with hoots of derision by the
sceptics; but I think this was due much more to the strength of their
preconceptions than to any inherent absurdity in the occurrence. Put it like
this: If you are a normal man and find yourself, for any reason, able to case
off in the middle of a battle, your thoughts naturally turn to the chances of
getting a drink and a smoke - at least, those of very many men would. That is to
say, you 'think of' these things and imagine them, i.e., images of whatever
drinks and smokes you normally indulge in arise in your mind; indeed, it is a
matter of common experience that this happens even when there is no chance of
getting them. So long as you are pent in the body these images remain
recognizable as such by contrast with the insistent sensa coming in from the
outer world; but if these sensa are cut off the images will (presumably) greatly
gain in vividness and become indistinguishable from 'reality', for the simple
reason that they will themselves be the only 'reality' available at the moment.
Thus, up to a point, at any rate, imagining the drink you long for will be
indistinguishable from having it actually before you. More generally, in the
absence of checks, supplied through the sense organs, from a material world
conforming to the laws of physics, the objects and events of imagination will
constitute the 'real' world, just as they do in dreams.
(3) Henceforward, to save trouble, the words
'ostensible', 'alleged', 'supposed,' etc., should be understood as qualifying
all remarks of this kind.
I hope I need hardly say that I hold no special brief for the veridicity of
remarks of this kind, and that the last thing I wish to suggest (but very much
the contrary) is that everything said by an entranced medium which purports to
come from a deceased person is to be taken at its face value. But I do put it to
you as a matter of plain common sense: Which seems the more plausible - that a man
killed in battle should enjoy and report the experience of drinking a whisky and
soda (which he probably badly needed), or that he should report being led off by
a celestial quarter-master to be fitted with a pair of wings?
It seems to me to be just one of those queer little unexpected points which so
often are especially illuminating.
Similar considerations apply to such statements as those to which a certain
amount of publicity has recently been given about deceased fighter-pilots
continuing to fly with the 'astral' R.A.F., escort bombers, etc. I should
consider this kind of thing to be a simple matter of what is technically called
'perseveration'. Almost every one is familiar with this, I suppose, in one
degree or another - when some activity in which one has been indulging for a
long time or to excess (e.g., driving a car for many hours on end) continues
persistently in one's mind after one has stopped doing it, and particularly may
continue in sleep, or especially in states bordering on sleep. The relevant
images recur again and again, and one cannot get rid of them. It seems to me
that in the case of a keen pilot, whose thoughts have probably been almost
exclusively of fighters and air-fighting for months on end, this sort of thing
would be extremely likely to recur; he would be likely to continue in
imagination after death just those activities which he had pursued in actuality
during life; and, if he had not learned to recognize his images as images, he
would report that he really is going on flying and fighting. What else should he
do?
There is nothing at all absurd about this; these people are simply experiencing
perseverative dreams - just as we may do in similar circumstances when cut off
from the physical world in sleep, temporarily as they are permanently. What is
absurd is to suppose that such statements do not need interpretation or any
reflection about what is likely to be going on, but are to be taken at their
face value as affirming the existence of a quasi-material 'astral' world
containing whisky, cigars, aeroplanes, etc., having the same properties as these
objects possess in the mundane world we know.
The Post-mortem World of Images
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Out of all this, several points of interest and difficulty arise. Since, by
hypothesis, there can be no sensa, we must suppose that the next world is a
world of images. Are we then to conclude that it is vague, shadowy, diaphanous
and lacking in vividness? I do not think so. I very much doubt whether it is, so
to say, inherent in the nature of an image to be vague and unvivid. Some people
report that their dreams, and even their day-dreams, may be as vivid as the
occurrences of waking life, though I have never found mine to be so. Eidetic
images seem to be as vivid as sensa, and there is some reason for supposing that
this type of imagery is more primitive - i.e., more the original and natural
type - than that which we usually experience; without going into details, I
suspect that the comparative faintness of normal imagery is due rather to lack
of concentration - i.e., the effect of competition between images in the field
of consciousness, and consequent distraction - or something of this kind, than
to anything in the nature of images as such. Moreover, it seems clear that
apparitions, the seeing of which is certainly not due to stimulation of the
seer's retina, may be every bit as vivid as 'real' (material) objects. I think I
should accordingly expect the psychical world to be just as vivid as the
mundane, though I should not care to be dogmatic on the point.
Next, I have spoken of the difficulty of recognizing images as images in the
absence of anything else against which to check them, or words to this effect.
Will this difficulty remain insuperable, or shall we learn, and how? I think the
answer is fairly clear in principle, though obscure in certain details.
When we have an hallucination we do not recognize it as such, but continue to
interpret our experience as being of a material object (otherwise it would not
be an hallucination) until we find that it does not exhibit the properties which
a material object would. We may mistake the apparition for a material person
until we find that we experience no sensation of touch when we put out our hand
in the way which ought to produce a tactile sensation if the visual experience
were originated by a material object; that is to say, until the normal sensum-sequence
is interrupted. If the sequence were never interrupted, if the apparition
exhibited all the properties of a material object, then there would be no
meaning to be attached to the statement that it was 'only an hallucination'.
Conversely, if we had no previous experience of material objects, there would be
no grounds for expecting one sensum-sequence rather than another, and anything
imagined might have any properties whatsoever. It is only the memory of past
events (sensum-sequences) which enables us to expect contemporary events to take
one course rather than another.
But memory does do this, and the surviving mind (psychon system) of our deceased
pilot - to continue with this example - will certainly contain plenty of memories of
the way in which material aeroplanes behave; if a wing is shot off, they fall;
if you crash one in landing, it will not fly again till it has been repaired;
and so forth. But the imaginary aeroplane does not behave like this; you can fly
with one wing or with no wings at all; you can crash it in imagination as often
as you like, and be flying again the next instant. It seems to me extremely
plausible to suppose that after a while this unprecedented behaviour will strike
the pilot as distinctly odd, and that he will begin to say to himself, 'I must
be dreaming,' and begin to adjust himself to the situation. In other words,
memory images, and memories of sensum-sequences, will serve perfectly well as a
basis for recognizing the non-materiality (I do not say 'unreality') of the
imaginary objects and events.
But what applies to exhausted warriors and fighter-pilots will presumably apply,
mutatis mutandis, to other people. One might broadly say, "Where your thoughts
have been, there will you find yourself." If you expect wings and harps, you
will get wings and harps, until you find that the expected sequences break down
and it occurs to you that it is only imagination. I remember a nice old Dutch
gentleman I once knew, aged about ninety at the time, who was immovably
convinced that he would burn eternally in hell for his (probably non-existent)
sins. After death he no doubt experienced in imagination all the distresses of
judgement and condemnation; but it pleases me to think of it dawning on him in
due course that there must be something wrong somewhere, when he found that the
flames did not burn - at least, not enough to worry about.
This raises the rather nice point of the extent to which imagined happenings
will have imaginary consequences. Presumably the imaginary act of drinking an
imaginary (but, so to put it, 'locally real') whisky and soda will call up by
association the images of smell and taste; but will it produce an imaginary but
locally real exhilaration, and will drinking a dozen of them produce an
imaginary but locally real intoxication, followed by an imaginary, etc.,
hangover? Only, I should think, to a very limited extent. The recalled images
will, it is true, or so we may suppose, be livelier and more vivid than those of
mundane life; but in the absence of material substances to reinforce and
maintain them by the continued influx of stimuli, I conceive that they will be
so transient and evanescent - so easily displaced by alternative images - as to
be scarcely worth considering. Thus, though the toper may pour innumerable
imaginary whiskies down his imaginary throat, he will make little more progress
towards satisfaction than the daughters of Danae perpetually filling their
broken cistern.
Corporeal versus Intellectual Interests
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I have deliberately written hitherto in terms of extreme and almost repellent
trivialities, because it is only by considering concrete and apparently trivial
examples of this kind that we can hope to reach plausible conclusions; and
because it is above all things important to exclude from our minds all those
sanctimonious sentimentalities which are apt so perniciously to corrupt thought
on the subject. There is no reason whatever to suppose that the fact of a man's
body ceasing to function should suddenly and magically invest him with knowledge
or wisdom or virtue which he did not possess before, or that he is suddenly
snatched into a state of beatitude or the opposite.
So far as we have gone, it is simply and solely a matter of trying to estimate
in a reasonable way how the mind is likely to work when all sensory stimuli are
cut off and the system of 'checks and balances' normally supplied by the
external world ceases to operate.
But from the apparently trivial examples considered a point of considerable
interest emerges. It looks very much as if the attempt - or rather the natural
tendency - to pursue in imagination after death the material avocations and
activities of mundane life is unlikely to be accompanied by any great degree of
satisfaction, though it may take some people a long time(4) fully to realize it.
I think, however, that this will apply only to what I have said, namely,
material activities - or mainly so. But as regards intellectual activities,
involving what we call abstractions, the matter seems to me to stand
differently. An 'astral'(5) tot of rum will be found not to have the same
properties as a mundane tot; but an astral circle must have exactly the same
properties as a mundane circle, because they are assured by definition, while
two and two will always make four whatever sort of a world you live in, for the
same reason. So if your chief interest in life is geometrizing or doing mental
arithmetic there seems no reason why you should not indulge it to your heart's
content after death, just as you did before(6). It may be objected here that it
is virtually impossible to conduct abstract thinking without the use of words,
and that it is in fact done largely by subliminal(7) innervations of speech
mechanisms; but it seems not unreasonable to suppose that memory images of the
words and concomitant bodily sensations may be sufficient for this purpose.
(4) I use the word 'time' somewhat
metaphorically here; it will not be astronomical time, but something like
'amount of experience'.
(5) I shall allow myself the use, without prejudice, of the word 'astral',
borrowed from the occultists, to refer to the next (post-mortem) phase of life
whenever convenient. It has the advantage of avoiding the implication of
'imaginary' that, because something is made of images, so to say, it is
therefore 'unreal'.
(6) We need not, I think, go into details about whether the inability to make
material notes, etc., is or is not compensated by vividness of imagery and
absence of distraction.
(7) 'Subliminal' = of too low an intensity to result in overt muscular movement,
etc.
I cannot quite make out how the matter would stand as regards aesthetic
appreciation, except for the kind we feel towards an 'elegant' mathematical
method, or a 'beautiful' piece of logical reasoning. The trouble would seem to
be the difficulty of obtaining, except, of course, from memory, the material, so
to speak, to appreciate aesthetically. It is no good transporting yourself in
thought to the National Gallery if you have no physical eyes with which to see
the pictures; and I see no reason at present (or very little) for supposing that
you could pick up in any useful way the thoughts or visual images of those
physically present; besides, on the whole I think I would rather not.
I will not pursue this line of thought further, but there is certainly a very
strong suggestion that those who have cultivated 'the things of the mind', as
the phrase goes, will find much greater possibilities of satisfaction than those
who have not. This conclusion will, I fear, please the moralists (so-called)
more than I usually care to do; but I do not think it is to be taken as implying
that we should neglect mundane life in exclusive concentration on an ascetic
intellectualism. After all, the physical world is just as much a part (I would
even say just as respectable a part) of the total world as is the psychical, and
experience of its properties, it seems to me, is just as necessary a part of
one's mental equipment as anything else. It is, indeed, as I have just
indicated, solely by such experience of these properties, carried forward in
memory, that we can hope to orient ourselves in post-mortem existence at all.
But this is taking me well beyond my terms of reference, and there are many
points yet to be discussed on which it seems possible to form not unreasonable
opinions.
The Problem of Recognition, Reunion, etc
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First and foremost, perhaps, is the vexed and somewhat poignant question of the
extent to which we may expect to recognize, and be recognized by, the friends
who have predeceased us, and of whether we may reasonably expect to 'meet them
again' in any satisfying sort of sense. Everything that I have said in the last
three sections is clearly of great relevance to this issue, though it is not one
on which I should care to be at all dogmatic, and the most plausible answer
seems to me appreciably more cheering than we might fear even if not quite so
good as (from our present viewpoint) we might hope.
Let us make no bones about it. We may say with perfect truth that we delight in
the qualities of X's mind or the beauties of his moral character, and that these
are more important to us than his physical body; but it is not, for most of us
at least, the loss of these that chiefly affrights us when death threatens, or
that we primarily miss when X is at last taken from us - it is the plain corporeal
absence of X, whom we can no longer see or hear or touch, that is so
distressing, and it is for renewal of the sights and sounds and touches that we
chiefly long and hope. As Dr. Jacks well points out, many a man would have some
difficulty In even identifying his wife "if he had nothing but her moral
characteristics to go by, however admirable these might be".
Now we evidently cannot expect a full-blooded physical reunion, such as we enjoy
in this life after a return from a journey, while to my earth-bound mind at
least a purely mental congruence seems most desperately chilly. But it seems to
me probable that, even if we keep wish-thinking at a minimum, there will be some
tempering of the wind to the shorn lambs.
Everything that I have said above about the 'local reality', so to term it, of
imagined drinks and aeroplanes will clearly hold equally well for our thoughts
of X. If, when I die, I desire the presence of X, I shall presumably think of X,
which means calling up various images (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) of X as
I remember him(8). And since there will be no competing sensa of physical
origin, as already pointed out, these images may be as vivid as the sensations
of mundane life; thus, for the moment, my re-meeting of X will appear what we
should usually call 'real' to me. But the other considerations will also apply,
so that, if there were no more to be said, I should be doomed to an almost
literal disillusionment, as I gradually discovered that this 'image-X' did not
react to and on myself in the same way that mundane X had done - i.e., did not
possess the physical properties of mundane X.
(8) This is rather an agreeable thought; it
seems to imply that we shall at least appear to meet again those we cared for in
the form in which it most pleases us to think of them.
But there is this very important difference to be noted: that X has a mind,
which by hypothesis is surviving as well as my own, whereas the drinks and
aeroplanes, etc., of our previous discussion have not. My thoughts of X and his
of me, with their images of situations and experiences shared, etc., are clearly
competent to serve as K's promoting telepathic interaction and linking our
psychon systems together. Indeed, if we have enjoyed any considerable period of
life together, with many experiences common to us both, but peculiar to the two
of us, this will presumably have already taken place to some extent.
Just how far this will affect the particular issue we are considering, I should
not care to say. It may be that X's ideas of himself and his relations with me
might react on mine of him, and vice versa; or it even might be that Mr.
Tyrrell's theory of Apparitions might prove relevant, and that our interacting
minds might conspire together, as it were, to construct image-situations, so to
call them, far more consistent and satisfactory than either of us could achieve
singly. We do not as yet know enough to form even a reasonably plausible
conjecture.
My own guess would be that these image-situations would be rather in the nature
of a stop-gap or stepping-stone, affording some degree of comfort and
satisfaction pending our learning to dispense with them. Thus those who despite
their disclaimers were in fact only, or almost only, interested in their X's
bodies and the physical gratifications to be derived therefrom, would find
themselves no more than tantalized by an ever-elusive wraith. Those, on the
other hand who, while properly delighting in the intrinsic merits of the flesh,
had yet wisely used them as a means to the end of a true community of mind and
spirit, would correspondingly soon adjust themselves to the changed conditions,
to their infinitely greater long-term satisfaction.
Contact with the Physical World: Psychical Environment
[top]
To what extent, again, may we expect to maintain contact with mundane happenings
and knowledge of them? My own surmise would be 'very slight'. To speak of
deceased persons 'seeing' or 'hearing' physical events appears to me to be
arrant nonsense. Seeing depends on physical light rays falling on a physical
retina, and if you have no physical retina you can't see-and there's an end of
it. But it seems to me very possible that, if you have a sufficiency of K-ideas
in common with some one still living you might to some extent how great I do not
know - pick up and share their visual images or some of them (and of course
other sensations), and thus maintain some sort of a vicarious contact. But I
should expect it to be extremely hazy and imperfect.
Much more important, I think, though very difficult to deal with, is the
question of what, if anything, takes the place of the external world of mundane
life and acts as an 'environment'. It is fairly easy to give a superficially
plausible answer to this by suggesting that the thoughts of other minds, i.e.,
psychon systems other than one's own, may play this part; but I am not sure that
this is more than verbally satisfactory, though I think it may be. We may
readily concede that, in the absence of competition from sensory stimuli,
images, and ideas derived telepathically from other minds are likely to be much
more important than they are at present. But if, at some moment or other (and
what in the context do we mean by this?) an idea K is present to my mind and to
that of X (incarnate or discarnate) and an idea A, associated with it in X's
mind, is thereby brought into my field of consciousness, how do I know that it
was his and not my own - what gives it its 'environmental' quality? There is
nothing whatever that I know of in the experimental work to indicate that 'telepathed'
ideas have any distinguishing feature or attribute at all. It seems to me
doubtful whether mere failure to recognize an image as one which I have imaged
before would be sufficient for the purpose; for I find it fairly easy to conjure
up images of which this is true - e.g., a black cat with a head at each end
without being sensible of any such alien quality. This, however, may very well
be due to inadequate introspection or insufficient analysis, and on the whole I
think that the notion of an environment consisting of the contents of other
minds is probably the most promising that can be adopted.
Stability of Psychon Systems
[top]
I think it is now time to say a few words about the question of the stability of
psychon systems, of which I emphasized the importance a few pages earlier.
Possibly 'coherence' would be a better term, but we may let that pass for the
moment.
To put the point in a very elementary way, what I have in mind is this. Granted
that the psychon system immediately after death is substantially identical with
what it was a moment before it, is there any guarantee that it will continue to
stick together, so to say; and is there not a chance that it may disintegrate or
come to pieces when the influx of sensory stimuli ceases?
At one time I thought there was, and that this was a much more serious risk, as
it were, than that of extinction at the moment of death itself. Now I am not at
all so sure, but the matter is of such manifest importance that I think it worth
while to spend a few minutes trying to clarify it.
It is very easy to picture to oneself a psychon-system consisting of groups and
sub-groups and sub-sub-groups, etc., of psychons linked together by associative
bonds like atoms in a molecule - one can almost see the psychons and the links and
the clusters of various sizes; and one can very easily visualize a group
becoming detached and, perhaps, setting up shop on its own. But it is precisely
this case of picturing that makes such forms of words so dangerous. The moment
we begin making quasi-mechanical models of things which are not even 'quasi-'
mechanical, we are asking for trouble, for we run the risk of unthinkingly using
for purposes of reasoning properties of the constituents of the model which we
did not use for building it. To take a crude example: We might try to convey to
a child the notion of gravitational 'force' as it appears in astronomy by saying
that the earth pulls the moon 'as if it were tied to it by a piece of elastic'.
"Oh, I see," says the child, "then the farther the moon is from the earth, the
harder it is pulled"; which, of course, is the exact opposite of the truth. The
precocious infant has seized on a property of elastic which we did not need for
our 'model' and discreetly ignored, and has argued correctly from it to a false
conclusion. Similarly, if we argue to any conclusion from any property of a
supposed 'link' or 'associative force' other than the fact which these terms are
used to symbolize, we are liable to go astray.
To say 'A is associated with B in mind M' is only a shorthand way of saying that
if A is presented to mind M, B is more likely to accompany or quickly follow it,
or, vice versa, than if A were not associated with B; and even this needs
considerable expansion before we reach a fully accurate statement. And to say
that there is 'an associative link between A and B' is only to say the same
thing in a different shorthand form. If we unthinkingly smuggle in any property
of links as known in other contexts, e.g., liability to being 'broken', we are
liable to come to false conclusions.
This question of the breakability of links seems to me to be of very great
importance. If the links were of a kind that could literally be broken, then
evidently sub-systems or groups of psychons could become literally detached from
the main mass, and there would be no reason in principle why the process should
not be continued to the point of complete disintegration of the whole system. If
this were true, then everything I have said above about the conditions of
post-mortem existence might be correct for the period immediately following
death; but it might be that the mind or personality gradually faded away or
dissolved like a lump of sugar in warm water. But I think that any such
conception of links would be much too material and quite illegitimate; and that
all the indications are against it.
It is a matter of common experience that suitable combinations of circumstances
may cause us to recall quite vividly images of long past experiences (or early
childhood and the like) which we should have said we had completely forgotten;
and I believe I am right in saying that the results of deliberately suggesting
such recall to hypnotized subjects indicates that any early experience could in
principle be recovered under appropriate conditions. Moreover, the work of the
psycho-analytic school seems to show pretty clearly that even though early
experiences may not be recoverable in the sense of the relevant images entering
the field of consciousness under normal conditions, they are none the less still
operative, and therefore still 'linked' in some fashion to the rest of the mind.
I accordingly provisionally conclude that a 'link' once formed can never be
broken; and I think this could be justified on theoretical grounds, by
translating into terms of probabilities, though it would be out of place to
attempt it here. But the actual conditions of equilibrium of a psychon system
will be a matter for mathematical treatment which we are at present far from
being in a position to apply.
But this view introduces fresh difficulties of its own, and I must warn the
reader that I am now going right out of my own depth into regions of almost
complete speculation, though I think the possibilities opened up are much too
interesting to be wholly ignored.
Formation of Larger Systems [top]
Let us go right back to the beginning of the telepathy story or rather to the
beginning of the association theory. In colloquial language: if an idea A is
associated with idea K in my mind, and idea K is presented to your mind, then
idea A is more likely to come into your mind than it would be if it had not been
associated with K in mine. This is telepathy. There are, of course, many ideas
of a 'public' character - such as sun, clouds, houses, trees, etc. - which at any
moment are presented to large numbers of people simultaneously, and these have
many ideas associated with them, which doubtless tend to come into all the minds
concerned. But most of these will be themselves public, and, so to say, already
in the minds concerned, while those that are not will have to compete, as
regards any particular person's mind, with the other 'thoughts' of that mind,
prompted by other factors in the person's environment, and with each other, so
that nothing very noticeable happens. It is only in very special circumstances,
such as those of experiments, that we can, as it were, identify an idea and
ascribe its appearance to telepathy. We accordingly need not worry about this
sort of generalized telepathy which is doubtless always going on, because it is,
as we might say, too diffuse and too random to lead to overt results.
None the less, we must suppose that whenever two or more persons entertain the
same or similar ideas (K's) at any time, then such other ideas as may be
associated with these in the mind of each will tend to appear in the minds of
the others. The operation of this tendency will be impeded in proportion to the
number, intensity, etc., of the incoming sensa originated by the external world,
and their associates, and it will naturally be facilitated as the competition of
the incoming sensa and their associates is reduced.
Now, under post-mortem conditions we can at least be certain that there will be
no competition from incoming sensa, because there will be no sense organs, nerve
fibres, brain cells, etc., such as are necessary for the generation of sensa or
the bringing of them (if they pre-exist) into the appropriate relation with the
self nucleus, etc.
It seems not unreasonable to suppose, therefore, that what may roughly be termed
'telepathic intercourse' is likely to be much more extensive and potent a factor
under post-mortem than under mundane conditions. But, as we have seen, telepathy
is essentially a matter of sharing rather than of transference; if, in everyday
language, X 'telepaths' the idea O to Y, he does not lose it-it merely becomes
more closely linked with the other constituents of Y's mind than it was (if at
all) before. Indeed, this is true of non-telepathic communication though hardly
in so pure a form. As I have pointed out elsewhere (7, cf. also 8) "there is a
sense in which we can and habitually do mingle our personalities. Whenever we so
laboriously communicate with each other through the roundabout methods of speech
and writing, I add some of your experience to my own stock, or vice versa, yet
you do not feel less you, or I less I, as a result. On the contrary, the
consciousness of each may well be enriched and enlarged, not weakened or
circumscribed, by the intercourse, and the effect would be enhanced if a less
cumbersome mode of exchange could be employed. If ... you and I could be put in
complete telepathic rapport, it would seem that you might absorb the whole of my
experience, and I the whole of yours without the sense of individuality being at
all diminished."
I should say, now, that this demands considerable qualification, but I think the
main idea is sound enough. If I were to acquire telepathically quasi-memories of
your childhood and parentage, etc., as vivid as those of my own, I might, to be
sure, begin to have doubts about my own identity in the purely Home Office
sense; but this is hardly the kind of 'I-ness' that I have in mind or is
important. If my view of Consciousness be anything like correct, the
consciousness of a system can hardly be diminished (but, I should have said, the
reverse) by linking more psychons into it, while the words "enriched and
enlarged" follow almost as a matter of definition.
The point I want to make, stated in the most general terms, is this: just as the
dissociative forces or their equivalent operative within the so-called
individual mind (cf. sections 72, 77, and 79 above) may lead to the formation of
repressed complexes, sub-personalities, etc., so the associative forces between
minds - i.e., telepathic linkings of their constituents - is likely to lead to the
formation of large syntheses or 'super-minds'. Admitting that all this is in the
highest degree speculative and conjectural, in the sense that observational
confirmation seems quite out of reach at present, I none the less think that it
is along some such lines as these that our post-mortem development is most
likely to proceed.
One or two points may be noted here. First, in accordance with the
considerations of section 49, the synthesizing telepathy will predominantly take
place between minds or parts or sub-groups thereof (this is likely to be
important), of like constitution. Thus, the music-loving elements of Jones's
personality would naturally become linked into one system, his motoring
enthusiasms into a second, and his beer-drinking propensities into a third, and
so fort h, though I do not see that this should involve any diminution in the
consciousness of Jones, though a strengthening, so to say, of the systems
concerned. Second, there seems nothing in principle to prevent such
higher-synthesis systems acquiring a certain autonomy of their own, in
accordance with the principle of section V; but, in view of the almost complete
lack of data from which to reason, I think it wiser not to attempt to pursue
this sort of possibility any further here. On the other hand, I think it would
be well worth any one's while to attempt a little constructive thinking on these
lines, to which I shall have occasion to refer again below.
Reincarnation: Genius and Inspiration
[top]
I mention the subject of Reincarnation solely because it enjoys a considerable
popularity in certain circles. I do not agree with the eminent philosopher who
declared it to be the only view of Immortality worthy the consideration of an
intelligent man; and, even if I did, this would not dispose of the two great
handicaps under which it labours - namely, first that there is not a shred of
worth - while evidence in its favour, second that not even its most ardent
exponents can give any reasonable account of what it is that is reincarnated.
The supposed reminiscences of soi-disant ex-priestesses (of whom there seems to
be a most astonishing number) are not verifiable, and would not be evidence of
anything but a particular sort of dramatized paranormal cognition even if they
were; I have yet to meet anything of the kind that could not have been
constructed by any normally competent novelist.
When we ask what it is that reincarnates, we are told that it is the Ego; but
unfortunately, further inquiry reveals that the Ego is supposed to be that which
remains when all qualities of the personality have been stripped away in the
process of advancement through successive 'planes'. That is to say, it is the
exact analogue of the Ding an sich - a featureless entity expressly divested of
all identifying attributes. It is accordingly meaningless to say that Smith's
Ego rather than Brown's or Jones's Ego is reincarnated in the body of Robinson.
None the less, I think it possible that in a certain not uninteresting sense,
the occultists may be on the track of a process that does actually occur.
To simplify matters, imagine that Smith devoted many years of his life to the
study of some subject so extremely obscure that no one else had ever studied
it - let us say the incidence of caries in the Plantagenet kings; then Smith's psychon system will contain a highly organized sub-system centred round the
closely linked key-ideas of 'caries' and 'Plantagenets'. In due course Smith is
gathered to his fathers; but half a century later, say, Robinson selects the
same peculiar subject for a doctoral thesis, and he also begins to gather a
system of ideas around the same key notion of 'carious Plantagenet'. But this is
just the condition we require for telepathic interaction between Smith's
(surviving) and Robinson's psychon systems, with (carious Plantagenet' acting as
a K.
I do not mean to suggest for a moment that the whole content of Smith's mind
instantly becomes accessible to Robinson, so that he can read off, so to say,
the specific results of Robinson's researches; for this would be as contrary to
common sense as it is to experience. But it does seem to me perfectly reasonable
to suppose (within the framework of our suppositions) that the relevant system
of Smith's mind might exert a certain influence on Robinson's.
After all, the essence of those lucky guesses which we describe as flashes of
genius, intuition, or inspiration is the sudden emergence into the field of
consciousness of an idea - from nowhere, as it seems - that fits the facts and does
the job we want it to. And it has always seemed to me as if such ideas were, so
to say, thrown up from the subconscious not so much because they are right as
because they are not wrong - in accordance, as it were, with the operation of some
Principle of Minimum Conflict. The difficulty usually is to find a theory, or a
solution to a problem which will fit - i.e., not conflict with - not merely one
set of facts, but several, which at first sight may appear contradictory.
Various ideas hover on the margin of consciousness, but are automatically thrust
back because they conflict with one set or another; and the satisfaction that is
felt when at last the right idea appears results, I think, from the feeling of
relaxation or relief from tension that accompanies the cessation of the
conflicts.
In this kind of process the system of ideas formed by Smith, and telepathically
linked, in the manner indicated, with that of Robinson, might reasonably be
supposed to play a part, without our having to postulate any crude transference
of thought from the deceased to the living.
In this somewhat Pickwickian sense, then, it seems possible to say without
absurdity that Smith's surviving mind is in some degree animating Robinson's
body - which is tantamount to 'reincarnation' of a sort.
I have, of course, taken an extreme and over-simplified case by way of
illustration, but the interested reader may amuse himself by thinking out other
possibilities.
It seems to me, too, that certain cognate phenomena, such as those of musical
prodigies, may be susceptible of at least partial elucidation on much the same
lines. If heredity and chance combine to produce a child equipped with the
anatomical prerequisites of, e.g., extreme auditory discrimination and digital
dexterity, we have a potential pianist or violinist, say, of outstanding
ability; and if such a child has the fortune to make the appropriate musical
contacts, he will automatically have presented to him the various ideas more or
less peculiar to these activities, but common to all who pursue them. These, I
would suggest, may act as K-ideas and serve to link his mind with whatever
pianistic or violinic, or merely musical', systems may have been formed -
notably on the lines so roughly indicated in the last section.
More generally, I suspect that the inspiration of any artist - which always
appears to come from 'outside' himself - may be due to no inexplicable magic but
to the linking of his mind, however feebly and transiently, into the appropriate
super-system built up, as it were, by all the masters and executants of his
craft.
But this is bordering on the fantastic and taking us too far from the problem of
Survival as such.
The Problem of Survival: Summary and Conclusions
[top]
The critical reader will have noticed that my later sections have contained much
that borders all too closely on - to borrow a phrase from Rhine - "the familiar
pattern of untested speculation". I have thought it worthwhile to make these
suggestions, vague and imperfect expressed as they may be, because of the
interesting possibilities they seem to open up. But I should be very sorry if
they were allowed to obscure or detract from the main points I have tried to
make, which I think may be regarded with a very fair measure of confidence. Let
us briefly run over these again to get them clear.
There can be no doubt at all about the reality of sensa and images (psychons),
which are, on the contrary, the only realities we can possibly know. The
phenomena of telepathy demonstrate that these entities do not conform to
physical laws, for they pass (to speak colloquially) from one mind to another
without any physical mediation; but they do conform to psychical law, notably
the Law of Association, and associative linkages effectively operate, so to say,
behind the physical scene. Associatively linked psychon systems accordingly
provide us with a non-physical order of reality, while there is no
justification, but the contrary, for supposing that they are extinguished by
physical death, since we know that they operate, in telepathy, without reliance
on physical processes. The phenomena of telepathy, etc., are therefore not an
alternative to survival, but a virtual guarantee of it.
The real problem is that of what happens to the psychon system after death, or,
in other words, what form survival takes. There is clearly an antecedent
possibility, which I do not think we are yet in a position wholly to eliminate,
though I regard it as unlikely in view of the evidence, that the surviving
psychon system might gradually disintegrate. Personally, I think that a process
of integration rather than of disintegration is more probable, and this without
any loss of the sense of 'I-ness'; but I should not care to defend this very
stoutly in the present state of our ignorance.
On the other hand, I think that what I have said about imagined objects,
situations, etc., being 'real' to the surviving mind, and the way in which this
accounts for the apparently crassly material nature of some ostensible
communications is almost indisputable; and I think the conclusion pretty well
follows from this that the 'next world' will have, in the first instance, a
definitely dream-like quality. That is not to say that it will be purely
fantastic, in the colloquial sense, only that it will be ordered by psychical
and not by physical laws, to which it will take us some little time to adjust
ourselves, just as it does when we first make contact with this physical world.
Up to this point I feel almost complete confidence; but beyond it any
conjectures one may venture must clearly be extremely tentative and liable to
the most drastic revision.
I cannot say that I find the prospect particularly alluring; on the other hand,
one would probably have felt much the same if, without mundane experience to go
upon, one had had described to one the general principles governing this
physical world one is so loathe to leave; so very likely post-mortem existence
will turn out to be a good deal more enjoyable, once we get used to it, than I
have painted it.
In conclusion: Perhaps the greatest difficulty we have to contend with in this
subject arises from within ourselves - from our natural desire to settle the
issue definitely one way or the other, and at once; and our reluctance to resign
ourselves to a state of partial and uncertain knowledge. It is this, I think,
rather than the voice of reason, which makes so many of us prone to accept the
roseate fairy-stories of spiritualists, occultists, religionists, etc., on the
one hand, or even (since we demand an answer at whatever price) the pretentious
extrapolations of materialists affirming extinction on the other. We insist
imperatively that Survival, if it occur, shall be 'proved'; whereas I doubt
whether this is possible in any ordinary sense of the word, because, I suspect,
just those properties of the universe that make some sort of survival a
certainty also provide alternative explanations (if we care to make them
far-fetched enough) for any evidence of it.
But I think we can do better than prove Survival - we can find out something
about it. If we harden our hearts against dogmatism in some quarters,
sentimentalism in others, and wish-thinking in ourselves; if we carefully
scrutinize the evidence (especially the odder and more unexpected items); if we
try to develop a reasonable theory of what is likely to be going on, and check
it wherever possible against any relevant facts obtainable, I believe we shall
gradually form a pretty clear conception of what post-mortem conditions are
like, and why. In this way, by studying the question of How, we shall make as it
were a detour around Whether, and end with a degree of informed assurance
unlikely to result from any frontal assault.
Note:
The article above was taken from Whately Carington's "Telepathy, an outline of
its facts, theory and implications" (New York: Creative Age Press, 1946)
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