The Debate Comes to a Climax
THAT AT least a few unquestionably honest mediums have transmitted life-like and
highly evidential communications which claim and seem to have come from
personalities who have survived bodily death has been shown in Chapters 5, 6 and
7. But Chapter 8 has brought forth a seemingly cataclysmic rejoinder: mediums
have also transmitted life-like and highly evidential communications from
alleged surviving spirits, some of whom, on investigation, have been shown to be
imaginary, others to be still physically embodied, and still others mere
secondary personalities of the medium.
Where does the evidential material come from, if not from surviving spirits?
Some of the facts communicated had been known to no living person before the
medium transmitted them. Can the anti-survivalists offer any explanation which
will account for both the plausible messages and those from the pseudo-spirits?
A two-pronged answer has been provided by the sceptics: they claim that both
kinds of communications might be accounted for by super-ESP and by unconscious
dramatization. Let us examine more closely this two-pronged explanation.
Can 'Super-psi' Explain Away all 'Spirit Messages'?
The hypothesis stated
Professor E. R. Dodds,
Gardner Murphy, and other
scientifically minded doubters of survival, have developed the theory that the
dramatizing powers of the unconscious, making use of a comprehensive form of
telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and retrocognition (which I shall call
super-ESP), may create pseudo spirit personalities, which convince wishful
believers, but which give no genuine evidence of survival beyond bodily death.
Dr. Murphy, Dr. Louisa Rhine,
and others have argued that a similar process creates (or might create)
apparitions of the dead which (if this theory were pushed to its limit) would
provide no evidence for survival. In recent decades they have come to believe
that telepathy, clairvoyance, retrocognition and even precognition operate in
ways which can gather pertinent information from anywhere in the world. And they
have come to believe that the information thus comprehensively gathered is
organized into plausible pseudo-communicator form by the dramatizing capacity of
the medium's (and perhaps the sitter's) unconscious mind. Let us review the
highlights of the discussion through which these ideas have become prominent.
Richet formulated super-ESP ponderously
As early as 1923 Charles Richet asserted that, rather than accept survival,
'I should prefer to suppose an extreme perfection of
transcendental cognitions giving a multiplicity of notions grouping themselves
round the imaginary centre of a fictitious personality...'
The above, somewhat ponderous, phraseology may be
taken as an early definition of super-ESP.
Saltmarsh objected
This conception of a kind of omniscient telepathy seemed incredible to many
psychical researchers. For example, Saltmarsh, in 1931, after having referred to
telepathy from the sitter, continued:
'Where the knowledge necessary for verification is
not in the possession of the sitter but is acquired subsequently from other
sources, the evidence for survival may be considerably stronger. It turns on the
question of the probability of the necessary connecting links between the medium
and the possessor of the knowledge...
Now unless we are prepared to credit the medium, the sitter, or the stranger or
some person en route between them, with what amounts to potential
omniscience, we have to postulate a very complex and unlikely series of links to
account for the phenomenon.
If we hold that the mind of the medium goes out, as it were, in search of
information, and invades the memories of living persons, we still have to
explain the fact that he discovered this hidden source. He had the whole world
in which to search and nothing to guide him, or at least, that is how it appears
to us with our very limited, almost non-existent knowledge of the conditions.'
Dodds's 'guesses' about super-ESP
In his explanation of 'Why I Do Not Believe in Survival', Professor Dodds
(though confessing his lack of adequate supporting data) formulated the
super-ESP idea more fully, yet more simply, than Richet had done:
'A further objection to the telepathic hypothesis is
that it appears to involve an otherwise unexampled selective action of
the medium's mind, in supernormally deriving from other human minds precisely
those remembered facts which are required for the building up of a particular
trance personality. This was the spearhead of
Hyslop's argument for the
Piper
phenomena, and has often been urged since.
But I do not think that the available evidence in the least requires me to
picture the subconscious mind of the medium hunting through the subconscious
mind of the assumed agent, as through a lumber room, until it finds precisely
the bit of information which it needs in order to give verisimilitude to the
impersonation of some deceased friend of the agent. I am equally free to imagine
that when rapport is established between the medium's subconscious mind
and that of the assumed agent, the nature of the material transmitted is
determined by the relative emotive force of the agent's various complexes, or by
the fact that the material belonged to an associative complex, some elements of
which are already in the medium's mind, or by any other cause that you like to
suggest. Selection does undoubtedly operate at some stage before the material is
presented in trance; but I see nothing to prevent its operating after the
material has become part of the furniture of the medium's subconscious mind. I
am free to imagine, in the first place, that the particular complex of feelings
and images which underlies a particular trance personality attracts to itself
only such elements of the newly acquired material as have some associative
relevance to its existing content; and secondly, that the "control" who sits in
the gateway of trance - Feda or Topsy, Phinuit or Rector - operates on occasion,
like the Freudian "censor", to prevent the emergence of irrelevant or disturbing
matter which might interrupt the illusion and break the continuity of the
medium's dream.
These are no more than guesses, although they derive a certain amount of support
from the known mechanism of the normal dream. I claim no more for them than that
they cover the observed facts as well as any other hypothesis, and better in one
important respect than the hypothesis of possession. The degree of relevance and
continuity to be observed in most trance communications is, to say the least,
extremely limited. In Mr. Saltmarsh's words, "One of the most striking features
of communications received through trance mediums is their disjointedness." This
is what I should expect from the sort of psychological machinery I have
suggested; it is not what I should expect if the communicators are what they say
they are.'
Gardner Murphy's inductions about super-ESP
By 1945, in his 'Difficulties Confronting the Survival Hypothesis', Dr. Murphy
formulated the super-ESP hypothesis in terms of a generalization emerging from
case evidence:
'We should not be misled by our tendency to form an
image of physical space in which the poor sensitive wanders, like Diogenes with
his lantern, trying to find - among two billion human beings - a mind possessing
the necessary information. Rather, it appears that space is utterly irrelevant
to the issue; the mind makes contact with that which is relevant to its
purpose. If a cluster of ideas relevant to a given central theme exists, it
appears reasonable to believe (in line with Carington's [1944] conception, for
example) that ideas which are related tend to function as a unit.
It must again be stressed, lest the point be regarded as sheerly hypothetical,
that we have direct evidence that this process of filching and sifting
among the minds of the living does actually occur.'
Murphy then cited certain cases from which he argued
the principle of super-ESP might be a legitimate deduction. He said:
'We have already seen that the capacity to pick up
needed material is highly developed in good sensitives; in fact, we cited
evidence that such appropriate material can be "filched" from the minds
of both present and distant living people... Whatever difficulties we may have
with such an interpretation, the power is clearly there. The same sort of
ability to go out and get specific needed material is witnessed in good
psychometric ["object-reading"] studies; for example, in those reported by Pagenstecher and
Walter Franklin Prince, and those more recently given us by
Hettinger in England.'
Super-ESP as a 'searchlight' capacity
In his 1957 paper on mediumship, Murphy made use of a new term to refer to
super-ESP:
'Information about either the deceased or the living
can be obtained by a sort of searchlight process... We are not manufacturing
this searchlight out of wishful thinking; the character Phinuit to whom I
earlier referred, who appears never to have existed, gave, through the Piper
trance, a good many of these rather striking searchlight effects, and the
Blanche Cooper of the Gordon Davis case and the Mrs. Halsey of the Réallier case
were apparently operating exactly in the manner of searchlights for the sweeping
in of paranormal information. It seems to me that we have to know considerably
more about the operation of these searchlights before we can say that
mediumistic phenomena are in themselves cogent evidence of survival and
communication.'
J. B. Rhine on super-ESP
Dr. J. B. Rhine himself, in 1949, summed up this argument as follows:
'There is nothing as yet on record from the studies
of mediumship that cannot be explained by the sort of "omnibus hypothesis" into
which we have expanded the old counter-hypothesis of telepathy.'
That the views which Dr. Rhine expressed in 1949 had
not changed fundamentally during the next eight years is indicated by an
Associated Press dispatch from Boston, dated 13 October, 1957. That dispatch
quoted him as having said that he and his scientist wife had worked on the
survival problem for thirty-five years without reaching a scientific solution.
The dispatch continued:
'"It is quite plain," Prof. Rhine said, "that any
theory of survival today would appear to have a fantastically greater set of
odds against it than it had a hundred years ago".'
Details Provided by Super-ESP are Dramatized
In the present chapter we are concerned with
understanding as clearly as we may the position of the disbelievers. Thus far,
in summarizing their points, we have been focusing attention on the evidence
which they have put forth in support of their belief in super-ESP. But they not
merely present evidence of the reality of mediumistic power to assemble
extra-sensory data; they also stress the fact that these data are organized into
dramatic form.
Unconscious dramatizing power is obvious in dreams
Commenting on this issue, Professor H. H. Price wrote, in 1958:
'On this interpretation, mediumistic phenomena are
very closely analogous to dreams. The medium is, as it were, dreaming
aloud. Ordinary dreaming is the most obvious illustration of the dramatizing
power of the human mind, and the most cogent evidence we have for the existence
of such a power. If dreams were not such familiar phenomena, it would be quite
incredible that even the most commonplace human mind has that astonishing
dramatizing capacity. We know that telepathically-received material is often
worked into the dream-drama (sometimes it gets distorted in the process).'
Dr. van Eeden believed that he had evidence of
this
In 1901 Dr. F. van Eeden reported the results of sittings which he had had with
Mrs. Thompson. Van Eeden had brought from Holland a necktie which had been worn
by a friend of his who had committed suicide. Reporting on these sittings, he
said:
'During the first period of experiments, in November
and December, 1899, I felt a very strong conviction that the person whose relics
I had brought with me and who had died 15 years ago,' was living as a spirit and
was in communication with me through Mrs. Thompson... But when I came home, I
found on further inquiry inexplicable faults and failures. If I had really
spoken to the dead man he would never have made these mistakes... I came to
the conclusion that I had dealt only with Mrs. Thompson, who, possessing an
unconscious power of information quite beyond our understanding, had acted
the ghost, though in perfect good faith...
Up to the sitting of June 7th all the information came through Nellie, Mrs.
Thompson's so-called spirit control. But on that date the deceased tried, as he
had promised, to take control himself, as the technical term goes. The evidence
then became very striking. During a few minutes - though a few minutes only - I
felt absolutely as if I were speaking to my friend myself. I spoke Dutch and got
immediate and correct answers. The expression of satisfaction and gratification
in face and gestures when we seemed to understand each other was too true and
vivid to be acted. Quite unexpected Dutch words were pronounced. Details were
given which were far from my mind, some of which, as that about my friend's
uncle in a former sitting, I had never known, and found to be true only on
inquiry afterwards.
But being now well on my guard, I could, exactly at this most interesting few
minutes, detect, as it were, where the failures crept in. I could follow the
process and perceive where the genuine phenomena stopped and the unconscious
play-acting began. In hardly perceptible gradations the medium takes upon
herself the role of the spirit, completes the information, gives the
required finish, and fills in the gaps by emendation and arrangement...
At the present moment it is about eight months since I had my last sitting with
Mrs. Thompson in Paris, and yet, when I read the notes again it is impossible
for me to abstain from the conviction that I have really been a witness, were it
only for a few minutes, of the voluntary manifestation of a deceased person.
At the same time, I feel sure that genuine direct information is far rarer and
scarcer than the medium believes, and in good faith would have us believe. I
held that a certain amount of unconscious play-acting is nearly always
going on at every sitting of every medium, and that even our most scrupulous and
careful observers, such as Myers and
Hodgson, have been misled by it. I doubt
not only the veracity but the actual existence of the so-called control spirit.
To me it seems not improbable that they are artificial creations of the medium's
mind.'
Dr. van Eeden thus (as he himself noted) wavered
between belief and disbelief in the existence of genuine communication with
departed spirits.
Podmore had no such doubts
In 1911 Frank Podmore, having cited van Eeden's experiences and other evidence,
wrote:
'The investigators themselves now recognize that the
primitive theory of possession, the theory advocated in a modified form by Dr.
Hodgson and still held by most spiritualists can no longer be defended. They
have substituted for it a theory of telepathic interaction between the mind of
the automatist and other minds, of the living or of the dead. The result is a
compound, in which the different elements can only be separated by patient
analysis...
But the propounders of this theory do not seem to realize the full implications
of their admission. We cannot simply drop the theory of possession as if the
facts on which it was originally based had never existed, and then proceed to
balance the successes against the failures, as in a telepathic experiment. If
these impersonations, as is now admitted, are not what they pretend to be, they
are shams, and we are faced with a gigantic system of make-believe... I see no
proof in these reports that there is any adequate recognition ... of the extreme
improbability involved in the assumption that one out of 10,000 lay figures, in
outward appearance indistinguishable from all the other lay figures, should for
a passing moment be endowed, with life, and should then again sink back amongst
the crowd of lifeless mockeries; for that, and nothing less, seems to be the
implication in some of the arguments put forward.'
Lady Trowbridge raised doubts about Drayton
Thomas's realistic theory
While Drayton Thomas spent more years in studying Mrs.
Leonard's mediumship, and
published more articles about it, than any other psychical researcher did, some
highly important studies of the Leonard mediumship were made by Lady Una
Trowbridge and by Mrs. W. H. Salter. These researchers were fully sympathetic
with Mrs. Leonard and with Drayton Thomas's painstaking studies of her trance
utterances; but they were less inclined to accept literally what Feda said about
the ways in which she secured the unquestionably supernormal information which
appeared so abundantly in the Leonard records. In an outstandingly important
study which Lady Trowbridge published in 1922, two highly significant points
stand out..
1. Though Feda talked as though she saw and heard the spirits who were giving
her communications, Lady Trowbridge cited a number of incidents which made her
doubtful as to whether these simple sensory terms conveyed any accurate analogy
of the process really involved. She concluded that it was much more likely that
Feda received a series of impressions telepathically, one at a time, and that
she then put these impressions together into the form of visible and audible
objects and people.
2. Absurd, irrelevant, and erroneous elements, which frequently cropped up in
the communications, appeared to Lady Trowbridge to be due to Feda's picking up
some wandering thought in the mind of the communicator. Lady Trowbridge wrote:
'I confess that I find it easier, at any rate in the
case of the lengthy and detailed descriptions pertaining to one topic, to
conceive of them as emanating intentionally and consciously from some agent
having the power to choose what impressions shall or shall not reach Feda.
Upon this hypothesis it would appear that, so long as the communicator can keep
some given portion of his mind exclusively upon the one fact or event which he
desires to give or to describe as evidence, Feda's descriptions will be
relatively clear and accurate. Should, however, the communicator's mind wander
ever so little, his irrelevant thought would be as likely to reach Feda as any
thought relative to the subject in hand, and when it does so will appear in some
form in her narrative.'
Lady Trowbridge then cites evidence that when these
errors due to mind-wandering appear in the script, the communicator gives
evidence of being excited and frustrated. Apparently this emotional disturbance
makes it still more difficult to correct the erroneous communications.
Gardner Murphy has stressed dramatized want-fulfilment
In the above account of Lady Trowbridge's findings, it will be noted that, while
she finds reasons to doubt Drayton Thomas's realistic interpretation of Feda's
statements, she does accept the hypothesis that real communicators are involved.
She thus is a believer in Survival.
Doubters of survival, however, have increasingly held the opinion that the
dramatic organization of super-ESP information need not indicate the presence or
the purposive activity of surviving spirits. Gardner Murphy, in 1945, summarized
this position as follows:
'The deep-level wants of the sensitive [i.e., the
medium], induced in response to the deep-level wants of the sitter, reach out
into relevant psychological material, bringing it together in organized form,
and presenting it in the form of a purporting communicator... The medium is
completely devoted to the purpose in hand (for normal personal consciousness is
gone); the trance personalities probably believe themselves at the time to be
the entities desired, and respond with energy to the demand to make themselves
known.'
In support of the above thesis, Murphy and other
doubters of survival, cite the evidence summarized in Chapter 8, relating to
pseudo-personalities communicating through mediums. But they offer also a
further development of this argument:
The whole spiritistic conception has been dismissed as a cultural artefact
The fact that non-spiritualistic forms of mediumship have flourished at various
times and places has been stressed by Dodds, in 1934, and by Flew, in 1953
(borrowing freely from Dodds). But the best statement of the point which I have
found was made by Murphy in 1945:
'Paranormal phenomena have been reported for some
thousands of years; people asleep or in trance, or under the influence of drugs
or fumes, together with a smaller number of people in a state of apparently
normal consciousness, have appeared to be invaded by intelligences which desire
to communicate. The kinds of intelligence which appear to communicate seem to
depend largely upon the expectations of the social group. Often the purporting
communicators through special sensitives have been nature spirits, demons,
devils, angels, gods, and goddesses. The vast array of psychical phenomena -
telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psycho-kinesis, etc. - has been manifest
through recorded history as an aspect of special mental conditions, which
suggests to observers that forces beyond the individual are at work, but often
with no thought of marshalling, evidence for survival. Under the special
cultural - especially the scientific - conditions of the last century, as
expressed by the work of societies for psychical research, mediums have been
constrained to use the paranormal gift primarily for securing messages
from deceased human beings; their task is to give survival evidence...
Self-induced states of passivity, in which automatic writing speaking, and
posturing occur are more or less alike everywhere. One gives oneself the
suggestion, throughout the training period, that one will serve as mediator for
a given divinity or demon; and with few exceptions the primitive or the advanced
practitioner receives in some measure the sort of unseen power upon which he
awaits. The manifestations carry to onlookers the sense of verisimilitude; one
recognizes the characteristic earmarks of the divinity or demon, exactly as the
sitter in a spiritualistic circle recognizes those earmarks which make a
convincing demonstration of personal continuity.'
The Survivalists Responded to the Super-ESP Challenge
Drayton Thomas offered counter-evidence
Faced with accumulating evidence and arguments as to the existence of super-ESP,
researchers who believed in survival still protested that no such process could
explain away the best communications received through the best mediums. In 1947,
Drayton Thomas published this:
'Study of [previous publications about the
mediumship of Mrs. Osborne Leonard] shows that telepathy from sitters can no
longer be held to explain the results obtained.
Other suggestions have been put forward in the endeavour to provide an
alternative to the idea that purported communicators are actually present at the
sittings and giving the information which comes from the medium's lips. These
suggestions include telepathic action of an almost unlimited character, whereby
the information is supposed to be derived from any person, however unknown and
distant, who might at any time have possessed the information; while other
suggestions go to the extreme of positing universal consciousness, or unlimited
community of mind, or a pooled memory of the human race from which the medium
selects appropriate items!
The hypothesis we now put forward, together with an outline of the facts on
which it is based, substitutes for these vague suggestions a claim for the
accuracy of that which had been consistently stated by the Communicators;
namely, that the messages are given by discarnate persons who come to the
sitting for this purpose. It also supports the assertion of Communicators that
they still have bodies - bodies of substance - although not formed of earthly
matter.'
Mr. Thomas then proceeded to offer the direct-voice
evidence from Mrs. Leonard's sittings, which has been summarized in Chapter 6.
Through Mrs. Willett the purported spirits themselves admitted the
existence of super-ESP
Bark in 1938 Tyrrell was using the term 'telaesthesia' to refer to what might
have been called 'super-ESP.' He cited three cases from the A.V.B. sittings with
Mrs. Leonard, and then he commented:
'These three last cases show that the theory that
the information given by trance-personalities is necessarily obtained
telepathically from the subconscious minds of the sitters, needs at least
considerable expansion; for items of information appeared in these cases which
were only known to complete strangers. This necessitates a much wider field of
telepathic operation - a field not limited by the interest and affection of the
supposed agents. In fact, one can scarcely suppose that the unconscious
stranger from whom this wider information comes is playing the part of an active
agent in the affair. It looks as if the telepathic theory would have to be
augmented by what ... we have defined as "Telaesthesia" - that is to say, by a
reaching out on the part of the trance-personality to prehend the information it
needs in whatever mind happens to contain it...
The faculty of telaesthesia, if it exists in this unrestricted form would seem
to represent a range of extra-sensory power of quite extraordinary universality
and extent, and evidently if mediums possess it, the theory that communications
are due to telaesthesia among the living would be greatly strengthened. It is
interesting therefore, to notice that Gurney-w, [Gurney, purportedly
communicating through Mrs. Willett] enthusiastically endorses it. In a long
Daylight Impression on 8 October, 1911, the following occurs:
"Oh he says, telaesthesia is a bed-rock truth, a
power of acquiring knowledge direct without the intervention of the discarnate
mind.
Oh he says, telepathy's one thing - that's thought communication; telaesthesia is
knowledge, not thought, acquired by the subliminal when operating normally in
the metethereal...
Oh he says, you none of you make enough allowance for what [telaesthesia]
implies, and the results of that can be shepherded and guided up to the
threshold of normal consciousness...
What I'm saying may be used to cut at the spiritualistic hypothesis, but it
doesn't. Again, who selects what of the total telaesthetically acquired
knowledge shall externalize itself - shall blend itself with those elements
received by direct telepathic impact!"'
From the above quotation it seems evident that
Tyrrell had borrowed the term telaesthesia from the Willett communicators
themselves - or, more probably, both he and they had taken over (with
modifications) the term coined by F. W. H. Myers in 1903.
Here, Then, is the Crux of the Anti-Survivalist Argument
As far as genuine mediumistic evidence is concerned,
the position of the anti-survivalists stands out in the opinions cited in this
chapter. The trance state, and the other forms of mental dissociation
characteristic of mediumship, set free the dramatizing tendency of the
unconscious mind. This tendency (according to the anti-survivalists) responds to
the suggestions provided by the cultural setting in which the medium works and
by the conscious and unconscious desires of the sitter. The fact that
spiritualism and the earlier stages of psychical research were concerned with
survival of personality beyond bodily death has provided the suggestions needed
to bring about the dramatization of pseudo spirit communicators.
The evidential material embodied in mediumistic communications does not come
from surviving spirits (according to the anti-survivalists). Rather, it is
provided by super-ESP - a faculty which assembles the information and the
personality patterns required for the production of both the demonstrably
fictitious 'communicators,' and also of the ostensibly spirit personalities
which have convinced Drayton Thomas and other researchers of the reality of
survival.
A constructive rejoinder will come later
When the seemingly powerful mediumistic case in favour of survival was being
presented, the reader was advised to suspend judgment until the counter
arguments had been examined. Now that the seemingly powerful case against
survival has been presented, the reader is still advised to suspend judgment
until later chapters have been examined. In particular, the evidence from
apparitions (as presented in Chapters 10 to 12) must be taken into account. And
the Persona Theory of Chapter 13 may be found to provide a key to constructive
reconciliation of the arguments both for and against survival.
Note:
The above article was taken from Hornell Hart's "The Enigma of Survival. The
Case For and Against an After Life" (London: Rider & Co., 1959).
|