Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  In certain senses, the supraliminal and the subliminal dimensions of the human personality line up closely with what later mainstream Freudian psychology would call the ego and the unconscious. In other senses, they do not line up at all, mostly because Myers’s metaphysical conception of the subliminal region of the psyche was far more robust and expansive than Freud’s instinctual personal unconscious.80 The subliminal may at times look like a “chamber” or basement (and Myers was very clear that the subliminal is by no means always positive or inspirational), but it was a basement that Myers insisted could suddenly open out into a vast psychical sea. Myers’s subliminal Self was thus much closer to what his most famous interpreter, William James, described as that “continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”81 This was Jamesian language, with a little Richard M. Bucke thrown in, but it was also pure Fred Myers.82 Myers’s Gothic castle, then, floated on top of the sea, as a haunted island of sorts, with God only knows what swimming in its surrounding waters. But it was much more than that floating castle. It was also the entire sea.

  According to Alan Gauld, Myers was mostly influenced in his psychological thought by James’s Principles of Psychology and so would have rejected what would eventually become the Freudian or Jungian models of the unconscious, whereby one can have a stream of thought or a set of impressions that exists and acts entirely outside conscious awareness.83 For Myers, in this reading at least, all streams of thought are conscious on their own level. They may be temporarily submerged or subliminal vis-à-vis the ego, but they remain forms of consciousness. They can never really be described as “unconscious.” They simply exist along a different band of the spectrum.

  Myers’s thought on the unity of the Self is also quite complex. On the one hand, he clearly insisted on the “composite structure of the Ego” (HP 1:xxv). That is, he considered any stream of thought that might be recalled and remembered as a “personality.” A personality for Myers, then, was essentially a “chain of memory” strung together in a meaningful way. I would rephrase this insight: on one level, the human personality is a narrative or story that can be remembered. If the chain of memories is too weak, that is, if these specific memories are forgotten, or if there is no binding meaning or stable story to hold them together, we may have a partial or dual or multiple personality operating, but not a coherent self. Moreover, in something like possession, another personality, chain of memories, or story can temporarily take over a body. Obviously, then, the human personality is radically multiple for Myers. It is not just Two.

  On the other hand, Myers also insisted on the personality’s “abiding unity” (HP 1:xxv), on a deep “Individuality,” by which he referred to “the underlying psychical unity which I postulate as existing beneath all our phenomenal manifestations,” that is, beneath all our other selves.84 We are thus One and Many. He even used, alas inconsistently, the capitalized Self, Personality, or Individuality to refer to the total Self, much in the way Jung later did to express the psychological state of the actualized individual, that is, the human person whose conscious ego is in tune with both the individual and collective unconscious. For Myers, at least, there could be multiple personalities or selves all coordinated within this large super Self:

  I find it permissible and convenient to speak of subliminal Selves, or more briefly of a subliminal Self . . . and I conceive that there may be,—not only co-operations between these quasi-independent trains of thought,—but also upheavals and alternations of personality of many kinds, so that what was once below the surface may for a time, or permanently, rise above it. And I conceive also that no Self of which we can here have cognisance is in reality more than a fragment of a larger Self,—revealed in a fashion at once shifting and limited through an organism not so framed as to afford its full manifestation. (HP 1:14–15)

  Perhaps all of this is clarified somewhat when Myers takes up his methodological metaphor of the spectrum and transforms it into an ontological suggestion. Enter the classic mystical understanding of consciousness as light. This is an ancient and well-worn metaphor, but it takes on a new life in the second half of the nineteenth century as physicists began to discover that visible light is in fact only a small part of a much larger spectrum of energy. Hence Myers’s aforementioned “spectrum of consciousness” through which he sought to draw “a comparison of man’s range of consciousness or faculty to the solar spectrum, as seen by us after passing through a prism or examined in a spectrascope” (HP 1:xxi). Myers uses such a prismatic effect to suggest that the light of consciousness is not singular at all, that consciousness can be broken up into various bands, much like white light can be separated into a rainbow of colors. Most of the light spectrum, moreover, particularly that beyond the infrared (on the lower end) and ultraviolet (on the higher end), appears well outside the bands of everyday awareness. Similarly, Myers suggested, most of the spectrum of consciousness is entirely invisible to our normal senses and present egoic form of awareness.

  But this hardly means that such bands of consciousness are unreal. What we need, then, is a way to see beyond the tiny visible spectrum. We need a new psychical technology, or what Myers called “artifices.” “Just as the solar spectrum has been prolonged by artifice beyond both red and violet ends, so may the spectrum of conscious human faculty be artificially prolonged beyond both the lower end (where consciousness merges into mere organic operation) and the higher end (where consciousness merges into reverie or ecstasy)” (HP 1:xxv).

  Myers, then, was not so naive as to confuse our present egoic methods of seeing with the real. Science had taught him that much:

  The limits of our spectrum do not inhere in the sun that shines, but in the eye that marks his shining. . . . The artifices of the modern physicist have extended far in each direction the visible spectrum known to Newton. It is for the modern psychologist to discover artifices which may extend in each direction the conscious spectrum as known to Plato or to Kant. (HP 1:17–18)

  The issues, in other words, are largely about what we would now call epistemology. Particularly when it comes to the subject of the Subject, that is, to the nature of human consciousness itself, what we see is largely determined by how we see, and how we see is in turn largely determined by the restricting structures of society and the brain. So the question becomes: By what methods, by what artifices, can we get around these limiting structures to see more, to reflect and refract a broader band of consciousness? More radically still, since the study of consciousness is inevitably performed by consciousness itself, how can we get around the mind-blowing paradoxes of a kind of infinite reflection, of a subject studying an object that is really the same subject? How can we step behind the mirror?

  The Supernormal and Evolution: The World as Two

  Myers may not have originated the term subliminal, but he did coin the term supernormal, in 1885, on the analogy of the abnormal to mark “phenomena which are beyond what usually happens—beyond, that is, in the sense of suggesting unknown psychic laws.” This particular altered word-state was another expression of his spectrum or graduation method. It was also deeply rooted in Myers’s specific understandings of evolution. Myers explains:

  When we speak of abnormal phenomenon we do not mean one which contravenes natural laws, but one which exhibits them in an unusual or inexplicable form. Similarly by a supernormal phenomenon I mean, not one which overrides natural laws, for I believe no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits the action of laws higher, in a psychical aspect, than are discerned in action in everyday life. By higher (either in a psychical or a physiological sense) I mean “apparently belonging to a more advanced stage of evolution.”85

  As we have already seen, Human Personality in fact begins with the insight that psychopathology and the disintegration of the everyday self can tell us something important about the higher states of psychic functioning, that is, there are intimate p
sychological connections between the breakdown of the supraliminal self in psychological suffering (what Myers calls the devolutive) and the transcendence of the same supraliminal self in the evolved states of genius, telepathic communication, possession, and ecstasy (what Myers calls the evolutive). There is a rhyming connection, then, for Myers between what we might call abnormal psychology and supernormal psychology. Psychologically speaking, that connection boils down to a single process expressed in multiple modes, that is, the temporary suppression of the supraliminal self or ego.

  This again is why so much of his data involves what we would now call dissociative or traumatic phenomena, that is, states of consciousness in which a traumatic event—usually death as actual or as threatened—separates or dissociates consciousness into at least two fields of operation. In some cases, this leads to abnormal, pathological, or devolutive states. In other cases, this leads to evolutive states of genius and various special powers that Myers called supernormal. In many cases, moreover, both processes can be seen in the same individual. Contrary to what many want to assume, pathological and mystical states are not mutually exclusive, and both are related to the suppression of the social ego. Myers saw this very clearly. Hence his rhyming model of the abnormal and the supernormal.

  For Myers, the supernormal carried multiple connotations. As its related category of the evolutive suggests, the supernormal was a term that signaled both a particular evolutionary purpose and an entirely natural or “normal” process. We might well say that the supernormal was super natural, but not supernatural. This is how Myers put it in the opening definitions of Human Personality (the asterisk signals a word of his own creation):

  *Supernormal.—Of a faculty or phenomenon which goes beyond the level of ordinary experience, in the direction of evolution, or as pertaining to a transcendental world. The word supernatural is open to grave objections; it assumes that there is something outside nature, and it has become associated with arbitrary interference with law. Now there is no reason to suppose that the psychical phenomena with which we deal are less a part of nature, or less subject to fixed and definite law, than any other phenomena. Some of them appear to indicate a higher evolutionary level than the mass of men have yet attained, and some of them appear to be governed by laws of such a kind that they may hold good in a transcendental world as fully as in the world of sense. In either case they are above the norm of man rather than outside his nature. (HP 1:xxii)

  As such a quote suggests, Myers was operating with a worldview that mirrored his bimodal psychology. The human being is certainly a material being almost seamlessly embedded in the physical world, but, in the words of Edward Kelly now, the human personality is also “rooted in a hidden, wider environment that underlies and interpenetrates the world of ordinary experience, at bottom a spiritual or ‘metetherial’ realm lying beyond the material as classically conceived.”86 Just as the Human is Two, so too is the World.

  Sort of. It is more accurate to say that, for Myers, the World is One, but that it is experienced by us in two different ways—in a naturalistic and social way via our supraliminal self, and in a spiritual or “transcendental” way via our subliminal Self. What finally renders this Two One for Myers is a firm conviction that both forms of consciousness and their corresponding worlds of experience are shaped by “fixed and definite law,” and that such a law is at root an evolutionary one. Again, beyond A and B, there is X.

  There is another way of putting this. In Myers’s spectrum model, the supraliminal self or sense-based ego, that is, a specific personality that has been created by the narrowing of the field of consciousness, is conceived as operating on a specific band along the spectrum of consciousness within a particular social and historical period. This point on the spectrum, however, is neither stable nor absolute. It is transitory and constantly shifting. It is a compromise, a temporary adaptation determined, Myers speculated, by something like Darwin’s natural selection.87 The ego or social self is, if you will, an adaptive response to the cultural and physical environments in which the subliminal self finds itself manifesting at a particular moment in space and time. In another place, Myers seems to intuit the role of culture and language in these evolutionary processes, if only as a metaphor this time: “The letters of our inward alphabet,” he writes, “will shape themselves into many other dialects;—many other personalities, as distinct as those which we assume to be ourselves, can be made out of our mental material.”88

  In other words, human nature is being written in vastly different ways, and these different languages of consciousness and culture will continue to morph and manifest as history proceeds into the future. Myers is an optimist here. As the human personality continues to evolve, he speculates that it will move further and further away from the primitive, ultrared, instinctual, physiological, or “terrene” end of the spectrum of consciousness and toward the ultraviolet, spiritual, psychical, or “extraterrene” end.

  Toward that further end of the spectrum lie what Myers called “super-conscious operations,” that is, capacities that are “not below the threshold—but rather above the upper horizon of consciousness.”89 He could be quite radical on this point. Consciousness and its sensory capacities, he claimed, are “doubtless still modifiable in directions as unthinkable to me as my eyesight would have been unthinkable to the oyster,”90 and the human being has “evoked in greatest multiplicity the unnumbered faculties latent in the irritability of a speck of slime” (HP 1:76). In short, just as it has in the history of life on this planet, consciousness will continue to evolve from the normal to the supernormal, and this to the extent that it can gain “a completer control over innate but latent faculty.”91

  As we have already noted, Myers often writes of this double evolution as “terrene” and “extraterrene.” He accepted the Darwinian model of natural selection with respect to the terrene or earthly processes, but he was very much a Platonist or, perhaps better, a Neoplatonist when it came to the extraterrene or spiritual processes, that is, he believed that extraterrene evolution flowed from an earlier involution, that that which evolves into our spiritual consciousness was always already there from the beginning. Indeed, he even refers to his understanding of the latter involution/evolution processes as “some sort of a renewal of the old Platonic ‘reminiscence,’ in the light of that fuller knowledge which is common property to-day.” So, for example, he felt it necessary to posit the primordial existence of a “primal germ,” which possessed what he called panaesthesia or an “undifferentiated sensory capacity” that later evolved into the various sensory organs known to biology and psychology (HP 1:xiv). In another fascinating passage, he calls this “an X of some sort.” Whether a carbon atom or an immortal soul, he muses, this X “must have dated in any case from some age anterior to its existence upon our recent planet . . . on which earth’s forces began their play.”92 For the modern reader at least, “the heavens” of the spiritual world and “the outer space” of astrophysics here mingle in provocative and suggestive ways.

  With respect to the extraterrene evolution of the subliminal Self and its supernormal capacities, Myers explicitly rejected the Darwinian notion that something like a telepathic faculty could be initiated “by some chance combination of hereditary elements.” He held rather that “it is not initiated, but only revealed; that the ‘sport’ [of evolutionary processes] has not called a new faculty into being, but has merely raised an existing faculty above the threshold of supraliminal consciousness” (HP 1.117–18). He recognized, of course, that this view is inconsistent with natural selection in the strict biological sense. Hence his double-language of the terrene and the extraterrene, or what I have called the Darwinian and the Neoplatonic:

  Our human life . . . exists and energises, at the present moment, both in the material and in the spiritual world. Human personality, as it has developed from lowly ancestors, has become differentiated into two phases; one of them mainly adapted to material or planetary, the other to spiritual or cosmic
operation. The subliminal self, mainly directing the sleeping phase, is able either to rejuvenate the organism by energy drawn in from the spiritual world;—or, on the other hand, temporarily and partially to relax its connection with that organism, in order to expatiate in the exercise of supernormal powers;—telepathy, tele-asthesia, ecstasy. (HP 1:155)

  Myers’s language here had a rather remarkable pedigree. On the extraterrene side, it went back to Plotinus and Plato, both of whom he read, knew, and loved in the original Greek. On the terrene side, it went back to the very origins of evolutionary biology. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-creator of the evolutionary thesis with Darwin, attended the first official meeting of the Society for Psychical Research on February 20, 1882. He also attended multiple séances, witnessed the full-blown materializations of various physical mediums, and accepted for publication William Barrett’s 1876 paper on thought-transference as chairman for the anthropological section of the British Association (the paper was later suppressed and then finally published in the journal of the S.P.R.).93 He thus wrote of how an “overruling intelligence” may have something to do with the evolution of mind and morality. He explained to T. H. Huxley his dream of a “new branch of Anthropology” that might be crafted out of a study of Spiritualist phenomena. And he asked his scientific colleagues to pursue “those grand mysterious phenomena of the mind, the investigation of which can alone conduct us to a knowledge of what we really are.”94 In other words, Wallace realized that science leads, inexorably, to ontological questions. Much like Myers, Wallace saw the phenomena of Spiritualism as evidence for a separate, nonphysical line of moral or spiritual evolution.95 In Myers’s own words, Wallace entertained the idea “that some influence, resembling that of man on the domestic animals, may have been brought to bear upon primitive man . . . and that some power of spiritual communion, differentiating man from the lower races, may have been thus originated.”96 We’ll return to that idea too: the earth as a farm.