Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  Despite all of this, Wallace was never entirely comfortable with the S.P.R., not because he thought its members were being too credulous, but because he thought that they were being too suspicious. In his mind at least, the researchers were being far too critical of psychical phenomena. Here he was closer to Stainton Moses than Frederic Myers. Accordingly, Wallace completely rejected Myers’s notion of the subliminal Self, or any other theory of the unconscious for that matter, as fundamentally unscientific. In his own mind, he was simply trusting his own senses, that is, what he heard and saw at the séances. He was being a good naturalist. Only the jungle had changed.

  Wallace’s Spiritualist beliefs aside, Myers was clearly working with a similar double-evolutionary model. As we have already seen, there were two lines of evolution for Myers—one that applied to the natural world and one that applied to the transcendental or spiritual world. But, again, they both answered to the same evolutionary law: the A and the B were both rooted in a deeper X. One of the implications of such a conclusion is the notion that human evolution continues after death. In the end, Myers arrived at a kind of mind-body dualism, fully convinced that a mind uses a brain, and that the “human brain is in its last analysis an arrangement of matter expressly adapted to being acted upon by a spirit” (HP 2:254). Thought and Consciousness are not, then, random products of biological processes. They “are, and always have been, the central subject of the evolutionary process itself.”97 Put simply, mind, not matter, is primary, and human evolution is guided by spiritual forces that have, over the course of millions of years, evolved their own bodily receptors and are working still toward the actualization of potential powers that have in fact always been enfolded into the universe. Evolution is exactly what its etymology suggests, then: an “unfolding” of something already present, already there.

  Little wonder, then, that Darwin shied away from the word evolution, citing its common mystical connotations as inappropriate to his own purely naturalistic understandings. Indeed, the word possessed (and still possesses) an especially rich background in German Idealism and English and German Romanticism. Such authors, drawing on ancient Neo-platonic notions of involution and evolution, the ancient image of the ouroboros (the snake biting its own tail), and the symbolism of the spiral, used the language of evolution to express the natural tendency or “way” (Weg) of the cosmos to “unfold” its own implicit consciousness or divine Mind. Schelling could thus write that “[h]istory is an epic composed in the mind of God,” and Coleridge could declare that “the nurture and evolution of humanity is the final aim.”98 Thus, to paraphrase the famous terms of Schelling, the God who is involved into the universe (Deus implicitus) manifests as the God who evolves out of the universe (Deus explicitus).99

  As a striking example of this pre-Darwinian understanding of evolution as a kind of cosmic Mind awakening through history and culture, consider M. H. Abrams’s reading of Hegel’s masterwork The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Abrams approaches this text as a “literary narrative,” that is, as a Romantic novel or myth of the mind coming into its own self-revelation. The hermeneutical results are certainly astonishing (and fantastically familiar) enough: in a world in which Spirit or Mind (Geist) constitutes both subject and object, as well as the plot of the story, the reader is as much a part of the text as the text is a part of the reader. We are all being written, even as we are also doing the writing. Hegel now reads remarkably like Philip K. Dick’s autobiographical descriptions of Valis:

  The spirit, the protagonist of the story, maintains no one phenomenal identity, but passes through the bewildering metamorphoses in the form of outer objects and phenomenal events, or “shapes of consciousness” [Gestalten des Bewusstseins], as well as multiple human personae, or particular “spirits.” . . . This protagonist, the spirit, is also his own antagonist . . . so that the one actor plays all the roles in the drama . . . It constitutes not only all the agents, but also the shifting setting in the phenomenal world of nature and society which it sets up as object against itself as conscious subject or subjects. . . . It constitutes the totality of the plot as well. In a sustained dramatic irony, however, the spirit carries on this astonishing performance all unknowingly. . . . until, that is, the process discovers itself to consciousness in its own latent manifestation, the thinking of the philosopher Hegel, in an on-going revelation with which our own consciousness is privileged to participate as we read. For the reader, no less than the author and the subject matter of the Phenomenology, is one of the Geister [or spirits] in which the spirit continues to manifest itself.100

  Put quite simply, Abrams reads the Phenomenology as an autobiography of metaphysical Mind evolving into consciousness, but an autobiography told explicitly “in the mode of a double consciousness,” that is, in the mode of the Human as Two as both author and reader. In this same context, it should hardly surprise us to learn that Hegel both wrote appreciatively of Jacob Boehme, one of the premiere (if also most baffling) representatives of Western esoteric thought, and drew on the literature of Mesmerism and animal magnetism to forge his own, basically mystical, understandings of “absolute Spirit” and its “magical” relationship to Nature.101 What I am suggesting here is that it was precisely this same Romantic and essentially mystical stream of thought, now fused with Darwinian biology, that Myers and Wallace picked up on and developed further in the second half of the nineteenth century in the mirror of their own Spiritualist and psychical data.

  And all of this in turn led to the grand idea that would have an astonishing run in the twentieth century and is, under many popular cultural guises, still very much with us today, namely, the idea that the supernormal powers evident in the psychical data are early signs of the species’ evolutionary advance. Myers at least is quite clear that the history of spirit communication gives witness to “the evolution of human personality” and that his work speaks “of faculties newly dawning, and of a destiny greater than we know” (HP 1:19). He even suggests that humanity may be able to hasten its own evolution and openly encourages his readers to see that their greatest duty is to increase the intensity of their mystical life and so come to recognize “that their own spirits are co-operative elements in the cosmic evolution, are part and parcel of the ultimate vitalizing Power” common to all religions (HP 1:23, 219).

  What are these evolving “faculties newly dawning”? There are numerous supernormal capacities posited in Human Personality, and all of them are derived from the data, that is, from the stories collected in the field or through the correspondence. Many of these powers, however, are best understood as different manifestations of a form of consciousness that is both nonlocal and nontemporal, that is, a form of Mind not bound by the usual parameters of space and time.

  A later writer like Aldous Huxley—the grandson of T. H. Huxley and his agnosticism—would call this form of consciousness Mind at Large and turn to the “artifices” of mescaline and LSD in order to become what he called an aspiring “Gnostic.”102 Such a gnosis for Huxley involved experiencing, directly and personally, the brain as a kind of filter (as opposed to the producer) of consciousness. Major thinkers like William James, Henri Bergson, and C. D. Broad had all arrived at a similar conclusion before Huxley. Neuroscientist Edward Kelly has succinctly captured these various “filter” or “transmission” theories of mind by describing them as models “according to which mind is not generated by the brain but instead focused, limited, and constrained by it.”103

  Although Myers would arrive at a more or less identical theory of consciousness, he took no mescaline, nor did he ever use the term “filter.” His expressions tended to be much more conservative and classical. Hence the first occurrence of the phrase “supernormal power” appears within yet another of his Greek coinages, hyperpromethia, defined as a “supernormal power of foresight; attributed to the subliminal self as a hypothesis by which to explain premonitions” (HP 1:xvii). Similarly, he turns to his Latin in order to coin the word retrocognition in order to refer to “Kno
wledge of the Past, supernormally acquired” (HP 1:xxi).

  As the above definitions make clear, the supernormal was intimately related to the subliminal. It was not that Myers’s subjects were walking around like Hollywood’s superheroes, seeing into the future or the past whenever they wished. Quite the contrary, whatever powers they reported seemed to work almost entirely outside the range of their conscious control, that is, subliminally. If there was an occasional Superman here, and there was, he usually appeared to and within a completely baffled Clark Kent. Hence Myers could write of “a shifting of man’s psychical centre of gravity from the conscious to the sub-conscious or subliminal strata of his being—and accompanied by the manifestation of powers at least not obviously derivable from terrestrial evolution.”104 Of course, Superman was not of this earth either.

  The clearest evidence of such evolving, subliminal, supernormal powers, Myers thought, could be found in the empirical data of psychical research, but both he and his colleagues recognized that the situation was complicated, to say the least. It is certainly true that the data can suggest the existence of hidden superpowers. But it is also true that such a conclusion finally relies on a particular interpretation of the data. Put more precisely, the supernormal arose not from the data alone, but from the ways Myers interpreted its patterns and their implied connections. This is why, I suspect, the very first occurrence of the supernormal appears within his opening definition of the term coincidental. “Coincidental,” Myers writes at the top of his fourth page, “is used when there is some degree of coincidence in time of occurrence between a supernormal incident and an event at a distance, which makes it seem probable that some causal connection exists between the two” (HP 1:xvi). This looks a lot like what Jung would later call a synchronicity.

  This originary appearance of the supernormal and the coincidental suggests that much, maybe everything, about how we read Frederic Myers comes down to how we manage just three terms: coincidence, cause, and comparison. Let me put it this way. When Mr. A wakes up in the middle of the night and sees his brother, Mr. B., standing at the bottom of his bed dripping wet, and then learns the next day that his brother had drowned the night before, what exactly are our interpretive options here? We can posit a causal X-connection called “telepathy” between the subliminal mind of Mr. B as he died and the subliminal mind of Mr. A as he slept, which is exactly what Myers and his colleagues did. But this, as they would be the first to admit, is a speculative theory, hence Myers’s very careful “makes it seem probable” phrase above. We do not really have a cause, at least not one we can safely identify and agree upon yet. What we do have are two events that are meaningfully connected. What we have, in other words, is a story, a text, a narrative, both quite literally in Myers’s book—which is filled with hundreds of such stories—but also in the historical world, where these events have indeed come together in deeply meaningful ways for those experiencing them, as if the world is a story telling itself. Jung called this meaningful connection without an obvious cause a synchronicity. In my own terms, we might say that the supernormal arises from the act of reading the paranormal writing us.

  If a coincidence, then, is a set of two events that appear to be related but for which no obvious causal connection can be found, comparison is the act of lining up numerous such coincidences until a hidden pattern can be posited and a story intuited. It is crucial to understand here that comparison is not necessarily about identifying causal mechanisms, although it certainly may lead to this, as in Darwin’s comparative observations about morphological coincidences between the beaks, wings, and limbs of various species that led to his theory of natural selection. What comparison is always about, though, is identifying meaningful connections between apparently separate events or things, that is, between seeming coincidences (which, again, makes the comparative method a very close cousin of Jung’s synchronicity, not to mention traditional magic and modern occultism).105 What sets apart Myers’s comparative method is that he will indeed posit a cause between the coincidence of a subjective vision and an external physical event. He will bestow a specific set of meanings on this cause (he will call it supernormal and link it to evolution), and he will give this causal mechanism a new name—telepathy.

  Telepathy: The Communications Technology of the Spirit

  Visions, of course, can also manifest no coincidence with the physical world. When there is no coincidence of time or fact between a vision and an external event, Myers calls these visions “delusional.” When there is such a meaningful coincidence, he calls them “veridical.” Which brings us to another coinage, the seeming oxymoron veridical hallucination.

  Such an expression functioned as one of the central data points of the S.P.R. Indeed, it was one of the earliest data points, as witnessed by the 702 cases of Phantasms of the Living. A “phantasm of the living” was defined as the appearance of someone in a dream or vision who was either alive but would be dead within twelve hours or who had not been dead for more than twelve hours.106 This is perhaps a curious way to describe the “living,” but they were trying to be precise and methodical in James’s Gothic jungle. Jungle indeed. There were all sorts of weird problems here, from the simple fact that apparitions usually came clothed (hence Deborah Blum’s delightful chapter, “Metaphysics and Metatrousers”) to the even weirder fact that there were more than a few cases of collective apparitions in which multiple individuals saw the same or a very similar vision (I close this book with a retelling of what is probably the most famous case of this collective phenomenon).

  Myers’s original reading of collective visions is worth explaining, as it is a good example of how he thought and wrote “off the page.” To explain such events, Myers invoked the subject of traveling clairvoyance, that is, the assumed ability of gifted somnambulists to travel in mind to distant places and bring back information that could then be used and verified (as in crime cases). Basically, Myers suggested that a collective apparition may be the sighting of a traveling clairvoyant in some sort of spiritual double or subtle body. He called the “point in space so modified by the presence of a spirit that it becomes perceptible to persons materially present near it” a phantasmogenetic center (HP 1:xix). There were even reciprocal cases in the files of the S.P.R. in which the traveling clairvoyant saw an individual at a distant locale and the individual saw the clairvoyant, hence the reported “bilocations” of Catholic saints. Gauld takes up such a line of thought and imagines what it would imply about a ghostly apparition. Such a phantasm, he suggests, could be compared to “a traveling clairvoyant who has been permanently cut off from his body.”107 One can catch the glimmers of a general theory of the paranormal taking shape within such thoughts.

  Things were not always this impossible, though. The classic or modal case of a veridical hallucination involved an often mundane dream or remarkably calm waking vision of a dying or dead loved one that was clearly hallucinatory, that is, a product of the imagination, but also carried accurate and veridical information about the time, nature, or details of the death, all unknown and unknowable to the supraliminal self until the subliminal or telepathic communication occurs. As Myers and company documented, cross-checked, and confirmed hundreds of times, the unsuspecting visionary, sometimes separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles, somehow knows what has happened—an eerie or surreal mix of “subjective” dream and “objective” reality, precisely as Breton intuited.

  There is, for example, the simple and brief case of Archdeacon Farler, “who twice during one night saw the dripping figure of a friend who, as it turned out, had been drowned during the previous day” (HP 2:17). Or there is the slightly more complex case of Reverend G. M. Tandy, who saw the face of an old friend from Cambridge in his window so clearly that he went out to look for him. Not finding him, he came back into the house, picked up a newspaper another friend had just given him, and read the first piece of news that he saw. It happened to be on the death of the old Cambridge friend whom he had just seen in his
window (HP 2:57).

  The case sent to “Professor James” about the death of Mrs. Margaret Q. R. is more complex still. Technically, it is more of a veridical audition than a veridical hallucination. Mrs. Q. R. died in her home in Wisconsin on November 5, 1885, at 8:40 p.m. One of her sons, a man named Robert, was working in North Dakota at the time, seven hundred miles away. Shortly after her death, at 9:45 p.m., her two daughters decided to lay down in an upstairs bedroom in order to deal with their grief, when both of them distinctly heard their brother Robert singing “We had better bide a wee.” So clearly did they hear the words and tune that they opened the windows of the upstairs bedroom in order to try to determine from what direction the sound was coming. When they got around to the east window, they heard a group now singing the last verse, as the music seemed to float off toward the north. When Robert returned home two days later, his two sisters were astonished to learn that he had in fact been singing that exact song at that exact time at a church function in North Dakota. Not only that, but the telegram announcing his mother’s death “was brought to him, and was held by the operator so as not to spoil the entertainment by telling him before he sang, and we—my sister Mary Q. and I—both heard every note and word of that song sung about seven hundred miles away, while our mother’s remains were in the parlour under our bedroom” (HP 2:58–59).

  Then there are the exceedingly complex cases, which read more like supernatural novellas than simple letters. Myers introduces one such case, which runs to three pages, by describing it as “one of the best-attested, and in itself one of the most remarkable, that we possess.” The account was originally published in the Proceedings and was sent to the American branch by a certain Mr. F. G. of Boston. The letter writer opens by stating that this event “made a more powerful impression on my mind than the combined incidents of my whole life.” It is not difficult to see why.