Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

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Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 12

by Jeffrey J. Kripal


  In 1867, the letter writer’s only sister died of cholera in St. Louis, Missouri, at a mere eighteen years. This was a severe blow to him, as he was very close to her and loved her deeply. A year or so later, he was traveling on business and happened to be in St. Joseph, Missouri (which, for non-Midwesterners, is on the opposite side of the state from St. Louis). He had sold a number of orders for his business, so he was particularly happy at the moment. It was noon, and he was smoking a cigar and cheerfully writing out his orders when

  I suddenly became conscious that some one was sitting on my left, with one arm resting on the table. Quick as a flash I turned and distinctly saw the form of my dead sister, and for a brief second or so looked her squarely in the face; and so sure was I that it was she, that I sprang forward in delight, calling her by name, and, as I did so, the apparition instantly vanished.

  The cigar in his mouth, the pen in his hand, and the still moist ink on his letter told him that he was not dreaming. Nor did his sister appear ghostly. On the contrary, her flesh “was so life-like that I could see the glow or moisture on its surface, and, on the whole, there was no change in her appearance, otherwise than when alive.”

  He was so impressed that he ended a business trip he had just begun and immediately took the next train home to tell his parents what he had seen. In particular, he “told them of a bright red line or scratch on the right-hand side of my sister’s face.” His mother rose and nearly fainted when she heard this particular detail. With tears in her eyes, she then “exclaimed that I had indeed seen my sister, as no living mortal but herself was aware of that scratch, which she had accidentally made while doing some little act of kindness after my sister’s death.” She was embarrassed, and so had covered the little scar with powder and make-up (as she prepared the body for burial, I take it) and never mentioned it to anyone. The writer goes on: “In proof, neither my father nor any of our family had detected it, and positively were unaware of the incident, yet I saw the scratch as bright as if it [were] just made.” A few weeks later, his mother died, “happy in her belief she would rejoin her favourite daughter in a better world.”

  It is interesting to see how the society debated this particular story. Frank Podmore, for example, wanted to argue that the daughter’s apparition was a projection of the mother’s mind. Obviously, this leaves a good deal unanswered, like how such a projection could extend from St. Louis to St. Joseph, but this is precisely the sort of thing that they came to call telepathy. Myers, on the other hand, sees much more. He sees a pastoral or emotional purpose in the telepathic event. More specifically, he wants to read the coincidence as “too marked to be explained away: the son is brought home in time to see his mother once more by perhaps the only means which would have succeeded; and the mother herself is sustained by the knowledge that her daughter loves and awaits her.” Myers thus ranks this case as an example of “a perception by the spirit of her mother’s approaching death” (HP 2:27–30).

  Then there is the related subject of dreams as veridical hallucinations. There are hundreds of cases we could treat here. As a rather arbitrary means of focusing, let us consider just nine pages of the second volume of Human Personality (HP 2:209–17). The first thing to remind ourselves here is that Myers understood consciousness not as a discrete or stable phenomenon, but as a broad spectrum of potentialities that are actualized at different points in space and time. Dreams or dreamlike phenomena are spread out along this entire spectrum. So there is not one kind of dream for Myers. Quite the contrary, there are different types of dreams for differently evolved states of consciousness. There are normal dreams. And there are supernormal dreams. There are dreams. And there are dreams.

  Consider, for example, the case of the two elite French intellectuals, Professor J. Thoulet and Professor Charles Richet, both well known to historians of psychology. On April 17, 1892, Thoulet wrote Richet with a most remarkable story. During the summer of 1867, Thoulet was traveling with an older friend by the name of M. F., a former naval officer turned businessman. They were sleeping in adjoining rooms. One night Thoulet awoke suddenly, walked into his friend’s room and said, “You have just got a little girl; the telegram says . . . ” He began to read the telegram—until, that is, he realized that he had received the telegram in a dream. At that moment, the telegram dissolved in his hands, and he could not read any further. The words he had already read remained, however, fully pronounced and clear in his memory; those he had not been able to read, that he had not allowed himself to consider real, remained as only a “form,” as he put it. At M. F.’s insistence, he wrote out what he could, and drew the rest as in pictorial form. He had repeated two or three lines of a six-line telegram.

  Eight or ten days later, now in Turin on his own, Thoulet received a “real” telegram from M. F.: “Come directly, you were right.” He returned to M. F., who showed him a telegram he had received the night before. “I recognized it as the one I had seen in my dream; the beginning was exactly what I had written, and the end, which was exactly like my drawing.” Thoulet himself underlines the weirdest part, namely, that he had dreamt of a telegram that had not been sent yet: “I had seen it ten days before it existed or could have existed.” Thoulet admits that, were he called into court on this matter, he could not produce a shred of reliable evidence. Nevertheless, “I am obliged to admit that it happened.”

  Or consider the case of a certain Mr. Edward A. Goodall, a member of the Royal Society of Painters. In the summer of 1869, he was vacationing in Naples when a pack-donkey he was sitting on suddenly fell to its knees, “as if he had been shot or struck by lightning,” and threw Goodall to the pavement, injuring his arm. Now bedridden, he awoke suddenly on the third or fourth night to the sound of his own voice saying, “I know I have lost my dearest little May.” Another voice, which he did not recognize, answered back immediately and clearly, “No, not May, but your youngest boy.” The next morning he noticed telegraph wires outside and sent a telegram back home. Later, he received two letters from home. The first informed him that his youngest boy was ill, the second that he was dead. The time of death coincided “as nearly as we could judge with the time of my accident.” Mr. Goodall speculated that the donkey’s collapse may have been caused by “terror at some apparition of the dying child.”

  It was out of thousands of stories like these that Myers coined the term telepathy in 1882, no doubt after the then cutting-edge technology of the telegraph and telegram.108 Interestingly, two of the three stories that I have just recounted involve precisely this new communications technology. And why not? Early models of Spiritualism had turned to the same kind of language, framing spirit-communications as a kind of “spiritual telegraphy.” Gauld also humorously reminds us that the spirits often claimed famous names, with Benjamin Franklin being one of their favorites, “perhaps because his electrical skills made him seem a likely inventor of the ‘Spiritual Telegraph.’”109 In a similar playful spirit, Bertrand Méheust goes so far as to describe Spiritualism as flowing out of a certain “mythology of telecommunications,” with the early knocks of the Fox sisters as a kind of celestial Morse code.110 On the other side of the equation, many of the earliest inventors of the new radio technology—Nikola Tesla, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Lord Raleigh—were all intimately involved in psychical research and sometimes imagined their science along similar occult lines.111 And it would not be long before the American writer Upton Sinclair would soon frame his own successful experiments with telepathy as a kind of “mental radio,” with none other than Albert Einstein writing the preface.112 The comparisons were simply irresistible.

  In the opening definitions of Human Personality, Myers defined telepathy as “the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense” (HP 1:xxii). Myers points out that the distance through which telepathic communications take place may be measured in miles or in metaphysical states, that is, between physical distances or between the
living and the dead. He also suggests that “[t]he operation of telepathy is probably constant and far-reaching, and intermingled with ordinary modes of acquiring knowledge” (HP 1:xlii). As the researches and writing of the S.P.R. developed, its members eventually came to see telepathy as the central category through which the stories they were receiving and back-checking made the most sense. The “telepathic law,” as Myers came to call it, thus became the bedrock theoretical construct of Human Personality.

  The collection of phenomena that this single construct named, however, was by no means singular or simple. To begin with, telepathic events were highly variable, ranging from those focused on some simple projective technology, like the tapping table, crystal ball, or planchette (a kind of automatic writing device invented in 1853 that would later morph into the Ouija Board or “Yes-Yes Board”), to exceedingly complex psychological automatisms, such as automatic writing, trance, and possession states. Words or textual messages were often the literal product, but not always. Myers points out that symbolism, music, and the visual arts are often more natural media for subliminal expressions (HP 1:xxx).

  Sometimes, moreover, the message is encoded in an even more basic, and more certain, feeling-tone. Significantly, Myers chose a coinage that literally means “feeling at distance” (telepathy), and not “voice at a distance” (telephony) or “writing at a distance” (telegraphy). By doing so, he chose to emphasize the emotional, not the intellectual or verbal, components of these remarkable events. There were at least two very good reasons to do this: (1) as phenomena rooted deeply in the wisdom of the body, telepathic communications appear to escape or subvert the rational censor, which would otherwise deem them impossible and so prevent them from happening at all; and (2) telepathic communications often emerge from highly charged events involving people who care about one another deeply, that is, they often involve the two greatest themes in human emotional experience: love and death. Pathos does indeed seem to be a key for Myers, maybe the key, as we shall soon see.

  It is also important to note that the category of telepathy emerged from the data of dreams and mediums, and that it was originally a category of suspicion, that is to say, it was developed in order to refute the older objectivist model of spirits. In essence, it “reduced” the phenomena of spirit-communication to a human psychical potential theoretically present in everyone. It thus practiced a form of reductionism, but finally found the human nature to which the religious phenomena could be reduced to be ironically spiritlike.113 Which is not to say that all of the researchers rejected the spirit thesis. They did not. Some of them at least were forced to conclude that telepathic communications could occur either between two living minds, or, more rarely, between a departed spirit and a living one.

  It is also important to keep in mind that, in Myers’s model, telepathic communications could occur with or without the knowledge of the mind sending them. They could even occur without the knowledge of the mind receiving them, as in Myers’s suggestion that sometimes telepathic communications could be received in the day and lay “dormant” until the evening, when the recipient fell asleep and the telepathic communication could surface into dream consciousness. Telepathic communications, moreover, were often couched in symbolic form, as in a dream, and their messages were by no means always clear. In short, as subliminal phenomena, telepathic communications had to cross a psychological threshold in order to appear to the conscious ego at all. Remember the limen? We are back to the Human as Two.

  And this, of course, is where Frederic Myers becomes a preeminent author of the impossible. He gives us a plausible explanation for why the impossible seems impossible, but is not. He teaches us that the impossible may in fact be a function not of the unreality or fiction of psychical events, but of our own inadequate models of the human personality and our fundamental failure to distinguish between the subliminal Self, which appears to be shared between individuals beyond both space and time, and the social ego, which is clearly limited to the individual personality and quite obviously restricted in both space and time. Because we keep assuming that our full human personalities and our social egos are coterminous and identical, we find telepathic events baffling, fraudulent, that is to say, impossible. What we have to do, Myers suggests, is shift our focus from the supraliminal to the subliminal. What we have to do is cross that threshold. Then the impossible not only becomes the possible. It becomes the real.

  The Perfect Insect of the Imaginal

  Such a threshold, however, cannot be crossed directly or literally, except perhaps at death. Before that, it can only be crossed through images, myths, and symbols. This, I would suggest, is also why the preeminent data fields of the supernormal lie in comparative mystical literature and the folklore and mythologies of the history of religions, that is, in those human expressions involving symbol and myth. Enter the category of the imaginal.

  Those who are familiar with the term inevitably trace it back to the French historian of Iranian Islamic mysticism Henri Corbin, who famously used it to discuss the profound effects mystical experience is said to have on the powers of imagination within his Iranian sources. Following his textual sources (and his own initiatory transmission from a medieval Sufi saint), Corbin understood the imaginal to be a noetic organ that accessed a real dimension of the cosmos whose appearances to us were nevertheless shaped by what he called the “creative imagination” (l’imagination créatrice). The creative imagination is an empowered form of what most people experience in its simpler and unenlightened state as the imagination or the imaginary. The imaginal is not the imaginary, though. The imaginal is in touch with and translating a higher dimension of reality, what Myers would have called the extraterrene. The imaginary is the same organ working on a strictly naturalistic or mundane level, what Myers would have called the terrene.

  Now it is true that Corbin brought the imaginal into contemporary scholarly prominence. But it is not true that he invented the term. Nor is it true that he was the first major scholar of religion to employ it. The seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Henry More appears to have coined the category, in 1642, as “the imaginall” in his Psychodia Platonica; or, a Platonick song of the Soul. The first major theorist of the imaginal in the study of religion to use the term in a consistent way, however, was none other than Frederic Myers.

  Drawing on over a century of Romantic poetry and literature that recognized the imaginative powers as capable of both floating fantasy and revelatory cognition, Myers understood that the human imagination works in many modes and on many levels. More specifically, he became convinced that in certain contexts, the imagination can take on genuinely transcendental capacities, that is, that it can make contact with what appears to be a real spiritual world or, at the very least, an entirely different order of mind and consciousness. The imaginal is the imagination on steroids. The imaginary is Clark Kent, the normal. The imaginal is Superman, the supernormal. Same guy, different suits. The Human as Two.

  As with his categories of the subliminal, the supernormal, and the telepathic, Myers linked the imaginal directly to his evolutionary worldview. Thus in the opening, still Roman-numeral pages of Human Personality, Myers defined imaginal this way: “A word used of characteristics belonging to the perfect insect or imago;—and thus opposed to larval;—metaphorically applied to transcendental faculties shown in rudiment in ordinary life” (HP 1:xviii). That’s a bit elliptical. What Myers intended to communicate here was the idea that the human imagination under certain very specific conditions can take on extraordinary or supernormal capacities that represent hints of a more highly evolved human nature. In his own more technical terms, such altered states of consciousness were “preversions” that represented “[a] tendency to characteristics assumed to lie at a further point of the evolutionary progress of a species than has yet been reached” (HP 1:xx).

  Hence just as the larval stage of an insect looks nothing like the imago or mature image of its adult form (which indeed appears “bizarre” or
alienlike in comparison to the larval slug), so too the images of the human imagination can mature into extremely strange but nevertheless accurate evolutionary forms as imaginal visions or veridical hallucinations—Breton’s surreal mix of “subjective” dream and “objective” reality again. The imaginal is to the imagination, then, as the adult insect or perfect imago is to its larval slug.114

  There is a delightful parable of sorts in Science and a Future Life where Myers in effect glosses his elliptical definition of the imaginal in Human Personality. It goes like this:

  Let us suppose that some humble larvae are dissecting each other, and speculating as to their destinies. At first they find themselves precisely suited to life and death on a cabbage-leaf. Then they begin to observe certain points in their construction which are useless to larval life. These are, in fact, what are called “imaginal characters”—points of structure which indicate that the larva has descended from an imago, or perfect insect, and is destined in his turn to become one himself. These characters are much overlaid by the secondary or larval characters, which subserve larval, and not imaginal life, and they consequently may easily be overlooked or ignored. But our supposed caterpillar sticks to his point; he maintains that these characteristics indicate an aerial origin. And now a butterfly settles for a moment on the cabbage-leaf. The caterpillar points triumphantly to the morphological identity of some of the butterfly’s conspicuous characters with some of his own latent characters; and while he is trying to persuade his fellow-caterpillars of this, the butterfly flies away.

 

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