by Lyall Watson
In all ages stern warnings have been issued against magic, ritual, drug, and trance procedures because of the dangers said to be inherent in communicating with something that could turn the tables and take over control of those involved. This risk is even recognized by law in the notion of "diminished responsibility," which deals leniently with a person considered to have acted under the influence of powers greater than his own.
The barrier between the two parts of the mind seems to be a powerful and even a necessary one. When it is breached by the transcendent experience of religious conversion, the convert may make contact with the spirit of a god, but is equally likely to be visited by devils. Chemical bridges over the barrier can lead to good or bad trips. Mediums often communicate with spirits that seem to have nothing but good intentions, but they are all constantly on their guard against being possessed by an evil spirit. The conclusion that our personalities are naturally and inevitably divided, both by our anatomy and by our experience, seems inescapable. I think it not unlikely that mediums may turn out to be people who have barriers between the two parts of their minds that are more than normally permeable. The best mediums have conscious control over these gateways, but there are many who resemble schizophrenics in the fact that they have no dominion over the comings and goings of their minds.
We higher primates, perhaps because of nothing more than an evolutionary accident, have a waking consciousness and a view of reality dominated by our well-developed cerebral hemispheres. We conveniently label those whose view of the world is less firmly grounded in this particular area as mad. Dolphins and birds have comparatively well developed cerebellar areas, and if their senses are organized in this hindbrain as well as in the cerebrum, they may have a totally different concept of reality -- one perhaps not greatly different from that enjoyed by mystics who have got the two parts of their minds together in other ways. Could this be the significance of John Lilly's identification with dolphins [166] and Carlos Castaneda's confrontation with an albino falcon? [44]
In addition to his opposing forces of id and ego, Freud also suggested that there might be a third entity, the superego. [27] If it is possible for the id or unconscious to well up and take over control of the consciousness during possession, perhaps the ego during this time actually moves to another area of the nervous system. Gooch again looks for a physical location and suggests that as this interaction between the two old systems is comparatively new, the third one will be found in that area of the brain most recently evolved -- the frontal lobes. [91]
Following this notion of a third level, we can suppose that possession means the domination of the unmoved consciousness, but that transcendence is the movement of the consciousness to a higher level as the result of the co-operation of the two formerly conflicting forces. Every mystical tradition and most of the new ideas about the growth of mind refer to higher states of consciousness, and the techniques for getting there all seem to revolve around two things. The first is a method of knocking some kind of hole in the barrier between the conscious and the unconscious levels of mind and opening this door on demand and at will. The second and more difficult step is to reconcile the conflicting interests and capabilities of the two systems and to forge an agreement that allows some measure of cooperation between them.
This model of the mind is necessarily very simplistic. The variety of personality types (and the legions of demons in the annals of the occult) suggests that there are probably many channels in and between consciousness and unconsciousness. If two apparently independent personality patterns can exist within the same person, there is nothing to prevent further splitting taking place. Multiple personalities can occur. The Three Faces of Eve [270] and Sybil [242] are two well-documented case histories that suggest some of the possibilities. There is nothing in either of these accounts that makes it necessary to assume that any outside agency is involved in the possession. A useful analogy is the one given by Gooch of a room containing a variety of illumination systems such as a chandelier, a table lamp, and concealed wall lighting. [91] One may light the room from any of these sources and each "will give the room a different character, and be respectively more suitable for particular occasions. One knows from one's own experience that lighting can create or dispel shadows, or give prominence to certain aspects of a room at the sacrifice of yet others. Nonetheless, it is of course always the same room."
I think that many of the phenomena produced by mediums in states of possession are the result of multiple intrusions of this kind from their own unconscious levels. We know that telepathy operates at that level as well, so it is not surprising that possessing personalities should bring with them information from outside sources, but sometimes this is so rich and detailed that the telepathic explanation begins to look a little strained.
Mary Roff died on July 5, 1865, at the age of eighteen. By all reports she was a strange girl, given to epileptic fits and pains in the head which she would relieve by bleeding herself. She is said to have had eyeless sight, being able to read books when blindfolded and letters still sealed in their envelopes. On April 16, 1864, just fourteen months before Mary died in convulsions, another young girl was born in the same town. Lurancy Vennum was perfectly normal for all of her first thirteen years, but when she reached puberty, strange things began to happen. The first was a cataleptic state that lasted five hours and this was followed by irregular trances in which she described "angels" and "spirits." She was believed insane and handed over for observation to a specialist. He found that she was apparently possessed by two alien personalities -- one a sullen, crabbed old hag and the other a young man who had committed suicide. Under hypnosis it was possible to restore Lurancy'S own personality, and in it she explained that there was only one way to keep the two evil spirits away, and that was to allow herself to be possessed instead by an angel that wanted to come to her aid. On being asked if she knew who it was, she said, "Her name is Mary Roff." [262]
Lurancy seemed to become Mary and was allowed to go and live with the Roff family. There she was perfectly happy, knowing every person and everything that Mary knew, recognizing friends and neighbors and calling them by name, remembering hundreds of incidents from Mary's life, including the big ones like a trip to Texas and the little ones like sewing on a collar. She was even able to find things that Mary had hidden and about which the Roff family knew nothing. This possession lasted for three months and ten days, and then suddenly Lurancy returned and went back to live with her own family, whom she now recognized again.
There have been many cases of alternating personalities, but this one is special in that the personality that displaced Lurancy's was, by every test that could be applied, that of Mary Roff complete with all the memories that belonged to this eighteen-year-old girl who had died when Lurancy was only one year old. The Roff and Vennum families had no contact, and there was no normal way Lurancy could have obtained the extensive and detailed knowledge of Mary's life that she demonstrated during her possession. After her return to her own personality, she knew nothing about the lost hundred days and never again had any problems of this kind.
The existence of fragmented and alternating personalities poses no great problems for psychology, but the possibility of invasion from outside can only be assessed by looking for biological precedents. For a biologist, one of the most appealing themes in science fiction is that of the gestalt, explored so beautifully by Theodore Sturgeon. [266] He starts one story with an awkward young man of great strength but limited intelligence who attracts others to him and forms the basis for a compound organism. To his "body" is added the "head" of a sensitive telepathic girl, the "hands" of a pair of psychokinetic twins, the "mind" of a Mongol baby with the capacity of a computer, and the "energy" of psychopathic teen-age criminal. Together this collection of misfits wield enormous but totally undirected power and seem destined to destroy their composite self and all those around, until the organism becomes complete with the addition of the "soul" of a young poet.
This might well be the way in which human evolution will now have to progress. Environmental changes today take place so fast that there is no longer time for the normal leisurely modifications of physical evolution. If we are to adapt and survive in some way, it seems that natural selection can only succeed if it acts at a mental level, and one of the most productive directions could be that of the combination, or gestalt. We can already begin to see the strength-of psychological unity in the co-ordinated behavior of a crowd.
Elias Canetti regards the crowd as an organism in its own right. [39] He distinguishes between random groups of people who just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and genuine crowds, which develop around a focal point that he calls a crowd crystal. The formation and growth of crowds are certainly universal and still rather mysterious phenomena. They can occur anywhere. At one moment there may be a few scattered individuals, and in the next there is a concerted action in which the movement of some parts of the organism seems to transmit itself to all the others like the waves of nervous discharge in a jellyfish. The people who form a crowd often do not know what has happened and if questioned have no answer, but they nevertheless hurry toward their common and invisible goal. A crowd in this state is a nebulous entity feeding on people. In its juvenile phase it is driven by only one instinct, the urge to grow. It wants to seize everyone within reach and it knows no limits, but in the formative period it is still a sensitive thing. Canetti says that a "foreboding of threatening disintegration is always alive in the crowd. It seeks, through rapid increase, to avoid this for as long as it can; it absorbs everyone, and, because it does, must ultimately fall to pieces."
The crowd organism exists for as long as it has an unattained goal. This may be a short-term one, such as a killing or the destruction of a building, or it may be as long-term as the vision of the Promised Land that kept the children of Israel together on their flight from Egypt. Species of crowd can be classified according to the nature of their goal, but all have certain attributes in common. Within their bounds, individual people lose separate identities, names, and economic and social status and become equal parts of the new being. This feeling is so strong that it is possible that all demands for justice and all theories of equality are based on the actual experience of brotherhood familiar to anyone who has ever been part of a crowd. In its unusual density all concepts of individual space are abandoned and all fear of touch and contact is lost in the new togetherness. In a dancing crowd the individuals are fused into a single creature with fifty heads and a hundred arms and legs all thrashing in unison. The actions may be prescribed and ritual in some species of crowd that have been domesticated by war or religion. These are unusually long-lived organisms, and as a result, they become diluted, but the most powerful crowd is the spontaneous one that rushes together for instant gratification. This species reaches its goal quickly, and at the moment of discharge that signals its end, it often produces a sound. When the executioner holds up the severed head of the victim, the voice of the crowd can be heard. This unique cry, the call of the organism, expresses its unity more powerfully than any other action. It is a vivid demonstration of the fact that the community is something qualitatively different from the simple sum of its parts.
The force that combines individual people together into a crowd is as mysterious as that which unites separate cells into a functional whole. It may be the same force that powers the etheric double and works at our unconscious level to produce the internal co-ordinating effects of acupuncture and the external manifestations of psychokinesis and poltergeists.
The best biological examples of individuals combining to form totally new organisms are the lichens. These are plants that grow like colored crusts or foliose clumps on tree trunks and exposed rock and provide the dominant flora in harsh mountain and tundra areas. They have specific forms and patterns and can be classified according to these characteristic colors and shapes, but every single lichen is composed of two totally distinct species belonging to separate botanical classes. One component is a green or blue-green alga and the other is an ascomycete fungus, each rather fragile on its own, and yet together they form a symbiotic compound capable of pioneering territories where few other living things can survive. The algal part can live on its own, but the fungus cannot survive unless its spores land in a place where the photosynthetic algal partner is present and available for combination. I believe that intruding personalities in cases of possession play a role similar to that of the fungal component in a lichen and that if it is at all possible for the dead to survive for long, they have a similarly parasitic relationship to the living.
So far we have established the following facts:
Every living thing creates and is surrounded by a life field. This
is an electrical phenomenon that exists at the normal physical
level of the body and can be measured by standard laboratory
equipment. It disappears at the moment of clinical death. Each body
also is accompanied by a bioplasmic counterpart that exists at a less
physical level, takes roughly the same form as the body, and is somehow
involved in controlling and organizing vital functions. This is not as
easily measured, but its existence is inferred from the practice of
acupuncture, and it can be revealed by special techniques involving
high-frequency apparatus. It does not disappear at the moment of
clinical death.
Any addition to this structure must be largely speculative, but I think that we are justified in suggesting the following pattern:
Apparitions of the living are produced by the detached bioplasmic or
etheric body which is visible all the time to certain sensitive people
and to others under special conditions. [248]
Apparitions of the dead can be seen in the same way for a short time
after clinical death, but the bioplasma body itself decays in time.
So if these apparitions persist for considerable periods after death,
it is necessary to assume that the bioplasma has been re-energized in
some way, most probably by contact with another and complete living
body. [277]
We have already seen what happens to a living cell taken away from its normal environment in the body. If properly cared for, it continues to grow and divide, but eventually it reaches the Hayflick limit, becomes totally anonymous, and then dies. This degradation can be halted in two ways. The first is by restoring the cell to its original body. Ideally it should be put back in touch with its own tissue, but it seems that a lost cell can regain its identity and vigor even if it is denied chemical contact with others of its kind. All it seems to need to "help it remember who it was supposed to be" is a transfusion with the right kind of energy. Experts in the culture of isolated tissue know that the easiest cells to grow are those taken from their own bodies, and that these tend to thrive best if given a lot of personal attention. This is one of those persistent fragments of laboratory superstition that could turn out to be based, like the concept of a gardener's green thumb, on fact.
The second way of giving an isolated cell a new lease on life is to induce a genetic change. If cells in a tissue culture go racing beyond the Hayflick limit, one can be almost certain that they have mutated -- and become cancerous. This of course also sometimes happens to body cells while they are still part of an organism, but normally mutations are confined to reproductive cells, which are unique also in being the only living units that are deliberately isolated from the body. Human sperm cells, even in the optimal conditions of the uterus, cannot survive for longer than forty-eight hours, but the one that fertilizes an egg, and in doing so undergoes a genetic change, can start a culture that keeps on going for a hundred years. Both kinds of sex cell, the sperm and the egg, have half the usual number of chromosomes, and one would expect this to limit their capacity for survival; but what does the fertilized egg
have that enables it to go on living and dividing long enough to produce a completely new individual, when any other isolated body cell is subject to the Hayflick limit? Both have the normal number of forty-six chromosomes and access to all the necessary raw materials, but it seems that the egg has acquired some reproductive advantage simply by having mixed its genes with those of another. This benefit persists throughout its life and is recognized in biology under the name of heterosis or hybrid vigor, which is an increase in growth or fertility that occurs as a result of a cross between two genetically different lines. This advantage is so powerful that it must have played a major part in the evolution of sexual reproduction, but it cannot be explained by noting only that a mixture of genetic material has taken place. Something else has been added, but mystery still surrounds the nature of this wonder additive that gives a fertilized egg its unlimited potential.
Mystics find nothing mysterious in this phenomenon. They simply assume that a discarnate soul comes along, takes up residence in the ovum, and is reincarnated. The doctrine of reincarnation is a very persuasive one, providing ready solutions to so many philosophic problems and biological anomalies, but as a scientist I cannot adopt it simply because it seems expedient. I need to search for some corroboration that could make it acceptable to my intellect as well as my intuition. To mystics it appears futile to seek evidence for something that seems to be self-evident, but I find that the search itself, even if it should be unsuccessful, brings understanding that can be gained in no other way.