Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (13 page)

The psychological castle built in this manner possesses a mindboggling number of rooms, hallways, dungeons, and secret stairwells, but it is also all basically a duplex. It is all, that is, built after the blueprint of Myers's central category of the
subliminal Self
. Myers argued that the human
personality
can be thought of as operating on two major functional levels, each of which is normally separated from the other by a “threshold” (
limen
). For Myers, in other words, the human personality is a
homo duplex
, or what I have called the Human as Two. There is what he called the
supraliminal
or “above” (
supra
) “the threshold” (
limen
) sense of self that one carries around most of the time as one's social and personal identity and mistakes as one's complete and total self. And there is the
subliminal
or “below” (
sub
) “the threshold” (
limen
) Self that normally manifests only in altered forms of consciousness, such as dreams or creative acts of genius, or under excessive or traumatic conditions that break down or temporarily suppress the operations of the supraliminal personality, as in trance, possession, ecstasy and, finally, death.

Here is how he defined his central term in the opening pages of
Human Personality
:

Subliminal
.—Of thoughts, feelings, etc., lying beneath the ordinary
threshold
(
limen
) of consciousness, as opposed to
supraliminal
, lying
above
the threshold. Excitations are termed subliminal when they are too weak to rise into direct notice; and I have extended the application of the term to feeling, thought, or faculty, which is kept thus submerged, not by its own weakness, but by the constitution of man's personality. The threshold (
Schwelle
) must be regarded as a level above which waves may rise,—like a slab washed by the sea,—rather than as an entrance into a chamber. (HP 1:xxi)

Myers did not invent the term
subliminal
, but he did redefine it. As the above quotation makes clear, this redefinition revolved around the idea that the subliminal named a certain dual structure of the human personality.

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this distinction between the supraliminal and the subliminal aspects of the human personality for early attempts to analyze and interpret religious phenomena. It was precisely psychological models like this one, after all, that allowed nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers to think anew about religious experience in a way that was both sympathetic to
and
suspicious of religious claims. They now had a powerful way to explain religious experiences without explaining them away.

But it would also be difficult
not
to misunderstand Myers's particular distinction between the subliminal and supraliminal levels of the human personality. There are at least two problems here. The first is his unfortunate use of the prefixes
sub
- and
supra
- in this context. Together, these two prefixes imply that what goes on “under” the threshold of egoic awareness
is
less conscious or developed than what goes on “above” it, that the social ego and its sensory capacities are somehow superior to other forms of consciousness and their own respective capacities. Myers recognized the problem and rejected this assumption:

There seems no reason to assume that our active consciousness is necessarily altogether superior to the consciousnesses which are at present secondary, or potential only. We may rather hold that
super-conscious
may be quite as legitimate a term as
sub-conscious
, and instead of regarding our consciousness (as is commonly done) as a
threshold
in our being, above which ideas and sensations must rise if we wish to cognize them, we may prefer to regard it as a
segment
of our being, into which ideas and sensations may enter either from below or from above.
⁷⁹

The second problem, very much related to the first, is the fact that Myers's consistent duplex language seems to suggest a basic dualism in the human personality. Again, Myers recognized the problem and explicitly rejected such a notion.

We must be very careful, then, about how we use a category like the Human as Two, which is my way of relating comparative mystical literature to modern psychological theory. Following Myers, I am using the expression not as a metaphysical statement implying an absolute dualism (which I also reject), but as a helpful heuristic device that captures quite accurately the kinds of functional dualisms that do in fact seem to give structure to human experience throughout the history of religions.

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 psychological 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.