Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (15 page)

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 “Knowledge 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).