Beyond the Occult (47 page)

Long was finally able to obtain more detailed knowledge of Kahuna doctrines from a doctor, William Tufts Brigham, who had been studying them for years.
According to Brigham, low selves or low spirits may become separated from the middle and high selves after death.
And they can be used by Kahuna magicians for evil purposes — such as causing death.
Brigham had had direct experience of this.
On an expedition up a mountain a Hawaiian boy became ill and showed symptoms of suffering from the death prayer.
When questioned the boy revealed that before he left his native village the local Kahuna had warned him that if he ever worked for the hated white men he would die.
He had forgotten the threat until now.
The natives regarded Brigham as a magician in his own right, and he felt that he had to make some effort to save the boy.
Standing above him he addressed the ‘spirits’ who were slowly paralysing his body, praising and flattering them and declaring that the boy was an innocent victim and that the man who deserved the blame was the Kahuna who sent them.
For a full hour he kept his mind concentrated upon this idea.
Then, suddenly, the tension vanished and the boy said he could feel his legs again.
The paralysis soon vanished completely.
But when Brigham made enquiries at the boy’s native village he learned that the Kahuna was dead.
He had come out of his hut in the early hours of the morning and told the villagers that the white magician had redirected the spirits, and that
since he had failed to take any ritual precautions he must bear the consequences.
A few hours later he was dead.

So according to Brigham the Kahunas performed their magic by means of spirits.
And Long seemed to believe that the Kahuna system of psychology offered a satisfactory explanation of the mystery of multiple personality.
He begins by describing one of the earliest known cases of dual personality, a girl named Mary Reynolds who woke up one morning in 1811 to find that she had lost every vestige of memory — she was exactly like a newborn child and had to be taught to speak all over again.
Five weeks later the original Mary woke up with no memory of what had happened.
And for the rest of her life the two Marys alternated in the same body, so that her relatives never knew which of them would open her eyes in the morning.
Moreover the two Marys were opposites in character.
The original Mary was a dull girl, prone to nervous depression; Mary Two, like Sally Beauchamp, was merry and mischievous.
Mary One hated nature; Mary Two loved it … .

After describing the Christine Beauchamp (Clara Fowler) case, Long goes on to speak of a case which he had heard described by a certain Dr Leapsley, who lived in Honolulu.
^*
It concerned the twenty-eight-year-old daughter of a California attorney.
From the age of four she had been subject to changes of personality similar to those of Mary Reynolds.
This happened regularly every four years.
The secondary personality had been a ‘baby’ when it first arrived, like Mary Two.
Neither personality had any knowledge of the other or of what happened when the other was ‘in the body’.
So when the original inhabitant of the body woke up at the age of eight she had no memory of anything that had happened since she was four.
At the age of twelve she ‘fell asleep’ again, and woke up to find herself sixteen … .
The primary personality was quiet, studious and shy; the secondary personality was an aggressive tomboy.

Dr Leapsley and two colleagues were called in and were able to gain her trust and place her under hypnosis.
The secondary personality was ordered to leave the body, but this (predictably) had no effect.
The doctors tried ordering the two personalities to amalgamate, but still nothing happened.
Then one day when the girl was under hypnosis she went into a deep trance from which she could not be awakened.
Suddenly a third voice spoke from her mouth.
It had a distinctly masculine quality — it almost seemed to be the voice of an old man.
This personality seemed to know all the details of the lives of both girls.
And in answer to the doctors’ questions it explained that it was their ‘guardian’ and that they were, quite literally, two different girls who were using the body.

The doctors argued that the girl’s life was being ruined by this alternation of personalities: she was unable to marry or live a normal life.
The guardian disagreed with them.
The purpose of life, it said, was personal evolution, and the girl
was
learning and maturing, even though she had to share her body with a stranger.

Finally, in desperation, one of the doctors told the guardian that unless the secondary personality agreed to go away they would keep the girl hypnotized indefinitely.
To this the guardian replied that unless they accepted the present situation it would withdraw both girls and leave them with a corpse.
The doctors knew they were beaten, and the girl continued to live as a dual personality.

For Long the case was a proof of the Huna belief in the high self, the superconscious mind: the guardian, he says, was the girl’s superconscious.
The secondary personality, according to Long, was an ‘invader’, an independent spirit.

Most people will reject this view out of hand.
Science and commonsense seem to agree that personality has a great deal to do with the body.
Professor John Taylor states, ‘We recognize personality as a summation of the different contributions to behaviour from the various control units of the brain.’
And it is true that a person with a brain tumour may begin to behave in a completely uncharacteristic way: if, for
example, the tumour presses on the amygdaloid nucleus the gentlest person may become aggressive and violent.
Yet it must be admitted that even in these cases the
basic
personality remains unchanged: there is nothing like the complete alteration of personality that occurred with Clara Fowler or Billy Milligan.
The various photographs of Doris Fischer’s personalities in the article by Walter Franklin Prince
^*
make them look like different people.

Yet the notion that the mind and the brain are two quite different entities has begun to gain a foothold in modern science.
Dr Wilder Penfield is one eminent brain physiologist who reluctantly came to this conclusion.
It was Penfield who, in 1933, discovered that a person can be made to re-live past memories in total detail by stimulating a part of the brain — the temporal cortex — with an electric current.
Penfield’s outlook was basically reductionist: he believed that consciousness is a product of the brain as heat is a product of fire.
But an experiment performed in 1959 changed his mind.
The patient was wide awake and his brain was being stimulated by an electric current so that he experienced a kind of mental film of his childhood: yet while this was going on he was also fully conscious of the room around him.
So two ‘streams of consciousness’ were flowing simultaneously without mingling.
This convinced Penfield that, ‘The patient’s mind … can only be something quite apart from the neuronal reflex action.’
Much the same view is taken by Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles in their classic work
The Self and Its Brain
, as the very title implies.
But if the mind — or self — exists
apart
from the brain (and body), then what characteristics does it possess?
Is it merely some anonymous ‘life force’ which has no more individuality than heat or light?
That is possible, for when my mind goes blank my personality seems to disappear.
Yet every mother knows that her babies show signs of personality long before they can do anything but drink milk and sleep.
So perhaps my personality is merely inactive when my mind goes blank.
And if the mind — or personality — can exist apart from the body, then this is a return to the religious notion of the soul and of life after death.

I must admit that this was a step that I found myself very reluctant to take.
This is not because I am disposed to reductionism — the belief that life can be explained entirely in material terms — but because it has always seemed illogical to me to believe something we cannot prove.
In
The Outsider
and subsequent books I took no interest whatsoever in the problem of life after death: it seemed to me unimportant.
In fact it seemed downright irrelevant.
The basic questions of existential philosophy are ‘Why are we alive?
What are we supposed to do now we are here?’
To reply, ‘Don’t worry — there is another life after this one,’ amounts to begging the question.
Even in
The Occult
I was inclined to steer clear of the questions.
I consulted one friend, Professor G.
Wilson Knight, who was a spiritualist, and he provided me with some interesting material which seemed to suggest that his mother was able to communicate with him after death.
But I remained basically unconvinced — or perhaps a better word would be uninterested.

Yet I must admit that the evidence for reincarnation struck me as very powerful indeed.
The famous case of Shanti Devi, the Indian girl who claimed to have lived a previous life in the town of Muttra, was studied by Professor Hemendra Bannerjee, a psychologist at Rajasthan University, who was convinced of its genuineness.
Shanti Devi, born in Delhi in October 1926, began to describe this previous life in detail when she was four.
Her husband, she said, had been a cloth merchant named Kedar Nath Chaubey.
A school principal who tried writing to the address she gave in Muttra was startled to receive a reply from Kedar Nath.
A cousin of Kedar Nath’s who hurried to Delhi was immediately recognized by Shanti Devi.
And when the nine-year-old girl was finally taken to Muttra she recognized relatives and was able to direct the carriage around the town.
In Kedar Nath’s house she led them to a spot where she said she had buried money in a tin; the tin proved to be empty, but Kedar Nath admitted that he had taken the money … .

Even more startling is the case of Jasbir Lal Jat, recorded by Professor Ian Stevenson, author of
Twenty Cases Suggestive
of Reincarnation
.
In 1954 three-year-old Jasbir died of smallpox, but before he could be buried he stirred and returned to life.
But the new personality was quite unlike the old one: the new Jasbir claimed to be someone called Sobha Ram who had died in Vehedi at the same time as Jasbir as a result of a fall from a cart.
He said he was of Brahmin caste and made difficulties about his food.
The family dismissed his claims as childish imagination.
When Jasbir was six a Brahmin lady from Vehedi came to Jasbir’s village and he declared that she was his aunt.
Taken to Vehedi, Jasbir showed the same kind of intimate knowledge as Shanti Devi had shown of Muttra.
His relatives were finally convinced that Jasbir and Sobha Ram were the same person, and the reader of Professor Stevenson’s well-documented account feels much inclined to agree.
In that case it would seem that Sobha Ram ‘moved into’ Jasbir’s body more or less at the moment of death, or soon after.

The problem with such cases is of course that the investigators get there long after it has taken place and therefore have to rely on witnesses who may or may not be lying.
But in at least one of his cases Stevenson eliminated this possibility by actually introducing the two families concerned.
In Lebanon in 1964 Stevenson heard about a man called Mohammed Elawar, a Druse who lived in the village of Kornayel ten miles east of Beirut.
His son Imad had been born in 1958, and the first word Imad had uttered when he learned to speak was a woman’s name, ‘Jamileh’.
Then Imad began speaking about his past life as a man called Bouhamzy and insisted that he had recognized one of Bouhamzy’s relatives in the street.
Imad said that Bouhamzy lived in the town of Khriby, twenty miles away, and gave details of the house and of his relatives.

In spite of all this, Imad’s father was too lazy to check on his son’s story.
So Stevenson decided to do it for him.
He first interviewed Imad and collected details of his life as Bouhamzy, then went to Khriby and talked to Bouhamzy’s family.
Introduced to Bouhamzy’s family, the six-year-old boy not only showed intimate knowledge of his ‘relatives’
but astonished them by behaving and sounding like Bouhamzy.
Fifty-one out of fifty-seven statements made by Imad about Bouhamzy proved to be correct.
(Occasional incorrect statements seem to be due to a blurring of memory: for example he said he had five sons when in fact it was Bouhamzy’s brother who had five sons.) ‘Jamileh’ proved to have been Bouhamzy’s mistress.
As Stevenson pointed out, the possibility of fraud was remote: it would have involved the deliberate collusion of seventeen people who had no reason to lie.