Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (53 page)

The problem, says Miller, is that the conscious mind is
unaware
that it is supposed to be in control.
The brain is like an enormous computer, overflowing with activity that seems to be independent of the will.
This is particularly obvious during sleep, when all kinds of strange phantasmagoria swarm into consciousness.
It is equally obvious if I get a tune stuck in my head and cannot get it out, or if I find myself thinking obsessively about something I would prefer to forget.
The brain physiologist Wilder Penfield discovered that if he touched an area in the temporal cortex—the seat of memory—with an electric probe, the patient would relive experiences from his past life in cinematic detail.
The brain is a vast library.
No wonder the conscious self feels like a visitor with only limited right of access.

Yet this is a mistake, as we discover every time a crisis produces a flood of concentration and vitality, or when ecstasy brings a sense of control and power.
In such moments, we suddenly realize that it is the “I” that is in control, not “it.”

The “I” only achieves this recognition when galvanized by intensified consciousness.
Yet if it
is
a recognition, and not an illusion, then we should be able to use this insight to reach unprecedented levels of self-control.
Miller compares our situation to a man sitting idly in a cinema, watching a jumbled phantasmagoria on the screen, and wondering what has happened to the projectionist.
He is unaware that he is the projectionist.
It takes a sudden crisis to wake him up, and make him realize that his proper place is in the projection room, not yawning in the “audience.”

What Miller is saying is that we must come to terms with this recognition that the “controlling ego” (which he calls “the unit of pure thought”) is intended to be the director of both the conscious and the unconscious minds.
As a species,
we have slipped into the habit of regarding consciousness as somehow subservient to the body and the emotions.
So that if I feel sick, or feel convulsed with jealousy, it seems self-evident that my ability to think is of no particular use; on the contrary, it seems to make things worse by looking on detachedly and telling me I oughtn’t to be such an idiot.

Yet the moment I feel the need to
turn my thought into action
, the moment I determinedly search for solutions, I experience a sense of control, a surge of power and insight.
The sensation is not unlike the surge of power and purpose produced by the orgasm.
And the more I become accustomed to these efforts of control, instead of lying down and surrendering to my emotions, the more I learn that “I” am not a cork tossed about on a sea of feelings and sensations; I am the
director.
In fact, if I study my perceptions—which seem to occur without my volition—I realize that even they depend on a form of unconscious effort (which the philosopher Husserl called “intentionality”).
If I look at my watch without paying attention, I fail to grasp the time; my mind has to make an effort, like a hand grasping an object.

It can be seen that the two minds of Hudson correspond to the two hemispheres of the brain—discussed in chapter 1—with the left brain as the objective mind, the right as the intuitive, subjective mind.
So it would seem a reasonable assumption that they also correspond to the Huna notion of the “lower self” and the “middle self”—the unconscious and conscious minds.
Yet this proves to be inaccurate.
In Enid Hoffman’s
Huna: A Beginner’s Guide
, a chapter is devoted to the split brain, and, as expected, the “middle self” is placed in the left cerebral cortex.
But the “lower self,” according to the kahunas, is located in the solar plexus.

This is less surprising than it sounds; after all, D.
H.
Lawrence identified the solar plexus as the center of intuition and emotion.
And this is confirmed by self-observation.
If some unpleasant thought enters my head—the left brain—I experience a “sinking feeling”—a leak—in the area of the solar plexus.

And what of the right brain?
This, according to Dr.
Hoffman, is the seat of the “higher self.” And this, again, is supported by self-observation.
In moods of serenity produced by music or poetry—both of which make their appeal through the right brain—we experience a sense of
expanding identity
, or contact with powerful vital forces.
It is the right brain that is involved in mystical ecstasy, in the feeling that G.
K.
Chesterton calls “absurd good news.”

So Huna philosophy has removed another of the puzzling contradictions of modern psychology: the notion that the unconscious mind is the source of our best and worst impulses, of inspiration and anarchic violence.
It anticipates Aldous Huxley’s suggestion that if the mind has an unconscious “basement,” full of repressions and neuroses, it must also have a superconscious “attic.”

The kahunas go considerably further than Howard Miller in defining the role of the “controlling ego.” The higher self, says Long, has control over the future, so that it is possible for us to direct the future, if we go about it in the right way.
Long describes his own experience of visiting an old kahuna woman during the Depression, when his camera shop in Honolulu was on the point of bankruptcy.

The healer told me that in her experience most people sent to the High Self a continuous jumble of conflicting wishes, plans, fears and hopes.
Each day and hour they changed their minds about what they wished to do or have happen.
As the High Self makes for us our futures from our averaged thoughts which it contacts during our sleep, our futures have become a hit-and-miss jumble of events and contrary events, of accidents and good and bad luck.
Only the person who decides what he wants and holds to his decision doggedly, working always in that direction, can present to the High Self the proper thought forms from which to build the future.

The High Self, says Long, must be contacted through the intermediary of the low self; the middle self cannot do it directly.

Long claims that as a result of the kahuna’s advice—which she arrived at through “scrying” with a glass of water—she was able to tell him: “Your path is not badly blocked,” and to give him precisely detailed instructions which showed an accurate foreknowledge of the future, and which saved him from bankruptcy.

All of which raises an obvious question: if the High Self knows the future, and is the “guardian angel,” why does it not do a better job of shaping our destinies?
The answer is to be found in Howard Miller.
Because the middle self is the director, the controller, it is
its
job to contact the high self, not vice versa.
It must do this by using its power of choice and rational analysis, by trying to grasp the insights of “moments of vision” and intensity, and living by these, instead of by the impulses of the low self, which is still close to the animal world.
The kahunas say that only the middle self can sin, for it has the power of choice.

It all sounds depressingly difficult.
In fact, it is not; for we are always receiving flashes of insight, “glimpses.” Every time a spring morning brings a surge of “absurd good news,” every time we experience a sense of interest and absorption that arouses a glow of sheer affirmation, we
see
the solution, and see that it is astonishingly simple.
(This is why every mystic has expressed a feeling that can only be translated: “Of
course!
”) The problem is that the low self fails to grasp it, so that half an hour later we can no longer remember what it was.
The romantics of the nineteenth century died off like flies because they suspected the “moments of vision” were an illusion, and the basic truth is that life is dull, brutish and short (Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
is a classic expression of this anguish).
Trained in kahuna teaching, they would have recognized that this is a purely technical problem of communication between the “selves,” and that despair is due to an absurd misunderstanding.

According to Long, Huna teachings originated in ancient Egypt and the Sahara, in the days when the Sahara was still fertile.
This original Huna people left in an exodus and spread in many directions; Long produces strong evidence that the Berber tribes of the Atlas mountains, in north Africa, spring from the same people.
We may, of course, reject the whole notion that Huna is a secret knowledge system (
Huna
means secret), and regard it simply as a form of intuitive psychology mixed with ancient superstition, in which the low, middle and high selves are simply aspects of the human psyche (corresponding roughly to Freud’s unconscious, conscious and superego).
What must be acknowledged is that, as a psychological system, it has a depth that is lacking in most modern psychologies.

Our concern in this book is with the poltergeist and its mysteries; and here the kahuna explanation seems to fit the facts rather better than most.
As Guy Playfair points out, the kahunas seem to have explanations for most “psi”’ phenomena.
Before considering some of these explanations, let us look once more at the “facts.”

It is Playfair’s contention that, after fifteen hundred years of poltergeist observation, and a century of psychical research, it is no longer true to say that our position is one of complete ignorance.
“If it were the mating habits of cockroaches, there’d be quite enough evidence for someone to produce a definitive paper in
Nature
.” In
This House Is Haunted,
he lists the nineteen or so “symptoms” of what he calls “the poltergeist syndrome,” beginning with raps and ending with equipment failure of cameras, tape recorders and so on.
He points out that in some cases, only half a dozen of these appear—let us say raps, overturning furniture, apports, “possession” and outbreaks of fire.

You always get them in the same order.
You don’t get puddles of water before stone throwing, you don’t get fires before raps.
So that there is a predictable behavior pattern.
They appear to be random to us, but they’re obeying some sort of rules that they understand even if we don’t.
[3]

What can we say about these rules?

We can say there is a source of energy.
There has to be, because physical work is being carried out, and since it’s being carried out in our space and our dimension, then it has to obey at least some of the laws of mechanics.

And he goes on to suggest that this energy source (the poltergeist) could be compared to a crowd of mischievous children who find a football in a field (some form of energy extruded from a “leaking” human being) and proceed to kick it around, smashing a few windows in the process.

The Brazilian novelist Chico Xavier, who claims that his novels come through “dictation” from “spirits,” states in one of his books (quoted by Playfair in
The Indefinite Boundary
) that the source of this “energy plasma” is the pineal gland.
This gland, a tiny grey mass like a slightly flattened pea, lies roughly in the center of the brain, and seems to be a vestigial eye.
In some creatures, like the Tuatera lizard of New Zealand, it is still a non-functioning eye.
One of its chief purposes is the inhibiting of the sexual hormones—people with a damaged pineal show abnormal sexual development.
There is some evidence that it also plays some role in the evolution of our higher functions; when the brain cells are deprived of the chemical messenger serotonin (secreted by the pineal gland) we become incapable of rational thought.
At puberty, according to Xavier, it ceases to be purely a controlling mechanism, and becomes a fountain of energy, an escape valve.
It secretes “psychic hormones” that generate creative energy.
These energies represent our “spiritual potential”; unfortunately, most of us are inclined to misuse them for purely animal sensations.
(De Sade would probably be a good example of extreme misuse.) When a child suddenly acquires this new force, at the age of puberty, there is a need for a channel or outlet—perhaps vigorous sporting or sexual activity.
If this outlet is lacking, Playfair suggests, the energy will be available for “marauding entities to steal and put to their own purposes.” “Perhaps if Brazilian girls played hockey or lacrosse there would be fewer poltergeists in São Paulo.”

The vital force involved seems to have some resemblance to electricity or magnetism.
This is what the Hunas call
mana.
And since the earth is covered with living creatures and organism—it may even be regarded as a living organism in itself—then it also, presumably, has a permanent supply of this force (what Stringer calls Tellurian force).
This force may be said to have been discovered, as far as Europeans are concerned, by Mesmer, who also made the interesting discovery since forgotten by Western science—that it can be influenced by magnets and by various metals.
Half a century later, it was rediscovered by Baron Reichenbach, who called it “odic force.” According to the kahunas, this is the force used by poltergeists.
(It may even be involved in that still-unexplained phenomenon, spontaneous combustion, which seems to be largely confined to the old in the way that poltergeist phenomena are largely confined to the young.) The poltergeist uses
mana
to solidify its own “shadowy body,” and so can act upon objects.