In fact, there is evidence that ‘psychic projection’ can be performed at will. Although Edmund Gurney was undoubtedly hoaxed by the exuberant teenagers who claimed that one of them had ‘visited’ his girlfriend under hypnosis,* other ‘experimental’ cases are well authenticated. In 1881, a student named S. H. Beard decided to try ‘projecting’ himself three miles, to the house of his fiancée, Miss L. S. Verity. He made the attempt after going to bed on a Sunday evening. On the following Thursday, he went to see Miss Verity, and she told him that she had been terrified to find him standing by her bedside the previous Sunday. As the apparition moved towards her, she screamed, and woke up her eleven-year-old sister, who also saw it. In his own statement, Beard said:
Besides exercising the power of volition very strongly, I put forth an effort which I cannot find words to describe. I was conscious of a mysterious influence of some sort permeating my body, and had a distinct impression that I was exercising some force with which I had been hitherto unacquainted, but which I can now at certain times set in motion at will.
After his studies in hypnosis, Myers found it easy enough to believe in such a force. If Dr Gibert could hypnotise Leonie from half a mile away, then he was, in some sense, ‘projecting’ himself to her; under different circumstances, he might have made her ‘see’ him. Myers, like Thomson Jay Hudson, was fascinated by the extraordinary powers of the ‘subliminal’ mind. One hypnotist told a patient to make a cross at exactly 20,180 minutes after being awakened from the trance, and the patient did it. Yet the patient was not particularly good at arithmetic. ‘Something’ inside her had carefully counted more than twenty thousand minutes (about fourteen days) then obeyed the order to make a cross. This is a variation on a power most of us possess — to decide that we must wake up at a certain time, and to wake up at that precise moment as if by an alarm. If the ‘subliminal mind’ has an alarm clock that can operate during sleep or count the minutes in fourteen days, then the power of ‘projecting’ an image of oneself to some other place seems altogether less extraordinary. And in our own time, when television transmitters can send images to the moon, it is a great deal easier to accept than in Myers’s day.
Professor C. D. Broad, discussing the case of Sarah Hall* — who saw her own ‘double’ by the sideboard — suggests that what she saw might have been her ‘astral body’. But that seems highly unlikely. To begin with, most accounts of the astral body state that it cannot be seen by other people. Secondly, many cases of ‘doppelgängers’ include objects — like the genealogical chart held by ‘Miss KE’ in church; there is no reason why a roll of paper should have an astral body. In another case cited by Myers, the ‘doppelgänger’ included a horse and carriage, as well as two people. The Rev. W. Mountford, of Boston, described how he was standing by the window, in the house of a friend, when he saw a horse and carriage arriving. He remarked to his host: ‘Here is your brother coming’, and his host also saw the carriage. It turned round the corner of the house, to the front door. But no visitors arrived. Instead, the host’s niece, Mary, came into the room, looking worried. She had just walked from her parents’ home, leaving them sitting by the fire; but as she was on her way, their carriage passed by her. They were looking straight ahead, and ignored her.
Ten minutes later, Mountford heard the sound of a carriage, and said: ‘Look, they’re coming down the road again.’ This time, the carriage proved to be real. And its occupants were baffled when told that they had arrived a quarter of an hour earlier, and that they had passed their daughter on the road.
The question Mountford should have asked was whether one of them had fallen into a daydream while sitting in front of the fire, and imagined driving to the brother’s house. The answer would almost certainly have been yes.
The implication seems to be that the ‘subliminal mind’ possesses a kind of television transmitter, as well as a receiver. Both Mountford and his host — and niece — all saw the carriage. Both of ‘Miss KE’ ’s sisters saw her walk into church clutching a roll of paper. In both cases, the image looked perfectly real and normal.
Another interesting point about the Beard case mentioned above is that, after his first successful attempt, he felt he had learned the ‘trick’, and could then do it at will. Gurney asked Beard to let him know next time he tried the experiment. Beard did this on 22 March 1884. And Miss Verity signed a statement to the effect that, at about midnight, Beard had appeared in her room and stroked her hair. She passed on this information to her little sister, who also verified it.
An American heart specialist, Dr Michael Sabom, became interested in near-death experiences of heart-attack patients, and wrote a book, Recollections of Death, in 1982. He noted that patients who had experienced out-of-the-body projections were often able to repeat them at will. One nineteen-year-old girl described how she had been knocked down by a car on a pedestrian crossing, and how suddenly she was ‘above the whole scene, viewing the accident’. She watched as the ambulance men arrived, and was critical of the way they lifted her on to the stretcher. After this, she woke up in hospital. When Sabom interviewed her thirteen years later, she told him: ‘I knew I had left my body because this became something I could do almost at will. I realised I had learned to do that at the time I had probably come close to dying.’ And she went on to describe how, lying alone in her trailer at night (her husband worked nights) she would leave her body and check that everything was safe in the trailer. One night, she noticed that the rear door of the trailer had been left open. After ‘returning’ to her body, she got up and closed it.
The inference would seem to be that we all possess these powers potentially, but simply never learn to make use of them. If Myers is correct, there is nothing mystical or metaphysical about this assertion; it is a plain statement of fact, based on scientific evidence.
We have now arrived at a crucial — in fact, the crucial — point in Myers’s argument, and before we continue, it may be as well to look back over the steps that have brought us here.
The basic objection to ‘personal’ survival is that personality is a kind of artifact. It is ‘built-up’ little by little, from our experiences. So there is no more reason why my personality should survive my death than why my house should survive after it has been knocked down.
Myers’s reply is to point to the mystery of multiple personality. Louis Vivé and Clara Fowler were, to all appearances, more than one person. Yet there was obviously some permanent substratum underneath these ‘personalities’, a being for whom the personalities were various masks. In his autobiography, Alfred Russel Wallace describes his experiments in hypnotism with his pupils. He says of one of these:
More curious still was the taking away of the memory so completely that he could not tell his own name, and would adopt any name that was suggested to him, and perhaps remark how stupid he was to have forgotten it; and this might be repeated several times with different names, all of which he would implicitly accept. Then, on saying to him, ‘Now you remember your own name again; what is it?’ an inimitable look of relief would pass over his countenance, and he would say, ‘Why, P— of course’, in a way that carried complete conviction.
The ‘real P—’ was there all the time, in spite of having forgotten his own name.
The point is reinforced by some more recent cases of multiple personality. In Sybil, Flora Rheta Schreiber describes a patient with fourteen different personalities, some of them male. The rapist Billy Milligan proved to have twenty-three sub-personalities, some of them far more talented and brilliant than Billy himself.* And Christine Sizemore, the subject of the famous Three Faces of Eve, reached an unbelievable total of forty alter-egos. And the Eve case also suggests that the ‘personality’ may, in some ways, be independent of the body. Christine Sizemore was allergic to nylon, but the moment her alter-ego took over, the nylon rash disappeared. She was shortsighted; her alter-ego could see perfectly without glasses. On one occasion, when she was under anaesthetic, her alter-ego took over and wa
s totally unaffected by the anaesthetic. If all this is true, then our usual assumption that ‘personality’ is somehow dependent on the body may be a misunderstanding. The body may be an instrument that responds to the demands of the personality — in the same way that a car responds to its driver, but to a far greater extent. This in turn suggests that physical illness may depend on the personality, not on the body — that when a person is bent and decrepit and feeble, it is the personality that is bent and decrepit. If another personality could take it over — as the mischievous ‘Sally’ took over the body of Clara Fowler — it might be instantly transformed.
All this is implicit in Myers’s argument. He has also suggested that we may possess powers that would once have been termed ‘magical’ — for example, the power to transmit our thoughts to someone on the other side of the world, and even to transmit a physical image of ourselves to the minds of other people. The scientific answer to that claim is that all our ‘powers’ have been developed in the course of millions of years of evolution, as a response to the challenges of evolution. So why should we possess these powers suggested by Myers?
His answer would be to point to the powers of men of genius: a Mozart able to play a whole concerto accurately after having heard it only once, a five-year-old Benjamin Blyth able to calculate how many seconds he had been alive. We have certainly never had need for any of these powers in the course of our evolution. Myers also points out that in the case of some calculating prodigies, like Professor Safford and Archbishop Whately, their unusual powers vanished at about the age of puberty, and they then became ‘like the rest of us’. If Whately and Safford could become ‘like the rest of us’, it clearly implies that the rest of us could, if we made the effort, become calculating prodigies like Whately and Safford, or could learn to leave our bodies at will, like Michael Sabom’s patient, to check that we have closed all the doors and windows. (It is easy to see that such a faculty would have been extremely useful to a cave-man, who could go and investigate a snuffling noise outside his cave without running the risk of being eaten.)
In fact, the evolutionary argument can be used to support either side. There is much evidence that primitive people are more ‘psychic’ than we are. Some Australian aborigines are able to detect underground water without even the aid of a dowsing rod. Other examples are cited by Professor Hornell Hart.* A Scottish sportsman, David Leslie, was curious about what had happened to his eight Kaffirs, who were on a hunting expedition two hundred miles away; a Zulu witch doctor was able to tell him exactly what was happening to them, and his information later proved to be ‘correct in every particular’. And Commander R. Jukes Hughes, serving in the Transkei, received a running commentary from local natives on a battle that was now taking place three hundred miles away — a commentary that again proved to be accurate.
In any case, it seems obvious that, over millions of years of evolution, different powers and capacities are developed and then submerged again, as they cease to be necessary. But although they may be submerged, they remain encoded in the genes. When Darwin arrived on the Galapagos Islands, he discovered many types of finch that had been blown from the mainland of South America, and which had probably been there for centuries. In the early 1940s, some of these birds were brought back to California, and instantly reacted with alarm to hawks, vultures and ravens — predators that do not exist on the Galapagos, and which no Galapagos finch had seen for hundreds of generations. Like a careful housewife, evolution never throws away anything that might one day be useful. For the past three thousand years, man has adapted himself to civilisation. But in the vast depths of his being, there must be thousands of characteristics that he developed in the great droughts and ice ages of the past three million years, and which he has packed away in the storage cupboard of the genes in case they should come in useful.
And so, says Myers, we seem to have demonstrated that there is some ‘substratum’ in man which is far more durable than his everyday personality, and that this deeper ‘self’ seems to possess some unusual powers that would startle the everyday self. Allow this much, and we come to the really interesting part of the argument: that there is evidence that this ‘substratum’ survives death, and that it is able to exercise some of these powers at will.
He begins by citing one of the most interesting and frequently quoted cases of near-death experiences, that of Dr A. S. Wiltse, an American doctor who ‘died’ in Skiddy, Kansas, in the summer of 1889, and revived a few hours later. Wiltse’s own account was published in St Louis Medical and Surgical Journal for February 1890.
Wiltse ‘died’ of typhoid fever, after taking leave of his family and friends. After losing consciousness, he woke up, apparently still ‘inside’ his body, but feeling quite unconnected with it. He was able to lie there and observe the way his bodily organs interacted with ‘himself’ — his ‘soul’. ‘I learned that the epidermis [outer layer of skin] was the outside boundary of the ultimate tissues, so to speak, of the soul.’ Then he felt himself being gently rocked back and forth as he separated from his body. There was a feeling of ‘the innumerable snapping of small cords’, and he felt as if ‘he’ was retreating from his body, starting at the feet, towards his head. Then he found himself ‘peeping out’ from his skull, and feeling as if he had the shape and colour of a jellyfish. ‘As I emerged from the head I floated up and down … like a soap bubble … until I at last broke loose from the body and fell lightly to the floor, where I slowly rose and expanded into the full stature of a man.’ There were two ladies in the room and he was embarrassed about being naked, but by the time he reached the door, found himself clothed. He turned round and his elbow came into contact with another man in the room; to his surprise, his elbow passed through the man.
He began to see the humorous side of the situation — with his dead body lying on the bed — and bowed playfully. Then he laughed aloud; no one heard him. He walked out of the door, and noticed a thin cord, ‘like a spider’s web’, running from his shoulders back to his body lying on the bed.
He walked along the road — which, he says, he could see perfectly clearly — and again lost consciousness. When he woke up, he seemed to be propelled forward by a pair of invisible hands. Ahead of him he saw three ‘prodigious rocks’, while overhead a dark cloud gathered. A voice speaking direct into his head told him that if he passed beyond the rocks he would enter the ‘eternal world’, but that if he chose to, he could return to his body. He was strongly tempted to pass through a low archway between the rocks, but as he tried to peer over the ‘boundary line’, saw a small black cloud and ‘knew I was to be stopped’. He suddenly woke up, lying on the bed, and insisted on telling everyone present what had happened, although they urged him to conserve his strength.
It is, as Myers points out, easy to dismiss this experience as some kind of dream. But the point to note is that Wiltse had ceased to breathe, and been pronounced dead by the doctor. It is, of course, possible that he lost consciousness for four hours, and then woke up again; but it seems strange that he should have such a precise and detailed ‘dream’ about dying when his pulse had stopped.
Where ‘survival’ is concerned, the most interesting cases are obviously those that cannot be dismissed as dreams or hallucinations. Myers cites the ‘red scratch’ case (mentioned in the previous chapter), and follows it up with another equally convincing case that was investigated by the Society for Psychical Research. A farmer named Michael Conley, of Ionia, Chicasaw County, was found dead in an outhouse of an old people’s home, and his body was sent to the morgue in Dubuque, Iowa. Since the workclothes he was wearing were filthy, they were tossed outside the door of the morgue. When the farmer’s daughter was told that her father was dead, she fainted. And when she woke up, she insisted that her father had appeared to her, and told her that he had sewed a roll of dollar bills in the lining of his grey shirt. She described precisely the clothes he was wearing — including slippers — and said that the money was wrapped in a piece of an old
red dress that had belonged to herself.
No one took her dream seriously, assuming she was upset by her father’s death. But the doctor advised them that it might set her mind at rest if they fetched the clothes. No one in the family had any idea of the clothes the farmer was wearing at the time of his death. But the coroner confirmed that they were precisely as the daughter had described. And in the lining of the grey shirt, which still lay outside in the yard, they found a roll of money wrapped in a piece of red cloth and sewed into the bosom.
Myers himself investigated many such cases, taking signed statements from all the witnesses, and it was obviously this close involvement that finally convinced him of the reality of ‘survival’. And it seems significant that everyone in that highly sceptical ‘Cambridge group’ who studied the evidence for life after death ended by being convinced. Myers himself started from the same assumption as Thomson Jay Hudson — that all paranormal phenomena may be due to the extraordinary powers of the ‘subjective mind’ (or subliminal mind, as Myers preferred to call it). Hudson used the evidence of hypnosis — like the patient who made a cross at the end of twenty thousand minutes — to argue that the unconscious mind has unlimited powers of observation and memory, as well as powers of telepathy and clairvoyance. According to Hudson, ‘spirits of the dead’ are actually the unconscious mind playing games. In most cases, this explanation can be stretched to fit the facts. For example, in the ‘red scratch’ case, Hudson would say that although the mother had covered up the red scratch with make-up, the brother of the dead girl noticed it subconsciously as she lay in her coffin. And his own unconscious knowledge that his mother was close to death led his ‘subliminal mind’ to conjure up the vision of his sister’s ghost, complete with red scratch, in order to provide his mother with comfort in the face of death … (This kind of ‘unconscious observation’ theory is sometimes known as ‘cryptomnesia’, meaning buried memory.) But it is altogether more difficult to stretch the ‘unconscious observation’ theory to fit cases like that of Michael Conley. The farmer was far away from his family when he died, and they had no idea of what he was wearing. The only explanation that fits the ‘subliminal’ theory is that the daughter used a form of clairvoyance or second sight to find out what clothes her father was wearing and about the money sewed into his shirt. But as an explanation, this one is no more ‘scientific’ — and it is slightly more far-fetched — than the assumption that Michael Conley’s spirit appeared to his daughter in a dream.