Historic Ghosts and Ghost HuntersBruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Religion
Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters
Bruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Ghosts
Here, in language that admits of no misinterpretation, we see stated the
doctrine of telepathy, which is only now beginning to find acceptance
among scientific men, but which, as I view it, has been amply
demonstrated by the experiments of recent years and by the thousands of
cases of spontaneous occurrence recorded in such publications as the
"Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research." And if these
experiments and spontaneous instances prove anything, they prove that
telepathy is distinctively a faculty of the subliminal self; and that a
greater or less degree of dissociation is essential, not to the receipt,
but to the objective realization, of telepathic messages. Thus, the
entranced "medium" of modern days extracts from the depths of his
sitter's subconsciousness facts which the sitter has consciously
forgotten, facts even of which he may never have been consciously aware,
but which have been transmitted telepathically to his subliminal self by
the subliminal self of some third person.[G]
So with Swedenborg. Admitting the authenticity of the afore-mentioned
anecdotes--none of which, it is as well to point out, reaches us
supported by first-hand evidence--it is quite unnecessary to appeal to
spirits as his purveyors of knowledge. In every instance telepathy--or
clairvoyance, which is after all explicable itself only by
telepathy--will suffice. In the Marteville affair, for example, it is
not unreasonable to assume that before his death the Ambassador
telepathically told his devoted wife of the existence of the secret
drawer and its contents; if, indeed, she had not known and forgotten. It
would then be an exceedingly simple matter for the dissociated
Swedenborg to acquire the desired information from the wife's
subconsciousness. Nor does this reflect on his honesty. Doubtless he
believed, as he represented, that he had actually had a conversation
with the dead Marteville, and had learned from him the whereabouts of
the missing receipt. In the form his dissociation took he could no more
escape such a hallucination than can the twentieth-century medium avoid
the belief that he is a veritable intermediary between the visible and
the invisible world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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