Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily DeathMyers, F. W. H. (Frederic William Henry)
Religion
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
Myers, F. W. H. (Frederic William Henry)
Immortality; Parapsychology; Personality
These cases of invasion by the spirits of living persons pass on into
cases of invasion by the dying, the impression being generally that of
the presence of the visitant in the percipient's surroundings.[54]
Sometimes the phantasm is seen as nearly as can be ascertained at the
time of death. But there is no perceptible break in the series at this
point. Some appear shortly after death, but before the death is known to
the percipient. [See Appendix IV. F]. Finally, there are cases when the
appearance takes place some time after death, but presents features
unknown to the percipient.[55]
We have now briefly reviewed certain phenomena of sleep from a
standpoint somewhat differing from that which is commonly taken. We have
not (as is usual) fixed our attention primarily on the _negative_
characteristics of sleep, or the extent to which it lacks the capacities
of waking hours. On the contrary, we have regarded sleep as an
independent phase of personality, existing with as good a right as the
waking phase, and dowered with imperfectly expressed faculties of its
own. In investigating those faculties we have been in no wise deterred
by the fact of the apparent uselessness of some of them for our waking
ends. _Useless_ is a pre-scientific, even an anti-scientific term, which
has perhaps proved a greater stumbling-block to research in psychology
than in any other science. In science the _use_ of phenomena is to prove
laws, and the more bizarre and trivial the phenomena, the greater the
chance of their directing us to some law which has been overlooked till
now. In reviewing the phenomena of sleep, then, we found in the first
place that it possesses a specific recuperative energy which the
commonly accepted data of physiology and psychology cannot explain. We
saw that in sleep there may be an increased co-ordination or
centralisation of muscular control, and also an increased vividness of
entencephalic perception, indicating a more intimate appreciation of
intra-peripheral changes than is manifest in waking life. In accordance
with this view, we found that the dreaming self may undergo sensory and
emotional experiences apparently more intense than those of vigilance,
and may produce thereby lasting effects upon the waking body and mind.
Similarly again, we saw that that specific impress on body and mind
which we term memory may in sleeping or hypnotic states be both wider in
range and fuller in content than the evocable memory of the waking day.
Nay, not memory only, but power of inference, of argument, may be thus
intensified, as is shown by the solution in sleep of problems which have
baffled waking effort.
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