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
Another indication of the subliminal power at work to produce these
hallucinations is their remarkable _range_--a range as wide, perhaps, as
that over which therapeutic effects are obtainable by suggestion. The
post-hypnotic hallucination may affect not sight and hearing alone (to
which spontaneous hallucinations are in most cases confined), but all
kinds of vaso-motor responses and organic sensations--cardiac,
stomachic, and the like--which no artifice can affect in a waking
person. The legendary flow of perspiration with which the flatterer
sympathises with his patron's complaint of heat--_si dixeris "Æstuo,"
sudat_--is no exaggeration if applied to the hypnotic subject, who will
often sweat and shiver at your bidding as you transplant him from the
Equator to frosty Caucasus.
Well, then, given this strength and vigour of hallucination, one sees a
possible extension of knowledge in more than one direction. To begin
with, by suggestion to the subject that he is feeling or doing something
which is beyond his normal range of faculties, we may perhaps enable him
to perceive or to act as thus suggested.
What we need is to address to a sensitive subject a series of strong
suggestions of the increase of his sensory range and power. We must
needs begin by suggesting hallucinatory sensations:--the subject should
be told that he perceives some stimulus which is, in fact, too feeble
for ordinary perception. If you can make him _think_ that he perceives
it, he probably will after a time perceive it; the direction given to
his attention heightening either peripheral or central sensory faculty.
You may then be able to attack the question as to how far his
specialised end-organs are really concerned in the perception;--and it
may then be possible to deal in a more fruitful way with those alleged
cases of _transposition of senses_ which have so great a theoretical
interest as being apparently intermediate between hyperæsthesia and
telæsthesia or clairvoyance. If we once admit (as I, of course, admit)
the reality of telæsthesia, it is just in some such way as this that we
should expect to find it beginning.
I start from the thesis that the perceptive power within us precedes and
is independent of the specialised sense-organs, which it has developed
for earthly use.
νοὑς ὁρα καἱ νοὑς ἁκοὑει τἁλλα κωφἁ καἱ τυφλα.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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