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
It suggests that the continuous dream-life which we must suppose to run
concurrently with our waking life is potent enough to effect from time
to time enough of dissociation to enable some element of the personality
to be perceived at a distance from the organism. How much of
consciousness, if any, may be felt at the point where the excursive
phantasm is seen, we cannot say. But the notion that a mere incoherent
quasi-dream should thus become perceptible to others is fully in
accordance with the theories suggested in this work. For I regard
subliminal operation as _continuously_ going on, and I hold that the
degree of dissociation which can generate a perceptible phantasm is not
necessarily a profound change, since that perceptibility depends so
largely upon idiosyncrasies of agent and percipient as yet wholly
unexplained.
That special idiosyncracy on the part of the agent which tends to make
his phantasm easily visible has never yet, so far as I know, received a
name, although for convenience' sake it certainly needs one. I propose
to use the Greek word φυχορραγὡ, which means strictly "to let the soul
break loose," and from which I form the words _psychorrhagy_ and
_psychorrhagic_, on obvious analogies. When I say that the agents in
these cases were born with the _psychorrhagic diathesis_, I express what
I believe to be an important fact, physiological as well as
psychological, in terms which seem pedantic, but which are the only ones
which mean exactly what the facts oblige me to say. That which "breaks
loose" on my hypothesis is not (as in the Greek use of the word) the
whole principle of life in the organism; rather it is some psychical
element probably of very varying character, and definable mainly by its
power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in
some portion or other of space. I hold that this phantasmogenetic effect
may be produced either on the mind, and consequently on the brain of
another person--in which case he may discern the phantasm somewhere in
his vicinity, according to his own mental habit or prepossession--or
else directly on a portion of space, "out in the open," in which case
several persons may simultaneously discern the phantasm in that actual
spot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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