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
Was it thus? Or did Mr. Searle in the Temple see with inner vision his
wife's head as she lay back faint and pallid in Gloucester Gardens? Our
nearest analogy here is plainly crystal-vision; and crystal-visions, as
we have observed, point both ways. Sometimes the picture in the crystal
is conspicuously symbolical; sometimes it seems a transcript of an
actual distant scene.
There are two further problems which occur as we deal with each class of
cases in turn,--the problem of time-relations and the problem of
spirit-agency. Can an incident be said to be seen clairvoyantly if it is
seen some hours after it occurred? Ought we to say that a scene is
clairvoyantly visited, or that it is spiritually shown, if it represents
a still chamber of death,[122] where no emotion is any longer stirring;
but to which the freed spirit might desire to attract the friend's
attention and sympathy?
Such problems cannot at present be solved; nor, as I have said, can any
one class of these psychical interchanges be clearly demarcated from
other classes. Recognising this, we must explain the central
characteristics of each group in turn, and show at what points that
group appears to merge into the next.
And now we come to that class of cases where B invades A, and A
perceives the invasion; but B retains no memory of it in supraliminal
life. From one point of view, as will be seen, this is just the reverse
of the class last discussed--where the invader remembered an invasion
which the invaded person (when there was one) did not perceive.
We have already discussed some cases of this sort which seemed to be
_psychorrhagic_--to have occurred without will or purpose on the part of
the invader. What we must now do is to collect cases where there may
probably have been some real projection of will or desire on the
invader's part, leading to the projection of his phantasm in a manner
recognisable by the distant friend whom he thus invades--yet without
subsequent memory of his own. These cases will be intermediate between
the _psychorrhagic_ cases already described and the _experimental_ cases
on which we shall presently enter.
In the case of Canon Warburton--in Chapter IV.--the person undergoing
the accident did recollect having had a vivid thought of his brother at
the moment;--while his brother on the other hand was startled from a
slight doze by the vision of the scene of danger as then taking
place;--the steep stairs and the falling figure. This is an acute
crisis, much resembling impending death by drowning, etc.; and the
apparition may be construed either way--either as a scene clairvoyantly
discerned by Canon Warburton, owing, as I say, to a spasmodic tightening
of his psychical link with his brother, or as a sudden _invasion_ on
that brother's part, whose very rapidity perhaps helped to prevent his
remembering it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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