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
The phenomena which this sensitive presents (Hélène Smith is Professor
Flournoy's pseudonym for her) cover a range which looks at first very
wide, although a clearer analysis shows that these varieties are more
apparent than real, and that self-suggestion will perhaps account for
all of them.
There is, to begin with, every kind of automatic irruption of subliminal
into supraliminal life. As Professor Flournoy says (p. 45): "Phenomena
of hypermnesia, divinations, mysterious findings of lost objects, happy
inspirations, exact presentiments, just intuitions, teleological
(purposive or helpful) automatisms, in short, of every kind; she
possesses in a high degree this small change of genius--which
constitutes a more than sufficient compensation for the inconvenience
resulting from those distractions and moments of absence of mind which
accompany her visions; and which, moreover, generally pass unobserved."
At séances--where the deeper change has no inconveniences--Hélène
undergoes a sort of self-hypnotisation which produces various lethargic
and somnambulistic states. And when she is alone and safe from
interruption she has spontaneous visions, during which there may be some
approach to ecstasy. At the séances she experiences positive
hallucinations, and also negative hallucinations, or systematised
anæsthesiæ, so that, for instance, she will cease to see some person
present, especially one who is to be the recipient of messages in the
course of the séance. "It seems as though a dream-like incoherence
presided over this preliminary work of disaggregation, in which the
normal perceptions are arbitrarily split up or absorbed by the
subconscious personality--eager for materials with which to compose the
hallucinations which it is preparing." Then, when the séance begins, the
main actor is Hélène's guide _Léopold_ (a pseudonym for Cagliostro) who
speaks and writes through her, and is, in fact, either her leading
spirit-control or (much more probably) her most developed form of
secondary personality.
"Leopold," says Professor Flournoy (p. 134), "certainly manifests a very
honourable and amiable side of Mlle. Smith's character, and in taking
him as her 'guide' she has followed inspirations which are doubtless
among the highest in her nature."
The high moral quality of these automatic communications, on which
Professor Flournoy thus insists, is a phenomenon worth consideration.
I do not mean that it is specially strange in the case of Mlle. Smith.
But the almost universally high moral tone of genuinely automatic
utterances has not, I think, been sufficiently noticed or adequately
explained.
In evidential messages--where there is real reason to believe that an
identified spirit is communicating--there is a marked and independent
consensus on such matters as these spirits profess themselves able to
discuss.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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