Spiritualism and the New Psychology: An Explanation of Spiritualist Phenomena and Beliefs in Terms of Modern Knowledge
John Stuart Mill · en
Table-turning is easily first among the ways of giving rein to the
unconscious. It has the advantage of allowing several people to play the
same game at once, and further of allowing one Dissociate to work the
miracle, whilst no one, not even the Dissociate himself, knows who is
doing it. This is illustrated in _The New Revelation_, p. 19, where Sir
Arthur says: 'Some one, then, was moving the table; I thought it was
they. They probably thought that I did it.'
_The Gate of Remembrance_[18] gives an illustration of tapping the
unconscious and producing results that seem astonishing.
[Footnote 18: By F. B. Bond; Blackwell, Oxford.]
Two gentlemen, Mr. F. B. Bond and his friend J. A. I., had devoted years
of study to the archaeology of Glastonbury, exploring every available
source of information in history or tradition and thinking hard and
often about the Edgar Chapel, a part of the Abbey whose site was
undetermined. After this preparatory storing up of memories and thoughts
in the unconscious, they proceeded to tap them. I quote from page 18:--
'What was clear enough was the need of somehow switching off the mere
logical machinery of the brain which is for ever at work combining the
more superficial and obvious things written on the pages of memory, and
by its dominant activity excluding that which a more contemplative
element in the mind would seek to revive from the half-obliterated
traces below.'
Recognising an old friend, we are not surprised to find that automatic
writing was the means employed to switch off the main stream of
consciousness and produce a dissociation.
I find myself more in accord with the writer than reviews had led me to
expect, for he disclaims 'the action of discarnate intelligences from
the outside upon the physical or nervous organisation of the sitters'
(p. 19).
The automatic writing is apparently controlled by Richard Bere,
Johannes, and other influences which would be welcomed by spiritualists
as 'objective entities'; but the writer gives his opinion regarding
Johannes (p. 50) as follows: 'Whether we are dealing with a singularly
vivid imaginative picture or with the personality of a man no one can
really decide.'
Here I must differ and claim to have decided, for myself at least, that
no personality other than that of the actual writer was concerned. The
record of hysterical phenomena contains so many similar 'personalities'
that I find no reason to call in the supernatural to account for this
one. If a natural explanation is available we must not appeal to the
supernatural; I am sure that F. B. B. is not unacquainted with Occam's
razor--miracles must not be unnecessarily multiplied.