Moncrieff's Clairvoyant Vision

Malcolm Matthew Moncrieff published a book in 1951 entitled The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception. I learned of it from a footnote in Carl Becker's book, Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death, where Becker refers to what I call “shielding,” thus the body’s way of shielding us from the perception of the subtle world. Alas. Becker was really referring to the Preface, written by Henry H. Price, not really to the substance of Moncrieff’s work. That work attempts to explain ordinary vision as a kind of limited clairvoyance. This disappointed me—but Moncrieff is very original in his approach to reality—if not on the subject of  “shielding”—so the book was worth the twelve dollars that it had cost me.

There is, to be sure, something of interest in the whole subject of vision, not the big kind but the ordinary, in the context of the borderzone. People who have had near-death experiences, usually while their bodies were in states of great extremity, often comatose, report initially seeing their own situation—their bodies on the hospital bed, doctors and nurses tending them. They also hear what is said. This suggests that souls have vision and quite without the help of physical eyes. In the very rare NDE report we sometimes hear persons explaining that their view was more comprehensive—not just “forward” in the direction of attention but encompassing also what was behind them. But most experiencers don’t notice anything like that. Yet other aspects of that experience are that the blind are able to see—at least during the experience—and many report that their minds are functioning with greater clarity. Could we call that clairmentation?

The simplest explanation of why we don’t see subtle beings is that our sensory apparatus produces too much noise. The distractions must be overcome. And sometimes people do see apparitions—when the son appears to his mother just at the time when he was killed during a war. These phenomena are accompanied by intense emotions, probably on both sides, and they temporarily overcome the distractions of materiality so that the subtle can briefly appear to say good-bye.