Over years now, time and time again, I’ve noted reading the mediumistic literature that the departed, communicating through a medium, never have anything really meaningful to say. We hear greetings and very short answers—never what, written down, might spell a complex sentence with clauses, never mind anything of paragraph length. Those who seek out mediums, of course, are people who want contact with those they’ve loved and lost, and they appear satisfied. They recognize voices or intonations. But if I were attending a séance (never have), I’d want to know what is over there, and I’d be wanting to hear something novel, anything novel at all.
Now this recurred to me because fellow-blogger, The Zennist, put up a pointer the other day to a film concerning the Scole Experiment (link), a 1990s account of various experiences of contact with the beyond. I watched a bit of that film and, doing so, and the thought came once again. One-word answers to questions. The séances are well-enough recorded so that one almost hears the strain and the effort in the voices from beyond that answer the questions. After I stopped the film, an association sprang up in my mind. These conversations sounded a lot like dialogs between two people one of whom does not speak the language very well. I’ve had that experience three times in my life—learning German, French, and English. You understand the question—because understanding comes before speech—but you struggle mightily to answer, because you lack the words.
Now it occurred to me that in spiritualistic encounters some analog to language might be at work. The spirit is striving to articulate speech either by using the medium’s vocal apparatus or trying to cause air to vibrate in imitation of spoken sound. This may be extraordinarily difficult for a person no longer directly linked to a physical body. Thus what does come out is the absolute minimum. Quite a few near-death experience (NDE) reports contain descriptions of attempts by those having NDEs to communicate—by touch or voice—with those they see around them, usually in a hospital setting. They absolutely fail. Not surprisingly, therefore, those who try to contact the dead reduce physical stimuli to a minimum—dark rooms, silence, concentration, etc. The skeptics interpret this as deliberate attempts to set up deceptions; indeed such conditions favor magicians and tricksters too; but they may be the minimum conditions for making any effective contact—not least the presence of a person who is already sensitive.
The difficulties involved, and the fact that the best that spirits can do is convey a small emotion and an indication that they are still there, convinced me long ago that the mediumistic enterprise is a fringe activity—and probably on both sides. As proof of the beyond these arcane sessions will never be persuasive for unbelievers. Systematic thought about our human condition will produce the right answer; and data on NDEs, if more data are needed, provide much better ancillary proof.
Showing posts with label Mediums. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mediums. Show all posts
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Realm of Shades
Many years ago already, long before the Internet dawned, I’d reached a kind of tentative conclusion. It was that the soul-realm nearest to ours is a subtle world, to be sure, but primitive or of a lower order. I based this solely on trying to understand why it is that the majority of mediums and psychics report nothing of interest from “over there.” When such psychics occasionally write book-length expositions, these books are thick with mounds of pious clichés. Mind you, I had also reached the conclusion that mediums do communicate with the beyond; some may be, but the majority are not frauds. But if I accept that they do—communicate—and with another realm—a good explanation for that might be that these psychics are mostly interacting with a lower realm—not with the peaks of the soul-order. Back in those days I also became acquainted with near-death experience (NDE) reports. The vast majority of those concern a distinctly superior realm; not all of them, mind you; but so-called “negative NDEs” tend to be kept out of books because reports like that would certainly dampen the sales of this new genre of spiritual literature. But I’m interested in reality, not in obtaining feelings of consolation. The very presence of negative NDEs also supports my view that lower realms exist—and probably closer to ours than the heavenly.
In the new age of the Internet, evidence for this conclusion has become much more readily available. Not only have populations become literate, but the web provides people an opportunity to share experience that (say in the eighteenth century) would never have reached print. Hundreds if not thousands of people with psychic gifts at various levels have web pages now; these are often linked to many others so that one has access to a huge deposit of raw data. The sites are extremely mixed in character, of course, but with the right background and a well-developed feel for such material, one can discover multiple sites where their authors are actually reporting experiences—and often skillfully enough to be enlightening.
Content of this kind tends to repel those culturally advanced—the very people who ought to take an interest. Few of the authors are educated in the round or deeply or have absorbed the western philosophical, literary, or scientific culture well enough to stand firm. By and large they’re off the reservation where the academically-trained are comfortable. Not that that surprises me. What proportion of the population is?—thus qualified, I mean. Moreover, many of these people have been coping with unusual abilities that society these days routinely and automatically classifies, minimally, as mental disorder. Therefore, on these sites, the authors keep saying, over and over again, that they are sane, well-adapted to ordinary life, employed, not crazy, not delusional, believe me, take my word for it, and other emphatic phrases no doubt occasioned by the social consensus which holds out a stiff arm in attempts to marginalize these people.
At the same time, and by way of contrast, to someone deeply steeped in the lore of the borderzone going as far back as we are able, in every culture around the globe, what these people have to say has a familiar ring. The very fact many of these people themselves are almost never familiar with ancient human traditions that say the same thing (although the labeling may be different) tells me that I’m reading about actual experience if couched in modern structures of reference. To point at one particular phenomenon, we might take the fact that humanity has always reported on demons and evil spirits, but in the modern setting these entities are rendered as alien abductors who perform unpleasant physical examinations aboard space ships. Ancient people—who’d never heard of aliens or space ships (space in our sense was not a concept for them)—used other language to report “encounters,” often negative, while they were in certain states.
I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the realms tradition labels as hell and heaven both have their basis in the actual experience of living people who, for some reason, are more open to the invisible dimension than the majority. NDEs and similar psychic experiences have painted the higher levels while ordinarily occurring psychic abilities have produced what humanity has called the underworld, Hades, hell, or the realm of shades. Are the shades that remain behind, as it were, the pool from which souls incarnate again? Is this a very populous realm? Does it take special energy—call it grace—for a soul to reach more paradisaical vistas? Is that famous tunnel we encounter in near-death reports a transit through a lower zone of shades? I wonder. But I’m not surprised that notions of a heavenly and of a darker world are universally found in human societies. There seems to be empirical evidence for them, even if not reported by a majority.
In the new age of the Internet, evidence for this conclusion has become much more readily available. Not only have populations become literate, but the web provides people an opportunity to share experience that (say in the eighteenth century) would never have reached print. Hundreds if not thousands of people with psychic gifts at various levels have web pages now; these are often linked to many others so that one has access to a huge deposit of raw data. The sites are extremely mixed in character, of course, but with the right background and a well-developed feel for such material, one can discover multiple sites where their authors are actually reporting experiences—and often skillfully enough to be enlightening.
Content of this kind tends to repel those culturally advanced—the very people who ought to take an interest. Few of the authors are educated in the round or deeply or have absorbed the western philosophical, literary, or scientific culture well enough to stand firm. By and large they’re off the reservation where the academically-trained are comfortable. Not that that surprises me. What proportion of the population is?—thus qualified, I mean. Moreover, many of these people have been coping with unusual abilities that society these days routinely and automatically classifies, minimally, as mental disorder. Therefore, on these sites, the authors keep saying, over and over again, that they are sane, well-adapted to ordinary life, employed, not crazy, not delusional, believe me, take my word for it, and other emphatic phrases no doubt occasioned by the social consensus which holds out a stiff arm in attempts to marginalize these people.
At the same time, and by way of contrast, to someone deeply steeped in the lore of the borderzone going as far back as we are able, in every culture around the globe, what these people have to say has a familiar ring. The very fact many of these people themselves are almost never familiar with ancient human traditions that say the same thing (although the labeling may be different) tells me that I’m reading about actual experience if couched in modern structures of reference. To point at one particular phenomenon, we might take the fact that humanity has always reported on demons and evil spirits, but in the modern setting these entities are rendered as alien abductors who perform unpleasant physical examinations aboard space ships. Ancient people—who’d never heard of aliens or space ships (space in our sense was not a concept for them)—used other language to report “encounters,” often negative, while they were in certain states.
I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the realms tradition labels as hell and heaven both have their basis in the actual experience of living people who, for some reason, are more open to the invisible dimension than the majority. NDEs and similar psychic experiences have painted the higher levels while ordinarily occurring psychic abilities have produced what humanity has called the underworld, Hades, hell, or the realm of shades. Are the shades that remain behind, as it were, the pool from which souls incarnate again? Is this a very populous realm? Does it take special energy—call it grace—for a soul to reach more paradisaical vistas? Is that famous tunnel we encounter in near-death reports a transit through a lower zone of shades? I wonder. But I’m not surprised that notions of a heavenly and of a darker world are universally found in human societies. There seems to be empirical evidence for them, even if not reported by a majority.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
On the Psychic
Turbulent Terminology
Humanity’s many experiences of the “psychic” are undoubtedly based on the same fundamental experience. Terminology obscures this fact. Let me give some examples. We almost never think that “psychics” and “saints” belong to the same category. Nor do we view insanity as a “species of psychism.” People we call “mystics” (Jacob Boehme comes to mind) are rarely designated psychics. We refer to Swedenborg as a philosopher or seer, never as a “medium”—although he also communicated with the dead, as mediums are supposed to do. In some circles a designation like “shaman” is more acceptable than a designation like “sensitive.” Healing phenomena occur but are explained in different ways all based on context. If the healer comes from what is viewed as a “backward” culture, he or she is practicing witch-craft, if from a religious, he or she manifests miraculous power, if from a secular modern, the healing comes from a “healing stream”; an example is the German healer, Bruno Gröning. Santaria is an interesting hybrid in which pagan and Christian derivations are synthesized.
Terminology obscures the underlying elements—because the “psychic,” generally speaking, lies below the salt and no theory to explain it dominates. But that the phenomena observed are closely related should be obvious to any alert observer. Sainthood is associated with the “miraculous,” hence processes of sanctification involve the documentation of such events. These phenomena occur in and around the holy. Padre Pio and Solanus Casey are figures in my own time—so is Therese Neumann, who, however, has not advanced as far as Casey in the process. But we discover precisely the same kinds of phenomena associated with figures outside religious cultures too—or in cultures where no institution designates such people “saints.”
Terminology is also confusing because some designations in common use are drawn from specific effects rather than from a structured explanation of what gives rise to the effect. “Psychic” and “sensitive” are generic labels applied to people with obvious gifts (or are these misfortunes?) manifesting at mild levels: they can see the future vaguely, hear people’s thoughts, discover the hidden, find the murdered, help the police, etc. Their gifts are assigned to paranormal “powers”; I take “paranormal” to be a secular concept. But note that when these phenomena manifest in people with religious vocations, at least believers view these gifts as divine interventions, thus as “supernormal.” Mediums are named after a single skill to communicate with the dead in passive trance states—hence that designation. They are not agents, they are media of communications. Some mediums have other powers as well, but these tend to be ignored. When psychics manifest multiple powers and at higher levels, more potent words are joined to the “psychic” designation. An example in my time was Edgar Cayce, “the sleeping prophet.” Cayce brought healing messages after periods of sleep; he was also labeled a “medical clairvoyant.”
Where the religious element is to the fore, the operant assumption is that the miraculous results are in the nature of a reward for superior virtue. Observers rarely contemplate an inverse process of causation, thus that the person is religious in the first place because he or she was first a psychic and, in dealing with that experience, found religion an appropriate outlet and expression of it and virtuous behavior a suitable adaptation for managing the strains and stresses of that experience. That last explanation, I think, is often the best.
Further problems also arise because the psychic phenomenon, as such, may not actually be present in people carrying certain labels. Some saints are psychic, but by no means all saints are. Pope John Paul II, advancing toward sainthood now, was certainly not a psychic, although a splendid human being. Some mediums are psychics—others are frauds or, to put it more mildly, clever entertainers. Some magicians cultivate the label to give their high gifts of trickery and bold illusion additional attractions. And so on. The consequence in all such cases is that the absence of a good theory produces gullibility on one side and acidy skepticism on the other, with the consequence that a long-known body of phenomena do not produce genuine knowledge, and therefore insight, into the human condition.
The above, I think, might be sufficient to present the problem by way of introducing some speculation about the underlying commonality between all of these experiences—ranging from insanity on up to the highest levels of psychic functioning at the level of the great saint or seer. My own working hypothesis follows.
A Hypothesis
As I hope I've demonstrated above, various kinds of phenomena, with all kinds of different labels, are all based on the same fundamental situation, thus that insanity, miraculous events, prophecies, sainthood, healings, mediumship, shamanism, paranormal powers, and much else all have their roots in a single phenomenon. My linking of insanity, say, and sainthood, my strike some reader as highly provocative, perhaps as incendiary—while striking others as so true. In what follows I hope to disappoint people who hold either view.
My working theory on his very difficult and elusive subject may best be presented by using a hypothesis—a description. I start with the notion that the human body is adapted to life in a material dimension and, to make it work effectively, it has a very effective filtering system, built up over uncountable eons precisely to aid us—meaning life—to operate efficiently in a lower dimension and thus to shield us from interference. But interference from what? From an equally complex psychic world. Why we may be in the material sphere rather than in that other one, I will leave untouched for the moment. It might be in order to develop—in order, therefore, to rise to a higher level than the one in which we naturally originate. That hypothetical explanation will serve my purpose here; humanity has suggested other reasons and I’ve mentioned them elsewhere, most recently here. The basics of this hypothesis are simply three. One is that we are here, for whatever reason. Another is that continuous awareness of the other world would interfere with our mission here—development, let us say. And third, that our brains act as selective filtering mechanisms. They keep out the noise of the psychic world, which, at it lowest levels, may be chaotic— while permitting beneficial higher energies to reach us, energies that are helpful in our task, thus grace or baraka. That is the hypothesis.
Now the filtering mechanism has evolved naturally; it is excellent but not fault-free. It manifests at all sorts of levels. If it is too effective, it blocks out not only the noise but also most of the helpful energies of inspiration and therefore renders us excessively insensitive. If it is weak, it might have mixed consequences ranging from favorable to deplorable. Favorable consequences may be high levels of inspiration beneficial to personal and social life; unfavorable might be situations that make people into nervous wrecks. When the filter is too weak, it may cause definite hardship and, at the extreme, insanity. The filtering powers of the brain don’t necessarily affect intelligence or will—nor the other way around. Thus we have an enormous gradient of possible reactions. Some people can deal effectively with a great deal of psychic noise and hardship because of the kind of people they are. Others are not so inclined and will take undesirable paths in consequence, either because they hear too much or too little. Similarly, the most insensitive people can be and often are very straight and virtuous—while others act in a contrary way. The moral power is no more affected by the behavior of the filtering system than it is by other bodily endowments. Some people can deal with beauty—or it may be their downfall; they may deal with handicaps or fail to do so.
Now it seems to me that psychic gifts, considered generically, are all of them instances of relatively weak filtering mechanism. When they fail, insanity is the consequence, and that’s simply a misfortune. Short of that unfortunate result, the kind of “openness” I have in mind may range from what we properly call “gifts” all the way to “challenges.” They are gifts if the openness enhances favorable inflow of higher energies like inspiration or grace. They are challenges when they open people to interference that adds nothing to knowledge and diverts from life’s tasks. Based on my studies, the majority of psychics experience their gifts as burdens. They tend to experience the lower regions of the psychic reality, not the highest. They hear “voices”; some of them call these voices “guides.” Swedenborg’s spiritual diaries contain many accounts of such voices; most of them are marked by a high level of stupidity. Swedenborg also spoke with angels, but most of his exchanges were with very low kinds of entities—not evil, but dumb. Similarly—at least based on my readings—most psychic messages from the beyond are on the same level of mediocrity. Reading them I’ve time and again remarked to myself: “If that’s the stuff that’s coming from the beyond, why bother listening?” But some people have no choice in the matter. For this reason I wonder above, parenthetically, whether some of these gifts are really gifts; they might be more accurately described as misfortunes.
Healing powers are one kind of energy that flows in strongly, in some people, when the filtering is weak. Bruno Gröning is a good example. These power brought him mostly conflict and grief and, it seems, eventually killed him when he could not put it to use. A post on that subject may be found here.
All of the above suggests that a combination of factors inherent in the hypothesis—of filtering, openness due to weak filtering, the variability of the weakness, and the exercise of moral powers by the agents who experience these phenomena—can adequately explain based on a single relationship phenomena as widely differing as mediumship, insanity, and miraculous phenomena surrounding sainthood. Worth some thought.
What the available materials suggest to me is that the psychic world has a certain hierarchical structure and that its coarsest energies (and agencies) are closest to us, its highest more removed. The higher the development of the individual who experiences the “opening” the more likely it is that he or she will become aware of the heavenly ranges. This suggests that development of psychic “organs” is part of our mission here. When these are still primitive, we will still communicate with the beyond when the filtering fails, but with rather slummy regions of it. And this may also be true after we die. If we’ve developed our inner organs, we shall have sight, orientation, and upward mobility; if not, we may remain below.
It occurs to me here worth mentioning chemical mysticism, as it were, and chemical ways of enhancing the filtering. The first had a run, for a while, some decades back when “dropping acid” was a fad, thus the ingestion of LSD. The drug evidently (under my theory) temporarily weakened the filtering system and made the psychic world partially visible to people. Their own developmental level seems to have had an influence on the quality of their experiences, hence the frequent references to “bad trips.” Drug use in religious practices long predates the twentieth century. Similarly, drugs used to treat mental diseases, like schizophrenia, probably in part restore the filtering functions of the brain.
All of this, of course, however long (especially for a blog entry), fails to exhaust the subject. Far from it. It may well be that a certain opening or, negatively put, a “weakening of the filters,” may be a natural consequence of normal development. And this may explain the higher ranges of psychic perception. Whereas organic kinds of weakening, be it as a consequence of genetic causes, disease, or drug use account for the more troublesome aspects of psychic experience. And I, for one, know of at least one case where schizophrenia, followed by grandiose, quasi-religious, but definitely mad visions, was caused by drug abuse.
Humanity’s many experiences of the “psychic” are undoubtedly based on the same fundamental experience. Terminology obscures this fact. Let me give some examples. We almost never think that “psychics” and “saints” belong to the same category. Nor do we view insanity as a “species of psychism.” People we call “mystics” (Jacob Boehme comes to mind) are rarely designated psychics. We refer to Swedenborg as a philosopher or seer, never as a “medium”—although he also communicated with the dead, as mediums are supposed to do. In some circles a designation like “shaman” is more acceptable than a designation like “sensitive.” Healing phenomena occur but are explained in different ways all based on context. If the healer comes from what is viewed as a “backward” culture, he or she is practicing witch-craft, if from a religious, he or she manifests miraculous power, if from a secular modern, the healing comes from a “healing stream”; an example is the German healer, Bruno Gröning. Santaria is an interesting hybrid in which pagan and Christian derivations are synthesized.
Terminology obscures the underlying elements—because the “psychic,” generally speaking, lies below the salt and no theory to explain it dominates. But that the phenomena observed are closely related should be obvious to any alert observer. Sainthood is associated with the “miraculous,” hence processes of sanctification involve the documentation of such events. These phenomena occur in and around the holy. Padre Pio and Solanus Casey are figures in my own time—so is Therese Neumann, who, however, has not advanced as far as Casey in the process. But we discover precisely the same kinds of phenomena associated with figures outside religious cultures too—or in cultures where no institution designates such people “saints.”
Terminology is also confusing because some designations in common use are drawn from specific effects rather than from a structured explanation of what gives rise to the effect. “Psychic” and “sensitive” are generic labels applied to people with obvious gifts (or are these misfortunes?) manifesting at mild levels: they can see the future vaguely, hear people’s thoughts, discover the hidden, find the murdered, help the police, etc. Their gifts are assigned to paranormal “powers”; I take “paranormal” to be a secular concept. But note that when these phenomena manifest in people with religious vocations, at least believers view these gifts as divine interventions, thus as “supernormal.” Mediums are named after a single skill to communicate with the dead in passive trance states—hence that designation. They are not agents, they are media of communications. Some mediums have other powers as well, but these tend to be ignored. When psychics manifest multiple powers and at higher levels, more potent words are joined to the “psychic” designation. An example in my time was Edgar Cayce, “the sleeping prophet.” Cayce brought healing messages after periods of sleep; he was also labeled a “medical clairvoyant.”
Where the religious element is to the fore, the operant assumption is that the miraculous results are in the nature of a reward for superior virtue. Observers rarely contemplate an inverse process of causation, thus that the person is religious in the first place because he or she was first a psychic and, in dealing with that experience, found religion an appropriate outlet and expression of it and virtuous behavior a suitable adaptation for managing the strains and stresses of that experience. That last explanation, I think, is often the best.
Further problems also arise because the psychic phenomenon, as such, may not actually be present in people carrying certain labels. Some saints are psychic, but by no means all saints are. Pope John Paul II, advancing toward sainthood now, was certainly not a psychic, although a splendid human being. Some mediums are psychics—others are frauds or, to put it more mildly, clever entertainers. Some magicians cultivate the label to give their high gifts of trickery and bold illusion additional attractions. And so on. The consequence in all such cases is that the absence of a good theory produces gullibility on one side and acidy skepticism on the other, with the consequence that a long-known body of phenomena do not produce genuine knowledge, and therefore insight, into the human condition.
The above, I think, might be sufficient to present the problem by way of introducing some speculation about the underlying commonality between all of these experiences—ranging from insanity on up to the highest levels of psychic functioning at the level of the great saint or seer. My own working hypothesis follows.
A Hypothesis
As I hope I've demonstrated above, various kinds of phenomena, with all kinds of different labels, are all based on the same fundamental situation, thus that insanity, miraculous events, prophecies, sainthood, healings, mediumship, shamanism, paranormal powers, and much else all have their roots in a single phenomenon. My linking of insanity, say, and sainthood, my strike some reader as highly provocative, perhaps as incendiary—while striking others as so true. In what follows I hope to disappoint people who hold either view.
My working theory on his very difficult and elusive subject may best be presented by using a hypothesis—a description. I start with the notion that the human body is adapted to life in a material dimension and, to make it work effectively, it has a very effective filtering system, built up over uncountable eons precisely to aid us—meaning life—to operate efficiently in a lower dimension and thus to shield us from interference. But interference from what? From an equally complex psychic world. Why we may be in the material sphere rather than in that other one, I will leave untouched for the moment. It might be in order to develop—in order, therefore, to rise to a higher level than the one in which we naturally originate. That hypothetical explanation will serve my purpose here; humanity has suggested other reasons and I’ve mentioned them elsewhere, most recently here. The basics of this hypothesis are simply three. One is that we are here, for whatever reason. Another is that continuous awareness of the other world would interfere with our mission here—development, let us say. And third, that our brains act as selective filtering mechanisms. They keep out the noise of the psychic world, which, at it lowest levels, may be chaotic— while permitting beneficial higher energies to reach us, energies that are helpful in our task, thus grace or baraka. That is the hypothesis.
Now the filtering mechanism has evolved naturally; it is excellent but not fault-free. It manifests at all sorts of levels. If it is too effective, it blocks out not only the noise but also most of the helpful energies of inspiration and therefore renders us excessively insensitive. If it is weak, it might have mixed consequences ranging from favorable to deplorable. Favorable consequences may be high levels of inspiration beneficial to personal and social life; unfavorable might be situations that make people into nervous wrecks. When the filter is too weak, it may cause definite hardship and, at the extreme, insanity. The filtering powers of the brain don’t necessarily affect intelligence or will—nor the other way around. Thus we have an enormous gradient of possible reactions. Some people can deal effectively with a great deal of psychic noise and hardship because of the kind of people they are. Others are not so inclined and will take undesirable paths in consequence, either because they hear too much or too little. Similarly, the most insensitive people can be and often are very straight and virtuous—while others act in a contrary way. The moral power is no more affected by the behavior of the filtering system than it is by other bodily endowments. Some people can deal with beauty—or it may be their downfall; they may deal with handicaps or fail to do so.
Now it seems to me that psychic gifts, considered generically, are all of them instances of relatively weak filtering mechanism. When they fail, insanity is the consequence, and that’s simply a misfortune. Short of that unfortunate result, the kind of “openness” I have in mind may range from what we properly call “gifts” all the way to “challenges.” They are gifts if the openness enhances favorable inflow of higher energies like inspiration or grace. They are challenges when they open people to interference that adds nothing to knowledge and diverts from life’s tasks. Based on my studies, the majority of psychics experience their gifts as burdens. They tend to experience the lower regions of the psychic reality, not the highest. They hear “voices”; some of them call these voices “guides.” Swedenborg’s spiritual diaries contain many accounts of such voices; most of them are marked by a high level of stupidity. Swedenborg also spoke with angels, but most of his exchanges were with very low kinds of entities—not evil, but dumb. Similarly—at least based on my readings—most psychic messages from the beyond are on the same level of mediocrity. Reading them I’ve time and again remarked to myself: “If that’s the stuff that’s coming from the beyond, why bother listening?” But some people have no choice in the matter. For this reason I wonder above, parenthetically, whether some of these gifts are really gifts; they might be more accurately described as misfortunes.
Healing powers are one kind of energy that flows in strongly, in some people, when the filtering is weak. Bruno Gröning is a good example. These power brought him mostly conflict and grief and, it seems, eventually killed him when he could not put it to use. A post on that subject may be found here.
All of the above suggests that a combination of factors inherent in the hypothesis—of filtering, openness due to weak filtering, the variability of the weakness, and the exercise of moral powers by the agents who experience these phenomena—can adequately explain based on a single relationship phenomena as widely differing as mediumship, insanity, and miraculous phenomena surrounding sainthood. Worth some thought.
What the available materials suggest to me is that the psychic world has a certain hierarchical structure and that its coarsest energies (and agencies) are closest to us, its highest more removed. The higher the development of the individual who experiences the “opening” the more likely it is that he or she will become aware of the heavenly ranges. This suggests that development of psychic “organs” is part of our mission here. When these are still primitive, we will still communicate with the beyond when the filtering fails, but with rather slummy regions of it. And this may also be true after we die. If we’ve developed our inner organs, we shall have sight, orientation, and upward mobility; if not, we may remain below.
It occurs to me here worth mentioning chemical mysticism, as it were, and chemical ways of enhancing the filtering. The first had a run, for a while, some decades back when “dropping acid” was a fad, thus the ingestion of LSD. The drug evidently (under my theory) temporarily weakened the filtering system and made the psychic world partially visible to people. Their own developmental level seems to have had an influence on the quality of their experiences, hence the frequent references to “bad trips.” Drug use in religious practices long predates the twentieth century. Similarly, drugs used to treat mental diseases, like schizophrenia, probably in part restore the filtering functions of the brain.
All of this, of course, however long (especially for a blog entry), fails to exhaust the subject. Far from it. It may well be that a certain opening or, negatively put, a “weakening of the filters,” may be a natural consequence of normal development. And this may explain the higher ranges of psychic perception. Whereas organic kinds of weakening, be it as a consequence of genetic causes, disease, or drug use account for the more troublesome aspects of psychic experience. And I, for one, know of at least one case where schizophrenia, followed by grandiose, quasi-religious, but definitely mad visions, was caused by drug abuse.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Communications III: People with Paranormal Talents
When we hear about people with paranormal gifts, can we say that they “communicate with the beyond”? I’ve had a few (fewer than five) unambiguous experiences of telepathy. In these experiences communications reached me, but invariably from living people, thus persons alive and well in the ordinary physical order. I’ve had one unambiguous dream of the future, reported here. Its content dealt with a future event in my ordinary life. Nevertheless—but stretching the concepts quite a bit—I include the experiences of people with paranormal talents as pointing at the beyond, not necessarily in the sense of communicating with it but in the sense of entering it temporarily in some way in order to recover information useful in this dimension.
What do I mean by such people? I include psychics and saints of a certain type, specifically those (of the latter) who’re able to heal, see the future, and read minds. In this category I also put people in whose vicinity strange things happen beyond healings: they can find lost things; they appear somehow to arrange things so that problems are solved; etc. The powers of these people range from relatively low to rather spectacular; some few are able to control them better; these individuals can also hide them at will. Saints with gifts are most certainly functionally psychics; they are called saints because they stem from intensely religious cultures or subcultures; they also tend to assign their gifts to supernatural agencies. As do some psychics, of course. I’m sure that we are dealing here with a clustering of experiences that arise everywhere. The interpretation of these experiences—by those who have them and by society—are culturally determined. Cultures in which concepts like “psychic” or “saint” have no currency have their own labels. But descriptions of these people match those found in the West.
Are these people real—or are they faking? I’ve no doubt that they are real. The only reason some few charlatans pretend to have powers is because such powers exist in others and collective knowledge and memory testifies to their deeds. You’ve got to have the real before the imitators make their appearance. Of course they are present—and a good thing too. What would the skeptics do without them?
Problems surround this field. Psychic powers are rarely if ever under the full control of people who have them. The weaker the power the more stochastic it is. In the exercise of these powers, the counterparties involved also need some kind of talent. Even the great healers cannot heal everyone. “Faith” must be present. But faith in this sense is itself a paranormal power, not just a strong thought that willfully asserts: “I believe. I do!” These matters unfold beneath the level of rational mentation. For these reasons psychic detectives, to use an example, do not invariably solve every crime. If they did, such detectives would be in very great demand and pull down very high salaries. But that some psychic detectives, in some instances, do solve hopelessly deadlocked cases is also true.
The presence of such people in the population and the exercise of these powers, when they do work, do seem to me to substantiate the hypothesis that it is possible temporarily to step out of the physical order, temporarily to gain visions from another perspective, and (and especially in the case of healings) bring energies to bear that can produce “miraculous” effects. If you assume, as I do, that two orders are involved, one placed above the other but each one governed by real laws of the universe, then the term “miraculous” loses its sense of “arbitrary intervention by agencies” out of this world. My own interest in these matters is strictly limited to understanding. I don’t seek such powers and all that is imagined to go with them. Most of the people who have such powers in much greater measure than the ordinary human could probably tell you all the hardships that go with a talent that “bloweth where it listeth” as John’s Gospel speaks of the spirit, as of the wind, in 3:8. What I conclude from the presence of these people with paranormal talents is that we are living on the edges of another order; we are generally shielded from it (understood either positively or negatively), but certain arrangements in our make-up permit us sometimes to act from or with the aid of phenomena accessible there.
Now a comment or two about the specific concept of “communications.” In the case of psychics generally, one does not encounter the claim of communications with spirits. Whatever range of the beyond the psychics reach, it is not evidently populated by spirits. The saints, to be sure, experience visions and communications with transcendental figures, but the content of these messages is almost always of a moral or theological portent. There is one famed exception. It is the case of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth century scientist-seer who claimed to have visited heaven and hell, to have held converse with the angels, indeed to have communicated with the departed. Swedenborg, however, is a very special case and requires separate consideration.
What do I mean by such people? I include psychics and saints of a certain type, specifically those (of the latter) who’re able to heal, see the future, and read minds. In this category I also put people in whose vicinity strange things happen beyond healings: they can find lost things; they appear somehow to arrange things so that problems are solved; etc. The powers of these people range from relatively low to rather spectacular; some few are able to control them better; these individuals can also hide them at will. Saints with gifts are most certainly functionally psychics; they are called saints because they stem from intensely religious cultures or subcultures; they also tend to assign their gifts to supernatural agencies. As do some psychics, of course. I’m sure that we are dealing here with a clustering of experiences that arise everywhere. The interpretation of these experiences—by those who have them and by society—are culturally determined. Cultures in which concepts like “psychic” or “saint” have no currency have their own labels. But descriptions of these people match those found in the West.
Are these people real—or are they faking? I’ve no doubt that they are real. The only reason some few charlatans pretend to have powers is because such powers exist in others and collective knowledge and memory testifies to their deeds. You’ve got to have the real before the imitators make their appearance. Of course they are present—and a good thing too. What would the skeptics do without them?
Problems surround this field. Psychic powers are rarely if ever under the full control of people who have them. The weaker the power the more stochastic it is. In the exercise of these powers, the counterparties involved also need some kind of talent. Even the great healers cannot heal everyone. “Faith” must be present. But faith in this sense is itself a paranormal power, not just a strong thought that willfully asserts: “I believe. I do!” These matters unfold beneath the level of rational mentation. For these reasons psychic detectives, to use an example, do not invariably solve every crime. If they did, such detectives would be in very great demand and pull down very high salaries. But that some psychic detectives, in some instances, do solve hopelessly deadlocked cases is also true.
The presence of such people in the population and the exercise of these powers, when they do work, do seem to me to substantiate the hypothesis that it is possible temporarily to step out of the physical order, temporarily to gain visions from another perspective, and (and especially in the case of healings) bring energies to bear that can produce “miraculous” effects. If you assume, as I do, that two orders are involved, one placed above the other but each one governed by real laws of the universe, then the term “miraculous” loses its sense of “arbitrary intervention by agencies” out of this world. My own interest in these matters is strictly limited to understanding. I don’t seek such powers and all that is imagined to go with them. Most of the people who have such powers in much greater measure than the ordinary human could probably tell you all the hardships that go with a talent that “bloweth where it listeth” as John’s Gospel speaks of the spirit, as of the wind, in 3:8. What I conclude from the presence of these people with paranormal talents is that we are living on the edges of another order; we are generally shielded from it (understood either positively or negatively), but certain arrangements in our make-up permit us sometimes to act from or with the aid of phenomena accessible there.
Now a comment or two about the specific concept of “communications.” In the case of psychics generally, one does not encounter the claim of communications with spirits. Whatever range of the beyond the psychics reach, it is not evidently populated by spirits. The saints, to be sure, experience visions and communications with transcendental figures, but the content of these messages is almost always of a moral or theological portent. There is one famed exception. It is the case of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth century scientist-seer who claimed to have visited heaven and hell, to have held converse with the angels, indeed to have communicated with the departed. Swedenborg, however, is a very special case and requires separate consideration.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Communications II
In the spiritualistic context, communications are understood as messages between two agents, one embodied and one a spirit—with the medium acting as an enabler or intervenor. Here the activity is equivalent to “conversation” or to “exchange.” But what is it that is being exchanged? Meanings capable of being rendered into concepts.
In ordinary experience, however, we also encounter all kinds of other forms of communication that don’t display real-time “give-and-take” characteristics. Examples are signs and broadcasts. These are messages put out by an agency on purpose; the message has a meaning; but when it is issued, no one in particular is being addressed; the target is everyone in general. These broadcasts are in the “Hear ye, hear ye!” category. They also convey concepts. The message may be spoken or written or may simply be an image, thus a left-pointing arrow to indicate a sharp curve on a highway.
A particularly interesting form of this “broadcast-style” communication is music. For purposes of discussion, let’s eliminate words set to music as in songs or operas and stick to pure compositions of sound. These musical messages have structure. In that they aren’t random noise, they have meaning. If we stick to clear and obvious forms, we can identify the seeming intention behind the music, or its the content. It may be rousing, martial, passionate, pastoral, sensuous, innocent-childish, tense (used in movies), lulling, exalted, transcending, and so on and so forth. Music therefore has a meaningful content usually labeled as emotional. The feelings aroused are a good match for other experience that produce the same emotions. Yet another way of looking at music is to see it as a structured form of energy. Its conceptual content is diffused; its feeling content is concentrated. Within the boundaries of the emotion, the listener can apply any number of fitting concepts to the sound. To put this more emphatically, the individual who hears the music is free to interpret it conceptually using his or her own ideas as they happen to occur. The ideas are not explicitly present in the music, but the music is compatible with the ideas. An eerie, tense piece of music may be added to a ghost-movie, a spy-thriller, the story of a lovable dog about to encounter a snake, a marital conflict, and on and on. The eerie music, however, is incompatible with love-scenes or birthday parties or the birth of a baby—unless the newborn just happens to be Damian.
I’ve gone in this direction—broadcasting, music—by way of introducing a speculation. It is that meaningful flows of energy, thus structured forms of energy, may be reaching us in this dimension from the order of the soul. I don’t conceive of these as coming from active agencies, thus angels or demons; others use yet other words for immaterial agents. I think of these flows as part of the normal environment of the soul-order, flows that have a dynamic behavior. The individual’s inner state can draw such energies towards itself; if the inner state is high, it will draw high energies; if the state is low, it will draw negative forms of the same energy appropriately structured.
Now here I’m really reaching, thus I’m engaging in pure speculation, but I think that experience provides a foundation of evidence for it. To give that experience a recognizable name, let me call it inspiration. Everyone experiences inspiration, but it is particularly obvious to those engaged in the arts. You have a general idea, a feeling and a fuzzy concept of what it is you’re trying to express. And suddenly the inspiration is right there. The hands start moving, images begin to flash, the words begin to flow. This last process, a reaction to the inspiration, is the action of the person, I believe. But the inspiration that triggers it is energy attracted by the inward groping of the agent’s will. Inspiration will flow—if the individual is at all in a listening state. But the result is due to the individual. A confused, unskilled, careless person will produce a chaotic sort of work, no matter how strong the inspiration is. The highly skilled, intelligent, and disciplined person will produce a fine piece of work even from a faintly-perceived inspiration. Great works of art signal very high gifts, very deep listening, and very strong flows from the beyond.
With this I have at least outlined how communication from the beyond, from another order, reaches ordinary people on more or less a daily basis. This is a hypothesis, of course. The reason why I find it plausible is because I’m certain that our consciousness, mind, soul—you name it—originates elsewhere and, in its normal operation, it uses energies from its native order even on the material plane. What we call inspiration is the noticeable manifestation of this linkage. It may very well be present in many other ways of which we remain unaware. One of the reasons why we notice it is because it surprises us. We get the most wondrous ideas when we are “in the zone,” as the phrase has it. We know full well what kinds of results we usually get. Great art, even a fortunate poem, is inexplicable in the ordinary way.
Some individuals are quite dense and “hear” very little of this heavenly music; at the other extreme are very gifted people who literally swim in the current. Being closed or open to the flow does not automatically translate into tangible achievements. Two factors are involved. To be effective in translating the inspiration, the individual must be competent in the tooling of this world as well. It did not in the least surprise me, therefore, that in Sufi teachings—one of the most mystical approaches to reality—the minimum qualification of the initiate is that he or she should be a “householder,” meaning somebody who’s already proved his or her competence in getting things done in the real world.
In ordinary experience, however, we also encounter all kinds of other forms of communication that don’t display real-time “give-and-take” characteristics. Examples are signs and broadcasts. These are messages put out by an agency on purpose; the message has a meaning; but when it is issued, no one in particular is being addressed; the target is everyone in general. These broadcasts are in the “Hear ye, hear ye!” category. They also convey concepts. The message may be spoken or written or may simply be an image, thus a left-pointing arrow to indicate a sharp curve on a highway.
A particularly interesting form of this “broadcast-style” communication is music. For purposes of discussion, let’s eliminate words set to music as in songs or operas and stick to pure compositions of sound. These musical messages have structure. In that they aren’t random noise, they have meaning. If we stick to clear and obvious forms, we can identify the seeming intention behind the music, or its the content. It may be rousing, martial, passionate, pastoral, sensuous, innocent-childish, tense (used in movies), lulling, exalted, transcending, and so on and so forth. Music therefore has a meaningful content usually labeled as emotional. The feelings aroused are a good match for other experience that produce the same emotions. Yet another way of looking at music is to see it as a structured form of energy. Its conceptual content is diffused; its feeling content is concentrated. Within the boundaries of the emotion, the listener can apply any number of fitting concepts to the sound. To put this more emphatically, the individual who hears the music is free to interpret it conceptually using his or her own ideas as they happen to occur. The ideas are not explicitly present in the music, but the music is compatible with the ideas. An eerie, tense piece of music may be added to a ghost-movie, a spy-thriller, the story of a lovable dog about to encounter a snake, a marital conflict, and on and on. The eerie music, however, is incompatible with love-scenes or birthday parties or the birth of a baby—unless the newborn just happens to be Damian.
I’ve gone in this direction—broadcasting, music—by way of introducing a speculation. It is that meaningful flows of energy, thus structured forms of energy, may be reaching us in this dimension from the order of the soul. I don’t conceive of these as coming from active agencies, thus angels or demons; others use yet other words for immaterial agents. I think of these flows as part of the normal environment of the soul-order, flows that have a dynamic behavior. The individual’s inner state can draw such energies towards itself; if the inner state is high, it will draw high energies; if the state is low, it will draw negative forms of the same energy appropriately structured.
Now here I’m really reaching, thus I’m engaging in pure speculation, but I think that experience provides a foundation of evidence for it. To give that experience a recognizable name, let me call it inspiration. Everyone experiences inspiration, but it is particularly obvious to those engaged in the arts. You have a general idea, a feeling and a fuzzy concept of what it is you’re trying to express. And suddenly the inspiration is right there. The hands start moving, images begin to flash, the words begin to flow. This last process, a reaction to the inspiration, is the action of the person, I believe. But the inspiration that triggers it is energy attracted by the inward groping of the agent’s will. Inspiration will flow—if the individual is at all in a listening state. But the result is due to the individual. A confused, unskilled, careless person will produce a chaotic sort of work, no matter how strong the inspiration is. The highly skilled, intelligent, and disciplined person will produce a fine piece of work even from a faintly-perceived inspiration. Great works of art signal very high gifts, very deep listening, and very strong flows from the beyond.
With this I have at least outlined how communication from the beyond, from another order, reaches ordinary people on more or less a daily basis. This is a hypothesis, of course. The reason why I find it plausible is because I’m certain that our consciousness, mind, soul—you name it—originates elsewhere and, in its normal operation, it uses energies from its native order even on the material plane. What we call inspiration is the noticeable manifestation of this linkage. It may very well be present in many other ways of which we remain unaware. One of the reasons why we notice it is because it surprises us. We get the most wondrous ideas when we are “in the zone,” as the phrase has it. We know full well what kinds of results we usually get. Great art, even a fortunate poem, is inexplicable in the ordinary way.
Some individuals are quite dense and “hear” very little of this heavenly music; at the other extreme are very gifted people who literally swim in the current. Being closed or open to the flow does not automatically translate into tangible achievements. Two factors are involved. To be effective in translating the inspiration, the individual must be competent in the tooling of this world as well. It did not in the least surprise me, therefore, that in Sufi teachings—one of the most mystical approaches to reality—the minimum qualification of the initiate is that he or she should be a “householder,” meaning somebody who’s already proved his or her competence in getting things done in the real world.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Communications with the Beyond
Although the title will immediately suggest contacting the departed by the mediation of a medium, I would suggest at least two other modes whereby communications from the soul-order beyond reach people. One mode is fairly routinely experienced and not viewed as unusual, transcendental, or weird in any way. The other one depends upon the extraordinary powers some few people develop or carry from early years. But let me first address the obvious, talking to the dead.
Spiritualistic Phenomena. Let me start here by explicitly expressing my own opinion on such communications so that those seeking positive reinforcement can avoid irritation and just click away to somewhere else. True: the rather extensive literature persuades me that such communications do indeed take place, but I’ve come to think of them as almost useless means of learning anything useful beyond knowledge much more easily obtained by other means—namely that another world (or worlds) beyond exist. The analogy I would suggests is learning something about China by means of interviewing derelicts and unfortunates on the margins of Chinese society in great cities like Shanghai, Beijing, or Hong Kong. Real mediums exist, I think, but the field is ripe with temptations to exploit gullible people. In the paranormal domain, spiritualism is almost impossible, therefore, to study in structured and rational ways.
I come to these conclusions for a number of reasons. What reports of near-death experiences (NDEs) suggest is that disembodied souls have a devil of a time communicating with the living—and the reason for this that I’ve suggested is that they lack access to the instruments by which to reach people in bodies. Those people are equally “blind,” as it were, to the other reality because the functioning of their bodies interferes with seeing the soul dimension. This suggests that unusual circumstances are required for any kind of communication. The central figure here becomes the medium. Virtually all mediums go into trances while they “channel” the other world. That word is suggestive. It suggests that the medium is a tool rather than an agency. The medium absents herself (most mediums are women). She gets out of the way. The spirit on the other side appears to take over the medium’s “instruments,” principally her vocal chords and, presumably, certain functions of her brain. Hence mediums often speak in strange voices. And there are rare cases where the other party in fact comments on the difficulties of using the medium’s body. Many mediums also make use (or are made use of by) a guide or a “control,” thus another spirit on the other side, who is well matched to the medium and in turns transmits information from a third party—the departed.
This suggests to me that some minimal form of at least partial possession is a necessary aspect of the spiritualistic phenomenon. A spirit must gain access to a living person; that person has to get out of the way, accomplished by the trance; then communications of a sort commence. The maintenance of this strange duality—two agencies using the same body—is difficult, chancy, and tiring to the medium. I for one see the medium’s gifts as ill-used in such communications for reasons that have to do with the other aspect of this phenomenon: its fundamentally banal content.
In years of looking at this phenomenon from time to time, I have yet to discover anywhere any information regarding the “beyond” which cannot be found with much less hocus-pocus in the writings of speculators, moralists, and other authors on values or cosmologies. There is nothing much there. What a person can discover is proof that life continues after this stint on earth, but for that we do not need to talk to some departed grandpa who still remembers the pet dog’s name. If the reader is interested in confirming this, I would suggest the excellent web site of SurvivalAfterDeath.org.uk accessible here. This site reproduces many original papers and extracts from the psychical literature reaching well into the nineteenth century; there is much else there as well on psychical research beyond spiritualism.
I will defer discussion of the other two categories of communications to future posts because this entry, as I observe, has already reached its appointed length.
Spiritualistic Phenomena. Let me start here by explicitly expressing my own opinion on such communications so that those seeking positive reinforcement can avoid irritation and just click away to somewhere else. True: the rather extensive literature persuades me that such communications do indeed take place, but I’ve come to think of them as almost useless means of learning anything useful beyond knowledge much more easily obtained by other means—namely that another world (or worlds) beyond exist. The analogy I would suggests is learning something about China by means of interviewing derelicts and unfortunates on the margins of Chinese society in great cities like Shanghai, Beijing, or Hong Kong. Real mediums exist, I think, but the field is ripe with temptations to exploit gullible people. In the paranormal domain, spiritualism is almost impossible, therefore, to study in structured and rational ways.
I come to these conclusions for a number of reasons. What reports of near-death experiences (NDEs) suggest is that disembodied souls have a devil of a time communicating with the living—and the reason for this that I’ve suggested is that they lack access to the instruments by which to reach people in bodies. Those people are equally “blind,” as it were, to the other reality because the functioning of their bodies interferes with seeing the soul dimension. This suggests that unusual circumstances are required for any kind of communication. The central figure here becomes the medium. Virtually all mediums go into trances while they “channel” the other world. That word is suggestive. It suggests that the medium is a tool rather than an agency. The medium absents herself (most mediums are women). She gets out of the way. The spirit on the other side appears to take over the medium’s “instruments,” principally her vocal chords and, presumably, certain functions of her brain. Hence mediums often speak in strange voices. And there are rare cases where the other party in fact comments on the difficulties of using the medium’s body. Many mediums also make use (or are made use of by) a guide or a “control,” thus another spirit on the other side, who is well matched to the medium and in turns transmits information from a third party—the departed.
This suggests to me that some minimal form of at least partial possession is a necessary aspect of the spiritualistic phenomenon. A spirit must gain access to a living person; that person has to get out of the way, accomplished by the trance; then communications of a sort commence. The maintenance of this strange duality—two agencies using the same body—is difficult, chancy, and tiring to the medium. I for one see the medium’s gifts as ill-used in such communications for reasons that have to do with the other aspect of this phenomenon: its fundamentally banal content.
In years of looking at this phenomenon from time to time, I have yet to discover anywhere any information regarding the “beyond” which cannot be found with much less hocus-pocus in the writings of speculators, moralists, and other authors on values or cosmologies. There is nothing much there. What a person can discover is proof that life continues after this stint on earth, but for that we do not need to talk to some departed grandpa who still remembers the pet dog’s name. If the reader is interested in confirming this, I would suggest the excellent web site of SurvivalAfterDeath.org.uk accessible here. This site reproduces many original papers and extracts from the psychical literature reaching well into the nineteenth century; there is much else there as well on psychical research beyond spiritualism.
I will defer discussion of the other two categories of communications to future posts because this entry, as I observe, has already reached its appointed length.
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