More on Slums Beyond the Border

The occasion for this post is my discovery quite recently of a major nineteenth century figure in psychology, Frederic W.H. Myers. I’ve been reading a one-volume compression of his two volume work, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Borderzone stuff, in other words.

A central concern of Myers’ work are phenomena that I’m inclined to classify as “mediumistic.” Myers’ own inclination is to use more scientific labels. He dislikes using such terms as “medium”—with the implication that such a person is an “intermediary” between this world and the spiritual or ethereal—because they signal a conclusion, whereas Myers was interested in understanding things first before he labeled them. His own view—later much used by C.G. Jung—was that the human mind had a rather extensive and superior range of functioning, mostly unconscious to the waking personality; he called it the subliminal mind; he also thought that the subliminal mind explains a great majority of what I (more carelessly) call the mediumistic phenomena.

Myers discusses this subject under various headings appropriate to his own system of classification: Disintegration of Personality (wherein he covers mental conditions of dissociation and multiple personalities), Motor Automatism (where he deals with such things as automatic writing, table wrapping, hauntings, and the like), and Possession (I haven’t reached that part of this massive book yet).

Reading such material, even when the commentator is a person of genius and very high penetration, I still always have a sense of recoil and unease. And that is because I think that such mediumistic communications or phenomena (the latter because no attempt at communication needs to be present perforce) come into our material realm from an immediate neighborhood next to the material world, thus just across (you might say) the Borderzone. And judging principally by the contents that reach us from there, I view that realm as decidedly inferior in character. Inferior but not evil, as such; simply sub-par. I call it the slums.

What do I mean by sub-par? The content tends to be conventional; no insights into existence in an immaterial realm ever surface. Veridical content (telling us what no one involved in the séance can know) is rare. Humor is present, but tends to be of the low sort. Gossipy at best. Jejune. There is content in the slums—but seemingly less developed than on our side.

Accessible from there are (I’m guessing) are vast fields of memory (such as Sheldrake presumes to exist—the morphic fields) and souls, agencies who, for some reason, did not “move on” to the more developed ethereal realm and are therefore “hanging on.” They are still oriented toward this realm, the reason why they are willing to communicate with it and, at times, to invade living people (possession) whose internal filters meant to block such intrusions are in some way weak; these spirits are still eager in some ways to participate in this life—which is very tough to do without a body. Also present in the mediumistic, extremely rarely, are higher manifestations. Nothing in this realm, or the next one over, is absolutely pure.

It is worth underlining that just because some realm is immaterial, it doesn’t mean that it’s superior. Similarly, just because a realm is material does not automatically signal that it is inferior. Qualitative differences have everything to do with the souls that produce the collective phenomena.

This view of mine is shared by at least one fairly well-known figure, the Dutch psychiatrist, Frederick van Eeden (1860-1932), a contemporary of Myers. I’ve touched on this subject twice before here (link, link); the first link discusses van Eeden’s views.  

Now, to be sure, Myers deal with this subject extensively because it represents evidence—evidence for other layers of reality than the conventionally experienced mind-body realm that we inhabit in this life. It also helps him “flesh out” (to use an ironic phrase) the reality of the subliminal mind. But once you are certain of those other realms, as I am, going slumming is not something I like to engage in unless I have to. And, often, I do. All those ridiculous dreams of the morning… 

The Demons at the Border

Waking dreams in my case very often have the character of a “return.” There is a trip in the background, a clear sense of heading home, sometimes a sense of urgency—because something needs to be done when I arrive. “Return” or “trip” are also marked by the presence of trains, trolleys, buses, roads, and the like. Very often the surroundings are pleasant but, as I proceed, they become urban, industrial, slum-like, crowded, and ever-more depressing. A sense of being lost arises as well. The landscape keeps changing. Home is “over there”—but then the expected landmark isn’t where it ought to be. And quite often as the chaos increases, some kind of very unpleasant encounters also follow. In this morning’s waking dream, for example, I found myself confronted by people trying to collect a debt I did not remember owing. After long discussions it suddenly occurred to me that if I had borrowed money, I must have signed some documents. I began demanding the documents and—unless they were immediately produced—I threatened to hire lawyers. And with that energetic thought I found myself awake—angry but awake.

The Dutch psychiatrist, Frederick van Eeden (1860-1932), the man who coined the phrase “lucid dream,” also had such dreams; he recorded some 352 of them over a period of 14 years. Toward their end, as he reports, they often morphed into ordinary dreams. And in such situations he sometimes encountered demons. Van Eeden was not asserting the reality of demons per se. They might or might not be real. But he gave an interesting definition. “I call demoniacal those [dream] phenomena which produce on us the impression of being invented or arranged by intelligent beings of a very low moral order.” For more see this paper of his—in which he also describes how to deal with such creatures.

Old van Eeden came back into my memories this morning as I reflected on that unpleasant waking dream of mine. Such dreams get one’s attention. The episode with the would-be debt collectors, within the dream, took place after I’d finally finished my trip and I was “home,” home because Brigitte lived there, but at that moment she was “out.”

It occurred to me that those “returns” might actually be genuine—the return of the soul to the body after some excursion outside of it. That return is usually from a splendid place (a plane that some, like van Eeden, experience lucidly) to the realm of matter, the coarse, the cosmic slums, as it were, the turbidity of the pools. We must return but aren’t eager. And at that lowly level might be assemblies of those “left behind” after they died and still playing their wretched games.

It was Ibn el Arabi who wrote that in some ways the experience of dreams and of the higher realms have similarities—but dreams are an inferior and distorted perception of what lies beyond them. The lucid, perhaps? Here is how van Eeden describes the human state in lucid dreams:

In these lucid dreams the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition. [See earlier link]

Both the ordinary and the lucid dream-worlds are symbolic, according to van Eeden. He defines symbol as follows: “A symbol is an image, or an imaginary event, standing for a real object or event whereto it has some distant resemblance. Now the invention of a symbol can only be an act of thought—the work of some intelligence.” Thus it is one—or many—minds that create environments and situations in the disembodied states we sometimes “dream.” Hence the “demonic” phenomena in waking dreams may be the projection of intelligent beings of “a very low moral order.” My own dream diaries have lots of examples; in virtually every such case, what ultimately wakes me up is the distinct feeling that “this isn’t me.”