Whisperers

by J H Brennan

  But while Batcheldor was conducting his experiments, a serious complication was on the horizon. In September 1972, members of a Canadian research group led by Dr. A. R. G. Owen, a former fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a seasoned psychical researcher, decided to find out whether they could create a ghost.46 To this end, they invented a fictional character named Philip, a well-born Cavalier officer who lived at the time of the English Civil War. Although married, Philip had an affair with a gypsy girl named Margo. When his wife, Dorothea, discovered what was going on, she denounced Margo as a witch. Margo was subsequently burned at the stake and a heartbroken Philip committed suicide by flinging himself off the battlements of Diddington Hall, his family home. The only factual element in this lurid tale was the family home. There really was a Diddington Hall (in Warwickshire) and group members found photographs of it to help them visualize the details of their story. They then began a series of séances designed to make contact with “Philip.”47

  For a year they were unsuccessful. Then one of the members stumbled on Batcheldor’s work, reports of which suggested that a lighthearted approach tended to be more conducive to phenomena. They began to tell jokes and sing while seated around the séance table. Three or four sittings later, they heard their first rap after which the table began to slide across the floor. One member had the presence of mind to ask aloud if Philip was causing this and was answered by an extraordinarily loud knock. The group quickly established a one-knock-for-yes, two-knocks-for-no code and set up a line of communication. Over several subsequent séances, the communicating entity confirmed details of its life, which matched—and in some instances creatively embroidered on—Philip’s fictional story. He also proved capable of providing apposite answers to questions that lay outside his story altogether.48

  The communications were accompanied by spectacular physical phenomena. These included rolling knocks across the table, table movements such as tilts and slides, raps made to order at specified locations in the room, distortions rising like oranges out of the table surface, and the flickering of electric lights on demand. During the making of a documentary movie about the séances, witnesses reported that the table levitated fully, about half an inch from the floor (although the action was not captured on film). When the group later took part in a television discussion, Philip managed to persuade the table to climb a set of steps in order to join the panelists on the platform. This complex and highly entertaining maneuver was recorded on camera.49

  As with Batcheldor’s work, the Toronto experiment proved repeatable by different groups, including one that met at a hotel in the Malverns on September 24, 1995, and conjured a fictional Saxon priestess named Coventina using a modified form of Solomonic ritual. The “entity” answered questions for some twenty minutes, having spontaneously “possessed” one of the participants who passed into a mediumistic trance.50

  Although the implications of these experiments have yet to find their way into mainstream thought, they establish beyond all doubt that if the human mind really is the ultimate home of spirits, it is a much more complex habitat than consensus psychology currently imagines—a conclusion confirmed by further experimental evidence.

  29. A SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION

  STANISLAV GROF WAS BORN IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA IN 1932. HE TRAINED as a physician and psychiatrist. In 1956, he graduated from medical school and just months later presented himself at the Psychiatric Department of the School of Medicine in Prague for an experiment that was to change the course of his life. It was an experiment with LSD.

  LSD is the common name for lysergic acid diethylamide, a potent psychoactive drug first synthesized in Switzerland in 1938. Its immediate physical effects can include drowsiness, dizziness, dilated pupils, numbness or tingling, weakness, tremors, and nausea. But even the most pronounced of these is insignificant when set against its mind-altering qualities. LSD evokes mood changes, thought changes, and an altered perception of time and space. Grof found its impact almost devastating:

  Stanislav Grof, the world-renowned psychiatrist whose investigation of human consciousness led him to a belief in alternate realities

  This experience profoundly influenced my personal and professional life and provided the inspiration for my lifelong commitment to consciousness research.1

  LSD usage did not long remain confined to the laboratory. In the 1960s it was taken up as drug of choice by the Hippie movement where it was used to intensify emotional connections with others and achieve what were believed to be insights into nature and the universe. Championed by psychedelic gurus like Timothy Leary, its use became so widespread among students that some politicians began to see it as a national crisis. In tandem with this development, legitimate use declined markedly. In the United States, it came under the restrictions of the Drug Abuse Control Amendment of 1965. The following year, the only authorized manufacturer withdrew the drug from the market and transferred its supplies to the federal government. Leary responded with his famous advice:

  If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in and drop out.2

  After the closure of legitimate supply sources, a flourishing black market in LSD quickly sprang up. In a predictable backlash, the medical profession decided there was no real clinical use for the drug and, by the early 1990s, had more or less abandoned serious research. Many reference sources now routinely cross-reference it and other psychoactive drugs with “substance abuse.” All are said to induce hallucinogenic states.

  There is, however, another viewpoint. It was put forward by the English intellectual Aldous Huxley in two essays combined to make a single book, i The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.3 After an experiment with mescaline—a natural derivative with similar affects to LSD—he outlined a theory that carried psychedelics into the realm of mysticism. Huxley, who was almost blind when he took the drug, experienced profound perceptual changes and vivid visions. But they were not, he decided, hallucinatory.

  Broadly speaking, there have been two schools of thought about the human mind throughout most of the twentieth century. One suggests it is a thing in itself, operating the brain as a driver might operate a car. The other, which has the support of the orthodox scientific paradigm, believes “mind” to be no more than a collection of subjective impressions generated by the electrical activity of the brain. Huxley subscribed to the first of these two theories. He believed that mind was not only a thing in itself but substantially more far-reaching than most of us imagine. He used the term mind at large to describe it.

  According to Huxley, mind at large is capable of a vastly extended perception of reality—so extended, in fact, that it is counterproductive in terms of survival. Simply put, if you are prey to constant visions, you are likely to end up underneath a bus. Thus the brain evolved as a sort of reducing valve, filtering out those impressions that are unnecessary for the job at hand. He believed that drugs like mescaline and LSD interfered with the efficiency of the brain in this respect and allowed extraneous information to come through. In the words of the poet William Blake, the “doors of perception were cleansed.” Far from promoting hallucinations, the drugs actually permitted a more profound experience of reality.

  This was a viewpoint with which Grof quickly came to agree. In 1956, he embarked on one of the most eccentric psychiatric careers of the century. Like his more orthodox colleagues, he treated patients suffering from various emotional and psychosomatic illnesses such as depression, neuroses, alcoholism, and drug addiction. But he also concerned himself with a substantial number of terminally ill patients—mostly cancer victims—with no specific psychiatric problems at all. In each case he used such drugs as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, dipropyl-tryptamine, and methylene-dioxy-amphetamine—all extremely powerful mind-altering substances. After conducting more than four thousand such sessions, with peripheral involvement in another two thousand directed b
y colleagues, the legal and professional pressures on those who used such drugs, even in a medical context, became too great. Grof switched emphasis to a special breathing technique that he and his wife discovered triggered similar non-ordinary states of consciousness.

  In 1992, he coined the name holotropic to describe such states. It was a combination of two Greek terms: holos, meaning “whole,” and trepein, which translates as “moving toward.” If, then, holotropic means “moving toward wholeness,” the implication is that we are not whole in our everyday state of consciousness but identify only with a small fragment of what we really are. Grof’s conviction in this respect stemmed directly from the experiences of his patients. Over and over they reported the same sort of changes in perception and worldview. This development was independent of intelligence, education, cultural background, or profession. In a holotropic state, everybody started to see the world in essentially the same way. Remarkably, the holotropic worldview includes direct experience of spirits. Says Grof:

  Holotropic states of consciousness can also provide deep insights into the worldview of cultures that believe that the cosmos is populated by mythological beings and that it is governed by various blissful and wrathful deities. In these states we can gain direct experiential access to the world of gods, demons, legendary heroes, suprahuman entities and spirit guides. We can visit the domain of mythological realities, fantastic landscapes and abodes of the Beyond. The imagery … can feature mythological figures and themes from any culture in the entire history of humanity. Deep personal experiences of this realm help us realise that the images of the cosmos found in pre-industrial societies are not based on superstition or primitive “magical thinking” but on direct experiences of alternate realities.4

  Grof found his holotropic adventurers were also in agreement that beyond mundane perceptions of the phenomenal universe—and even beyond the alternate realities of the spirit worlds—the cosmos was a mystical unity. This typically presented itself in one of two forms. One was an experience of Absolute Consciousness, immanent in all there is and ever was. The other was an experience of Cosmic Void, a transcendent “emptiness” that somehow contained the potential of everything that is, will be, and ever was. Absolute Consciousness and Cosmic Void seem at opposite ends of a spectrum, if not actually contradictory. But the holotropic worldview agrees with the insights of mystics down the ages that both are one and the same thing. Grof summarizes his findings in the following words:

  In holotropic states … it is possible to transcend the boundaries of the embodied self. These experiences offer us the opportunity to become other people, groups of people, animals, plants and even inorganic elements of nature and of the cosmos. In this process, time does not seem to be an obstacle and past and future events can become as easily available as anything happening at present.

  Experiences of this kind convey a very convincing insight that all boundaries in the material world are illusory and that the entire universe as we know it, in both spatial and temporal aspects, is a unified web of events in consciousness. It becomes very clear that the cosmos is not an ordinary material reality but a creation of intelligent cosmic energy or the Universal Mind …

  While such transpersonal experiences dramatically change our understanding of the nature of everyday material reality, there are others that reveal dimensions of existence that are ordinarily completely hidden to our perception. This category includes discarnate entities, various deities and demons, mythological realms, suprahuman beings and the divine creative principle itself … Experiences of this kind demonstrate that cosmic creation is not limited to our material world, but manifests on many different levels and in many dimensions.5

  Despite the uniformity of holotropic reports, there remained the problem of whether they represented an objective reality or some sort of shared hallucination. Even Jung balked at this hurdle. Although he frequently referred to an objective psyche, he was careful to explain it as arising out of our basic brain structure. The collective unconscious was collective in the sense of belonging to all humanity, not in the sense of being a single mental entity that each of us tapped into.6 But Grof went the whole hog. He noted time and again that patients in the holotropic state were able to obtain verifiable information by means of extrasensory processes. That is to say, they learned things they did not already know as their minds expanded beyond the confines of the treatment room. Such observations went a long way to convince him that the holotropic experience was valid and something akin to Huxley’s mind at large.

  The whole question of extrasensory information is controversial. There is good reason to believe that the brain faithfully records every impression—including background noises and other inconsequential details—that reaches it. Every book you have ever read, every TV program you have ever seen, every snatch of conversation you have ever heard is in there and will remain in there, barring accidents, until the day you die. This is obviously not to say that the entire wealth of stored information is available to you. Clearly in your normal state of consciousness it is not. But in altered states, such as hypnotic trance, or under electrical stimulation of the brain, the most extraordinary details can be recalled. This means that information presenting itself as the result of extrasensory perception may sometimes actually be the stored memory of something you read or experienced years ago and have long since forgotten.

  Skeptics argue that it is impossible to determine where any hypothetical ESP begins and memory ends and consequently invoke Occam’s razor7 to dismiss the extrasensory hypothesis altogether. But for Grof, the holotropic insights are something more than theory. He has personally witnessed at least one practical application.

  The Esalen Institute was founded in California in 1962 to promote the exploration of human potential. It runs an extensive program of courses and workshops on subjects like consciousness expansion, holistic health, parapsychology, and even the mental aspect of sports training. After Grof took up residence in the United States, he was appointed a scholar in residence at the institute. One of the events he was involved in organizing was a monthlong seminar on Buddhism and Western psychology. A guest facilitator at the seminar was a master swordsman from Korea. At one point during the event, the Korean offered a special demonstration of his skills. For this he required one of his pupils to lie down on his back on the grass. A napkin was then placed on his naked stomach and a watermelon placed on top of the napkin. The swordsman retreated to a distance of fifteen feet and had his head covered with a tightly fitting thick black velvet bag. He was then given an enormous sharp-bladed sword. He stood quite still for several minutes.

  As Grof later described the incident, every dog in the area suddenly began to bark. The Korean immediately joined in with a wild howl, then—still blindfold—began to cartwheel furiously toward his pupil. As he reached him, he swung the giant sword viciously and cut the watermelon neatly in two. There was a slight trace of the sword blade on the napkin beneath, but the pupil’s body was unharmed.

  The assumption of most of those watching was that the swordsman must have carried a vivid, detailed mental picture of the scene that allowed him to perform the precision feat. But the Korean gave a different explanation: “You meditate and wait until all is one—the swordmaster, the sword, the grass, the melon, the disciple—and then there is no problem.”8

  This type of demonstration is by no means unique. But despite the anecdotal evidence, a majority of scientists still consider mind at large a nonsense since mind itself is no more than the passage of electrons through the synaptic gateways of the brain. The claim is repeated again and again in the reference sources of modern psychology, yet it can only be maintained by ignoring the result of an experiment carried out by the distinguished British neurophysiologist, Dr. W. Grey Walter, in the 1960s.

  Grey Walter announced his findings in his 1969 Eddington Memorial Lecture. The procedure he had followed was based on the fact that the human brain generates small but measurable electrical signals. Electr
odes were attached to his subjects’ scalps over the area of the frontal cortex. These transmitted any brain electrical activity via an amplifier to a specially constructed machine. Set before the subject was a button that, when pressed, caused what Grey Walter described as an “interesting scene” to appear on a TV screen.

  When one decides to take a particular physical action, such as pressing a button, a 20-microvolt electrical surge occurs across a large area of the cortex. This is technically known as a readiness wave. What Grey Walter did was amplify the readiness wave to such a degree that it could directly trigger the TV picture. This obviously happened a fraction of a second before the button was actually pressed. The subject decided to press the button and the readiness wave surged across the cortex. The electrodes detected and amplified it, sending a signal to the machine, which called up the TV picture before the subject could actually reach the button. He called the process “auto-start.”