Whisperers

by J H Brennan

  But reasonable or not, there are problems with Flournoy’s theory. The most obvious is the fact that “spirits” have shown themselves capable of presenting the conjurer/medium with data—like Dee and Kelley’s Enochian language—that he does not already possess and seems incapable of fabricating. Jung’s answer to this problem was his theory of a collective unconscious. Even as a student he noticed that his mediumistic cousin, Hélène Preiswerk, exhibited a “No. 2 personality” in trance that was distinctly more mature than her waking persona.8 At the time, he dismissed this as a precocious development of the psyche occasioned by an unconscious understanding that she was destined to die young. Later, his experience with Philemon gave him personal proof that what he had thought of as “secondary personalities” were capable of greater insight and knowledge than the person who manifested them and thus could not be secondary personalities at all. Yet Jung’s eventual formulation of a collective unconscious remains unsatisfactory. To say there is a portion of the human psyche that manifests nonpersonal content and autonomous entities is really little different from the magician’s assumption that there exists a spirit world from which spirits may be summoned. All Jung did was locate the spirit world inside the magician’s head.

  Neither Jung nor Flournoy went any distance toward solving the problem of the physical manifestations associated with spirit contact. Even if we dismiss as nonsense the Grimoire Verum suggestion that a manifested spirit might eat a walnut, we are still left with a mass of Spiritualist evidence for raps, levitations, apports, and the rest. Jung was aware of the problem but never achieved a solution. His attempt to interest Freud in the carefully worded “catalytic exteriorization phenomenon” was met with ridicule, and while Jung later approached the same problem obliquely by way of his theory of synchronicity, mainstream psychology still declined to recognize the possibility that the human mind could have a direct affect on its physical environment.

  Jung died in 1961, three years before Batcheldor began the experiments that showed conclusively that exteriorization might be generated to order by groups who cared to use his methods. Six years before the Rosenheim poltergeist case, in which a nineteen-year-old girl was the unwitting cause of paranormal electrical and telephone disruptions, Batcheldor convinced psychical researchers that the same psychokinetic abilities might be vested in a single individual.9 Had Jung lived another decade, one imagines he would have had a field day with the implications of Batcheldor’s work. But no one else did. Today, Batcheldor’s name is virtually unknown to professional psychologists, even those of the Jungian school. The implications of the Owens’s experiments are even more profound. Novelists have long bemoaned the tendency for fictional characters to go their own way (thus ruining a perfectly good plot), but the fictional character Philip took this tendency to a whole new level. For Philip was an exteriorized entity, identical in every way to traditional manifestations in the séance room. Had the Owens group not known better, he would certainly have been accepted as a genuine spirit.

  One is immediately moved to wonder how many other apparently genuine spirits have been the unconscious creations of Spiritualist groups or ceremonial conjurers, projected into the real world by a hitherto unsuspected mechanism of the human mind. The answer is almost certain to be some, perhaps even most, but it would be dangerous to assume it applies to all. The sticking point is Jung’s observation, mirrored in the experience of practitioners throughout the entire history of the Western esoteric tradition, that his familiar spirit Philemon was capable of teaching him things he did not already know. Surely a creation is in no position to teach its creator? From a commonsense viewpoint, the answer is obvious, but the question contains a subtle trap: it assumes we know the real nature of the creator. Experimental work by the American neurobiologist Roger Sperry suggests we may not.

  During the 1950s, Dr. Sperry, a professor of psychobiology at the California Institute of Technology, carried out a series of surgical experiments, at first on animals and later on human patients, during which he severed the corpus callosum, a band of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. The result of his work, which earned him a Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1981, showed in summary that each hemisphere was capable of functioning independently of the other, each specialized in different tasks, but that one—the left—was normally dominant over the other. He concluded, however, that the right hemisphere (the activities of which we are normally unaware) was “a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing and emoting, all at a characteristically human level.”10

  In other words, the human psyche contains not just one but two seats of consciousness, an insight confirmed by Sperry when he said, “Both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”11 Thus, while we think of ourselves as a single consciousness, we are, in fact, dual. The British author Anthony Peake makes the intriguing suggestion12 that right-brain consciousness may have a different perception of reality from that of the more familiar left brain, and consequently may be the root of such visitations as Socrates’s daemon and the visionary experiences of Jakob Boehme.13 For Peake, right-brain consciousness gave rise to the esoteric concept of a “higher self,” while a whole range of spirits—angels, demons, shades of the dead—may represent its attempts at communication in any illusory form necessary to attract our attention.

  Some aspects of Peake’s theory were anticipated by Julian Jaynes, who was also intrigued by the implications of Sperry’s split-brain experiments. But whether we accept these ideas or not, the very fact of a hidden right-brain consciousness clearly provides a possible mechanism for the creation of “spirits” that demonstrate knowledge and insights unknown to our familiar waking selves. Furthermore, even without this mechanism, it is important to recognize that the closest analogy to the creation of entities like Philip is the birth of a child: the infant may be created by its parents and to some extent molded by them, but over time it becomes an autonomous individual, potentially capable of learning more than those who gave it life.

  In summary, then: spirit contact, for centuries, was widely taken at face value as communication with discarnate intelligences inhabiting a non-material reality. With the advent of Victorian materialism, however, this view of the phenomenon began to be questioned and alternative ideas put forward. Although some apparent spirit manifestations were shown to be fraudulent, fraud clearly could not account for them all and, increasingly, psychological explanations began to be advanced. Initially, these were confined to ideas like unconscious fabrication, self-deception, or pathological hallucination, but proved unsatisfactory in accounting for certain aspects of the phenomena.

  Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious went some way toward solving the dilemma—the idea of spirits as inner (i.e., psychological) yet objective entities was certainly in accord with major aspects of their nature—but failed to explain how they exerted an influence on the physical world. Batcheldor’s work confirmed experimentally that a dependable mechanism for such influence actually existed. Owens’s experiments showed it possible to evoke a fictional spirit that took on many of the aspects of traditional spirit manifestations and demonstrated an ability to acquire information outside of the data that comprised its original story. The experimental findings clearly point up the need for modification of Jung’s collective unconscious theory—not to mention serious modification of the way in which spirits have been viewed historically. What emerges is the realization that the human mind has capabilities far beyond anything most of us would normally suspect.

  The ancient world knew what spirits were. They were entities that shared our planet—fairies, elementals, ancestral ghosts, and even gods who lived in trees, streams, and sacred groves. Sometimes you saw them, sometimes not. They had the power of invisibility or else they simply hid themselves extremely well. Modern tribal communities know this too.

  Vic
torian anthropologists knew what spirits were. They were delusions of the primitive mind, entertaining fictions humanity once needed to explain such mysteries as the hurricane or a lightning flash. They had no place in a universe where everything would soon be weighed and measured.

  Julian Jaynes knew what spirits were. They were hallucinations generated by minds that had not achieved self-awareness and needed mock-ups of gods and similar authority figures to tell them what to do. Their usefulness diminished as the bicameral mind broke down. They were banished, more or less, by the developed light of consciousness.

  Carl Jung knew what spirits were. They were inherited structures in the depths of the human psyche that sometimes contacted and often influenced the conscious mind. They were objective in the sense that they formed no part of personal consciousness or experience, nor were they in any way created by the individual.

  All were theories attempting to explain a phenomenon that seems to have been part of human experience throughout recorded history. The phenomenon itself is real. It is with us still and can be studied to this day. But none of the popular theories so far advanced has proven entirely satisfactory. It is difficult to believe that we share the world with an invisible miscellany. But it is equally difficult to accept the Victorian conviction that spirits are nothing more than primitive personifications of natural forces or wish fulfillment for an afterlife. The problem is the one that Carl Jung discovered when he met Philemon. That spirit knew a great deal more than he did. How could such knowledge arise from the personification of a natural process or wish fulfillment? Jung attempted a solution with his postulate of a collective unconscious that contained structures reflecting the evolution of the race. No wonder Philemon knew more than he did. The “spirit” had the whole of human history to draw on.

  But that was only Jung’s public stance. In private he acknowledged that there were difficulties with his theory. Why, for example, did the “structures” of the collective unconscious present themselves as personalities? Why, in other words, did spirits stubbornly behave like spirits? And how was it that they were (sometimes) able to influence the material world? It is only since the Grey Walter experiment that we can come to grips with the real nature of spirits. It is only since the development of quantum physics that we can begin to understand the theoretical structure of spirit worlds.

  Ironically, the spirit voices have tried to explain these realities all along. Among the Raudive tapes is a recording that contains the words “Raudive, antiwelten sind.” The German phrase translates as, “Raudive, anti-worlds exist.” In another, a voice complains, “There is no time,” echoing Firsoff’s suggestion that beings in a neutrino universe might exist outside the time flow we experience. Over and over, the taped voices insist that a bridge must be built between the two dimensions: “One must have the bridge … Konstantin, please the bridge … Build, build the bridge … Build the bridge now, Konstantin … Span the bridge … Build the bridge! Make the voice!”

  The use of religious and occult terminology frequently conceals a bedrock rationality in many spirit communications, but the messages require a shift of viewpoint. This shift goes beyond the acceptance of a parallel universe and even beyond the idea that we somehow interact with it. We are also asked to believe that the parallel universe is inhabited not only by the souls of the human dead, but also by a variety of aliens with an interest in humanity. The communicating entity Upuaut maintains, for example, that the gods of ancient Egypt were not gods at all in the sense of all-knowing, all-powerful deities, but rather fallible beings who happened to be a little more evolved than those they were trying to assist.

  Whatever we may think of this—and Upuaut, like several other spirit contacts, claims to be the product of an ancient evolution that was once as primitive as any human culture—there is no doubt spirits are typically the recipients of what psychologists term “projections.” They become, in effect, the receptacle of their listeners’ hopes and fears and are often credited with powers and insights they neither claim nor possess. The situation is further complicated by their numinous quality. This is something inherent in the experience of contact that causes humanity, instinctively, to treat spirits with respect, to give weight to their words, and to act on their instructions. Whether this is always a good thing remains open to question. Even a superficial reading of history indicates that spirit advice does not always benefit the recipient. These are all factors that make it extremely difficult to see the spirit voices for what they really are.

  So long as we could pretend they were hallucinations, we could comfortably ignore them. But there is clear and mounting evidence that some of the voices are not and never have been hallucinations. They know things we don’t. They can move from host to host. They leave traces on magnetic tape. The latest findings of physics allow the possibility that they are creatures from a parallel world. If we are to believe the spirit messages and the results of the Grey Walter experiment, then we have our own natural extension into that world, albeit with a limited awareness. In a very real sense we are as much citizens of the parallel dimension as the ghosts and gods we have associated with it for so long. It is this that allows mediums and channelers to reach between the dimensions and extract information from those beyond.

  The real problem with investigating a spirit world is that throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, we have been culturally conditioned to believe it could not possibly exist. Most scientists today “know” there are no such things as spirits and consequently decline to investigate the evidence. This attitude, reprehensible (and unscientific) though it is, extends to many of the rest of us. When we hear claims that spirits may be popped conveniently into a crystal, that evolved entities are looking after the welfare of humanity, that discarnate beings have interfered with human history, it all seems far too romantic, too “occult” to take seriously. It runs contrary to all we think we know about the world. But this is only to say it runs contrary to the current mind-set.

  That mind-set is still largely conditioned by the superstition of Victorian materialism. No matter that the leading physicists today are convinced the universe is maya or illusion, that the observing mind interacts with reality and may, in some sense, actually create it. No matter that many of their theories have now been experimentally confirmed. We simply do not believe them. We cannot feel this new, strange world in the gut. It has nothing to do with our everyday lives.

  Technology routinely delivers miracles. Who needs telepathy when there are mobile phones? Who needs a crystal ball to see things at a distance when we can switch on the TV news? Many of the old psychic marvels have been devalued, and with them the ease and wonder with which our ancestors met a spiritual creation. We live as if the material world was all there is. We armor ourselves with skepticism. But if this armoring sometimes protects us from mistakes, it also locks us in a mental prison. We are no longer open-minded enough to wonder if the world is really like that. If anybody challenges our beliefs, we write them off as “unrealistic,” stupid, or incurably romantic.

  Yet the evidence that has arisen—the evidence of history, the evidence of experience and observation, the evidence of modern physics—positively demands that we consider a new paradigm. It may be unfamiliar and uncomfortable, but that is the price routinely paid for progress. The new paradigm suggests humans are more than they realize. It is a matter of personal experience that they are more than their bodies. Each day we are perpetually aware of our inner processes—thoughts, emotions, imaginings. Each night we are aware of dreams. These processes are not physical, but they are real. Yet we have been taught to believe they are somehow less true, and less important, than physical phenomena. But for more than fifty years now our scientists have been studying the nonmaterial realities of the quantum field. Some have even begun to speculate about linkages between their findings and the worldview taught by mystics through the generations. Within the new paradigm, we become a continuum that extends from the physical world into an
incredible nonmaterial universe. This is the universe Jung called the collective (or objective) unconscious, the universe the shamans call the “spirit world,” the universe of the Summerland, the place where the Raudive voices live, the dimension inhabited by entities like Seth and Mark and Anubis. Non-material though it may be, it can no longer be dismissed as unreal. For the stuff of ghosts has now been detected in particle accelerators and quantum physics shows there are worlds upon worlds … beyond.

  This is the reality to which history points us. This is the reality taught by every major religion. This is the reality of the mystic’s vision and the shaman’s quest. This is the quantum reality discovered by our scientists. How long will it take for us to grasp it?

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Acosta, Fr. Joseph de. The Natural and Moral History of the Indies. London: Hakluyt Society, 1880.

  Agrippa, Henry Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 2000.

  al-Halveti, Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi. The Name & the Named: The Divine Attributes of God. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2000.

  Almedingen, E. M. The Romanovs. London: The Bodley Head, 1966.

  Ashcroft-Nowicki, Dolores. Highways of the Mind: The Art and History of Pathworking. Wellingborough, UK: Aquarian Press, 1987.

  Assagioli, Roberto. Transpersonal Development. Bath: Crucible, 1991.