VII THE NIGHT SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
THE FIELD OF PSYCHIC RESEARCH
It is difficult to divest the words hypnotism and clairvoyance of certain sordid and sinister associations. We are apt to think of them only as urban flora of the dust and dark, cultivated for profit by itinerant professors and untidy sibyls. Larger knowledge of the night side of human nature, however, profoundly modifies this view. The invoked image is then of some hushed and studious chamber where a little group of people sit attentive to the voice of one entranced—listeners at the keyhole of the door to another world. This "news from nowhere," garnered under so-called test conditions and faithfully recorded, has grown by now to a considerable literature, accessible to all—one with which every well-informed person is assumed to have at least a passing acquaintance.
A marked and constant characteristic of trance phenomena consists of an apparent confusion between past, present and future. As in the game of three-card monte, it appears impossible to tell in what order the three will turn up—was, is and will be, lose their special significance. Clairvoyance, in its time aspect, whether spontaneous, hypnotically induced, or self-induced, is susceptible of classification as post-vision, present vision, and prevision. Post-vision is that in which past events are not recollected merely, but seen or experienced. It is the past become present. Present vision is clairvoyance of things transpiring elsewhere; the present, remote in space, but not in time. Prevision is the future in the present. These various orders of clear-seeing transcend the limits of the actual knowledge and experience of the seer. This classification and these definitions are important only to us, to whom past, present, and future stand sharply differentiated in thought and in experience; not to the clairvoyant, who, though bound in body to our space and time, is consciously free in a world where these discriminations vanish. Why do they vanish? This question can best be answered by means of a homely analogy.
For a symbol of the flow of time in waking consciousness, imagine yourself in a railway carriage which jogs along a main-travelled line at a rate predetermined by the time-table. You approach, reach and pass such stations as are intersected by that particular railway, and you get a view of the landscape which every other traveler shares. Having once left a station, you cannot go back to it, nor can you arrive at places further along the line before the train itself takes you there. Compare this with the freedom to do either of these things, and any number of others, if you suddenly change from the train to an automobile. Then, in effect, you have the freedom of a new dimension. In the one case, you must travel along a single line at a uniform rate; in the other, you are able to strike out in any direction and regulate your speed at will. You can go back to a place after the train has left it; you can go forward to some place ahead, before the train arrives, or you can strike out into, and traverse, new country. In short, your freedom, temporal and spatial, will be related to that of the train-bound traveler, somewhat as is trance consciousness to everyday waking life.
MODIFYING THE PAST
Modern psychology has demonstrated the existence of a great undercurrent of mental and emotional life, transcending the individual's conscious experience, in which the most complex processes are carried on without the individual's conscious participation. The clearest symbol by which this fact may be figured to the imagination is the one already presented: the comparison of the subjective field to a plane, in which the conscious experience of the individual is represented by a single line. In sleep and trance we have an augmented freedom of movement and so are able to travel here and there, backward and forward, not only among our own "disassociated memories" but in that greater and more mysterious demesne which comprehends what we call the future, as well as the present and the past.
The profound significance of the disassociation and sublimation of memory by hypnotism, or by whatever other means the train of personal experience and recollection can be thrown off the track, appears to have been ignored on its theoretical side—that is, as establishing the return of time. It has cleverly been turned to practical account, however, in the treatment of disease. By a series of painstaking and brilliant experiments, the demonstration of the role played by "disassociated memories" in causing certain functional nervous and mental troubles has been achieved. It has been shown that severe emotional shocks, frights, griefs, worries, may be—and frequently are—completely effaced from conscious recollection, while continuing to be vividly remembered in the depths of the subconscious. It has been shown that thence they may, and frequently do, exercise a baleful effect upon the whole organism, giving rise to disease symptoms, the particular type of which were determined by the victim's self-suggestion. As a preliminary to effecting a permanent cure to such disorders, it is necessary to get at these disassociated memories and drag them back into the full light of conscious recollection. To get at them, medical psychologists make use of hypnotism, automatic writing, crystal-gazing—in short, of any method which will force an entrance into that higher time-world, whereby the forgotten past may become the present. This accomplished, and the crucial moment recovered and transfixed, the victim of the aborted opportunity is led to deal with it as one may deal with the fluid, and may not deal with the fixed. Again his past is plastic to the operation of his intelligence and his will. Here is glad news for mortals: the past recoverable and in a manner revocable!
Buddha taught that all sin is ignorance, and this teaching has escaped oblivion because its truth has echoed in so many human hearts. We find that it is possible to deal with our old ignorances in the light of later knowledge. What is this but the self-forgiveness of sins? Subconsciously we may be always at work, mending the past. Repentance is the conscious recognition of some culmination of this obscure process, when the heart is suffused with the inner gladness of liberation from the payment of old karmic debts. Christ's words, "Thy sins are forgiven," spoken to the woman who washed his feet with her tears, sanctions this idea—that the past is remediable by knowledge and by love.
Conceding this much, we must equally admit the possibility of moulding the future, of adjusting the will to the event which shall befall. If the present moment can again intersect the stream of past conscious experience, it may equally do so with regard to the future. This brings up the tremendous questions of free-will and fore-ordination. Upon these the Oriental doctrines of karma and reincarnation cast the only light by which the reason consents to be guided. As these doctrines are intimately related both to higher time and to trance revelations, some consideration of karma and reincarnation may appropriately find place here.
KARMA AND REINCARNATION
Karma is that self-adjusting force in human affairs which restores harmony disturbed by action. It is the moral law of compensation, and by its operation produces all conditions of life, misery and happiness, birth, death, and re-birth; itself being both the cause and the effect of action. Its operation is indicated in the phrase, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
The essential idea of reincarnation is indicated in the following quotation from the Upanishads: "And as a goldsmith, taking a piece of gold, turns it into another, newer, and more beautiful shape, so does this Self, having thrown off this body and dispelled all ignorance, make unto himself another and more beautiful shape."
Reincarnation is the periodic "dip" of an immortal individual into materiality for the working out of karma, after an interval, long or short, spent under other conditions of existence. These alternations constitute the broader and deeper diapason of human life, of which the change from waking to sleeping represents the lesser, and the momentary awareness and unawareness of the sense mechanism to stimulation, the least.
Thus a physical incarnation, in the broadest sense of the term, is the interval, long or short, of the immersion of consciousness in materiality. Under fatigue, the cell life withdraws; that is, it ceases to respond to physical stimuli, and so passes out of incarnation. When this occurs en masse there transpires that hiatus of the personal consciousness called sleep, and while sleep lasts the personality is out of incarnation. After death—in the interval between one life and the next—the specific memories of the personality fade out as in sleep, or rather, become latent, leaving the soul, the permanent life-center, clear and colorless, a mysterious focus of spiritual forces and affinities (the seeds of karma) ready for another sowing in the world of men. This center of consciousness is thereupon drawn to the newly forming body, the life environment of which will rightly and justly—perhaps retributively—bring the tendencies and characteristics of the conscious center into objectivity again. Character is destiny, and character is self-created. "All that we are is the result of what we have thought." But in the vast complexity and volume of human life there is a constant production of forms, with all the varieties of characteristics and capacities requisite to meet the needs of every soul, thirsty for the destiny that awaits it; and here heredity plays its part. Beyond the individual soul is the world-soul, which periodically incarnates in the humanity of a planet, and beyond the worlds of a single system, suns and congeries of suns.
The profound and pregnant doctrines of karma and reincarnation, here so sketchily outlined, are but expansions of one of the fundamental propositions of all Eastern philosophical systems, that the effect is the unfolding of the cause in time.
To omit a consideration of karma and reincarnation in connection with higher time would be to force a passage and then not follow where it leads. The idea of time curvature is implicit in the ideas of karma and reincarnation. For what is karma but the return of time, the flowering in the present of some seed sown elsewhere and long ago? And what is reincarnation but the major cycle of that sweep into objective existence and out again, of which the alternation between waking and sleeping is the lesser counterpart?
COLONEL DE ROCHAS' EXPERIMENTS
During the past few years evidence has been accumulating that we never really forget anything. We have rediscovered the memory of the subconscious mind. It is generally known that in the mesmeric or somnambulistic sleep things hopelessly beyond recall for the habitual mind come to the surface, in fragments, or in whole series, as the case may be. It is perhaps news to some readers, however, that the memory of past lives has been recovered in this way. This but confirms the Eastern secret teaching that could we remember our dream experiences we should recover the knowledge of our past incarnations.
Among the achievements of Eastern hypnotism is the recovery of the memory of past births. Colonel de Rochas appears to have paralleled this achievement in the West. Certain of his experiments have been admirably reported by Maurice Maeterlinck in the eighth chapter of Our Eternity. Maeterlinck's account, somewhat condensed, is given here, because it so well illustrates the liberation of consciousness from the tyranny of time as we conceive it. He says:
"First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into a hypnotic sleep and, by means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and their sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence and his recovery.
"Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The subject is a girl of eighteen, called Joséphine. She lives at Voiron, in the department of Isére. By means of downward passes she is brought back to the condition of a baby at its mother's breast The passes continue and the wonder-tale runs its course. Joséphine can no longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which seems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. Joséphine no longer answers except by signs: she is not yet born. 'She is floating in darkness.' They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and suddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of another being, a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful and discontented old man. They question him. At first he refuses to answer, saying that 'of course he's there, and he's speaking;' that 'he sees nothing;' and 'he's in the dark.' They increase the number of passes and gradually gain his confidence. His name is Jean Claude Bourdon; he is an old man; he has long been ailing and bedridden. He tells the story of his life. He was born at Champvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to school until he was eighteen and served his time in the army with the Seventh Artillery at Besançon; and he describes his gay time there, while the sleeping girl makes gestures of twirling an imaginary moustache. When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but the essential facts), and dies at the age of seventy, after a long illness.
"We now hear the dead man speak; and his posthumous revelations are not sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason for doubting their genuineness. He feels himself growing out of his body; but he remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidic body, which is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. He lives in darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does not suffer. At last, the night in which he is plunged is streaked with a few flashes of light. The idea comes to reincarnate himself and he draws near to her who is to be his mother (that is, the mother of Joséphine). He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon he gradually enters the child's body. Until about the seventh year, his body is surrounded by a sort of floating mist, in which he used to see many things which he has not seen since.
"The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean Claude. A mesmerization lasting nearly three-quarters of an hour, without lingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back to babyhood. A fresh silence, a new limbo; and then, suddenly, another voice and an unexpected individual. This time it is an old woman who has been very wicked; and so she is in great torment (she is dead, at the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives go backward and of course begin at the end). She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil spirits. She speaks at first in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies to the questions put to her, instead of cavilling at every moment, as Jean Claude did. Her name is Philoméne Carteron.
"'By intensifying the sleep,' adds Colonel de Rochas, whom I will now quote, 'I induce the manifestations of a living Philoméne. She no longer suffers, seems very calm and always answers coldly and distinctly. She knows that she is unpopular in the neighborhood, but no one is a penny the worse and she will be even with them yet. She was born in 1702; her maiden name was Philoméne Cherpigny; her grandfather on the mother's side was called Pierre Machon and lived in Ozan. In 1732 she married, at Chevroux, a man named Carterton, by whom she had two children, both of whom she lost.'"
Before her incarnation, Philoméne had been a little girl who died in infancy. Previous to that, she was a man who committed murder, and it was to expiate this crime that she endured such suffering in the darkness, and after her life as a little girl, when she had no time to do wrong. Colonel de Rochas did not think it wise to carry the hypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to watch. He obtained analogous and even more surprising results with other subjects.
Maeterlinck's comments upon all this are of negligible value. He pays a fine tribute to the theory of reincarnation. "There was never a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful and probable creed," he says: yet for all that, it is clear that he has not been at pains fully to inform himself of the Eastern teaching.
Colonel de Rochas' success, and that of all other experimenters along these lines, is due to their unconscious following of the Eastern method. He himself says that he "avoided everything that should put the subject on a definite tack,"—that is, he refrained from voluntary suggestion.
Having referred so frequently and so familiarly to the Eastern belief in reincarnation, and hinted at a more solid foundation for that belief than the single series of experiments above referred to, it would be unfair to the reader not to gratify his curiosity more fully in regard to these matters. In the light of our hypothesis they take on an importance which justifies their further consideration here.