PSYCHIC-CONSCIOUSNESS.
As we advance in our investigations we find in the higher conditions of these states a double or treble consciousness or memory. The higher including and overlapping the lower. Thus the consciousness of the hypnotic state includes that of the waking state, while the memory of the waking state possesses no conscious recollection of what has taken place in hypnosis, and so on, each stage has its own phases of consciousness. The memory of the sensitive, under influence, overlapping and including the memory of ordinary or normal life.
Strange as it may appear, there are no phenomena which have been evolved in any of these abnormal conditions of life, which have not been observed again and again in ordinary or normal life, as well authenticated instances of dreams, warnings, and telepathy testify.
Dr. Richardson notwithstanding, “in dreams and visions of the night” God has manifested himself to man in all ages. In other words, the soul (in sleep and analogous states to somnambulism and trance) comes more in touch with the sub-conscious or soul sphere of thought and existence. At times there is an inrush from that sphere into our present conscious state, by which we know of things which could not otherwise be known. Of dreams, our space will not admit more than occasional reference, we may mention as a case in point the dream of Mrs. Donan, wife of the livery stableman from whom Dr. Cronin hired his horse in Chicago. A week before Dr. Cronin was murdered this lady had a dream-vision, and dreamt he was barbarously murdered, and saw in a vision the whole terrible scene. This dream was a means, first, of forewarning the doctor, and second, of leading to the detection of the miscreants.
Of premonitions, an incident reported in the Register of Adelaide, will suffice:—“Constable J. C. H. Williams has reported to headquarters that he had an unpleasant experience at about midnight on Monday. He was on duty at the government offices in King William Street, and while standing at the main entrance he had a presentiment that he was in danger, and walked away a few steps. Scarcely had he moved from the spot, when a portion of the cornice work at the top of the building fell with a crash on the place where he had been standing. The piece of plaster must have weighed fully a stone, and had it struck Williams the result would doubtless have been fatal. A passer-by saw the constable a few minutes after, and his scared looks and agitated manner clearly showed that his story was true.” Concerning telepathy, Mrs. Andrew Crosse, the distinguished widow of the famous electrician, relates in Temple Bar an anecdote about the late Bishop Wilberforce, to the effect, the Bishop was writing a dry business letter one day, when a feeling of acute mental agony overcame him and he felt that some evil had befallen his favourite son, a midshipman in the navy. The impression was correct. On that very day the lad, who was with his ship in the Pacific, had been wounded and nearly bled to death. When this was told Hallam, the historian, he replied that a very similar thing had happened to himself. A few cases are noted further on. Some persons would repudiate all such incidents as accidents or coincidences; while others would fly to the extreme, and declare all such are the result of “spirit control”—that is, some disembodied but friendly spirit projected the dream, conveyed the warning, or telepathically despatched the news. But we must never forget news has to be received as well as despatched. Consequently, we, as embodied spirits, must possess psychic consciousness.
I believe that much of the phenomena, directly and indirectly attributed to disincarnate spirit control, are traceable to no other source than the powers of our own embodied spirits, as revealed by the facts of somnambulism and trance, and this is the opinion of all intelligent spiritualists.
“Because,” says Mr. G. H. Stebbins, a prominent investigator of modern spiritualism in the United States “a person quotes from books he never saw, or tells of what he never knew in any external way, that is not final proof that he is under an external spirit control. Psychometry and clairvoyance may sometimes solve it all.”
“I hold,” says Mr. Myers, “that telepathy and clairvoyance do, in fact, exist—telepathy, a communication between incarnate mind and incarnate mind, and perhaps between incarnate minds and minds unembodied; clairvoyance, a knowledge of things terrene which over-passes the limits of ordinary perception, and which, perhaps, achieves an insight with some other than terrene world.”
These are the cautious admissions of eminent investigators in psychical research.