Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death

by F. W. H. Myers

And we may hope, indeed, that as our investigations proceed, and as we on this side of the fateful gulf, and the discarnate spirits on the other, learn more of the conditions necessary for perfect control of the brain and nervous system of intermediaries,—the communications will grow fuller and more coherent, and reach a higher level of unitary consciousness.

Among the cases of trance discussed in this chapter, we have found intimately interwoven with the phenomena of possession many instances of its correlative,—ecstasy. Mrs. Piper's fragmentary utterances and visions during her passage from trance to waking life,—utterances and visions that fade away and leave no remembrance in her waking self; Stainton Moses' occasional visions, his journeys in the "spirit world" which he recorded on returning to his ordinary consciousness; Home's entrancement and converse with the various controls whose messages he gave;—all these suggest actual excursions of the incarnate spirit from its organism. The theoretical importance of these spiritual excursions is, of course, very great. It is, indeed, so great that most men will hesitate to accept a thesis which carries us straight into the inmost sanctuary of mysticism; which preaches "a precursory entrance into the most holy place, as by divine transportation."

Yet I think that this belief, although extreme, is not, at the point to which our evidence has carried us, in any real way improbable. To put the matter briefly, if a spirit from outside can enter the organism, the spirit from inside can go out, can change its centre of perception and action, in a way less complete and irrevocable than the change of death. Ecstasy would thus be simply the complementary or correlative aspect of spirit-control. Such a change need not be a spatial change, any more than there need be any spatial change for the spirit which invades the deserted organism. Nay, further: if the incarnate spirit can in this manner change its centre of perception in response (so to say) to a discarnate spirit's invasion of the organism, there is no obvious reason why it should not do so on other occasions as well. We are already familiar with "travelling clairvoyance," a spirit's change of centre of perception among the scenes of the material world. May there not be an extension of travelling clairvoyance to the spiritual world? a spontaneous transfer of the centre of perception into that region from whence discarnate spirits seem now to be able, on their side, to communicate with growing freedom?

The conception of ecstasy—at once in its most literal and in its most lofty sense—has thus developed itself, almost insensibly, from several concurrent lines of actual modern evidence. It must still, of course, be long before we can at all adequately separate,—I can hardly say the objective from the subjective element in the experience, for we have got beyond the region where the meaning of those words is clear,—but the element in the experience which is recognised and responded to by spirits other than the ecstatic's, from the element which belongs to his own spirit alone.

In the meantime, however, the fact that this kind of communion of ecstasy has been, in preliminary fashion, rendered probable is of the highest importance for our whole inquiry. We thus come directly into relation with the highest form which the various religions known to men have assumed in the past.

It is hardly a paradox to say that the evidence for ecstasy is stronger than the evidence for any other religious belief. Of all the subjective experiences of religion, ecstasy is that which has been most urgently, perhaps to the psychologist most convincingly, asserted; and it is not confined to any one religion. From a psychological point of view, one main indication of the importance of a subjective phenomenon found in religious experience will be the fact that it is common to all religions. I doubt whether there is any phenomenon, except ecstasy, of which this can be said. From the medicine-man of the lowest savages up to St. John, St. Peter, St. Paul, with Buddha, Mahomet and Swedenborg on the way, we find records which, though morally and intellectually much differing, are in psychological essence the same.

At all stages alike we find that the spirit is conceived as quitting the body; or, if not quitting it, at least as greatly expanding its range of perception in some state resembling trance. Observe, moreover, that on this view all genuine recorded forms of ecstasy are akin, and all of them represent a real fact.

To our embodied souls the matter round us seems real and self-existent; to souls emancipated it is but the sign of the degree which we have reached, and thus the highest task of science must be to link and co-ordinate the symbols appropriate to our terrene state with the symbols appropriate to the state immediately above us. Nay, one might push this truth to paradox, and maintain that of all earth's inspired spirits it has been the least divinised, the least lovable, who has opened the surest path for men. Religions have risen and die again; philosophy, poetry, heroism, answer only indirectly the prime need of men. Plotinus, "the eagle soaring above the tomb of Plato," is lost to sight in the heavens. Conquering and to conquer, the Maid rides on through other worlds than ours. Virgil himself, "light among the vanished ages, star that gildest yet this earthly shore," sustains our spirit, as I have said, but indirectly, by filling still our fountain of purest intellectual joy. But the prosaic Swede,—his stiff mind prickly with dogma,—the opaque cell-walls of his intelligence flooded cloudily by the irradiant day,—this man as by the very limitations of his faculty, by the practical humility of a spirit trained to acquire but not to generate truth,—has awkwardly laid the corner-stone, grotesquely sketched the elevation of a temple which our remotest posterity will be upbuilding and adorning still. For he dimly felt that man's true passage and intuition from state to state depends not upon individual ecstasy, but upon comprehensive law; while yet all law is in fact but symbol; adaptation of truth timeless and infinite to intelligences of lower or higher range.

Beyond us still is mystery; but it is mystery lit and mellowed with an infinite hope. We ride in darkness at the haven's mouth; but sometimes through rifted clouds we see the desires and needs of many generations floating and melting upwards into a distant glow, "up through the light of the seas by the moon's long-silvering ray."

The high possibilities that lie before us should be grasped once for all, in order that the dignity of the quest may help to carry the inquirer through many disappointments, deceptions, delays. But he must remember that this inquiry must be extended over many generations; nor must he allow himself to be persuaded that there are byways to mastery. I will not say that there cannot possibly be any such thing as occult wisdom, or dominion over the secrets of nature ascetically or magically acquired. But I will say that every claim of this kind which my colleagues or I have been able to examine has proved deserving of complete mistrust; and that we have no confidence here any more than elsewhere in any methods except the open, candid, straightforward methods which the spirit of modern science demands.