Telepathy and the Subliminal Self

by R. Osgood Mason

To thinking men of all classes this bold declaration opened up the grand thought, not new, but newly formulated and endorsed, that as the seed contained all the possibilities of the future plant—the ovum all the possibilities of the future animal, so matter, which had been thought so lightly of, contained within itself the germ, potency, and promise of nature in all her subsequent developments—of the vast universe of suns and systems, planets and satellites, and of every form of life, sensation, and intelligence which in due process of evolution has appeared upon their surfaces. It pointed the way to the thought of an infinite causal energy and intelligence pervading matter and working through nature in all its various grades of life from the first organized cell up to the grandest man. It gave a new meaning to mind in man, as being an individualized portion of that divine potency which ever existed in matter, and which acting through constantly improving and developing organisms, amidst constantly improving environments, at length appeared a differentiated, individualized, seeing, reasoning, knowing, loving spirit.

The mind, then, is of importance. It is no transient visitor which may have made its appearance by chance—a concatenation of coincidences, fortunate or unfortunate, but it is the intelligent tenant and master of a singularly beautiful and complicated house, a house which has been millions upon millions of years in the building, and yet which will be lightly laid aside when it ceases to accommodate and fulfil the needs of its tenant.

Who and what, then, is this lordly tenant whose germ was coeval with matter, whose birth was in the first living cell which appeared upon the planet, whose apprenticeship has been served through every grade of existence from the humble polyp upwards, whose education has been carried on through the brain and organs of every grade of animal life with its countless expedients for existence and enjoyment, until now, as lord of its domain, it looks back upon its long course of development and education, looks about upon its environments and wonders at itself, at what it sees, and at what it prophesies. Truly what is this tenant, what are its powers, and why is it here at all?

These are the questions which it has been the business of the strongest and wisest to discuss, from the time men began to think and record their thoughts until the present time; but how various and unsatisfactory have been the conclusions. The mental philosophers, psychologists, and encyclopedists simply present a chaos of conflicting definitions, principles, and premises, upon none of which are they in full agreement amongst themselves; they are not even agreed regarding the nature of mind—whether it is material or immaterial—how it should be studied, how it is related to the body, indeed whether it is an entity at all, or simply “a series of feelings or possibilities of them”; whether it possesses innate ideas or is simply an accretion of experiences. In short, the stock of generally received facts relating to mind has always remained exceedingly small. Psychologists have busied themselves chiefly about its usual and obvious actions, and when in full relation to the body, ignoring all other mental action or arbitrarily excluding it as abnormal and not to be taken into account in the study of normal mind; so with only half the subject under consideration true results could hardly be attained.

Since the organization of the Society for Psychical Research, in 1882, new fields of investigation have been undertaken and the unusual phenomena connected with the operations of mind have been systematically studied. A very hasty and imperfect sketch of this study and of the results obtained has been given in the preceding chapters, but for the use here made of these studies in connection with his own observations the writer alone is responsible. In these studies the field of investigation has been greatly extended beyond that examined by the old philosophers and physiologists. Beyond the usual activities in which we constantly see the mind engaged—observation of surroundings made by the senses, memory of them, reasoning about them, and putting them in new combinations in science, literature, or art—new activities have been observed, activities lying entirely outside the old lines, in new and hitherto unexplored fields.

It has been demonstrated by experiment after experiment carefully made by competent persons that sensations, ideas, information, and mental pictures can be transferred from one mind to another without the aid of speech, sight, hearing, touch, or any of the ordinary methods of communicating such information or impressions. That is, Telepathy is a fact, and mind communicates with mind through channels other than the ordinary use of the senses.

It has been demonstrated that in the hypnotic condition, in ordinary somnambulism, in the dreams and vision of ordinary sleep, in reverie, and in various other subjective conditions the mind may perceive scenes and events at the moment transpiring at such a distance away or under such physical conditions as to render it impossible that knowledge of these scenes and events could be obtained by means of the senses acting in their usual manner. That is, mind under some circumstances sees without the use of the physical organ of sight.

Again, it has been demonstrated that some persons can voluntarily project the mind—some mind—some centre of intelligence or independent mental activity, clothed in a recognizable form, a distance of one, a hundred, or a thousand miles, and that it can there make itself known and recognized, perform acts, and even carry on a conversation with the person to whom it was sent. That is, mind can act at a distance from, and independent of, the physical body and the organs through which it usually manifests itself.

These propositions present an aspect of mind which the authorities in the old fields of psychology have failed to observe or to recognize; or if they have at times caught a glimpse of it they have rather chosen to close their eyes and deny altogether the phenomena which these propositions imply, because they found it was impossible to classify them in their system. It has been to a degree a repetition of the folly exhibited by Galileo’s contemporaries and critics, who refused to look through his telescope lest their favorite theories of the universe should be damaged. Nevertheless, this newly studied aspect exists, and is adding greatly to our knowledge of the nature and action of mind.

Still another class of unusual mental phenomena found in this outlying field of psychology is that known under the general name of automatism; and by this is meant something more than the “unconscious cerebration” and “unconscious muscular action” of the physiologists, and something quite different from that.