Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (14 page)

This
again is why so much of his data involves what we would now call dissociative or traumatic phenomena, that is, states of consciousness in which a traumatic event—usually death as actual or as threatened—separates or dissociates consciousness into at least two fields of operation. In some cases, this leads to abnormal, pathological, or devolutive states. In other cases, this leads to evolutive states of genius and various special powers that Myers called supernormal. In many cases, moreover, both processes can be seen in the same individual. Contrary to what many want to assume, pathological and mystical states are
not
mutually exclusive, and both are related to the suppression of the social ego. Myers saw this very clearly. Hence his rhyming model of the abnormal and the supernormal.

For Myers, the supernormal carried multiple connotations. As its related category of the evolutive suggests, the supernormal was a term that signaled both a particular evolutionary purpose and an entirely natural or “normal” process. We might well say that the supernormal was super natural, but not supernatural. This is how Myers put it in the opening definitions of
Human Personality
(the asterisk signals a word of his own creation):

*Supernormal
.—Of a faculty or phenomenon which goes beyond the level of ordinary experience, in the direction of evolution, or as pertaining to a transcendental world. The word
supernatural
is open to grave objections; it assumes that there is something outside nature, and it has become associated with arbitrary interference with law. Now there is no reason to suppose that the psychical phenomena with which we deal are less a part of nature, or less subject to fixed and definite law, than any other phenomena. Some of them appear to indicate a higher evolutionary level than the mass of men have yet attained, and some of them appear to be governed by laws of such a kind that they may hold good in a transcendental world as fully as in the world of sense. In either case they are above the norm of man rather than outside his nature. (HP 1:xxii)

As such a quote suggests, Myers was operating with a worldview that mirrored his bimodal psychology. The human being is certainly a material being almost seamlessly embedded in the physical world, but, in the words of Edward Kelly now, the human personality is also “rooted in a hidden, wider environment that underlies and interpenetrates the world of ordinary experience, at bottom a spiritual or ‘metetherial' realm lying beyond the material as classically conceived.”
⁸⁶
Just as the Human is Two, so too is the World.

Sort of. It is more accurate to say that, for Myers, the World is One, but that it is experienced by us in two different ways—in a naturalistic and social way via our supraliminal self, and in a spiritual or “transcendental”
way
via our subliminal Self. What finally renders this Two One for Myers is a firm conviction that
both
forms of consciousness and their corresponding worlds of experience are shaped by “fixed and definite law,” and that such a law is at root an evolutionary one. Again, beyond A and B, there is X.

There is another way of putting this. In Myers's spectrum model, the supraliminal self or sense-based ego, that is, a specific personality that has been created by the narrowing of the field of consciousness, is conceived as operating on a specific band along the spectrum of consciousness within a particular social and historical period. This point on the spectrum, however, is neither stable nor absolute. It is transitory and constantly shifting. It is a compromise, a temporary adaptation determined, Myers speculated, by something like Darwin's natural selection.
⁸⁷
The ego or social self is, if you will, an adaptive response to the cultural and physical environments in which the subliminal self finds itself manifesting at a particular moment in space and time. In another place, Myers seems to intuit the role of culture and language in these evolutionary processes, if only as a metaphor this time: “The letters of our inward alphabet,” he writes, “will shape themselves into many other dialects;—many other personalities, as distinct as those which we assume to be
ourselves
, can be made out of our mental material.”
⁸⁸

In other words, human nature is being written in vastly different ways, and these different languages of consciousness and culture will continue to morph and manifest as history proceeds into the future. Myers is an optimist here. As the human personality continues to evolve, he speculates that it will move further and further away from the primitive, ultrared, instinctual, physiological, or “terrene” end of the spectrum of consciousness and toward the ultraviolet, spiritual, psychical, or “extraterrene” end.

Toward that further end of the spectrum lie what Myers called “
super-conscious
operations,” that is, capacities that are “not
below the threshold
—but rather
above the upper horizon
of consciousness.”
⁸⁹
He could be quite radical on this point. Consciousness and its sensory capacities, he claimed, are “doubtless still modifiable in directions as unthinkable to me as my eyesight would have been unthinkable to the oyster,”
⁹⁰
and the human being has “evoked in greatest multiplicity the unnumbered faculties latent in the irritability of a speck of slime” (HP 1:76). In short, just as it has in the history of life on this planet, consciousness will continue to evolve from the normal to the supernormal, and this to the extent that it can gain “a completer control over innate but latent faculty.”
⁹¹

As we have already noted, Myers often writes of this double evolution as “terrene” and “extraterrene.” He accepted the Darwinian model of natural selection with respect to the terrene or earthly processes, but he was
very
much a Platonist or, perhaps better, a Neoplatonist when it came to the extraterrene or spiritual processes, that is, he believed that extraterrene evolution flowed from an earlier involution, that that which evolves into our spiritual consciousness was always already there from the beginning. Indeed, he even refers to his understanding of the latter involution/evolution processes as “some sort of a renewal of the old Platonic ‘reminiscence,' in the light of that fuller knowledge which is common property to-day.” So, for example, he felt it necessary to posit the primordial existence of a “primal germ,” which possessed what he called
panaesthesia
or an “undifferentiated sensory capacity” that later evolved into the various sensory organs known to biology and psychology (HP 1:xiv). In another fascinating passage, he calls this “an X of some sort.” Whether a carbon atom or an immortal soul, he muses, this X “must have dated in any case from some age anterior to its existence upon our recent planet . . . on which earth's forces began their play.”
⁹²
For the modern reader at least, “the heavens” of the spiritual world and “the outer space” of astrophysics here mingle in provocative and suggestive ways.

With respect to the extraterrene evolution of the subliminal Self and its supernormal capacities, Myers explicitly rejected the Darwinian notion that something like a telepathic faculty could be initiated “by some chance combination of hereditary elements.” He held rather that “it is not initiated, but only revealed; that the ‘sport' [of evolutionary processes] has not called a new faculty into being, but has merely raised an existing faculty above the threshold of supraliminal consciousness” (HP 1.117–18). He recognized, of course, that this view is inconsistent with natural selection in the strict biological sense. Hence his double-language of the terrene and the extraterrene, or what I have called the Darwinian and the Neoplatonic:

Our human life . . . exists and energises, at the present moment, both in the material and in the spiritual world. Human personality, as it has developed from lowly ancestors, has become differentiated into two phases; one of them mainly adapted to material or planetary, the other to spiritual or cosmic operation. The subliminal self, mainly directing the sleeping phase, is able either to rejuvenate the organism by energy drawn in from the spiritual world;—or, on the other hand, temporarily and partially to relax its connection with that organism, in order to expatiate in the exercise of supernormal powers;—telepathy, tele-asthesia, ecstasy. (HP 1:155)

Myers's language here had a rather remarkable pedigree. On the extraterrene side, it went back to Plotinus and Plato, both of whom he read, knew, and loved in the original Greek. On the terrene side, it went back
to
the very origins of evolutionary biology. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-creator of the evolutionary thesis with Darwin, attended the first official meeting of the Society for Psychical Research on February 20, 1882. He also attended multiple séances, witnessed the full-blown materializations of various physical mediums, and accepted for publication William Barrett's 1876 paper on thought-transference as chairman for the anthropological section of the British Association (the paper was later suppressed and then finally published in the journal of the S.P.R.).
⁹³
He thus wrote of how an “overruling intelligence” may have something to do with the evolution of mind and morality. He explained to T. H. Huxley his dream of a “new branch of Anthropology” that might be crafted out of a study of Spiritualist phenomena. And he asked his scientific colleagues to pursue “those grand mysterious phenomena of the mind, the investigation of which can alone conduct us to a knowledge of what we really are.”
⁹⁴
In other words, Wallace realized that science leads, inexorably, to ontological questions. Much like Myers, Wallace saw the phenomena of Spiritualism as evidence for a separate, nonphysical line of moral or spiritual evolution.
⁹⁵
In Myers's own words, Wallace entertained the idea “that some influence, resembling that of man on the domestic animals, may have been brought to bear upon primitive man . . . and that some power of spiritual communion, differentiating man from the lower races, may have been thus originated.”
⁹⁶
We'll return to that idea too: the earth as a farm.

Despite all of this, Wallace was never entirely comfortable with the S.P.R., not because he thought its members were being too credulous, but because he thought that they were being too suspicious. In his mind at least, the researchers were being far too critical of psychical phenomena. Here he was closer to Stainton Moses than Frederic Myers. Accordingly, Wallace completely rejected Myers's notion of the subliminal Self, or any other theory of the unconscious for that matter, as fundamentally unscientific. In his own mind, he was simply trusting his own senses, that is, what he heard and saw at the séances. He was being a good naturalist. Only the jungle had changed.

Wallace's Spiritualist beliefs aside, Myers was clearly working with a similar double-evolutionary model. As we have already seen, there were two lines of evolution for Myers—one that applied to the natural world and one that applied to the transcendental or spiritual world. But, again, they both answered to the same evolutionary law: the A and the B were both rooted in a deeper X. One of the implications of such a conclusion is the notion that human evolution continues after death. In the end, Myers arrived at a kind of mind-body dualism, fully convinced that a mind uses
a
brain, and that the “human brain is in its last analysis an arrangement of matter expressly adapted to being acted upon by a spirit” (HP 2:254). Thought and Consciousness are not, then, random products of biological processes. They “are, and always have been, the central subject of the evolutionary process itself.”
⁹⁷
Put simply, mind, not matter, is primary, and human evolution is guided by spiritual forces that have, over the course of millions of years, evolved their own bodily receptors and are working still toward the actualization of potential powers that have in fact always been enfolded into the universe. Evolution is exactly what its etymology suggests, then: an “unfolding” of something already present, already there.

Little wonder, then, that Darwin shied away from the word
evolution
, citing its common mystical connotations as inappropriate to his own purely naturalistic understandings. Indeed, the word possessed (and still possesses) an especially rich background in German Idealism and English and German Romanticism. Such authors, drawing on ancient Neo-platonic notions of involution and evolution, the ancient image of the
ouroboros
(the snake biting its own tail), and the symbolism of the spiral, used the language of evolution to express the natural tendency or “way” (
Weg
) of the cosmos to “unfold” its own implicit consciousness or divine Mind. Schelling could thus write that “[h]istory is an epic composed in the mind of God,” and Coleridge could declare that “the nurture and evolution of humanity is the final aim.”
⁹⁸
Thus, to paraphrase the famous terms of Schelling, the God who is involved into the universe (
Deus implicitus
) manifests as the God who evolves out of the universe (
Deus explicitus
).
⁹⁹

As a striking example of this pre-Darwinian understanding of evolution as a kind of cosmic Mind awakening through history and culture, consider M. H. Abrams's reading of Hegel's masterwork
The Phenomenology of the Spirit
. Abrams approaches this text as a “literary narrative,” that is, as a Romantic novel or myth of the mind coming into its own self-revelation. The hermeneutical results are certainly astonishing (and fantastically familiar) enough: in a world in which Spirit or Mind (
Geist
) constitutes both subject and object, as well as the plot of the story, the reader is as much a part of the text as the text is a part of the reader. We are all being written, even as we are also doing the writing. Hegel now reads remarkably like Philip K. Dick's autobiographical descriptions of Valis: