Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (17 page)

The
Perfect Insect of the Imaginal

Such a threshold, however, cannot be crossed directly or literally, except perhaps at death. Before that, it can only be crossed through images, myths, and symbols. This, I would suggest, is also why the preeminent data fields of the supernormal lie in comparative mystical literature and the folklore and mythologies of the history of religions, that is, in those human expressions involving symbol and myth. Enter the category of the imaginal.

Those who are familiar with the term inevitably trace it back to the French historian of Iranian Islamic mysticism Henri Corbin, who famously used it to discuss the profound effects mystical experience is said to have on the powers of imagination within his Iranian sources. Following his textual sources (and his own initiatory transmission from a medieval Sufi saint), Corbin understood the imaginal to be a noetic organ that accessed a real dimension of the cosmos whose appearances to us were nevertheless shaped by what he called the “creative imagination” (
l'imagination créatrice
). The creative imagination is an empowered form of what most people experience in its simpler and unenlightened state as the imagination or the imaginary. The imaginal is not the imaginary, though. The imaginal is in touch with and translating a higher dimension of reality, what Myers would have called the extraterrene. The imaginary is the same organ working on a strictly naturalistic or mundane level, what Myers would have called the terrene.

Now it is true that Corbin brought the imaginal into contemporary scholarly prominence. But it is not true that he invented the term. Nor is it true that he was the first major scholar of religion to employ it. The seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Henry More appears to have coined the category, in 1642, as “the imaginall” in his
Psychodia Platonica; or, a Platonick song of the Soul
. The first major theorist of the imaginal in the
study
of religion to use the term in a consistent way, however, was none other than Frederic Myers.

Drawing on over a century of Romantic poetry and literature that recognized the imaginative powers as capable of both floating fantasy and revelatory cognition, Myers understood that the human imagination works in many modes and on many levels. More specifically, he became convinced that in certain contexts, the imagination can take on genuinely transcendental capacities, that is, that it can make contact with what appears to be a real spiritual world or, at the very least, an entirely different order of mind and consciousness. The imaginal is the imagination on steroids. The imaginary is Clark Kent, the normal. The imaginal is Superman, the supernormal. Same guy, different suits. The Human as Two.

As with his categories of the subliminal, the supernormal, and the telepathic, Myers linked the imaginal directly to his evolutionary worldview. Thus in the opening, still Roman-numeral pages of
Human Personality
, Myers defined
imaginal
this way: “A word used of characteristics belonging to the perfect insect or
imago
;—and thus opposed to
larval
;—metaphorically applied to transcendental faculties shown in rudiment in ordinary life” (HP 1:xviii). That's a bit elliptical. What Myers intended to communicate here was the idea that the human imagination under certain very specific conditions can take on extraordinary or supernormal capacities that represent hints of a more highly evolved human nature. In his own more technical terms, such altered states of consciousness were “preversions” that represented “[a] tendency to characteristics assumed to lie at a further point of the evolutionary progress of a species than has yet been reached” (HP 1:xx).

Hence just as the larval stage of an insect looks nothing like the imago or mature image of its adult form (which indeed appears “bizarre” or alienlike in comparison to the larval slug), so too the images of the human imagination can mature into extremely strange but nevertheless accurate evolutionary forms as imaginal visions or veridical hallucinations—Breton's surreal mix of “subjective” dream and “objective” reality again. The imaginal is to the imagination, then, as the adult insect or perfect imago is to its larval slug.
¹¹⁴

There is a delightful parable of sorts in
Science and a Future Life
where Myers in effect glosses his elliptical definition of the imaginal in
Human Personality
. It goes like this:

Let us suppose that some humble larvae are dissecting each other, and speculating as to their destinies. At first they find themselves precisely suited to life
and
death on a cabbage-leaf. Then they begin to observe certain points in their construction which are useless to larval life. These are, in fact, what are called “imaginal characters”—points of structure which indicate that the larva has descended from an imago, or perfect insect, and is destined in his turn to become one himself. These characters are much overlaid by the secondary or larval characters, which subserve larval, and not imaginal life, and they consequently may easily be overlooked or ignored. But our supposed caterpillar sticks to his point; he maintains that these characteristics indicate an aerial origin. And now a butterfly settles for a moment on the cabbage-leaf. The caterpillar points triumphantly to the morphological identity of some of the butterfly's conspicuous characters with some of his own latent characters; and while he is trying to persuade his fellow-caterpillars of this, the butterfly flies away.

“This,” Myers explains, “is exactly what I hold to have happened in the history of human evolution.” And it was Plato who “was the first larva to insist upon the imaginal characters.”
¹¹⁵

Here he is thinking again of Plato's doctrine of reminiscences whereby “sudden increments of faculty” of a mathematical or musical type (as with a genius) are explained by positing a preexisting state in which these forms of knowledge came naturally to the soul. “Somewhat similarly,” Myers writes, “I would suggest that telepathy and cognate faculties . . . may be the results of an evolution other than that terrene or physical evolution.” Basically, in a telepathic event, we are (re)discovering an innate human potential that evolution is now actualizing in a fuller and fuller fashion. We are realizing that we may not be slugs after all. Still on that cabbage-leaf band of the spectrum, but seeing past it now, Myers concludes that “here is a similarity of structure between our own intelligence and some unseen intelligence, and that what that unseen intelligence is we too may once have been, and may be destined again to be.”
¹¹⁶

Such a line of thinking, of course, did not begin or end with Frederic Myers. We have encountered it already in Alfred Russel Wallace. The truth is that literally hundreds of philosophers, poets, psychical researchers, psychologists, physicists, and philosophers were exploring the idea in the second half of the nineteenth century. Different forms of it, for example, were expressed by the British writer Edward Carpenter and, in a much less disciplined way, by the Canadian physician and Whitmanian mystic, Richard Maurice Bucke, who gave the twentieth century the phrase “cosmic consciousness.”
¹¹⁷
It was this same line of thought again that led eventually to a world-class intellectual like Henri Bergson, who philosophically refigured the nature of consciousness in the light of psychical research and what he
called
the “evolutionary impulse” (
élan vital
), kept a portrait of William James in his office, became president of the London Society for Psychical Research in 1913, and ended his very last book with this very last line:

Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. . . . Theirs [is] the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.
¹¹⁸

Who today writes like
that
?

The
Telepathic and the Erotic: Myers's Platonic Speech

The subliminal, the supernormal, and the imaginal, then—all on their way to “the making of gods.” For Myers, all of this was subsumed within the centerpiece of his system—the telepathic. The “telepathic law,” as he called it, is what held everything else together. It was the “gravity” of the psychical world, the binding idea that explained almost everything for Frederic Myers, from spirit communication and poetic or philosophical genius, to crisis apparitions and possession, to the efficacy of prayer, the communion of saints, and the ancient doctrine of the World-Soul, even the actions of a possible Divine Spirit.
¹¹⁹
This is all well known and often discussed in the literature on Myers and the S.P.R.

What is not so well known and, as far as I can tell, seldom discussed is Myers's own clearly stated conviction that the telepathic is related to the erotic, that telepathy is, if you will, ultimately an expression of love or, conversely, that “Love is a kind of exalted, but unspecialized telepathy” (HP 2:282). Some of this may have already been intuited in the curious linguistic fact that the British psychical research tradition emerged out of an earlier discourse on Mesmerism and animal magnetism located largely in France and the delightful coincidence that the French word for “magnet” is also the adjective for “loving” (
aimant
). To my knowledge, however, Myers never engages in such playful speculations.

We need no such speculations, however, in order to establish that the telepathic and the erotic are intimately linked phenomena for Frederic Myers, that, somehow, these two dimensions of the human condition are expressing the same deep metaphysical unity of things. Myers, after all, explicitly tells us exactly this in one of the most dramatic sections of
Human Personality
. In the third chapter on “Genius,” we come across an extensive
discussion
of “the primary passion” (HP 1:111–16). Myers has just completed a long discussion of genius as subliminal uprush in philosophers, mathematical prodigies, poets (Wordsworth, Browning, and Shelley), and contemporary novelists (George Sand, Charles Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson), all of whom, he argues, were uniquely skilled at remaining open to subliminal suggestions of great scientific, literary, and philosophical worth. Stevenson, for example, dreamed of possessing a double personality (the Human as Two again). He wrote entire stories after what he called “the Little People” or “Brownies.” These were his dream sprites who, with an eye to the bankbook, happily and dutifully appeared in his dreams in order to act out precise plots that he could later write down and sell (HP 1:91). Exactly like Freud, moreover, Myers saw a poet of Wordsworth's status as an “introspective psychologist,” that is, as a genius who was accessing on an experiential level what the psychologists were mapping on an abstract theoretical level (HP 1:109). In our own contemporary terms, we might say that, for Myers, great writers are practical mystics.

After such literary studies, Myers suggests that, as far as such subliminal uprushes or impossible authorizations are intellectual, they also tend to be
telaesthetic
, that is, they bring “direct knowledge of facts of the universe outside the range of any specialized organ or of any planetary view” (HP 1:111).
Telaesthesia
was yet another Greek coinage of Myers. The term referred to the mind's ability to access information at a distance without any receiving or sending mind on the other end. He preferred it to the more common French term, clairvoyance, because the latter implies the organ of sight, and perceptions at a distance are by no means always visual. It is also important to note that, although telaesthesia is clearly related to telepathy, they are not the same thing. Telepathy requires another human being, whereas telaesthesia does not.
¹²⁰
Unlike telaesthesia, moreover, telepathy implies, as its Greek root suggests, a powerful emotional connection. Tele
pathy
implies love, passion, pathos. For Myers, telepathy, precisely because of this strong emotional component, is higher than telaesthesia. In my own terms now, Myers's central category of telepathy is not simply about Consciousness. It is also about Energy.

The reader can almost feel this energy in the text. When Myers gets to the subject of eros, the voice and tone shift dramatically. We are no longer reading a scientific treatise or a piece of literary criticism. Myers becomes a poet again, and he is giving a speech now. But not just any speech. It is as if, with just a few months left to live, he decided to set aside all reservations and say what he
really
thought.

And
so he imaginatively enters, he
becomes
one of his most beloved Greek classics, that most famous of all collections of speeches on eros and its sublimation into philosophical ideation, Plato's
Symposium
or “Drinking Party.” Fred Myers enters the text, stands up in his turn, and begins:

Telaesthesia is not the only spiritual law, nor are subliminal uprushes affairs of the intellect alone. Beyond and above man's innate power of world-wide perception, there exists also that universal link of spirit with spirit which in its minor earthly manifestations we call telepathy. Our submerged faculty—the subliminal uprushes of genius—can expand in that direction as well as in the direction of telaesthesia. The emotional content, indeed, of those uprushes is even profounder and more important than the intellectual;—in proportion as Love and Religion are profounder and more important than Science or Art. (HP 1:111)

And he goes on:

That primary passion, I repeat, which binds life to life, which links us both to life near and visible and to life imagined but unseen;—
that
is no mere organic, no mere planetary impulse, but the inward aspect of the telepathic law. Love and religion are thus
continuous
;—they represent different phases of one all-pervading mutual gravitation of souls. The flesh does not conjoin, but dissever; although through its very severance it suggests a shadow of the union which it cannot bestow. We have to do here neither with a corporeal nor with a purely human emotion. Love is the energy of integration which makes a Cosmos of the Sum of Things. (HP 1:112)