Afterlife by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson [Wilson, Colin]
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80533-1
Publisher: A Dolphin Book
Published: 2011-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

But a mere twenty years later, this was no longer true; psychology was quickly becoming a real science, and it was revealing some of those secrets about ‘ourselves’ that Catherine Crowe regarded as the most important of all kinds of knowledge. This explains the undercurrent of excitement and optimism that runs through Myers’s book. He was quite convinced — he says as much at the end — that man was at some crucial turning point in his history, and that this new ‘science of ourselves’ would transform human existence as completely as the science of Galileo and Newton had transformed it since the seventeenth century.

What abnormal psychology teaches us, he argued, was that our minds are richer and stranger than we could imagine. Even Aldous Huxley’s image of a house with an upper storey fails to do justice to Myers’s vision of human personality. It is more like a skyscraper, with dozens of storeys above ground, and another dozen or so below. His experiments with different ‘layers’ of consciousness seemed to reveal that man has a whole series of ‘basements’ below his ‘everyday self’. And that in turn suggests that he also has a series of upper storeys above his everyday consciousness. Moreover, if we think of a case like that of Louis Vivé, we can see that his criminal alter-ego was a more primitive, violent person than the polite, well-behaved Louis, and therefore a step in the direction of the cave-man. Which also suggests that his undeveloped higher levels are a step in the opposite direction — towards the god.

For Myers, cases like the ones we discussed at the beginning of this chapter — the lady who saw her own ‘double’ standing by the sideboard and the schoolteacher who was continually standing ‘beside herself’ — were not psychological freaks or anomalies; they were evidence of some peculiar power we do not understand. He cites a typical case of a ‘phantasm of the living’ taken from the Society for Psychical Research’s ‘Census of Hallucinations’. On a Sunday afternoon in August 1889, a girl identified as ‘Miss KE’ changed her mind about going to church, and instead spent the afternoon in her uncle’s library, studying his genealogical chart. But her two sisters, who went to church, saw her walking up the aisle with a roll of paper (evidently the genealogical chart) under her arm. All three sisters wrote an account of this odd occurrence.

The case is not as unusual as it sounds; there are well over a hundred like it in the ‘Census of Hallucinations’ and Phantasms of the Living. In most of them, it seems clear that the person who projected the ‘doppelgänger’ was thinking about the place where the ‘double’ was seen. In his autobiography Legends, the dramatist Strindberg describes how, when he was dangerously ill in Paris, he experienced a powerful longing to be back in Germany with his wife’s family. For a moment, he felt he was inside the house, and could see his mother-in-law playing the piano.

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