Frederic Myers

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903).

Telepathy and the larger self

Myers coined the word telepathy for the passing of impressions from one mind to another without the known channels of sense, and with Gurney he gathered the cases of figures seen at the hour of a death on which the Society first built. That work, the word, the crisis case and the rules of evidence, is taught in the branch on telepathy, among The sixth sense. His own teaching goes further. It is a whole picture of the human being, drawn to explain those cases and many others, and its centre is the subliminal self.

The threshold

Waking consciousness, Myers teaches, is not the whole of a person. It lies above a threshold, the limen, and he calls it the supraliminal self; below the threshold lies a far larger field of mind, the subliminal self, always at work, perceiving, remembering and reasoning, though the waking self knows little of it. The two are not two persons but one personality, of which the waking part is the portion in use for the business of earthly life.

He likens it to the spectrum of sunlight. The colours the eye sees are only a band of a much longer spectrum, which runs on unseen beyond the red and beyond the violet. So our ordinary consciousness is a narrow band: beyond its red end lie the mind's powers over the body's own processes, which we use without knowing it, and beyond its violet end lie the higher powers, of genius, of telepathy and of vision, which rise into awareness only now and then.

The uprush of genius

Genius, for Myers, is not a disease or a freak but a fuller use of what all have: a power of drawing on a wider range of faculties than others can, and of letting the results of subliminal thought rise into the waking stream. He calls the moment a subliminal uprush, when a thought, a melody, the answer to a sum or a line of verse comes unbidden, whole and right, shaped below the threshold. The poet's inspiration and the calculating boy's sudden answer are the same law at work, and so, in their degree, are the hunches of ordinary life.

Sleep and suggestion

Sleep, he holds, is not a mere stopping but another phase of the personality, in which the subliminal self takes over the care of the body and restores it, and sometimes reaches beyond it, so that dreams now and then carry knowledge the dreamer could not have had through the senses. Hypnotism is an experimental way into the same region. Suggestion works, in his account, when it makes a successful appeal to the subliminal self, which has more power over the body's processes than the waking will has.

Automatisms

The subliminal self speaks to the waking self by roundabout ways, which Myers calls automatisms. Sensory automatisms come as things seen or heard: a picture in a crystal, a voice, a figure at the bedside. Motor automatisms come through the muscles: a sudden impulse to act, writing that runs on of itself, the tilting of a table under the hands. Most of what comes this way, he teaches, comes from the person's own hidden mind and is worth studying for that alone; some of it, he believed, carries knowledge from other minds, living or dead. The art lies in telling the one from the other, and it asks for patience and suspicion in equal measure.

Phantasms of the dead

From the phantasms of the living he turns to those seen after death. A ghost, as he defines it, is not a dead person come back in the body but a manifestation of persistent personal energy: a sign that some force is at work after death which is connected with a person once known on earth. Many such figures, he finds, seem to repeat a scene or drift without purpose, and only a few seem to come with a message and an aim.

Trance, possession and ecstasy

At the far end of his scale stand three states. In trance the subliminal self comes to the surface and takes over the organism. In possession, he holds, another spirit may use the vacated organism to speak and write, as he believed happened with the best mediums he studied. In ecstasy the person's own spirit goes out, and returns with memories of another world. These are the states the old religions knew as prophecy, inspiration and rapture, and he hoped that the new inquiry would one day weigh them as carefully as the cases of the living.

Such states are not to be sought by the unready. Myers wrote for those who study them, and anyone troubled by voices, by writing that seems not their own or by a sense of being taken over needs a doctor's care first.

Love as telepathy

His epilogue gathers the teaching into a hope. If minds can touch beyond the senses, the universe is not a heap of sealed souls but a society, and telepathy is a law of the spiritual world as gravitation is of the material. Love, in that light, is a kind of exalted but unspecialised telepathy, the simplest and most universal sign of the kinship of spirits on which the telepathic law rests, and it is the bond that death, he believed, does not break. He held that the evidence pointed towards survival, and that the human personality is set on a path of growth that goes on beyond the body.