Spirits or Psychic Powers?

Once the occurrence of anomalous phenomena is accepted the question of whether some of these phenomena involve spirits, who can be defined, here as non-corporeal self aware intelligent entities (no jokes about excluding dead politicians please) capable of existing independently of humanity. The phenomena involved include Survival of Consciousness, apparent possession, reincarnation and channelling. The most extreme case seems to be Survival of consciousness, where a conclusive disproof of Telepathy, Clairvoyance and Psychokinesis would immensely strengthen the case for survival, and conversely a proof survival is impossible would make the evidence for PSI much stronger: it seems that die hard materialist skeptics realise this and devote great effort to arguing against both sides of this camp, though I seem to see more effort put into discrediting PSI than survival.

Multiple Personality disorder (MPD) resembles “controls” taking over a medium in a spiritualist séance – and there is a consensus that controls are an aspect of the medium's mind-, Loa taking over Voodoo worshippers, “speaking in tongues” practiced by some ecstatic Christian sects, channelling, where information is allegedly transmitted by an entity that controls the vocal cords or writing hand of a subject (sometimes both hands) and the personalities that emerge in the use of a planchette or ouija board.

There is a recognised definition of MPD that allows reliable diagnosis. Rates vary from country to country ranging from 0.105% of the population of mentally ill patients in India to between 6% and10% in the US and 14% in Turkey. However in the general population the rate is around 1% in Canada, 0.4% for Turkish men and 1.1% for Turkish women. The causes of this disorder are a matter of debate, but the theories all seem to postulate some form of early life stress which the subject copes with by developing a second personality. The incidence of diagnoses of MPD is rising and it seems to be becoming socially acceptable: A few years ago one victim married one of their other personalities.

There seems also to be a correlation between early life stress and mediumistic ability though the correlation is not strong enough to indicate causality, and the development of a shaman often requires some form of trauma. Wikipedia notes that at one time the symptoms of MPD were regarded as those of possession, the most famous case being perhaps the nuns of Loudon, commonly regarded as an example of hysteria generated by repressed sexuality.

It is possible to build up a case that the communications presented through mediums and those channelling information from allegedly non corporeal entities is a working up of data known to the subject into a coherent narrative. One can also include Hypnotic regression to a previous “incarnation” in this hypothesis. And one can then consider MPD as an extreme case of the ability humans have to make up and even enact a story about their lives. Such a theory would on the face of it leave no room for spirits: such a hypothesis would not be needed.

What would you need to be able to separate say MPD from genuine possession, the spirit at a séance from a projection of the mind of a medium or a sitter, or the personality that emerges in a hypnotic regression from some form of possibly therapeutic fantasy?

The probability is that small bits of evidence would have to be accumulated till they constituted at least legal proof. Conversely one can look for evidence that a spirit is not involved. Here are a couple of examples.

Colin Wilson cites a case of MPD where the victim reported four personalities but three of the personalities unanimously described the fourth as an intruder, and a case where some other personalities were those of deceased siblings of the victim. While not taking the statements of personalities at face value such cases could be indicative of true possession. If the intruder were able to provide verifiable information that was not only not known to the other personalities but not known to any living person this might strengthen the case for external possession, but the number of cases where someone undergoing hypnotic regression has provided such information concerning an earlier life but it later turned out that the information had been absorbed unknowingly at an earlier time, would again weaken the theory. At the very least it would be necessary to ask the intruding personality where it got the information.

Wilson also cites a case of a psychiatric patient apparently occupied by a non human entity that while not controlling their body was influencing the patient negatively. Once this entity was persuaded to leave the patient's condition improved.

These cases illustrate the difficulty of separating spirits from PSI as causes of these phenomena. In the case of MPD there are situations where one personality needed glasses and another didn't, one had an allergy another didn't and so on. These are not beyond the abilities of the unconscious mind but could also be evidence corroborating true possession.

One way to look at Channeling and Mediumship is to look at the content of the communications. This allows a lot of material to be dismissed as psychic clutter. As a rule anything channeled that involves Atlantis, enlightened beings in a distant galaxy or inhabitants of flying saucers should at least be treated with suspicion. Warnings about the dangers of global warming can also be dismissed: they are like the warnings about nuclear power decades earlier and probably reflect the fears of the channeller or medium. And some communications have a characteristic inflated style that seems to be a certain giveaway.

In a spiritualist séance “He is happy and wants you to be happy” is much less evidential than “The money is buried in the garden where the plaster gnomes used to be” - especially if the money IS found there.

Equally a communication from (say) Einstein or Dirac ( as great as Einstein in a different area of Physics) should add to human knowledge not consist of banalities or imprecise waffle. One equation would be worth a million words. Equally a communication from the Fermat about his famous theorem should state the “short proof” he found that would not fit the margin of a textbook.

So what would be a positive indication that the communicator was not merely a figment of the mediums imagination? If the communicator were alleged to be a scientist, in the broadest of terms, they should be able to propose a new and testable hypothesis, or at least state a theory on which others could work. If like the alleged communicators in the famous cross correspondences they were experts in the “soft” disciplines like linguistics or history one would assume that their knowledge was greater than when on earth (this is an untested assumption) and give information that would resolve puzzles in their field. If they are ordinary people then the communication should do more than just reassure those left here.

One interesting case from Scandinavia which would seem to push the idea that the communicator arose from the mediums mind, described by Alan Gauld in his book Mediumship and Survival occurred in 1938 when a “character” began appearing regularly at seances in a home circle in Reykjavik. This character expressed a desire for snuff, coffee and alcohol as well as saying he was looking for his leg, which he claimed was “in the sea”. So far he seemed nothing more than a comic character created unconsciously by the participants to brighten up the normally dull seances.

In 1939 a new sitter named Ludvik Gudmundsson joined the circle. The unknown communicator showed great interest in this new sitter, and eventually stated that his missing leg was in the latter 's house. After a good deal of further pressure from the sitters, he made the following statement, quoted in full from Gauld's book:

My name is Runolfur Runolfson, and I was 52 years old when I died. I lived with my wife at Kolga or Klappakot, near Sandgerdi. I was on a journey from Kellavik [about six miles from Sandgerdi in the latter part of the day and I was drunk. I stopped at the house of Sveinbjorn Thordarson in Sandgerdi and accepted some refreshments there. When I went to, go, the weather was so bad that they did not wish me to leave unless accompanied by someone else. I became angry and said I would not go at all if could not go alone. My house was only about 15 minutes walk away. So I left by myself , but I was wet and tired. I walked over the kambuin [pebbles] and reached the rock known as FIankastadaklettur which has almost disappeared now. There I sat down, took my bottle, and drank some more. Then I fell asleep. The tide came in and carried me away. This happened in October, 1879. I was not found until 1 January, 1880. I was carried in by the tide, but then dogs and ravens came and tore me to pieces. The remnants [of my body] were found and buried in Utskalar graveyard [about four miles from Sandgerdi.] But then the thighbone was missing. It was carried out again to sea, but was later washed up again at Sandgerdi. There it was passed around and now it is in Ludvik 's house.

On another occasion the communicator said he had been a very tall man. Runki's extraordinary tale was subsequently verified in considerable detail, although it seems he did not did not stop at the house of Sveinbjorn Thordarson. Ludvik Gudmundsson knew nothing about any thighbone in his house, but after enquiries among older local inhabitants, he found that sometime in the 1920s such a bone, believed to have been washed up by the sea, had been placed in an interior wall. It was recovered, and turned out to be the femur of a very tall man. No one knew whose bone it was, and there was no record which indicated whether or not the thighbone was missing from Runki 's remains. A teasing question is why, even if Runki was the source of the communications, and the thigh bone was actually his, he should have had any special knowledge of the matter.

Of course this is not conclusive proof the communicator WAS a spirit, but it seems a particularly pointless tale for a group of spiritualists to brew up unconsciously, and the communicator arrived well before the new sitter joined, which would make the hypothesis of the medium reading the sitters mind ( and the sitter knew nothing of the bone till later). Under the ESP hypothesis the medium would have had to know Gudmundsson was going to join the circle ( not impossible), scanned him and his region for interesting facts, discovered the bone, clairvoyantly, read the minds of older inhabitants to find the story of the bone having been washed up at see, and any memories of Runki, then created a colourful character: the sort one loves to read about but hopes never sits near you on the bus, and presented it to the sitters for a long time before the right sitter joined. Somehow it is a little easier to think this was really a deceased entity trying to communicate. We can also deduce that there is a shortage of snuff, alcohol and coffee in the next life.

Reincarnation is another controversial topic. I have written on the absurdity of the idea that reincarnation is intended to teach you lessons based on your previous lives while wiping all memory of those lives: like requiring someone to retake a failed exam but wiping their memory before they start studying. There are a number of problems both with the reincarnation hypothesis and the anti-reincarnation hypothesis. One problem is how a fixed stock of souls can fill an ever increasing population. Another is the simple question why so few people remember past lives.

It should be noted that Multiple Personality disorder is rare in India but there seem to be many more people claiming to remember past lives in India than in the West (though there are such cases and the Greeks, Celts and Scandinavian peoples believed in reincarnation) and seem able to produce verifiable evidence that their memories correspond to reality. Nevertheless such evidence is at best suggestive.

Hypnotic regression has been taken by some as evidence of reincarnation. In a regression the subject is “led” by the hypnotist to relive earlier and earlier memories until these memories become memories of a past life. Often enough these are therapeutic, and the subject relives earlier lives as people of status and wealth: Probably at this minute there are half a dozen people who think they are reincarnations of the Emperor Tiberias or Cleopatra. As with the competing claims of religions, they cannot all be right and may all be wrong. The late Stan Gooch pointed this out and used it as an argument agains the existence of spirits. Gooch's skepticism is valuable but should be taken only as showing the folly of taking such evidence uncritically, and perhaps giving a few guidelines for evaluating it. For example his argument that (say) someone remembering a past life in Ancient Egypt (very popular) should speak Ancient Egyptian and not modern English could be countered by saying it is the same person and that they know both languages and have knowledge of modern technology.

There have been cases where memories of a past life have been verified in detail but it turned out that the memories were a working up of forgotten reading or listening. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Blanche Poynings case where a subject gave verifiable historical data later verified, but, when asked under hypnosis, where the information came from, gave the name of a historical novel the subject had flipped though as a child, looking at the pictures. The subject had taken a minor character in the book and created a past life as this fictional character.

Paradoxically the regressions most likely to be true are those that are less easy to verify and minor details become evidential In one regression the subject recalled a life as a poor person some hundreds of years ago, and, while writing left handed in this life wrote right handed when regressed. While this is not beyond the ability of the unconscious mind, it is a pity the writing was not compared with known samples of writing of the period.

When looking at presumed cases of reincarnation the investigator must be careful not to “lead” the subject, and should be wary of contamination of the evidence.

As with paranormal fires and poltergeists Channeling, Multiple Personality Disorder, Mediumship and past life memories, let alone the controversial new field of transplant memories, share enough characteristics that they can be viewed as aspects of a common ability or phenomenon, and many cases can be explained without recourse to the hypothesis a spirit is involved. The fun begins when the involvement of a spirit becomes the simpler hypothesis.