578 - 1) Enemies of Freedom & 2) Life After Death

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley

A gathering of friends at Laura Huxley’s home

Today’s podcast features two recordings of Aldous Huxley. The first is an interview conducted by Mike Wallace, and the second part of today’s program features a lecture of Huxley’s that speculates about the possibilities of some sort of existence after the death of our bodies.

Date the Mike Wallace interview was recorded: May 18, 1958

[NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.]https://archive.org/download/578HuxleyFreedomAndMind/578-HuxleyFreedomAndMind.mp3

“We mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology.”

“People with a vested interest in a certain kind of philosophy find it almost impossible to accept facts which go against that particular philosophy.”

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Transcript

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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

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Salon, and I want to welcome my new Patreon supporter, Jake S.,

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whose donations will be used to partly offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.

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So, thank you very much, Jake.

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Well, for today’s program, I’ve decided to go back in time a bit

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and listen to some words of wisdom from Aldous Huxley. Now, I realize that

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for many of our younger salonners, that name, well, it probably is only faintly recognizable.

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And to be honest, my guess is that had he not inspired people like Alan Watts, Timothy Leary,

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and Terrence McKenna, well, we’d mainly be talking about Huxley’s writing, you know, books like Brave New World and his most significant book, Island. However, it’s his 1954 book titled The Doors of

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Perception that is the one that, well, in essence, began the current state of awareness about

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psychedelic substances. So today I’m going to play two recordings of Huxley, but as you listen to the first one, it may be worthwhile keeping in mind that one of my favorite sayings is,

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everything has changed, but nothing is different.

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So as you are listening to this interview of Huxley that was conducted by the legendary Mike Wallace,

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try to keep in mind that these warnings by Aldous Huxley were given 60 years ago.

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That was before Kennedy was even elected, before the American war in Vietnam, before 9-11, and before the insanity of the Trump administration.

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Yet, as you will hear, he could have been speaking just yesterday.

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It’s rather disconcerting, I think, but you should be your own judge of that.

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disconcerting, I think, but well, you should be your own judge of that. So now let’s join Mike Wallace and Aldous Huxley, and after their interview, I’ll be back to introduce another

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Huxley talk that I think you’re going to be interested in. This is Aldous Huxley, a man

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haunted by a vision of hell on earth. A searing social critic, Mr. Huxley, 27 years ago, wrote

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Brave New World, a novel that predicted that someday the entire world would live under a frightful dictatorship.

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Today, Mr. Huxley says that his fictional world of horror is probably just around the corner for all of us.

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Good evening, I’m Mike Wallace.

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Tonight’s guest, Aldous Huxley, is a man of letters as disturbing as he is distinguished.

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is a man of letters, as disturbing as he is distinguished.

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Born in England, now a resident of California,

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Mr. Huxley has written some of the most electric novels and social criticism of this century.

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He’s just finished a series of essays called Enemies of Freedom,

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in which he outlines and defines some of the threats to our freedom in the United States. And Mr. Huxley, right off the bat, let me ask you this.

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As you see it, who and what are the enemies of freedom here in the United States?

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Well, I don’t think you can say who in the United States.

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I don’t think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom.

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But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal

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forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom. And I also think

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that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to

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accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.

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What are these forces and these devices, Mr. Hudson?

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I should say that there are two main impersonal forces.

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The first of them is not exceedingly important in the United States at the present time,

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though very important in other countries.

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This is the force which in

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general terms can be called overpopulation, the mounting pressure of population pressing

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upon existing resources. This, of course, is an extraordinary thing. Something is happening

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which has never happened in the world’s history before. I mean, let’s just take a simple fact

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that between the time of the birth of Christ and the landing of the Mayflower,

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the population of the earth doubled.

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It rose from 250 million to probably 500 million.

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Today, the population of the earth is rising at such a rate that it will double in half a century.

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Well, why should overpopulation work to diminish our freedoms?

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Well, in a number of ways.

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I mean, the experts in the field, like Harrison Brown, for example,

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pointed out that in the underdeveloped countries,

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actually the standard of living is at present falling,

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that people have less to eat and less goods per capita than they had 50 years ago.

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And as the position of these countries,

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the economic position, becomes more and more precarious,

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obviously the central government has to take over

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more and more responsibility

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for keeping the ship of state on an even keel.

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And then, of course, you’re likely to get social unrest

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under such conditions,

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with, again, an intervention of the central government.

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So I think one sees here a pattern which seems to be pushing very strongly towards a totalitarian

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regime.

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And unfortunately, as in all these underdeveloped countries, the only highly organized political party is the Communist Party,

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it looks rather as though they will be the heirs to this unfortunate process,

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that they will step into the position of power.

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Well, then, ironically enough, one of the greatest forces against communism in the world,

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the Catholic Church, according to your thesis,

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would seem to be pushing us

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directly into the hands of the communists because they are against birth control.

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Well, I think this strange paradox probably is true.

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There is, it’s an extraordinary situation, actually.

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I mean, one has to look at it, of course, from a biological point of view.

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I mean, one has to look at it, of course, from a biological point of view. The whole essence of biological life on Earth is a question of balance, and what we have

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done is to practice death control in a most intensive manner without balancing this with

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birth control at the other end. Consequently, the birth rates remain as high as they were,

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and death rates have fallen substantially.

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All right, then.

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So much for the time being, anyway, for overpopulation.

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Another force that is diminishing our freedoms.

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Well, another force which I think is very strongly operative in this country

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is the force of what may be called overorganization.

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As technology becomes more and more complicated, it becomes necessary to have more and more

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elaborate organizations, more hierarchical organizations.

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And incidentally, the advance of technology has been accompanied by an advance in the

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science of organization.

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It’s now possible to make organizations on a larger scale than was ever possible before.

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And so that you have more and more people living their lives out as subordinates in

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these hierarchical systems controlled by bureaucracies, either the bureaucracies of

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big business or the bureaucracies of big government.

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The bureaucracies of big business or the bureaucracies of big government.

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Now, the devices that you were talking about,

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are there specific devices or methods of communication which diminish our freedoms in addition to overpopulation and overorganization?

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Well, there are certainly devices which can be used in this way.

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I mean, let us take a piece of very recent and very painful history.

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It’s the propaganda used by Hitler, which was incredibly effective.

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I mean, what were Hitler’s methods?

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Hitler used terror on the one kind, brute force on the one hand,

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but he also used a very efficient form of propaganda,

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which he was using every modern device at that time.

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He didn’t have TV, but he had the radio, which he used to the fullest extent, and was able

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to impose his will on an immense mass of people.

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I mean, the Germans were a highly educated people.

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Well, we’re aware of all this, but how do you equate Hitler’s use of propaganda with

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the way that propaganda, if you will, is used, let us say, here in the United States?

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Are you suggesting that there is a parallel?

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Needless to say, it’s not being used in this way now.

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But the point is, it seems to me, that there are methods at present available, methods

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superior in some respects to Hitler’s method, which could be

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used in a bad situation.

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I mean, what I feel very strongly is that we mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own

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advancing technology.

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This has happened again and again in history, with technology as advanced, and this changes

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social conditions, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee

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and doing all sorts of things they didn’t really want to do.

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Well, now, what do you mean?

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Do you mean that we develop our television, but we don’t know how to use it correctly?

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Is that the point that you’re making?

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Well, at present, the television, I think, is being used quite harmlessly.

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It’s being used, I think.

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I would feel it’s being used too much to distract everybody

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all the time.

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But I mean, imagine, which must be the situation in all communist countries, where the television,

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where it exists, is always saying the same thing the whole time, is always driving along.

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It’s not creating a wide front of distraction.

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It’s creating a one-pointed drumming in of a single idea all the time. It’s obviously

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an immensely powerful instrument. So you’re talking about the potential misuse of the instrument?

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Exactly. We have, of course, all technology is in itself morally neutral. These are just powers

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which can either be used well or ill. It’s the same thing with atomic energy. We can either use

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it to blow ourselves up or we can use it as a substitute for the coal and the oil,

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which are running out.

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You’ve even written about the use of drugs in this life.

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Well, now, this is a very interesting subject. I mean, in this book, which you mentioned,

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this book of mine, Brave New World, I postulated a substance called soma, which was a very

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work, I postulated a substance called soma, which was a very versatile drug. It would make people feel happy in small doses.

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It would make them see visions in medium doses, and it would send them to sleep in large doses.

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Well, I don’t think such a drug exists now, nor do I think it will ever exist.

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But we do have drugs which will do some of these

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things and I think it’s quite on the cards that we may have drugs which will profoundly

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change our mental states without doing us any harm.

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I mean, this is the pharmacological revolution which has taken place, that we have now powerful

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mind-changing drugs which, physiologically speaking, are almost costless.

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I mean, they are not like opium or like cocaine, which do change the state of mind,

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but leave terrible results physiologically and morally.

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Mr. Huxley, in your new essays, you state that these various enemies of freedom

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are pushing us toward a real-life brave new world,

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and you say that it’s awaiting us just around the corner.

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First of all, can you detail for us what life in this brave new world which you fear so much,

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what life might be like?

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Well, to start with, I think this kind of the dictatorship of the future,

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I think will be very unlike

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the dictatorships which we’ve been familiar with in the immediate past.

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I mean, take another book prophesying the future, which was a very remarkable book,

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George Orwell’s 1984.

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Well, this book was written at the height of the Stalinist regime and just after the Hitler regime. And

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there he foresaw a dictatorship using entirely the methods of terror, the methods of physical

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violence. Now, I think what is going to happen in the future is the dictators will find,

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as the old saying goes, that you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. But if you want to preserve your power indefinitely,

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you have to get the consent of the ruled.

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And this they will do, partly by drugs, as I foresaw in Brave New World,

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partly by these new techniques of propaganda.

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They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing

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to his subconscious and his deeper emotions and his physiology even, and so making him

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actually love his slavery. I mean, I think this is the danger, that actually people may

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be in some ways happy under the new regime, but they will be happy in situations

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where they oughtn’t to be happy.

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But let me ask you this. You’re talking about a world that could take place within the confines

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of a totalitarian state. Let’s become more immediate, more urgent about it. We believe,

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anyway, that we live in democracy here in the United States.

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Do you believe that this brave new world that you talk about could, let’s say in the next quarter century, the next century,

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could come here to our shores?

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I think it could.

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I mean, that’s why I feel it’s so extremely important here and now

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to start thinking about these problems,

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not to let ourselves be taken by surprise by the new advances in technology.

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I mean, for example, in regard to the use of the drugs,

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we know there’s enough evidence now for us to be able, on the basis of this evidence

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and using a certain amount of creative imagination,

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on the basis of this evidence and using a certain amount of creative imagination to foresee the kind of uses which could be made by people of bad will with these things

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and to attempt to forestall this.

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And in the same way, I think, with these other methods of propaganda,

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we can foresee and we can do a good deal to forestall.

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I mean, after all, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. unforeseen we can do a good deal to force to a lot of people

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prices freedom is eternal vigilance

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you right in enemies of freedom you write specifically about the united

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states you say this writing about american political campaigns

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you say all that is needed is money

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and the candidate who can be coached to look sincere

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political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance.

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The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts

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are the things that really matter.

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Well, this is, during the last campaign, there was a great deal of this kind of statement

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by the advertising managers of the campaign parties,

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this idea that the candidates had to be merchandised as though they were soap or toothpaste,

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and that you had to depend entirely on the personality.

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I mean, the personality is important, but there are certainly people with an extremely amiable personality,

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with an extremely amiable personality, particularly on TV,

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who might not necessarily be very good in positions of political trust. Well, do you feel that men like Eisenhower, Stevenson, Nixon, with knowledge of forethought,

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were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public?

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No, but they were being advised by powerful advertising agencies who were making campaigns of a quite

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different kind from what had been made before.

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And I think we shall see probably all kinds of new devices coming into the picture.

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I mean, for example, this thing which got a good deal of publicity last autumn, subliminal projection.

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I mean, as it stands, this thing I think is of no menace to us at the moment.

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But I was talking the other day to one of the people who has done most experimental work in the psychological laboratory with this,

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who was saying precisely this, that it is not at the moment a

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danger, but once you’ve established a principle that something works, you can be absolutely sure

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that the technology of it is going to improve steadily. And I mean, his view of the subject was

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that, well, maybe they will use it to some extent in the 1960 campaign, but they will probably use

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it a good deal and much more effectively in the 1964 campaign,

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because this is the kind of rate at which technology advances.

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And we’ll be persuaded to vote for a candidate

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that we do not know that we are being persuaded to vote for.

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Exactly. I mean, this is the rather alarming feature,

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that you’re being persuaded below the level of choice and reason.

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In regard to advertising, which you mentioned just a little ago, in your writing,

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particularly in Enemies of Freedom, you attack Madison Avenue, which controls most of our

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television and radio, advertising, newspaper advertising, and so forth. Why do you consistently

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attack the advertising agency? Well, no, I think that advertisement plays a very necessary role,

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but the danger, it seems to me, in a

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democracy is this. I mean, what does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual

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voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest

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in any given circumstance. But what these people are doing, I mean, both for their particular purposes, the selling goods, and the dictatorial propagandists are doing, is to try to bypass the rational side of man and to appeal directly to these unconscious forces below the surface, so that you are, in a way, making nonsense of the whole democratic procedure, which based on conscious choice of on rational ground

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of course well maybe maybe i you have just answered this this next question because in your essay

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you write about television commercials not just political commercials but television commercials

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as such and how as you put it today’s children walk around singing beer commercials and toothpaste

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commercials and then you link this phenomenon in some way with the dangers of a dictatorship.

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Now, could you spell out the connection, or how do you feel that you have done so sufficiently?

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Well, I mean, this whole question of children, I think, is a terribly important one,

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because children are quite clearly much more suggestible than the average grown-up.

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And again, suppose that for one reason or another

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all the propaganda was in the hands of one or very few agencies,

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you would have an extraordinarily powerful force

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playing on these children,

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who after all are going to grow up and be adults quite soon.

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I do think that this is not an immediate threat,

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but it remains a possible threat.

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You said something to the effect in your essay

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that the children of Europe used to be called cannon fodder,

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and here in the United States they are television and radio fodder.

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Well, after all, you can read in the trade journals

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the most lyrical accounts of how necessary it is to get hold of the children,

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because then they will be loyal brand buyers later on.

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But, I mean, again, you just translate this into political terms.

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The dictator says they will be loyal ideology buyers when they’re grown up.

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We hear so much about brainwashing as used by the communists.

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Do you see any brainwashing other than that which we’ve just been talking about

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that is used here in the United States?

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Other forms of brainwashing?

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Not in the form that has been used in China and in Russia

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because this is essentially the application of propaganda methods

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of the most violent kind, to individuals.

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It’s not a shotgun method like the advertising method.

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It’s a way of getting hold of the person

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and playing both on his physiology and his psychology

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until he really breaks down,

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and then you can implant a new idea in his head.

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I mean, the descriptions of the methods are really blood-curdling when you read them.

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And not only the methods applied to political prisoners,

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but the methods applied, for example,

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to the training of the young communist administrators

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and missionaries.

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They receive an incredibly tough kind of training,

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which causes about 25% of them to break down

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or commit suicide,

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but produces 75% of completely one-pointed fanatics.

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The question, of course, that keeps coming back to my mind is this.

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Obviously, politics in themselves are not evil.

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Television is not in itself evil.

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Atomic energy is not evil.

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And yet you seem to fear that it will be used in an evil way.

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Why is it that the right people will not, in your estimation, use them? Why is it

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that the wrong people will use these various devices and for the wrong

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motives? Well I think one of the reasons is that these are all instruments for

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obtaining power and obviously the passion for power is one of the reasons is that these are all instruments for obtaining power, and obviously the passion

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for power is one of the most moving passions that exist in man, and after all, all democracies

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are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous, and that it’s extremely important

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not to let any one man or any one small group have too much power for too long a time after what are the British and American constitutions

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except devices for limiting power and all these new devices are extremely

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efficient instruments for the imposition of power by small groups of a larger

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message well you ask this question yourself in Enemies of Freedom. I’ll put your own question back to you. You ask this. In an age of accelerating overpopulation, of accelerating overorganization, and ever more efficient means of mass communication, how can we preserve the integrity and reassert the value of the human individual

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you put the question

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now here’s your chance to answer it Mr. Hudson

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well this is obviously

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first of all it’s a question of education

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I think it’s terribly important to

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insist on individual values

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I mean what is

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there is a tendency,

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as you probably read a book by White,

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The Organization Man,

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a very interesting, valuable book, I think,

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where he speaks about the new type of group morality,

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group ethic,

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which speaks about the group

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as though the group was somehow more important

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than the individual.

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But this seems, as far as I’m concerned, to be in contradiction with what we know about the

00:23:31 ►

genetical makeup of human beings, that every human being is unique. And it is, of course,

00:23:35 ►

on this genetical basis that the whole idea of the value of freedom is based. And I think it’s

00:23:42 ►

extremely important for us to stress this in all our

00:23:46 ►

educational life. And I would say it’s also very important to teach people to be on their

00:23:52 ►

guard against the sort of verbal booby traps into which they’re always being led, to analyze

00:23:58 ►

the kind of things that are said to them. Well, I think there is this whole educational

00:24:03 ►

side, and I think there are many more things that one could do to strengthen people and to make them more aware

00:24:10 ►

of what was being done.

00:24:11 ►

You’re a prophet of decentralization.

00:24:14 ►

Well, yes, if this is feasible. It’s one of the tragedies, it seems to me. I mean, many

00:24:21 ►

people have been talking about the importance of decentralization in order to give back to the voter

00:24:27 ►

a sense of direct power.

00:24:31 ►

I mean, the voter in an enormous electorate

00:24:33 ►

feels quite impotent,

00:24:35 ►

and his vote seems to count for nothing.

00:24:37 ►

This is not true where the electorate is small

00:24:39 ►

and where he is dealing with a group

00:24:43 ►

which he can manage and understand.

00:24:45 ►

And if one can, as Jefferson, after all, suggested,

00:24:50 ►

break up the units into smaller and smaller units

00:24:55 ►

and so get a real self-governing democracy.

00:25:00 ►

Well, that was all very well in Jefferson’s day,

00:25:02 ►

but how can we revamp our economic system and decentralize and at the same time meet militarily and economically the tough challenge of a country like Soviet Russia?

00:25:14 ►

Well, I think the answer to that is that there are, it seems to me that you, the production, industrial production is of two kinds. I mean, there are some kinds of industrial production which obviously need the most tremendously high centralization,

00:25:28 ►

like the making of automobiles, for example.

00:25:31 ►

But there are many other kinds where you could decentralize quite easily

00:25:35 ►

and probably quite economically,

00:25:38 ►

and that you would then have this kind of decentralized life.

00:25:42 ►

After all, you begin to see it now to travel

00:25:45 ►

through the south this decentralized textile industry which is springing up

00:25:51 ►

there mr. Huxley let me ask you this quite seriously is freedom necessary as

00:25:59 ►

far as I’m concerned it is yes Is it necessary for a productive society?

00:26:05 ►

Yes, I should say it is.

00:26:07 ►

I mean, a genuinely productive society, I mean, I think you could produce plenty of

00:26:12 ►

goods without much freedom, but I think the whole sort of creative life of man is ultimately

00:26:19 ►

impossible without a considerable measure of individual freedom. The initiative, creation, all these things which we value, and I think value properly,

00:26:30 ►

are impossible without a large measure of freedom.

00:26:34 ►

Well, Mr. Huxley, take a look again at the country which is in the stance of our opponent

00:26:40 ►

any way it would seem to be there, Soviet Russia. It is strong and getting stronger economically, militarily.

00:26:49 ►

At the same time, it’s developing its art forms pretty well.

00:26:55 ►

It seems not unnecessarily to squelch the creative urge among its people,

00:27:03 ►

and yet it is not a free society.

00:27:05 ►

It’s not a free society, but here is something very interesting, that those members of the

00:27:11 ►

society, like the scientists who are doing the creative work, are given far more freedom

00:27:17 ►

than anybody else.

00:27:18 ►

I mean, it’s a privileged aristocratic society in which, provided that they don’t poke their noses into political affairs, these

00:27:26 ►

people are given a great deal of prestige, a considerable amount of freedom, and a lot

00:27:31 ►

of money.

00:27:33 ►

I mean, this is a very interesting fact about the new Soviet regime, and I think what we’re

00:27:39 ►

going to see is a people on the whole with very little freedom, but with an oligarchy on top,

00:27:49 ►

enjoying a considerable measure of freedom and a very high standard of living.

00:27:54 ►

And the people down below, the epsilons down below…

00:27:58 ►

Enjoying very little.

00:27:59 ►

And you think that that kind of situation can long endure?

00:28:03 ►

I think it can certainly endure much longer than a situation in which everybody is kept down.

00:28:09 ►

I mean, they can certainly get their technological and scientific results on such a basis.

00:28:15 ►

Well, the next time that I talk to you then, perhaps we should investigate further

00:28:20 ►

the possibility of the establishment of that kind of a society,

00:28:24 ►

where the drones

00:28:26 ►

work for the queen bees up above.

00:28:29 ►

Well, yes, but I must say I still believe in democracy.

00:28:34 ►

We can make the best of the creative activities of the people on top, plus those of the people

00:28:42 ►

on the bottom, so much the better.

00:28:44 ►

Mr. Huxley, I surely thank you for spending this half hour with us, and I wish you Godspeed, sir.

00:28:50 ►

Thank you.

00:28:52 ►

Aldous Huxley finds himself these days in a peculiar and disturbing position.

00:28:57 ►

A quarter of a century after prophesying an authoritarian state in which people were reduced

00:29:03 ►

to ciphers, he can point at Soviet Russia and say, I told you so.

00:29:08 ►

The crucial question, as he sees it now, is whether the so-called free world

00:29:12 ►

is shortly going to give Mr. Huxley the further dubious satisfaction

00:29:17 ►

of saying the same thing about us.

00:29:21 ►

Now I’m going to play a lecture that Aldous Huxley gave,

00:29:25 ►

obviously from a written text, as he generally did.

00:29:28 ►

And while we’re listening to it, should you begin to think that,

00:29:32 ►

although it is profound and interesting, that nonetheless it, well, it seems a bit dry and slow,

00:29:37 ►

well, if you begin to think that, then here’s something else to think about.

00:29:43 ►

Aldous Huxley was the inspiration for both Timothy

00:29:46 ►

Leary and Terence McKenna, the inspiration that led them in a psychedelic direction.

00:29:52 ►

And as we listen to this thought-provoking lecture, when Huxley comes to a point where

00:29:57 ►

he’s speaking about one of the Buddhist concepts about the afterlife, and he says,

00:30:02 ►

the ultimate is to realize that, and I quote, thou art that, unquote.

00:30:08 ►

Well, when he comes to that brief point, right near the end of his talk, I suggest that you

00:30:14 ►

maybe pause this recording for a moment and try to recall if you’ve ever felt that way yourself

00:30:19 ►

on a deep psychedelic voyage. And if you have, well, then you know exactly what psychonauts mean when they say

00:30:26 ►

that these experiences are important preparations for meeting our own deaths with equanimity,

00:30:33 ►

and so as to eventually escape the wheel of birth, death, and rebirth that the Buddhists believe in.

00:30:40 ►

will leave in.

00:30:46 ►

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,

00:30:50 ►

I propose to begin this lecture with a rather long quotation

00:30:52 ►

from William James.

00:30:54 ►

It’s extremely relevant to our purpose

00:30:57 ►

and it has a great deal of charm

00:30:59 ►

as all James’ writing has.

00:31:03 ►

This is what he says.

00:31:05 ►

To know one type of mind

00:31:07 ►

is it given

00:31:09 ►

to discern the totality of truth.

00:31:14 ►

Something escapes the best of us,

00:31:16 ►

not accidentally, but systematically,

00:31:19 ►

and because we have a twist.

00:31:22 ►

The scientific academic mind

00:31:24 ►

and the feminine mystical mind shy away

00:31:28 ►

from each other’s facts, just as they shy from each other’s temper and spirit. Facts

00:31:35 ►

are there only for those who have a mental affinity with them. When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the academic and

00:31:46 ►

critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to interpret them and discuss them. For

00:31:58 ►

surely to pass from mystical to scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity.

00:32:05 ►

But on the other hand,

00:32:08 ►

if there is anything

00:32:09 ►

which human history demonstrates,

00:32:12 ►

it is the extreme slowness

00:32:14 ►

with which the ordinary academic

00:32:17 ►

and critical mind

00:32:18 ►

acknowledges facts to exist

00:32:21 ►

which present themselves

00:32:23 ►

as wild facts

00:32:24 ►

with no stall or pigeonhole, or

00:32:28 ►

as facts which threaten to break up the accepted system. In psychology, physiology and medicine,

00:32:36 ►

whenever a debate between the mystics and the scientifics has been once for all decided. It is the mystics who have usually proved to be right about the facts,

00:32:49 ►

while the scientifics have had the better of it in respect to theories.

00:32:55 ►

Now the reluctance of the scientifics, the academic and critical minds to accept wild facts, facts which don’t fit into the current theories,

00:33:11 ►

has of course been recognized long before James drew attention to it.

00:33:16 ►

It was recognized, for example, by Lord Chesterfield when he said that

00:33:20 ►

if someone in our days were indubitably to rise from the dead,

00:33:27 ►

the Archbishop of Canterbury would be the first to deny it.

00:33:32 ►

And it was recognized again by one of the early British historians of science,

00:33:40 ►

Playfair, in the end of the 18th century,

00:33:42 ►

where he spoke about the difficulty with which people

00:33:47 ►

who had, so to say, an intellectual vested interest in an idea, the difficulty that they

00:33:53 ►

had in changing their ideas.

00:33:56 ►

And similarly, we find this trait of reluctance to accept wild facts,

00:34:06 ►

going right on through the 19th century.

00:34:09 ►

A particularly flagrant example of this

00:34:12 ►

is the attitude of the official scientific mind

00:34:16 ►

towards what used to be called animal magnetism,

00:34:20 ►

which came to be called after the days of James Braid, hypnotism.

00:34:25 ►

This is a really extraordinary story.

00:34:28 ►

When you find men like Lord Kelvin saying that hypnotism is half fraud and half bad observation,

00:34:37 ►

and when you find doctors, for example, eminent surgeons used to say in the early days before anesthetics

00:34:46 ►

when amputations were performed in the mesmeric trance,

00:34:51 ►

they used to say it was quite obvious that the man who was having his leg cut off

00:34:56 ►

was merely pretending not to feel pain just in order to spite the doctors.

00:35:01 ►

And other surgeons admitted that he probably wasn’t feeling pain,

00:35:04 ►

but they said he ought to feel pain because pain was very good for people.

00:35:09 ►

And the most extraordinary and monstrous example of this behavior towards people who made experiments in this field is the case of James Esdale, the young Scottish surgeon who went to India and performed several hundred major

00:35:27 ►

operations, many of which had never been performed before under mesmeric trance. And the most

00:35:35 ►

startling fact was that not only did he perform these operations without pain to his patients,

00:35:42 ►

he also performed them with a then incredibly low mortality rate.

00:35:47 ►

The standard mortality rate after surgery in his day, before anesthetics and before

00:35:53 ►

antiseptics or asepsis, was about 29%.

00:35:57 ►

And Esdale did his 300 or 400 operations with a five percent mortality.

00:36:05 ►

But all he got for his pains was to be violently attacked by his colleagues

00:36:09 ►

and hounded out of the medical profession.

00:36:13 ►

This shows, indicates very clearly how right James was to emphasize this fact

00:36:22 ►

that people with a vested interest in a certain kind of philosophy

00:36:29 ►

find it almost impossible to accept facts which go against that particular philosophy.

00:36:37 ►

And James himself went on to discuss the reaction in his own day to subjects like telepathy.

00:36:47 ►

The word was invented by F.W.H. Myers and was, of course, the thing was extensively studied

00:36:54 ►

in the early history, the early years of the Society for Psychical Research after 1882.

00:37:02 ►

And James has an interesting comment on this. He says, why do so few scientists,

00:37:10 ►

quote, even look at the evidence for telepathy? Because they think, as a leading biologist

00:37:17 ►

now did once said to me, that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep it suppressed

00:37:25 ►

and concealed. It would make, it would undo the uniformity of nature and all sorts of

00:37:34 ►

things without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits. And this is not an exaggeration

00:37:42 ►

because at about the time that James was writing this, another eminent biologist, Ray Lancaster, resented, denounced a group of his fellow scientists in Britain for taking part in an investigation of telepathy. He said it was a disgrace that any group of scientists should demean themselves

00:38:07 ►

by even inquiring whether such evidences had been presented could possibly be true, because

00:38:14 ►

it could not be true. And as late as 1926, we get Professor Trolland of Harvard saying

00:38:21 ►

that the modern psychologist tends to regard alleged psychical phenomena

00:38:26 ►

as the modern physicist regards perpetual motion machines.

00:38:32 ►

And at about the same time we have Professor Joseph Jastrow saying,

00:38:36 ►

obviously, this is curious, obviously,

00:38:40 ►

obviously if the alleged facts of psychical research were genuine and real, the labors of scientists would be futile and blind.

00:38:50 ►

It’s very difficult to see why they should be futile and blind.

00:38:53 ►

I mean, all that this seems to prove is that the theory of the world on which the scientists were basing their efforts, required modification. I mean, it doesn’t mean to say

00:39:07 ►

in the least that their labors were futile. And yet we find at the present time certain

00:39:15 ►

extremely eminent psychologists, such as Dr. Hebb of McGill, speaking in exactly the same

00:39:22 ►

way. Hebb has a very interesting comment on the work of

00:39:26 ►

Rhine for example

00:39:27 ►

he says personally I do not

00:39:30 ►

accept ESP for a moment

00:39:32 ►

because it does not make sense

00:39:35 ►

Rhine may still

00:39:36 ►

turn out to be right improbable

00:39:38 ►

as I think that is

00:39:39 ►

and my own rejection of his

00:39:42 ►

views is in a literal

00:39:44 ►

sense prejudice this reminds And my own rejection of his views is, in a literal sense, prejudice.

00:39:47 ►

This reminds me of an anecdote of my grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley,

00:39:54 ►

where he said of Herbert Spencer that that philosopher’s conception of a tragedy

00:40:00 ►

was a deduction foully murdered by effect.

00:40:12 ►

tragedy was a deduction foully murdered by effect. And here again we have this strange phenomenon of the existence apparently of facts, which because they do not fit into into a certain type of philosophical system

00:40:26 ►

are either denied or else blandly ignored.

00:40:32 ►

And we have to remember that this is a very deeply rooted human tendency

00:40:42 ►

and it is a deplorable tendency, but it seems to be very deeply rooted human tendency and it is a deplorable tendency but it

00:40:46 ►

seems to be very deeply rooted

00:40:48 ►

and we must take it into account

00:40:49 ►

now

00:40:51 ►

we have to consider

00:40:54 ►

the problem

00:40:56 ►

now of survival

00:40:57 ►

if ESP

00:41:00 ►

is a fact and I think it is

00:41:02 ►

a fact then

00:41:04 ►

there would seem to be some prima facie reason to suppose that survival is a possibility. communication between people without the intervention of bodily signs

00:41:26 ►

and without the intervention of the sense organs,

00:41:29 ►

then on the face of it, it is possible to imagine

00:41:33 ►

that some kind of survival after the death of the body may be possible.

00:41:39 ►

On the other hand, once we grant the existence of ESP, of psi phenomena, the problem of validating what appear to be the evidences for survival becomes immeasurably greater.

00:42:02 ►

greater because practically

00:42:03 ►

every case, I don’t think

00:42:06 ►

every case, but certainly a great majority

00:42:08 ►

of the cases which

00:42:10 ►

on the face of them appeared

00:42:12 ►

to be veridical cases

00:42:14 ►

of spirit communication

00:42:15 ►

can on the hypothesis

00:42:18 ►

that ESP exists

00:42:20 ►

be interpreted

00:42:22 ►

in terms of the

00:42:24 ►

medium’s great ability in picking up information from

00:42:30 ►

the living.

00:42:31 ►

For example, a case becomes veridical, is regarded as veridical, if the alleged spirit

00:42:40 ►

communicator gives a piece of information which subsequently is found out to be true.

00:42:50 ►

But somebody then must know it is true, and in this case, some living person must know

00:42:56 ►

it is true, and in this case, obviously, ESP becomes a possible explanation of the phenomena.

00:43:25 ►

ESP becomes a possible explanation of the phenomena, so that we see there is this curious paradox that with the establishment of ESP, and I personally believe it has been established, a certain intrinsic probability that there may be survival,

00:43:29 ►

but we also are confronted with an extraordinary difficulty in ever demonstrating that a given phenomenon is due to survival.

00:43:35 ►

It is almost impossible, I think, to…

00:43:40 ►

Well, anyhow, it is very difficult,

00:43:41 ►

difficult or perhaps almost impossible,

00:43:43 ►

to devise an experiment which would definitely eliminate all possibility of explanation through ESP

00:43:56 ►

and definitely demonstrate the spirit survival.

00:44:02 ►

This, of course, is one of the problems which does confront parapsychologists at the present time

00:44:08 ►

who are interested in the problem of survival,

00:44:10 ►

the extraordinary difficulty of setting up an experiment

00:44:16 ►

which would definitely establish survival, as I say,

00:44:29 ►

definitely establish survival, as I say, without opening the way to an explanation through a kind of extended ESP.

00:44:32 ►

Practically all the mediumistic communications, the best of which can be studied in the proceedings

00:44:42 ►

in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in London

00:44:45 ►

and in the American Society,

00:44:48 ►

practically all of these, with a few exceptions,

00:44:52 ►

do lend themselves to a perfectly plausible explanation in terms of ESP.

00:44:58 ►

And consequently, we have somehow to think of some alternative type of experiment in relation to survival.

00:45:10 ►

And something of the same, I think, is true in the cases of those veridical apparitions

00:45:18 ►

which have been studied ever since 1882 and have been studied recently with great thoroughness by Dr. Louisa

00:45:28 ►

Rine at Duke and by Dr. Hornell Hart, who was at Duke, this too lends itself to the

00:45:36 ►

same kind of interpretation.

00:45:39 ►

Because we know now by experience that an apparition which appears to give veridical information

00:45:48 ►

may be not what it seems to be, something willed into existence by an incorporeal personality,

00:45:58 ►

but the creation of the percipient. It may simply be the percipient picking up, out of the psychic

00:46:08 ►

medium, some kind of veridical information. And then, by means of this extraordinary dramatizing

00:46:16 ►

and storytelling faculty, which seems to lie at the back of so many minds, and especially

00:46:22 ►

at the back of the minds of sensitives, building

00:46:26 ►

up this figure, this apparitional figure. Dr. Louisa Rine, in her enormous collection

00:46:33 ►

of cases, she sorts them out into degrees of probability of survival. The great majority, she thinks, are the actual creations of the

00:46:47 ►

percipient using ESP plus this dramatizing faculty. And she would regard

00:46:55 ►

as completely evidential only cases in which the percipient of the apparition had no active motive for seeing the apparition,

00:47:11 ►

whereas the hypothetical disembodied spirit would have a very strong motive for presenting himself to the percipient.

00:47:22 ►

And some of the cases that she has collected, she’s collected many thousands of them

00:47:26 ►

and examined them very carefully,

00:47:28 ►

some of them come fairly near to this,

00:47:32 ►

but only one appears to fully come up

00:47:37 ►

to this standard of complete convincingness

00:47:41 ►

in this respect,

00:47:42 ►

and this particular one is not very well confirmed unfortunately

00:47:46 ►

on the other hand

00:47:47 ►

Dr.

00:47:50 ►

Hornell Hart

00:47:51 ►

who has also made a considerable

00:47:54 ►

study of the

00:47:55 ►

apparitional evidence

00:47:57 ►

is of opinion that

00:47:59 ►

there are many apparitions

00:48:02 ►

apparently

00:48:04 ►

stemming from incorporeal personal agencies,

00:48:10 ►

which cannot be distinguished from the apparitions of the living.

00:48:17 ►

One of the early classics of psychical research was Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living,

00:48:24 ►

where he brought together a very large number

00:48:26 ►

of very interesting cases

00:48:28 ►

of apparitional appearances

00:48:31 ►

of people actually alive

00:48:34 ►

and this kind of census of phenomena

00:48:37 ►

has gone on since

00:48:38 ►

and Hart points out that

00:48:40 ►

in many cases

00:48:42 ►

the apparitions of the dead appear to be of exactly the same

00:48:47 ►

nature as the apparitions of the living. And seeing that in many cases we know that

00:48:54 ►

apparitions of the living have been the vehicles of communication and action by personalities, we may by analogy perhaps imagine that some anyhow of the apparitions of the dead

00:49:12 ►

are also vehicles of personal thought and action.

00:49:18 ►

Well, be it as it may, there are, I think, a number of cases in which the weight of evidence seems on the whole to fall on the side of the survival hypothesis.

00:49:37 ►

There are cases in which it seems to be simpler and more plausible to adopt what is now called the IPA hypothesis, the Incorporeal

00:49:47 ►

Personal Agency hypothesis, in favor of the ESP hypothesis.

00:49:53 ►

There is another point, however, which I think has to be raised here, which is that as a matter of historical fact, it is only fairly recently

00:50:06 ►

that it has been assumed

00:50:09 ►

that most of this kind of evidence

00:50:14 ►

did refer to spirits of the dead.

00:50:18 ►

It’s interesting in this context

00:50:20 ►

to compare, for example,

00:50:21 ►

what Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy

00:50:24 ►

has to say on the subject

00:50:26 ►

with what one of the pioneers

00:50:28 ►

in the psychical research

00:50:30 ►

F.W.H. Myers had to say

00:50:32 ►

200

00:50:34 ►

years later

00:50:35 ►

Burton in the anatomy of melancholy

00:50:38 ►

dismisses as self

00:50:40 ►

evidently absurd the idea

00:50:42 ►

that a departed

00:50:44 ►

spirit could possess what we should now call

00:50:48 ►

a medium and impart information through the medium. He says that information is given

00:50:57 ►

through mediums, but it does not come from departed spirits, but on the contrary, it comes from some non-human spiritual source,

00:51:07 ►

either divine or diabolical.

00:51:12 ►

F.W.H. Myers, on the other hand, completely dismisses this very ancient hypothesis

00:51:19 ►

in favor of the IPA hypothesis, the departed spirit hypothesis.

00:51:27 ►

And here, this again, I think, is a rather disturbing fact,

00:51:31 ►

that essentially the same phenomena do lend themselves to interpretation

00:51:37 ►

either in terms of some kind of spirit possession, a non-human spirit possession,

00:51:48 ►

of spirit possession, a non-human spirit possession, or to some kind of communication or possession by departed human spirits. Nevertheless, I think when we have taken all these things

00:51:56 ►

into account, it seems to me that there is enough evidence, for example, in the celebrated cross-correspondence cases,

00:52:08 ►

in the best work of Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Leonard, there seems to be enough evidence to make

00:52:20 ►

it reasonably plausible that something does survive bodily death.

00:52:27 ►

Now, if we accept this evidence on its face value,

00:52:33 ►

if we assume that given the immense number of facts collected since 1882,

00:52:41 ►

since the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research,

00:52:46 ►

if we assume that these do point to some kind of survival of a personality

00:52:55 ►

or a part of a personality after the dissolution of the body,

00:53:00 ►

the next thing we have to inquire is what sort of philosophy of the universe do we have to accept in order to be able to account for this.

00:53:13 ►

We have seen that an eminent psychologist of the present day, such as Dr. Hebb, regards this whole thing as making no sense.

00:53:26 ►

Well, of course it doesn’t make any sense in terms of the particular hypothesis,

00:53:33 ►

the theory of the world, in terms of which he is carrying on his experiments and interpreting them.

00:53:43 ►

he is carrying on his experiments and interpreting them. Obviously, if you believe that mind is an epiphenomenon of matter,

00:53:53 ►

the action of matter,

00:53:55 ►

or even if you believe that mind and matter are the manifestations

00:54:03 ►

of a single neutral substratum, unknown substratum.

00:54:09 ►

If you think that, for example, that matter, so to say, is the outside of mind,

00:54:17 ►

and mind is matter as experience from the inside,

00:54:30 ►

experienced from the inside, then neither of these views seems to be compatible with the idea of survival. If you accept either of these views, then the evidence, I think both for ESP and also for survival,

00:54:38 ►

which is much more difficult to accept than ESP, it quite clearly doesn’t make sense.

00:54:46 ►

But do we have to accept this view of the world?

00:54:51 ►

Is the fact that mental phenomena are so obviously a function of bodily phenomena,

00:55:03 ►

a function of bodily phenomena,

00:55:07 ►

does this fact drive us of necessity into postulating this kind of naturalistic, materialistic monism?

00:55:14 ►

Well, this question was discussed many years ago

00:55:17 ►

by William James in his Ingersoll lecture on human immortality.

00:55:24 ►

And he said, of course, it does not necessarily mean

00:55:32 ►

that we have to accept this kind of view of the world.

00:55:37 ►

He says that mind may be a function of matter,

00:55:49 ►

but that there are two kinds of functions.

00:55:51 ►

There is the productive function,

00:55:53 ►

where we say that mind is actually produced by some kind of material activity,

00:55:59 ►

but there is also what he calls the transmissive function,

00:56:02 ►

that matter, and especially the central nervous

00:56:06 ►

system, is the organ, the reducing valve, through which a previously existing mind stuff

00:56:18 ►

passes into the material world. And this view, of course, was strongly supported by Bergson,

00:56:29 ►

and it, as I shall point out later on,

00:56:33 ►

it still has its adherence.

00:56:36 ►

And James points out that the,

00:56:39 ►

he says that the theory of production

00:56:41 ►

is not a jot more simple and credible in itself than any other

00:56:46 ►

conceivable theory. It is only a little more popular.

00:56:51 ►

So let us then distinguish between these two possible views of mind as a function of matter, the productive function, is it functionally, is it, is the function

00:57:10 ►

of a productive nature or is it of a transmissive nature?

00:57:13 ►

Now this debate has been going on ever since James’s day.

00:57:20 ►

And let me quote here another remark of Dr. Hebb’s, where he says, we have no choice but to physiologize psychology.

00:57:42 ►

biologists by any means.

00:57:45 ►

There are plenty of them who do not feel that they have no choice in the matter,

00:57:49 ►

that they have to physiologize psychology.

00:57:52 ►

For example, take the case of an extremely eminent biologist,

00:57:58 ►

Professor Joseph Needham,

00:58:00 ►

who doesn’t feel anything of the kind,

00:58:04 ►

he doesn’t feel at all that there is any necessity in the nature of the evidence

00:58:09 ►

to compel us to physiologize psychology.

00:58:15 ►

What he has to say on the matter is this, this is how he sums it up, mind and all mental phenomena cannot possibly receive explanation or description

00:58:28 ►

in physico-chemical terms, but that would amount to explaining something by an instrument

00:58:36 ►

which is itself the product of the thing to be explained. Because obviously all scientific theories, such as the theory of naturalistic, materialistic monism,

00:58:51 ►

is a product of the mind, and as we know from the philosophers of science from Mach onwards,

00:59:00 ►

all these scientific theories have an enormous subjective element in them

00:59:07 ►

and are themselves the most characteristic products of the mind

00:59:12 ►

which they seek to explain

00:59:14 ►

so that mind is being explained away in terms of something which is a product of mind

00:59:19 ►

so that we see there is a profound logical fallacy here. Now, Needham goes on to say,

00:59:27 ►

the legitimacy of physico-chemical explanations

00:59:32 ►

in the realm of physical life is well grounded,

00:59:36 ►

but we have found that as far as mental life is concerned,

00:59:41 ►

biochemistry and biophysics have no authority. The opinion, therefore, which

00:59:47 ►

seems to me most justifiable, is that life in all its forms is the phenomenal disturbance

00:59:54 ►

created in the world of matter and energy when mind comes into it living matter is the outward and visible sign

01:00:05 ►

of the

01:00:07 ►

presence of

01:00:09 ►

mind

01:00:10 ►

the splash made by the entry

01:00:13 ►

of mental existence

01:00:15 ►

into the sea of matter

01:00:16 ►

and he concludes this essay by saying

01:00:19 ►

the biochemist

01:00:21 ►

and the biophysicist

01:00:23 ►

can and must be thoroughgoing mechanists,

01:00:27 ►

but they need not on that account hesitate to say with Sir Thomas Brown,

01:00:33 ►

there is something in us that can be without us and will be after us.

01:00:39 ►

Now, I quote this in order to show that the transmission theory is a perfectly live theory at the present time,

01:00:49 ►

and that there is, philosophically, it seems to be better founded, perhaps, than the production theory.

01:00:56 ►

There is no compulsion for us to accept the production theory, and therefore no compulsion for us to accept a theory which means that ESP or even IPA are things which make no sense.

01:01:16 ►

They do make sense in terms of a transmission theory.

01:01:34 ►

Now, the transmission theory, obviously, is related to the old Platonic and Cartesian theories, but is considerably more subtle, say, than the Cartesian theory.

01:01:53 ►

Descartes postulated the relationship of mind and matter in a much too limited way. He spoke of mind as being something whose essence is consciousness, being related to matter whose essence is extension, and each mind being completely watertight and separated

01:02:01 ►

from all other minds.

01:02:02 ►

watertight and separated from all other minds.

01:02:10 ►

But of course now we are able to see that his cogito ergo sum, his I think therefore I am, should be really modified as von Bader, the romantic German philosopher of the early

01:02:17 ►

19th century, modified it when he said that cogito ergo sum should be revised and that

01:02:24 ►

we should say cogitor ergo sum.

01:02:27 ►

I am thought, therefore I am.

01:02:30 ►

We are thought by an immensely much larger subliminal mind

01:02:35 ►

and this conscious ego of which we are aware.

01:02:39 ►

And in any kind of reasonable and realistic transmission theory, we have to postulate, I think, that this subliminal mind in which our self-conscious ego floats, so to speak, like a kind of crystal within a sea, within a solution,

01:03:03 ►

a sea within a solution.

01:03:10 ►

This subliminal mind is not cut off from all other minds,

01:03:16 ►

that it communicates somehow with all other minds in a kind of psychic medium,

01:03:20 ►

and that we are, in a certain sense,

01:03:24 ►

like crystals floating within this medium

01:03:28 ►

and communicating with other crystals through the medium.

01:03:33 ►

Well, Bergson accepted this view and maintained that intrinsically the mind was virtually omniscient

01:03:44 ►

and that it merely was not in fact omniscient here and now

01:03:49 ►

because for the benefit of the animal who has to survive on the surface of this planet

01:03:56 ►

we cannot be omniscient because we should be so full of irrelevant information

01:04:02 ►

that we should simply not be able to get out of the way of the cars in the street.

01:04:07 ►

And consequently, the nervous system, central nervous system in the brain, exists in order

01:04:12 ►

to limit this virtually endless quantity of consciousness which we virtually have, to

01:04:22 ►

limit it and to funnel it through for the purposes of biological survival on the surface of this particular planet.

01:04:30 ►

Well, my own feeling is, I would think that this idea of a completely omniscient mind

01:04:39 ►

seems to me a little fantastic.

01:04:42 ►

But I would think that there is something to be said

01:04:45 ►

for a view

01:04:47 ►

which would say that

01:04:49 ►

this psychic medium

01:04:52 ►

whatever it may be

01:04:54 ►

is let us say

01:04:56 ►

virtually omniscient

01:04:58 ►

that it could

01:04:59 ►

take on into itself

01:05:02 ►

every kind of specialized

01:05:04 ►

information but what it is in itself take on into itself every kind of specialised information

01:05:05 ►

but what it is in itself

01:05:08 ►

is a kind of undifferentiated consciousness

01:05:12 ►

and as I shall try to point out later on in this lecture

01:05:17 ►

there is a lot of evidence

01:05:21 ►

on the part of the mystics both both East and West, to the effect that our particular

01:05:28 ►

specialized, individualized consciousness is underlain by an undifferentiated consciousness.

01:05:39 ►

And this undifferentiated consciousness possesses what the Catholic mystics call obscure knowledge.

01:05:49 ►

This is a very curious and interesting phrase,

01:05:52 ►

which we meet with very frequently in the literature of mysticism.

01:05:57 ►

They speak, the mystics constantly speak of this obscure knowledge of the world, which is not a particular knowledge of how to make sulfuric acid

01:06:09 ►

or what is the distance of the nearest fixed star and so on.

01:06:12 ►

It is a generalized knowledge in the individual,

01:06:19 ►

an awareness of this total underlying awareness,

01:06:24 ►

which, as I say, underlies all particular awarenesses,

01:06:29 ►

that this obscure knowledge of the universe is, I think, a direct awareness of the undifferentiated consciousness, mental, mentoid state,

01:06:47 ►

which underlies all particular consciousnesses.

01:06:53 ►

Now, we exist within this undifferentiated awareness

01:07:00 ►

as, so to speak, a succession of vortices in a liquid.

01:07:08 ►

We have, unfortunately, our psychological vocabulary is so extremely poor that we are

01:07:14 ►

always driven back to use these material and spatial metaphors.

01:07:20 ►

But we must always remember that when we use material and spatial metaphors,

01:07:26 ►

that we use them in a… that they are necessarily very misleading

01:07:29 ►

inasmuch as this mental… this under-differentiated consciousness is not in space and time

01:07:38 ►

and it does not have the characteristics of a material medium.

01:07:44 ►

Nevertheless, we have to, simply because we do not have the necessary vocabulary,

01:07:50 ►

to speak in these sort of terms.

01:07:52 ►

We have to use analogies with vortices.

01:07:56 ►

Well, it is as though we were persistent vortices within a medium.

01:08:03 ►

persistent vortices within a medium and I think we have to postulate

01:08:07 ►

that by our experience

01:08:10 ►

in the embodied state

01:08:12 ►

we build up these particular

01:08:16 ►

awarenesses within the general undifferentiated

01:08:19 ►

awareness and that we leave certain

01:08:22 ►

traces in the form of persistent vortices

01:08:25 ►

upon the undifferentiated medium,

01:08:28 ►

that these things go on.

01:08:33 ►

Now, the question then arises,

01:08:37 ►

what are these vortices within the undifferentiated awareness?

01:08:44 ►

Here, I think, we find some very interesting suggestions

01:08:48 ►

from the Oxford philosopher H. H. Price,

01:08:52 ►

who speaks of these different types of,

01:08:59 ►

so to say, the molecules of awareness,

01:09:02 ►

which may be of any, the complexes of awareness may be of any size

01:09:07 ►

so to speak from a single

01:09:08 ►

idea from

01:09:09 ►

a haunting for example to go back to

01:09:12 ►

the question of survival

01:09:14 ►

this purely non

01:09:16 ►

personal thing which seems to remain

01:09:18 ►

attached to a certain

01:09:20 ►

place up to

01:09:22 ►

a large fragment of a personality, and perhaps to a complete personality.

01:09:29 ►

Now, we pronounce this word personality, and it’s a word we use very glibly, but when we

01:09:37 ►

come to examine exactly what it means, we are confronted by very great difficulties. What precisely is a personality?

01:09:49 ►

When we look closely at personalities, our own or other people, what do we find? Well,

01:09:59 ►

I think the first thing that we are struck by is that any given personality is certainly not a monolithic unity.

01:10:11 ►

The personality is a good-unitary thing.

01:10:32 ►

It is made of disparate elements, both in its temporal extension and in its cross-section. In its temporal extension, obviously we change very considerably as we grow older.

01:10:43 ►

But it’s not merely a question of maturation

01:10:46 ►

that changes the personality.

01:10:48 ►

It’s quite clear if we look at the history of almost any life

01:10:51 ►

that there may be profound changes of the personality

01:10:55 ►

brought about by particular circumstances.

01:10:59 ►

Let us take a hypothetical case of a child

01:11:03 ►

whose mother dies

01:11:05 ►

and who, from having been a happy and completely healthy personality,

01:11:12 ►

becomes a very wretched and neurotic personality.

01:11:16 ►

I mean, here is a startling change in the nature of the personality.

01:11:22 ►

And similarly, changes of surroundings, casual meetings may

01:11:31 ►

make the most profound difference to people. I mean, one often hears of cases of people

01:11:38 ►

who seem to be almost moronic, who suddenly find what their talents are, what they can do. A chance meeting opens

01:11:47 ►

up a new world for them and from having been practically idiotic they become alert and

01:11:53 ►

intelligent and efficient and one sees that there is a profound change in the personality.

01:11:59 ►

And after all it’s one of the commonplaces of religious literature that certain types

01:12:03 ►

of religious experience will produce immense changes in personality, that the whole attitude towards life, towards other

01:12:10 ►

human beings, the whole way of behaving will change profoundly. And consequently, the whole

01:12:18 ►

stock of memories, which obviously become extremely important in the problem of survival,

01:12:24 ►

which obviously become extremely important in the problem of survival will be totally changed.

01:12:28 ►

And similarly, in the cross-sections of a personality at any given time,

01:12:41 ►

there are again, obviously,

01:12:49 ►

disparate elements brought together.

01:12:52 ►

After all, there is the conscious and the unconscious.

01:12:56 ►

There is the rational and the childish in human beings.

01:13:01 ►

There is the respectable persona and the generally rather disreputable

01:13:03 ►

psychophysiological reality which lies beneath it,

01:13:07 ►

all these things are there as very loosely connected bits of the personality.

01:13:20 ►

And so it leads us to ask, what exactly do we mean by a personality?

01:13:28 ►

Do we mean what I think I am, or what I would wish to be, or what the Freudian analyst interprets me as being, or what my friends think I am?

01:13:48 ►

me as being, or what my friends think I am. There are obviously a great many ways in which a personality can be thought about. And then, on top of everything else, we have to remember

01:13:57 ►

that there are in every personality immense numbers of, an indefinite number I think of potentialities

01:14:06 ►

which might have been developed in other circumstances

01:14:10 ►

but which in the particular circumstances of the life have not been developed

01:14:14 ►

so that over and above all the other enigmas of personality

01:14:20 ►

there is this immense enigma of the might-have-been,

01:14:25 ►

the fact that we carry about immense latent potentialities

01:14:31 ►

which have not, in fact, been actualized, but which might have been actualized.

01:14:37 ►

Well, now, from this, let us return to the question of survival.

01:14:44 ►

let us return to the question of survival.

01:14:55 ►

Now, let us assume that the evidence which points to something surviving is valid.

01:15:01 ►

Now, the question arises, what is it that is actually surviving. Now, I would agree with Professor C.D. Broad, who is one of the rather

01:15:11 ►

few philosophers who has really taken the trouble to study the literature of psychical

01:15:18 ►

research with great care and has devoted a lot of speculation to the problem. I would agree with Professor Broad in thinking that in most cases, certainly,

01:15:31 ►

what survives and what comes through in the communications with the medium or the recipient

01:15:39 ►

is perhaps not a complete personality, whatever exactly that may be,

01:15:47 ►

but is rather a fragment of a personality,

01:15:53 ►

that a piece comes through and establishes some kind of communication with the percipient in life.

01:16:06 ►

And in this case we would have to assume that these traces left in the psychic medium, have some sort of power of establishing communication with the percipient

01:16:30 ►

and sometimes bringing through some kind of veridical information.

01:16:36 ►

But as I say, in the majority of cases,

01:16:39 ►

it does look as though what is coming through is not a total personality,

01:16:46 ►

but only a piece of one.

01:16:48 ►

This may be because the communication is extraordinarily difficult

01:16:52 ►

between one mode of being and another.

01:16:56 ►

But on the whole, I think we have to envisage this possibility

01:17:00 ►

that what in general is coming through is only a fragment of a personality.

01:17:10 ►

Now, this means that it may be possible for the same human being to survive in several

01:17:21 ►

fragments simultaneously. For example, let us take the case of a boy X and a boy Y.

01:17:32 ►

These are close friends in their boyhood.

01:17:36 ►

The boy X dies.

01:17:39 ►

The boy Y goes on and lives to a ripe old age.

01:17:44 ►

Now, presumably, if there is survival, goes on and lives to a ripe old age now presumably

01:17:46 ►

if there is survival

01:17:48 ►

the personality or some fragment of the personality of the boy X

01:17:54 ►

associates

01:17:56 ►

with

01:17:58 ►

the

01:17:59 ►

vortex

01:18:01 ►

which left in the psychic medium

01:18:03 ►

by Y when he was a boy

01:18:06 ►

I mean he may be associating

01:18:08 ►

with something that why has left behind him

01:18:11 ►

even while why is still alive

01:18:14 ►

it seems to me perfectly on the cards

01:18:17 ►

that there may be

01:18:19 ►

this survival of bits of personalities

01:18:24 ►

which may communicate with disembodied personalities

01:18:30 ►

even while the first personality is still in life

01:18:36 ►

and that the boy X and the boy who was y will perhaps go on associating and here i mean quite

01:18:50 ►

obviously seeing that this is a purely mental and subjective life which is going on in the psychic

01:18:56 ►

medium we must assume that the association is necessarily through similarity or through some other kind of psychological congruity,

01:19:07 ►

that there is not an association through any spatial or chemical relationship,

01:19:14 ►

but solely through some psychic congruity between the two groups of surviving experiences.

01:19:22 ►

of surviving experiences.

01:19:28 ►

Well, now we may pursue this still further and assume that why, as he grows older,

01:19:33 ►

let us assume that he marries

01:19:35 ►

and he loses his wife after a few years,

01:19:38 ►

marries again,

01:19:40 ►

and then in later life has an accident

01:19:42 ►

which, say, reduces him to imbecility.

01:19:45 ►

Well, here he is already, his personality is broken up into a number of fragments,

01:19:51 ►

each of which may leave its traces behind in the psychic medium and associate with those surviving fragments of the people with whom he associated

01:20:12 ►

during life so that he will, as I say, perhaps survive in several forms at the same time.

01:20:29 ►

several forms at the same time. This, I think, is a genuine possibility.

01:20:37 ►

Suppose that we now have to come to a very curious and difficult point. Suppose this kind of association of fragments of personality is possible within the psychic medium,

01:20:48 ►

what can happen?

01:20:50 ►

I mean, suppose that we assume that these vortices which remain

01:20:58 ►

can associate with similar vortices.

01:21:10 ►

with similar vortices, what can we envisage in this posthumous life? Here let me quote a curious and interesting passage where C.D. Broad has discussed this.

01:21:20 ►

He says, when we consider analogies with persistent vortices, stationary waves, transmitting beams, etc.,

01:21:30 ►

we can envisage a number of interesting and fantastic possibilities.

01:21:37 ►

We can think of the possibility of partial coalescence, partial mutual annulment or reinforcement,

01:21:46 ►

interference, etc., between the psi components of several deceased human beings,

01:21:53 ►

in conjunction, perhaps, with non-human flotsam and jetsam, which may exist around us.

01:22:02 ►

There are reported mediumistic phenomena

01:22:05 ►

and pathological mental cases

01:22:08 ►

not ostensibly involving mediumship

01:22:11 ►

which suggest that some of these disturbing possibilities

01:22:15 ►

may sometimes be realized.

01:22:18 ►

And then he adds

01:22:19 ►

it is worthwhile to remember

01:22:22 ►

though there is nothing we can do about it, that the world as it really is may easily be a far nastier place than it would be if scientific materialism were the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

01:22:53 ►

This is a rather characteristic summing up by Broad, who has said in a wry sort of way that he would be the world might be a considerably nastier place.

01:23:06 ►

But he might have added, I think, that the world also may be a considerably nicer place.

01:23:13 ►

And for the evidence of this, let us turn for a moment to the whole mystical tradition.

01:23:21 ►

the whole mystical tradition.

01:23:23 ►

Here I think there is

01:23:25 ►

I cannot see why

01:23:27 ►

we should reject

01:23:29 ►

the evidential nature

01:23:31 ►

of much of this mystical tradition.

01:23:35 ►

This has

01:23:35 ►

gone on for an immense time

01:23:37 ►

both in the East and the West

01:23:39 ►

this conception

01:23:40 ►

of this underlying

01:23:43 ►

undifferentiated consciousness, this divine ground, this mother sea of cosmic consciousness, as William James called it, with which, by suitable practices, individuals can become aware, become unified, even during this life.

01:24:06 ►

And this operational process, this is what essentially it is,

01:24:14 ►

the all-oriental philosophy is essentially a kind of transcendental operationalism

01:24:19 ►

which provides certain techniques for producing certain changes in consciousness,

01:24:27 ►

and which then goes out into speculation to give a metaphysical explanation for the nature of the change of consciousness.

01:24:38 ►

And the fundamental formula for describing, for interpreting these changed states of consciousness

01:24:49 ►

is of course the ancient Indian formula

01:24:53 ►

tat tvam asi, thou art that

01:24:56 ►

or as the Buddhists say, mind with a small M from mind with a large M

01:25:02 ►

is not divided, or, as Eckhart would say,

01:25:06 ►

that the ground of the soul is identical with the ground of the Godhead.

01:25:15 ►

Now, in relation to survival, what does this mean?

01:25:21 ►

What does this mean?

01:25:27 ►

It means that immortality,

01:25:32 ►

in the sense in which the mystics use the word,

01:25:35 ►

they don’t use the word survival so much as immortality, that immortality is the continuation into the post-mortem life

01:25:43 ►

of the kind of awareness of the divine ground

01:25:48 ►

which can be attained in this life.

01:25:52 ►

And in this context,

01:25:54 ►

I would like to make some quotations from this,

01:25:59 ►

perhaps one of the most remarkable of all pieces of religious literature,

01:26:04 ►

the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

01:26:07 ►

which is a kind of handbook for helping the dead person

01:26:14 ►

through the intermediate state between lives.

01:26:19 ►

This is a Buddhist work of Tantric Buddhism,

01:26:22 ►

and the Buddhists, of course, assume that there is reincarnation.

01:26:30 ►

This has always been taken for granted in the Far East,

01:26:35 ►

and incidentally, in our own Western tradition, David Hume said that the only form of immortality

01:26:41 ►

which a philosophic mind could accept was that of

01:26:45 ►

reincarnation. I don’t think we have

01:26:47 ►

to discuss whether this is true or not

01:26:49 ►

but the

01:26:50 ►

point is that

01:26:53 ►

the Tibetan

01:26:55 ►

Book of the Dead

01:26:56 ►

speaks of the possibility

01:26:59 ►

of communicating

01:27:01 ►

with the departed spirit immediately

01:27:03 ►

after death and helping it in this intermediate state between lives.

01:27:10 ►

If the person who dies

01:27:13 ►

can be made to be aware

01:27:17 ►

of the basic fact

01:27:21 ►

of the mind from mind being not divided,

01:27:24 ►

then he can escape from the wheel

01:27:27 ►

of birth and death and enter into this timeless immortality.

01:27:33 ►

And the Tibetan Book of the Dead makes the following statement, that at the moment of death, the dead person becomes aware of this undifferentiated consciousness,

01:27:50 ►

which in the language of Mahayana Buddhism is called the clear light.

01:27:56 ►

He becomes aware of this, and if during his lifetime he has practiced this awareness,

01:28:04 ►

he is able to associate himself with this.

01:28:08 ►

If he has practiced during his lifetime the realization that thou art that,

01:28:14 ►

that the basic, the foundation of his own, the ground of his own existence

01:28:21 ►

is identical with the ground of the universe,

01:28:23 ►

then he can unify, unite himself with the clear light

01:28:29 ►

and escape from the horrors of continuous birth and death.

01:28:35 ►

But the chances are, of course, that he will not,

01:28:37 ►

I mean the overwhelming probability is that he will not have been,

01:28:42 ►

have achieved this kind of enlightenment during life

01:28:46 ►

and so will not be able to accept the pure light, the clear light as it is presented to him.

01:28:53 ►

In fact, it will seem intolerably brilliant and impossible to bear

01:28:59 ►

and he will then have to go on to a series of less intense lights.

01:29:06 ►

In all these stages as he goes down, he can get back to immortality.

01:29:13 ►

But the difficulty becomes greater and greater.

01:29:17 ►

And he will pass then through a stage of wild visionary illusions.

01:29:24 ►

of the wild visionary illusions and finally will come down to the point where

01:29:28 ►

he has to re-enter a womb and be born again

01:29:34 ►

merely to escape from the intolerable purity and brilliance

01:29:39 ►

of the clear light

01:29:41 ►

it is a very powerful conception

01:29:44 ►

which is not unlike St. Catherine of Genoa’s conception of purgatory,

01:29:49 ►

where the pain of the suffering souls in purgatory

01:29:53 ►

is the pain of being impure

01:29:56 ►

in relation to this supremely pure light of God,

01:30:00 ►

which is then experienced as fire.

01:30:03 ►

And in this conception in the Tibetan

01:30:08 ►

Book of the Dead we see something similar, that the clear light is of a degree of purity

01:30:14 ►

so great that the majority of people can’t stand it and have to go down finally into

01:30:20 ►

this comforting world of flesh once more. But now let me read the passage

01:30:26 ►

with which the priest speaks to the dying man

01:30:31 ►

and goes on speaking when the breath has ceased.

01:30:35 ►

What he says,

01:30:37 ►

O nobly born,

01:30:39 ►

the clear light seen at the moment of death,

01:30:42 ►

you are now aware of the clear light seen at the moment of death. You are now aware of the clear light

01:30:46 ►

seen at the moment of death.

01:30:49 ►

Now thou art experiencing

01:30:50 ►

the radiance of the clear light of pure reality.

01:30:55 ►

Recognize it.

01:30:58 ►

Thy present intellect

01:30:59 ►

in its real nature void,

01:31:02 ►

undifferentiated,

01:31:04 ►

naturally void, is the very reality, the all good.

01:31:09 ►

Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as of the voidness of nothingness,

01:31:16 ►

but as being mind in itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling and blissful,

01:31:24 ►

is the very consciousness, the all-good Buddha.

01:31:28 ►

Thine own consciousness, shining, void and inseparable from the great body of radiance,

01:31:34 ►

has no birth nor death and is the immortal and light.

01:31:41 ►

Knowing this is sufficient.

01:31:42 ►

knowing this is sufficient.

01:31:49 ►

And this knowledge of the clear light,

01:31:51 ►

of the undifferentiated consciousness underlying our ego consciousness

01:31:54 ►

seems to be also among Western mystics

01:31:59 ►

the conception of the essence of immortality.

01:32:03 ►

For example, Meister Eckhart says that for an enlightened soul,

01:32:08 ►

and he was obviously speaking from personal experience,

01:32:13 ►

he says that for the soul which has purified itself,

01:32:20 ►

such a soul enjoys, even in this life,

01:32:26 ►

all that it will enjoy in the eternal life,

01:32:29 ►

that already there is eternity here and now

01:32:33 ►

in this knowledge of the undifferentiated ground

01:32:39 ►

of all particular awarenesses.

01:32:42 ►

And I shall conclude with an anecdote which is told about Jakob

01:32:48 ►

Boehmer, the great Protestant mystic of the early 17th century. He was asked by a young

01:32:57 ►

friend, where does the soul go after death? And he replied, there is no need for it to go anywhere. The reason

01:33:10 ►

being that if the soul has been properly prepared, it is, so to say, there already. And this

01:33:20 ►

over and against the whole problem of survival,

01:33:33 ►

which the Tibetan Book of the Dead regards as ending necessarily in the reincarnation, is set over against this mystical idea of immortality,

01:33:41 ►

of participating in the divine ground of all being.

01:33:47 ►

And I think we should always make this distinction.

01:33:51 ►

I don’t think we make it sufficiently strongly that survival is not necessarily a divine state at all.

01:34:04 ►

necessarily a divine state at all. It may be just exactly on a par

01:34:08 ►

with the sort of life that is being lived now

01:34:11 ►

by the average sensual man.

01:34:13 ►

But there is always a possibility

01:34:16 ►

for anybody who is prepared to fulfill the conditions,

01:34:21 ►

there is always a possibility

01:34:22 ►

of achieving this union with the

01:34:26 ►

clear light, which is of the essence of immortality.

01:34:34 ►

It may be, of course, a complete melting away into the totality of mind, or it may be, as the mystics have constantly assured us, what is possible during life,

01:34:52 ►

it may be a continuation of individualized awareness, transfigured, so to say, by the light of this knowledge of the undifferentiated ground of all being,

01:35:08 ►

so that there is a possibility, both in this world and in the next,

01:35:16 ►

of a kind of individual awareness in which the soul, so to say, makes the best of both worlds,

01:35:25 ►

where the absolute is not apart from the world,

01:35:30 ►

but is seen in the relative,

01:35:33 ►

where the, as Blake says,

01:35:35 ►

you see infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in a flower,

01:35:41 ►

that there is a possibility, as I say, if the ground of our own being has

01:35:51 ►

been realized as identical with the ground of all absoluteness of the divine ground

01:36:07 ►

and of the individualized life.

01:36:12 ►

This naturally, as all the fundamental truths of life are,

01:36:17 ►

this is a huge paradox which makes no sense, of course,

01:36:24 ►

except insofar as it is a fact of experience.

01:36:29 ►

Thank you.

01:36:32 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:36:35 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:36:39 ►

By the way, as a little side note here,

01:36:43 ►

there’s this story about Aldous Huxley’s wife, Laura, injecting him, following his strict instructions, with LSD during the hours in which he was dying.

01:36:53 ►

Well, I happen to know that that story is true, because Laura told it to me herself.

01:36:59 ►

And I’m sure that must have been an interesting way to die, but for what it’s worth, I have no intention of doing that myself.

01:37:07 ►

You know, death is one of the trips that I’ve never had yet, quite obviously.

01:37:11 ►

And I don’t want to polydrug my first time I have that experience, if you know what I mean.

01:37:17 ►

You know, I want to see what it’s like without any enhancement.

01:37:20 ►

Now, I’m sure that you caught the idea that he kind of whizzed by us about the fragmenting of a personality after bodily death, but I don’t ever remember before hearing any speculations about a person’s ego surviving death in quite the same way as Huxley speculated.

01:37:45 ►

but rather as a collection of individual fragments of one’s personality.

01:37:50 ►

And this is something I’m going to spend a little of my night time hours thinking about.

01:37:57 ►

As you know, I’ve always felt that the primary way a person’s spirit remains on earth is when one of us living humans thinks about them.

01:38:00 ►

When we do, in some small and strange way, I believe at least, the spirit of that person

01:38:07 ►

is somehow alive in our minds. And that’s why I make a point of thinking of all the deceased

01:38:13 ►

members of my family who were close to me. And now that I think about it, that includes almost

01:38:18 ►

all of them that I knew. And a little aside here, if you ever want to have revenge on somebody,

01:38:26 ►

well, just outlive them.

01:38:29 ►

Then they won’t be able to contradict any stories that you tell about them.

01:38:36 ►

Of course, that means that you should also take everything that I say with a grain of salt as well,

01:38:40 ►

especially when I’m talking about people who are no longer roaming the planet.

01:38:43 ►

So think about that for a minute. Anyway, I think that, well, at least it’s

01:38:47 ►

interesting to contemplate that there may be a galaxy of personality fragments floating in

01:38:54 ►

some other dimension somewhere, somehow, like countless little puzzle pieces. And maybe when

01:39:01 ►

we die, we can sort of pick and choose from those fragments and shape a new character for our non-physical life that we may be embedded in.

01:39:11 ►

Now, if after a few tokes, that doesn’t blow your mind,

01:39:14 ►

well, then you simply have not yet smoked enough dope.

01:39:18 ►

As Jonathan Ott often says, beware the dreaded underdose.

01:39:23 ►

And in case you’re wondering where I come out on the issue of life after death,

01:39:28 ►

well, I’ve run the full gauntlet of varying beliefs.

01:39:31 ►

Finally, I’ve come to the same position as the man that Huxley quoted,

01:39:36 ►

and that is, when my body dies, if I still am something that continues on,

01:39:42 ►

well, I would be considerably more annoyed than surprised.

01:39:48 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. you

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

578 - 1) Enemies of Freedom & 2) Life After Death

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