By Renée Haynes
Great-granddaughter of T. H. Huxley. Coined the phrase "the boggle threshold". Received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Oxford. Joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1946, editor of the JSPR from 1970-1981, past vice President and council member. Member of the Alistair Hardy Research Centre and the Churches' Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies. Contributed chapters to many books and wrote numerous articles in a variety of publications, including The Christian Parapsychologist, Theta, Parapsychology Review, The International Journal of Parapsychology, Fate, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, and many others. Received into the Catholic Church in 1942.
IT HAS been argued that in animals psi seems to be a function of the "form and behaviour design" of each species, interacting with that group mind which builds "itself up from the unconsciously shared experience of all"[1] its members and is operative in each of them. It appears as inherited instinct, impelling the spider to make its web, the bee its octagonal cell, in accordance with a given, unchanging norm. It appears as telepathy, synchronizing and co-ordinating the specialized activities of the different workers in the termitary. It appears as precognition in certain migrants making their way unerringly through the sea currents or the winds from where they were hatched to place they have never seen, known only to generations dead before they came into being. In producing an overriding impulse to follow out the appropriate behaviour pattern, it subserves the reproduction, the survival and the perfection of each kind of creature.
[1] Hardy, Sir Alister, Biology and Psychical Research, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 50, London, 1953. See also, The Living Stream, Gifford Lectures Vol. 1, London, 1965.
As species develop the ability to form conditioned reflexes, and then habits, and then learnt judgements, the part played by the group mind becomes increasingly important. It may modify, by its reaction to changing exterior circumstance, the workings of the original "form and behaviour design". This reaction may be expressed either as a more and more elaborate self-defence or as a flexible adaptation to the new conditions. It has been suggested, indeed, that the degeneration and extinction of species such as those prehistoric monsters whose armoured bony carapaces became so cumbrous that they could hardly move, may be attributable to the psycho-somatic influence of a group mind preoccupied with self-protection against all change.
In man, individual reasoning and separate personal choice became possible. As a result of one conscious and profound choice - to cut himself off from spontaneous dependence on God, live separate in unalterable pride - his group mind did not merely degenerate, with something analogous to sloth, from the form and behaviour design of his species. It split away. Both survive in him, the latter maintaining his ineradicable sense that, like it or not, some behaviour patterns should be followed and others rejected; that, in human parlance, some actions are right and some are wrong. Different cultures, different modes of upbringing, different creeds may modify his judgements as to which are which; but nothing will alter his conviction that the two sorts exist. As has already been noted, brain washing itself can do no more than reorientate conscience; it cannot destroy it.
The group mind, the collective unconscious, tainted by the ancient and continuing experience of evil, seeps into the being of every individual self, a self which is simultaneously drawn towards the original design for its species. The constant tension between the two is eased by the formulation of legal codes; the law of nature for the species is projected and rationalized in natural law, external, rigid, easy to recognize, hard to follow.
The Incarnation fulfilled and transcended with joy this projected, external law, showing it to be not a series of arbitrary decrees but a means to an end, and bringing into being a group mind renewed, spontaneous, free, in which the individual reborn could ultimately achieve that end, carry out the purpose for which he and his species were made; to know, love and serve God and to enjoy His Presence for ever. Psi would still link each human being with his contemporaries and his forebears, with the collective unconscious of mankind, whose impulses, good, bad, and neutral, would flow into him as before. But it could also link him with the new group, with the springs of grace welling up through those who were members of one another in the Mystical Body of Christ. Through that individual, moreover, the impulses of the new group could flow back (without his necessarily knowing it), into the old, changing its colouring, revitalizing it deep below the level of consciousness. Hence the overwhelming importance for all mankind of those dedicated to contemplative prayer. Hence the stress and exhaustion and glory of their calling.
It has been argued that in animal species the psi-factor is to be found at work in instinctive processes subserving reproduction. Ancient tradition and modern observation can both be adduced to support the hypothesis that in man too there is a close connexion between psychical and sexual activity.
One aspect of this is to be seen in the insistence upon virginity, chastity, or at the very least upon periodical spells of continence in those who deliberately attempt to cultivate and to use the psi-function, as in the traditional employment of a child under the age of puberty for scrying in the inkpool or the crystal.
If sexual activity inhibits the workings of psi, so also it seems can psi-activity inhibit biological processes connected with reproduction. Reference has already been made to Ronald Edwin's remark that during the long periods in which his clairvoyant powers were at their height he was completely free from physical desire. Women clairvoyants and mediums have noticed that in similar circumstances the menses do not occur.[2]
[2] Personal communication.
Persons of great vitality appear often to swing between the one impulse and the other, as seems to have happened in the cases of Rasputin, and of those late nineteenth-century occultist figures involved in sexual scandals. When such persons have carefully trained themselves to dissociate the unconscious mind, through which psi works, from the inhibitions of the conscious self; they have no means of resisting a temptation as violent as vision has been vivid. It is no coincidence that this kind of instability is associated with the cultivation of psychic powers.
Deliberate attempts have of course been made from time to time to stimulate the psi-function by means of orgy. The cult of Dionysus and the life of Aleister Crowley afford concrete and revolting examples of this, and Arthur Rimbaud, writing in the 1870s, provided a prescription and a theory: "The poet makes himself a seer by a long, vast, and reasoned derangement of all the senses - every form of love, of suffering and of madness." It seems probable that if these attempts succeed it is because they are exceptionally forceful methods of dissociation; commending themselves especially to minds tight-laced into Greek rationalism, into the rigid doctrines of the Plymouth Brethren, or into the strict logic of the French educational system.
A form of dissociation akin to Rimbaud's "reasoned derangement of the senses" which has aroused much recent interest is that to be achieved by the use of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD. These sometimes permit detachment, the swallower remaining aware, throughout a series of overwhelming experiences, that they are subjective, in a state perhaps akin to that "dual functioning of consciousness" which enabled Lily Yeats to be aware simultaneously of her surroundings and of veridical hallucinations. Pace the opinion of the late Mrs Eileen Garrett who once told me that such drugs must release psi-activity in those who take them "because those experiences show us our real selves", it seems to me that they can at best act, so to speak, as snorkel masks, enabling or compelling people to sink into their own depths, there to perceive "under the glassy green translucent wave" all that can hardly, or very dimly, be seen from above the surface: the sand, the glimmering shoals of fish, a crab going sideways, the brilliant anemones, the fronds of seaweed, red and green and brown, stirring with the movements of the current or of some octopus emerging slowly and horribly from a cleft in the rocks they cover. But nothing can be seen that was not already there all the time; psi-activity may be revealed, but not stimulated.
I have already touched upon the way in which extra-sensory is linked with sensory perception, knowledge intuitively received expressing itself through such a network of associated images as carries remembrance, but with much greater vividness. Sometimes the percipient projects this imagery upon the outside world (as a magic lantern projects large and clear on a white sheet the picture, tiny and obscure in the lantern slide), and then becomes aware of it reflected back to himself as say an exterior "vision" or "voice".[3] Sometimes he is conscious of it as an inner experience of peculiar intensity. This may happen in connexion with telepathy with the dead. Which form it takes is probably determined by the temperament and conditioning of the percipient. Thus one woman, completely absorbed in sorting out the personal papers of a lately dead father who could not bear to have his personal possessions touched, might be so roused and shocked by the sudden unexpected sense of a furious presence as to say to the empty soundless room, "Darling, I'm terribly sorry, but as you're dead it's got to be done, and I'm the best person to do it"; another might "see" or "hear" the dead man; or yet another project a similar awareness in the form of poltergeist disturbances.
[3] For a fascinating discussion of the fact that "the sporadic spontaneous experiences reported to parapsychologists are generally different in quality and in frequency from the hallucinations associated with (mental) illness and abnormal physiological states", the reader is referred to Dr Donald J. West's article "Visionary and Hallucinatory Experiences" in The International Journal of Parapsychology, II, I (Winter, 1960).
It has also been indicated that religious experiences follow similar patterns; this is hardly surprising if, as is postulated, the same function, using the same psycho-physical mechanisms, is at work. Some temperaments, especially in those culture patterns where it seems normal and natural so to do, see visions, hear voices, which express to them their inner awareness of God and of His will for them, as happened in the quiet everyday pastures of Domrémy to that breathless child who was to deliver her country, to be burned at the stake and to be canonized as St Joan. Others use sensory imagery, recognizing it as no more than an analogy of their experience and yet finding that analogy more real, more significant than even the original that the senses knew. Witness St Augustine: "And yet when I love my God, I do love a light, a voice, a fragrance, a food and an embrace - the light, voice, fragrance, food, embrace of my inner being, where there is the inshining into my soul of That which space cannot contain, and where there is a sound of which time cannot deprive me, and where there is a fragrance whose sweetness the wind cannot blow away, and a taste which cannot be diminished by eating, and an embrace never sundered by satiety."[4]. Yet others can speak only of "a dazzling darkness" and cry with Henry Vaughan:
[4] Confessions, X, 6.
Oh for that dark, that I in Him
Might live invisible and dim.
And others still can say no more than Neti, Neti; He is not this, not that; but a Presence which cannot be defined in words or ideas or concepts, which can only be known as existent, as That which Is, known as mysteriously but as certainly as a man knows himself to be.
And so back, full circle, to the body again: the body, first means of perception, continual source of that imagery in which its owner may become fully aware of his own intuitions: the body, the living symbol through which his feelings, his desires, his whole self may be imaged to the world in varying degrees, from the blush to the stigmata, from the sweat of fear to the odour of sanctity,[5] from jumping for joy or trembling with fright to the phenomenon of levitation: the body, generator of that energy which can be used to subserve either the reproduction and survival of the species, or psi-activity.
[5] For well-authenticated instances of this odd, but objective occurrence, cf. Thurston, Herbert, S. J., The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, London, 1952. It seems to have been observed with especial frequency in living and dead members of the order of Discalced Carmelites.
And if, as has been suggested, the psi-function in man is the means of contemplation, a quantity of apparently heterogenous teachings, from those dealing with the celibacy of the priesthood to those forbidding fortune-telling, fall neatly into pattern.
As the vision of God is the fulfilment of man's being, it is plainly necessary so to regulate sexual activity that he is neither swallowed up in this by way of simple animal enjoyment nor distracted from his main Object by a series of absorbing and passionate love affairs with one person after another. A certain amount of energy must be left for psi, whether its workings come into consciousness or not. Hence the prohibition of polygamy; hence the enjoinment of pre-marital chastity; hence the three possible kinds of life open to the individual Catholic.
In the first of these, marriage, the spouses give themselves to be part of the splendour of creation, bringing into being through the sacrament of bodily love unique new lives, new mirrors of God, new selves "struck from nothingness to know eternity". Since these new humans have to be fed, warmed, washed, trained, taught and clothed, their parents will have little time or energy for contemplative prayer while they are young; if psi appears - as it often does between mother and small child - it will be linked with family love. It is interesting, though, to consider in this connexion the ruling that if a spacing out of births is to be attempted this should be either by sexual abstinence or by the use of the infertile period; each of these modes of behaviour ensures that some fund of energy may be available for other uses. In the main, however, though the wills and bodies of those who choose this way of living may joyfully serve the purposes of God, not until they grow old will they have much leisure to think about Him.
The second kind of life is, of course, that of the priest. It is plain that the celibacy of this state is not only a device for ensuring that those who serve God at the altar should not be distracted and encumbered by human obligations. It is also, and primarily, an attempt to divert the energy that might have been used for reproductive activity to the uses of psi, psi to be dedicated to prayer and to a knowledge of the needs of their people.
The third is the life of the hermit and of the religious orders, wholly dedicated to contemplation, in which psi may be given full fruition in union with God, and thence radiate into the collective unconscious, so that the contemplative's prayers, insight, adoration will be used for all men.
Each state will obviously have its own difficulties. The first may tend to the placid satisfaction of biological fulfilment, the habit of concentrating an attention upon the needs of the family rather than upon the Presence of God. Those called to the second and third states will be tormented when sexual desire threatens to filch away the fund of energy they wish to devote to contemplative prayer, though sometimes, as happened to St Hugh of Lincoln, they may succeed at a comparatively early age in using that fund for prayer alone. Those in the third state may also find themselves overwhelmed with the fear, gloom, terror, loneliness, temptations of people known and unknown, which have been transferred to their shoulders to bear with Christ.
It becomes plain, moreover, why Catholics - like their spiritual forefathers the Jews - are forbidden to try to develop and use the psi-function for any but religious ends. It is not only that others who attempt to cultivate it are frequently committed to beliefs which they believe to be erroneous. It is not only that the modes of cultivation employed almost always involve dissociating the conscious from the unconscious mind, with a consequent suspension of judgement, reason and integrated choice. It is that such an attempt is fundamentally distracting, focusing attention not upon essentials but upon trivialities, on the one hand linking a man more closely with the tainted collectivity of his species, and on the other encouraging him to excited pride rather than to calm, matter-of-fact humility. By the cultivation of psi I do not of course mean engaging in prolonged (and often boring) scientific experiments in card guessing and so on, or perfecting and using a talent for dowsing or map-dowsing; but the deliberate, professional attempt to yield the mind, whether awake or in an induced trance state, to record and transmit any vivid extra-sensory perceptions it may receive.
It is a very different thing if these perceptions are received unsought. The psi-function is morally neutral and can, like most human functions, operate in an automatic way above or below the threshold of consciousness or be used for good or for evil ends in accordance with the bent, and sometimes the will, of its owner.
It may rightly be remarked that very little has been said about how the psi-function works, whether in interaction between living minds, in interaction with matter, or in interaction with time. This is because, though various tentative hypotheses have been put forward, no one knows. It remains profoundly mysterious. As has already been reiterated, the analogy with electricity, and especially with radio, is both tempting and extremely misleading. Radio is not selective. Anyone can listen to any programme available in his locality. Spontaneous psi-activity is selective. Telepathy occurs between those linked by personal relationships and common interests. It might be hazarded that some weak electrical activity not yet understood, emitted by one person at a moment of stress, could stimulate the temporal lobe of the brain in another closely connected with him, reviving memory and its associations so vividly as to produce an hallucination of his presence; but this theory does not serve to explain how new information could be transmitted. It does not, moreover, account for crisis apparitions, or telepathic impressions, of people a very great way off, even at the other side of the world. Wireless waves weaken in accordance with the inverse square of distance from the place of their origin. Spontaneous psi is not affected.
There are many fully documented and evidentially satisfying cases on record in which someone was telepathically aware, clearly or dimly, of the feelings of a friend thousands of miles away. Perhaps I may be allowed to cite an instance known to me. One Monday morning a young relation told me that he had had a most curious, uneasy, vivid dream of being back at school among a small group of boys being coached by the history master, a dream in which something was very wrong, though he did not know what. He had liked this master very much and was gratefully conscious that he owed a great deal to his teaching. Since his schooldays, however, he had spent three years at Oxford, taken his degree, and gone into the Army to do his National Service, while the history master had left the school, and taken up a university post in New Zealand. It was at least five years since they had met and he was not in the foreground of the young man's life. "I haven't thought of him for years, I do hope he's all right," the latter said as he finished telling me the dream. This was about half-past eight in the morning. As I left my office about six o'clock that evening, I bought an Evening Standard and saw that an aeroplane carrying the former history master and a number of other university men from New Zealand and some South-East Asian countries to an educational conference had crashed and that there were no survivors.
The connexion between psi-activity and matter, living or inert, is just as difficult to explain and even harder to accept. Where what is called "psychic healing" is concerned, it is clear that psycho-somatic processes initiated by very powerful suggestion are at work; but how odd it is that one mind should be able so powerfully to impress another that a suggestion should be transmitted to the autonomic nervous system which coordinates and determines, deep below the level of consciousness, even of sensation, all the non-voluntary activities of the body. Inedia, the power to do without food, for very long periods, of which there are reliable records both among ordinary people and among those dedicated to a religious life[6]; levitation; and the sudden loss of weight said to have been observed during the course of séances in mediums, specializing in physical phenomena: all these are odd enough, but do at any rate concern the reactions of the living body-mind, in which consciousness and energy co-exist and are correlated in everyday experience.
[6] Cf. Thurston, Herbert, S. J., The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, London, 1952 , for accounts of the nineteenth-century American Mollie Fancher, as of St Catherine of Siena and others.
Odder still are those poltergeist phenomena in which objects are observed to move in a peculiar and characteristic curve, quite unlike the trajectory of something thrown, for they apparently imply that the unconscious mind can exert physical force at a distance. Yet there is evidence for it, evidence supported by the fact that the pattern of scoring in psycho-kinesis experiments is the same as that observed in those testing ordinary extra-sensory perception, in that significant results usually occur towards the beginning and tail off in a "decline effect" as the subject gets bored, which is totally unlike that shown by someone learning a skill.
The oddest and most unpalatable of all aspects of psi lies in its peculiar relationship to time as we experience it. It is not too difficult, to be sure, to allow that retro-cognition (otherwise post-cognition) may occur; perhaps because the process of remembering one's own past, so vividly there, though invisible, provides a familiar analogy, perhaps because one can think of a film being played over and over again, or can imagine say the "ghost" of Lady Macbeth re-enacting for ever, in a timeless repetitive automatism, the guilty gesture of attempting vainly to wash her hands. It is possible moreover to talk - and to be understood - about a place being "full" of a certain emotional atmosphere to whose survival everyone conscious of it will contribute more vitality. And so on. Though these are no more than analogies, they afford a comfortable feeling that something points towards a rational explanation, an explanation that may one day be made completely plain.
But there is no ordinary experience, no convincing analogy to make comfortable the notion that people are occasionally aware of what has not yet happened, whether it is a card one ahead of that being proposed for guessing, or a railway accident twenty years in the future. Myers' query, "Are we regarding as a stream of consequences what is really an ocean of co-existencies?"; William James' kindred notion of an eternal present; the concept of other dimensions whose effects we can observe but whose nature we can no more comprehend than the Flatlanders could comprehend the nature of a cube; Dunne's theory of a Serial Universe, with a time behind our time, and another behind that, and so on to infinity: all these weave a discreet curtain of speculation over the skeleton in the cupboard, but in no way ease acceptance of the fact that it is there, or not at any rate by the non-mathematical type of mind. This may however be given some inkling of what is meant by considering instead of Dunne's mathematical arguments and symbols his likening of consciousness to a searchlight exploring a four-dimensional world.
There are those who find the small "time-displacement" phenomenon to be seen in the precognitive card guesser less strange than the long-range prophecies which are occasionally recorded and verified. This is not simply because the irregularity is "only a very little one", but because there is not such a vast multiplicity of causes and choices at work between the seer and the seen.
I am no more competent to discuss the problems of predestination and free will than I am to explain those of the higher mathematics, but, since it may be useful to people who share my incompetence, I shall put forward some considerations that seem relevant to the strange way in which the psi-function, like Friar Bacon's brazen head, may be aware of how "Time Is, Time Was, Time Will Be".
"Ask me no more", sang the poet:
Ask me no more where Jove bestows
When June is past the fading rose,
For in your beauty's orient deep
These things, as in their causes, sleep.
St Thomas Aquinas, discussing the problem of precognition, held that it sprang from the capacity to perceive future events "as in their causes, sleeping" in the present. The percipient, telepathically aware of all the relevant factors at work, came intuitively to a correct conclusion as to their outcome (rather as a man working on some problem may sleep on it and wake to find his subconscious has brought the solution into focus).
He then projected his conclusion in the form of vision, voice or dream, so that it appeared to come from some external source.
Although the methods employed are entirely different, and the materials available are chosen and manipulated by the reasoning mind, sociological attempts to deduce future developments from present conditions are continually being made, and with some success. Neither in the case of the conscious nor of the subconscious process can it be inferred that there is any implicit or explicit derogation of the principle of individual free will. Thus an expert in demographical statistics will try to predict, by correlating the age of the present population, the birth rate and the infant mortality in a given area, how many children will be passing through its schools in fifteen years' time and what buildings should be planned to accommodate them. He will probably be able to give a reasonably accurate overall estimate, but this estimate will take no account of individual lives and choices, of who will take vows of chastity as priest or nun, of who will marry whom, or of who will live in promiscuity producing illegitimate babies.
It is interesting that Werner Heisenberg[7] should maintain the existence of two types of causality, which seem to operate the one on a large scale, the other on a small. In the former, a strict determinism prevails. In the latter, there is "potentiality", the possibility of unpredictable, spontaneous activity (and even, at the level of nuclear physics, of "time reversal", of a situation in which it is not possible to know which of two events is the cause of the other and which the effect). He contends moreover that "the causality governing Man is of the weaker type, and he embodies both mechanical fate and potentiality". In large-scale matters, sociologists will be justified in basing their plans on the assumption that a number of developments are predetermined, in personal matters the individual can pray for grace to help him make a free and a right choice.
[7] Op. cit
If that individual becomes aware, through hunch or dream or warning "voice", of some disaster to which present causes outside his control are building up, he may be free to choose, ahead of schedule as it were, whether he will be involved in it or trust his intuition, even if this brings him temporarily into ridicule. The odd way in which some trivial veridical detail of the achieved disaster - a newspaper headline, a soldier's uniform - may present itself to him with especial clarity can be paralleled by the common experience of remembering just such details of past events, details charged with some strong emotional significance not always understood.
I do not myself find this attempt to interpret the process involved precognition very satisfying, for precognitive experiences are usually so vividly of something "given", independent, existing in its own right, and containing chunks of objective and, so to speak, irrelevant data, which neither telepathy as to present circumstances nor intuition as to their outcome could be expected to provide. It should, however, be considered as well as the mathematical theories which have been put forward, and perhaps in connexion with them.
There are two other hypotheses in which time and causality are involved. Both are characterized by a careful, painstaking avoidance of what would seem to any theist to be the obvious explanation of the problem involved. One seems to imply that occasional reversals of the temporal process can occur, as if part of a stream were, here and there, to be diverted and pumped at high pressure round a looped channel to flow backwards into the main current. This was first formulated nearly sixty years ago by a French thinker, Gabriel Tarde, in an article entitled "The Effect of Future Events".[8] "Purposiveness," he wrote, "plays a role in the phenomena of life perhaps more important than that of heredity. The embryo is explained by the adult creature. Evolution ... shows changes occurring not at random but apparently in accordance with a directing idea ... when several events converge towards one important event, this future event has exerted an influence" (my italics) on the present.
[8] Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, IX (Paris, 1901).
Perhaps the contemporary blaze of Bergson's thought so dazzled Monsieur Tarde that he did not realize that he was seeing, and reiterating in other words, Aristotle's theory of teleology. Perhaps it was simply such a distaste for the whole concept as, according to Dr Denis Hill,[9] leads medical students who have been conditioned to consider disease in terms of strict physical causation to shy away from psychiatry as "non-scientific". Was it however an emotional reaction against some all too anthropomorphic concept of the Divine, or an assumption that there could be no contact between the disciplines of science and of theology that made him construct a very difficult theory of time rather than accept the fact that "directive ideas" exist not in the void but in a mind; that forced him and his followers to postulate an abstract "purposiveness" working itself out in biological development rather than realize that purposiveness and purposes are not autonomous entities, but can only be conceived, held, and co-ordinated in an Intelligence alive and aware of Itself and of Its own activities?
[9] "Acceptance of Psychiatry by the Medical Student", British Medical Journal (26 March, 1960).
The other hypothesis is that put forward by Jung in the theory of synchronicity which is, as has already been noted, an attempt to reconcile with what he calls the iron law of causality the occurrence not only of psi-phenomena but also of significant coincidences, events in the outer world which suddenly express, symbolize or perfect psychological developments in this or that individual. He instances an occasion on which he was carefully explaining to a worried patient, reluctant to accept what he said, that an insect of which that patient kept dreaming was a scarab, the Egyptian symbol of rebirth and renewal. His remarks were met with a sort of glum resistance until suddenly there flew into the room where they were sitting the nearest European equivalent of the scarab, a glowing green and gold rose beetle. It settled before them, and the arrival of this external image of his own thought in some odd way jolted the patient into realizing its meaning, and set him on the way to recovery.
Where Tarde wrote of purposiveness, directive ideas, and the effect of future events to explain what he had observed, Jung uses the word Tao to indicate the source alike of temporal processes and of synchronicity: Tao, the self-caused, self-existent activity, which cannot be contained in human thought. It is clear from his other work that the Name of God carries for him at best the definition of an archetypal idea at work in the psyche and at worst the sense of a threatening, capricious, and implacable tyrant.
For those who associate that Name with "the unfathomable mystery, the incomprehensible Being" of whom Bede Griffiths writes in The Golden String, and with that passage from St Augustine quoted there which broods upon the Power "most secret, most present, most beautiful, most mighty ... ever in action and ever quiet ... upholding, filling and protecting, creating, nourishing and perfecting all things" there will be no difficulty in accepting that the continuous glory of creation in matter, life and consciousness, and our power of recognizing it by reason and intuition, in time and in eternity, spring all alike from God.
Note:
The article above was taken from Renée Haynes's "The Hidden Springs. An Enquiry into Extra-Sensory Perception" (Hollis & Carter, 1961).
Great-granddaughter of T. H. Huxley. Coined the phrase "the boggle threshold". Received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Oxford. Joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1946, editor of the JSPR from 1970-1981, past vice President and council member. Member of the Alistair Hardy Research Centre and the Churches' Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies. Contributed chapters to many books and wrote numerous articles in a variety of publications, including The Christian Parapsychologist, Theta, Parapsychology Review, The International Journal of Parapsychology, Fate, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, and many others. Received into the Catholic Church in 1942.
IT HAS been argued that in animals psi seems to be a function of the "form and behaviour design" of each species, interacting with that group mind which builds "itself up from the unconsciously shared experience of all"[1] its members and is operative in each of them. It appears as inherited instinct, impelling the spider to make its web, the bee its octagonal cell, in accordance with a given, unchanging norm. It appears as telepathy, synchronizing and co-ordinating the specialized activities of the different workers in the termitary. It appears as precognition in certain migrants making their way unerringly through the sea currents or the winds from where they were hatched to place they have never seen, known only to generations dead before they came into being. In producing an overriding impulse to follow out the appropriate behaviour pattern, it subserves the reproduction, the survival and the perfection of each kind of creature.
[1] Hardy, Sir Alister, Biology and Psychical Research, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 50, London, 1953. See also, The Living Stream, Gifford Lectures Vol. 1, London, 1965.
As species develop the ability to form conditioned reflexes, and then habits, and then learnt judgements, the part played by the group mind becomes increasingly important. It may modify, by its reaction to changing exterior circumstance, the workings of the original "form and behaviour design". This reaction may be expressed either as a more and more elaborate self-defence or as a flexible adaptation to the new conditions. It has been suggested, indeed, that the degeneration and extinction of species such as those prehistoric monsters whose armoured bony carapaces became so cumbrous that they could hardly move, may be attributable to the psycho-somatic influence of a group mind preoccupied with self-protection against all change.
In man, individual reasoning and separate personal choice became possible. As a result of one conscious and profound choice - to cut himself off from spontaneous dependence on God, live separate in unalterable pride - his group mind did not merely degenerate, with something analogous to sloth, from the form and behaviour design of his species. It split away. Both survive in him, the latter maintaining his ineradicable sense that, like it or not, some behaviour patterns should be followed and others rejected; that, in human parlance, some actions are right and some are wrong. Different cultures, different modes of upbringing, different creeds may modify his judgements as to which are which; but nothing will alter his conviction that the two sorts exist. As has already been noted, brain washing itself can do no more than reorientate conscience; it cannot destroy it.
The group mind, the collective unconscious, tainted by the ancient and continuing experience of evil, seeps into the being of every individual self, a self which is simultaneously drawn towards the original design for its species. The constant tension between the two is eased by the formulation of legal codes; the law of nature for the species is projected and rationalized in natural law, external, rigid, easy to recognize, hard to follow.
The Incarnation fulfilled and transcended with joy this projected, external law, showing it to be not a series of arbitrary decrees but a means to an end, and bringing into being a group mind renewed, spontaneous, free, in which the individual reborn could ultimately achieve that end, carry out the purpose for which he and his species were made; to know, love and serve God and to enjoy His Presence for ever. Psi would still link each human being with his contemporaries and his forebears, with the collective unconscious of mankind, whose impulses, good, bad, and neutral, would flow into him as before. But it could also link him with the new group, with the springs of grace welling up through those who were members of one another in the Mystical Body of Christ. Through that individual, moreover, the impulses of the new group could flow back (without his necessarily knowing it), into the old, changing its colouring, revitalizing it deep below the level of consciousness. Hence the overwhelming importance for all mankind of those dedicated to contemplative prayer. Hence the stress and exhaustion and glory of their calling.
It has been argued that in animal species the psi-factor is to be found at work in instinctive processes subserving reproduction. Ancient tradition and modern observation can both be adduced to support the hypothesis that in man too there is a close connexion between psychical and sexual activity.
One aspect of this is to be seen in the insistence upon virginity, chastity, or at the very least upon periodical spells of continence in those who deliberately attempt to cultivate and to use the psi-function, as in the traditional employment of a child under the age of puberty for scrying in the inkpool or the crystal.
If sexual activity inhibits the workings of psi, so also it seems can psi-activity inhibit biological processes connected with reproduction. Reference has already been made to Ronald Edwin's remark that during the long periods in which his clairvoyant powers were at their height he was completely free from physical desire. Women clairvoyants and mediums have noticed that in similar circumstances the menses do not occur.[2]
[2] Personal communication.
Persons of great vitality appear often to swing between the one impulse and the other, as seems to have happened in the cases of Rasputin, and of those late nineteenth-century occultist figures involved in sexual scandals. When such persons have carefully trained themselves to dissociate the unconscious mind, through which psi works, from the inhibitions of the conscious self; they have no means of resisting a temptation as violent as vision has been vivid. It is no coincidence that this kind of instability is associated with the cultivation of psychic powers.
Deliberate attempts have of course been made from time to time to stimulate the psi-function by means of orgy. The cult of Dionysus and the life of Aleister Crowley afford concrete and revolting examples of this, and Arthur Rimbaud, writing in the 1870s, provided a prescription and a theory: "The poet makes himself a seer by a long, vast, and reasoned derangement of all the senses - every form of love, of suffering and of madness." It seems probable that if these attempts succeed it is because they are exceptionally forceful methods of dissociation; commending themselves especially to minds tight-laced into Greek rationalism, into the rigid doctrines of the Plymouth Brethren, or into the strict logic of the French educational system.
A form of dissociation akin to Rimbaud's "reasoned derangement of the senses" which has aroused much recent interest is that to be achieved by the use of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD. These sometimes permit detachment, the swallower remaining aware, throughout a series of overwhelming experiences, that they are subjective, in a state perhaps akin to that "dual functioning of consciousness" which enabled Lily Yeats to be aware simultaneously of her surroundings and of veridical hallucinations. Pace the opinion of the late Mrs Eileen Garrett who once told me that such drugs must release psi-activity in those who take them "because those experiences show us our real selves", it seems to me that they can at best act, so to speak, as snorkel masks, enabling or compelling people to sink into their own depths, there to perceive "under the glassy green translucent wave" all that can hardly, or very dimly, be seen from above the surface: the sand, the glimmering shoals of fish, a crab going sideways, the brilliant anemones, the fronds of seaweed, red and green and brown, stirring with the movements of the current or of some octopus emerging slowly and horribly from a cleft in the rocks they cover. But nothing can be seen that was not already there all the time; psi-activity may be revealed, but not stimulated.
I have already touched upon the way in which extra-sensory is linked with sensory perception, knowledge intuitively received expressing itself through such a network of associated images as carries remembrance, but with much greater vividness. Sometimes the percipient projects this imagery upon the outside world (as a magic lantern projects large and clear on a white sheet the picture, tiny and obscure in the lantern slide), and then becomes aware of it reflected back to himself as say an exterior "vision" or "voice".[3] Sometimes he is conscious of it as an inner experience of peculiar intensity. This may happen in connexion with telepathy with the dead. Which form it takes is probably determined by the temperament and conditioning of the percipient. Thus one woman, completely absorbed in sorting out the personal papers of a lately dead father who could not bear to have his personal possessions touched, might be so roused and shocked by the sudden unexpected sense of a furious presence as to say to the empty soundless room, "Darling, I'm terribly sorry, but as you're dead it's got to be done, and I'm the best person to do it"; another might "see" or "hear" the dead man; or yet another project a similar awareness in the form of poltergeist disturbances.
[3] For a fascinating discussion of the fact that "the sporadic spontaneous experiences reported to parapsychologists are generally different in quality and in frequency from the hallucinations associated with (mental) illness and abnormal physiological states", the reader is referred to Dr Donald J. West's article "Visionary and Hallucinatory Experiences" in The International Journal of Parapsychology, II, I (Winter, 1960).
It has also been indicated that religious experiences follow similar patterns; this is hardly surprising if, as is postulated, the same function, using the same psycho-physical mechanisms, is at work. Some temperaments, especially in those culture patterns where it seems normal and natural so to do, see visions, hear voices, which express to them their inner awareness of God and of His will for them, as happened in the quiet everyday pastures of Domrémy to that breathless child who was to deliver her country, to be burned at the stake and to be canonized as St Joan. Others use sensory imagery, recognizing it as no more than an analogy of their experience and yet finding that analogy more real, more significant than even the original that the senses knew. Witness St Augustine: "And yet when I love my God, I do love a light, a voice, a fragrance, a food and an embrace - the light, voice, fragrance, food, embrace of my inner being, where there is the inshining into my soul of That which space cannot contain, and where there is a sound of which time cannot deprive me, and where there is a fragrance whose sweetness the wind cannot blow away, and a taste which cannot be diminished by eating, and an embrace never sundered by satiety."[4]. Yet others can speak only of "a dazzling darkness" and cry with Henry Vaughan:
[4] Confessions, X, 6.
Oh for that dark, that I in Him
Might live invisible and dim.
And others still can say no more than Neti, Neti; He is not this, not that; but a Presence which cannot be defined in words or ideas or concepts, which can only be known as existent, as That which Is, known as mysteriously but as certainly as a man knows himself to be.
And so back, full circle, to the body again: the body, first means of perception, continual source of that imagery in which its owner may become fully aware of his own intuitions: the body, the living symbol through which his feelings, his desires, his whole self may be imaged to the world in varying degrees, from the blush to the stigmata, from the sweat of fear to the odour of sanctity,[5] from jumping for joy or trembling with fright to the phenomenon of levitation: the body, generator of that energy which can be used to subserve either the reproduction and survival of the species, or psi-activity.
[5] For well-authenticated instances of this odd, but objective occurrence, cf. Thurston, Herbert, S. J., The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, London, 1952. It seems to have been observed with especial frequency in living and dead members of the order of Discalced Carmelites.
And if, as has been suggested, the psi-function in man is the means of contemplation, a quantity of apparently heterogenous teachings, from those dealing with the celibacy of the priesthood to those forbidding fortune-telling, fall neatly into pattern.
As the vision of God is the fulfilment of man's being, it is plainly necessary so to regulate sexual activity that he is neither swallowed up in this by way of simple animal enjoyment nor distracted from his main Object by a series of absorbing and passionate love affairs with one person after another. A certain amount of energy must be left for psi, whether its workings come into consciousness or not. Hence the prohibition of polygamy; hence the enjoinment of pre-marital chastity; hence the three possible kinds of life open to the individual Catholic.
In the first of these, marriage, the spouses give themselves to be part of the splendour of creation, bringing into being through the sacrament of bodily love unique new lives, new mirrors of God, new selves "struck from nothingness to know eternity". Since these new humans have to be fed, warmed, washed, trained, taught and clothed, their parents will have little time or energy for contemplative prayer while they are young; if psi appears - as it often does between mother and small child - it will be linked with family love. It is interesting, though, to consider in this connexion the ruling that if a spacing out of births is to be attempted this should be either by sexual abstinence or by the use of the infertile period; each of these modes of behaviour ensures that some fund of energy may be available for other uses. In the main, however, though the wills and bodies of those who choose this way of living may joyfully serve the purposes of God, not until they grow old will they have much leisure to think about Him.
The second kind of life is, of course, that of the priest. It is plain that the celibacy of this state is not only a device for ensuring that those who serve God at the altar should not be distracted and encumbered by human obligations. It is also, and primarily, an attempt to divert the energy that might have been used for reproductive activity to the uses of psi, psi to be dedicated to prayer and to a knowledge of the needs of their people.
The third is the life of the hermit and of the religious orders, wholly dedicated to contemplation, in which psi may be given full fruition in union with God, and thence radiate into the collective unconscious, so that the contemplative's prayers, insight, adoration will be used for all men.
Each state will obviously have its own difficulties. The first may tend to the placid satisfaction of biological fulfilment, the habit of concentrating an attention upon the needs of the family rather than upon the Presence of God. Those called to the second and third states will be tormented when sexual desire threatens to filch away the fund of energy they wish to devote to contemplative prayer, though sometimes, as happened to St Hugh of Lincoln, they may succeed at a comparatively early age in using that fund for prayer alone. Those in the third state may also find themselves overwhelmed with the fear, gloom, terror, loneliness, temptations of people known and unknown, which have been transferred to their shoulders to bear with Christ.
It becomes plain, moreover, why Catholics - like their spiritual forefathers the Jews - are forbidden to try to develop and use the psi-function for any but religious ends. It is not only that others who attempt to cultivate it are frequently committed to beliefs which they believe to be erroneous. It is not only that the modes of cultivation employed almost always involve dissociating the conscious from the unconscious mind, with a consequent suspension of judgement, reason and integrated choice. It is that such an attempt is fundamentally distracting, focusing attention not upon essentials but upon trivialities, on the one hand linking a man more closely with the tainted collectivity of his species, and on the other encouraging him to excited pride rather than to calm, matter-of-fact humility. By the cultivation of psi I do not of course mean engaging in prolonged (and often boring) scientific experiments in card guessing and so on, or perfecting and using a talent for dowsing or map-dowsing; but the deliberate, professional attempt to yield the mind, whether awake or in an induced trance state, to record and transmit any vivid extra-sensory perceptions it may receive.
It is a very different thing if these perceptions are received unsought. The psi-function is morally neutral and can, like most human functions, operate in an automatic way above or below the threshold of consciousness or be used for good or for evil ends in accordance with the bent, and sometimes the will, of its owner.
It may rightly be remarked that very little has been said about how the psi-function works, whether in interaction between living minds, in interaction with matter, or in interaction with time. This is because, though various tentative hypotheses have been put forward, no one knows. It remains profoundly mysterious. As has already been reiterated, the analogy with electricity, and especially with radio, is both tempting and extremely misleading. Radio is not selective. Anyone can listen to any programme available in his locality. Spontaneous psi-activity is selective. Telepathy occurs between those linked by personal relationships and common interests. It might be hazarded that some weak electrical activity not yet understood, emitted by one person at a moment of stress, could stimulate the temporal lobe of the brain in another closely connected with him, reviving memory and its associations so vividly as to produce an hallucination of his presence; but this theory does not serve to explain how new information could be transmitted. It does not, moreover, account for crisis apparitions, or telepathic impressions, of people a very great way off, even at the other side of the world. Wireless waves weaken in accordance with the inverse square of distance from the place of their origin. Spontaneous psi is not affected.
There are many fully documented and evidentially satisfying cases on record in which someone was telepathically aware, clearly or dimly, of the feelings of a friend thousands of miles away. Perhaps I may be allowed to cite an instance known to me. One Monday morning a young relation told me that he had had a most curious, uneasy, vivid dream of being back at school among a small group of boys being coached by the history master, a dream in which something was very wrong, though he did not know what. He had liked this master very much and was gratefully conscious that he owed a great deal to his teaching. Since his schooldays, however, he had spent three years at Oxford, taken his degree, and gone into the Army to do his National Service, while the history master had left the school, and taken up a university post in New Zealand. It was at least five years since they had met and he was not in the foreground of the young man's life. "I haven't thought of him for years, I do hope he's all right," the latter said as he finished telling me the dream. This was about half-past eight in the morning. As I left my office about six o'clock that evening, I bought an Evening Standard and saw that an aeroplane carrying the former history master and a number of other university men from New Zealand and some South-East Asian countries to an educational conference had crashed and that there were no survivors.
The connexion between psi-activity and matter, living or inert, is just as difficult to explain and even harder to accept. Where what is called "psychic healing" is concerned, it is clear that psycho-somatic processes initiated by very powerful suggestion are at work; but how odd it is that one mind should be able so powerfully to impress another that a suggestion should be transmitted to the autonomic nervous system which coordinates and determines, deep below the level of consciousness, even of sensation, all the non-voluntary activities of the body. Inedia, the power to do without food, for very long periods, of which there are reliable records both among ordinary people and among those dedicated to a religious life[6]; levitation; and the sudden loss of weight said to have been observed during the course of séances in mediums, specializing in physical phenomena: all these are odd enough, but do at any rate concern the reactions of the living body-mind, in which consciousness and energy co-exist and are correlated in everyday experience.
[6] Cf. Thurston, Herbert, S. J., The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, London, 1952 , for accounts of the nineteenth-century American Mollie Fancher, as of St Catherine of Siena and others.
Odder still are those poltergeist phenomena in which objects are observed to move in a peculiar and characteristic curve, quite unlike the trajectory of something thrown, for they apparently imply that the unconscious mind can exert physical force at a distance. Yet there is evidence for it, evidence supported by the fact that the pattern of scoring in psycho-kinesis experiments is the same as that observed in those testing ordinary extra-sensory perception, in that significant results usually occur towards the beginning and tail off in a "decline effect" as the subject gets bored, which is totally unlike that shown by someone learning a skill.
The oddest and most unpalatable of all aspects of psi lies in its peculiar relationship to time as we experience it. It is not too difficult, to be sure, to allow that retro-cognition (otherwise post-cognition) may occur; perhaps because the process of remembering one's own past, so vividly there, though invisible, provides a familiar analogy, perhaps because one can think of a film being played over and over again, or can imagine say the "ghost" of Lady Macbeth re-enacting for ever, in a timeless repetitive automatism, the guilty gesture of attempting vainly to wash her hands. It is possible moreover to talk - and to be understood - about a place being "full" of a certain emotional atmosphere to whose survival everyone conscious of it will contribute more vitality. And so on. Though these are no more than analogies, they afford a comfortable feeling that something points towards a rational explanation, an explanation that may one day be made completely plain.
But there is no ordinary experience, no convincing analogy to make comfortable the notion that people are occasionally aware of what has not yet happened, whether it is a card one ahead of that being proposed for guessing, or a railway accident twenty years in the future. Myers' query, "Are we regarding as a stream of consequences what is really an ocean of co-existencies?"; William James' kindred notion of an eternal present; the concept of other dimensions whose effects we can observe but whose nature we can no more comprehend than the Flatlanders could comprehend the nature of a cube; Dunne's theory of a Serial Universe, with a time behind our time, and another behind that, and so on to infinity: all these weave a discreet curtain of speculation over the skeleton in the cupboard, but in no way ease acceptance of the fact that it is there, or not at any rate by the non-mathematical type of mind. This may however be given some inkling of what is meant by considering instead of Dunne's mathematical arguments and symbols his likening of consciousness to a searchlight exploring a four-dimensional world.
There are those who find the small "time-displacement" phenomenon to be seen in the precognitive card guesser less strange than the long-range prophecies which are occasionally recorded and verified. This is not simply because the irregularity is "only a very little one", but because there is not such a vast multiplicity of causes and choices at work between the seer and the seen.
I am no more competent to discuss the problems of predestination and free will than I am to explain those of the higher mathematics, but, since it may be useful to people who share my incompetence, I shall put forward some considerations that seem relevant to the strange way in which the psi-function, like Friar Bacon's brazen head, may be aware of how "Time Is, Time Was, Time Will Be".
"Ask me no more", sang the poet:
Ask me no more where Jove bestows
When June is past the fading rose,
For in your beauty's orient deep
These things, as in their causes, sleep.
St Thomas Aquinas, discussing the problem of precognition, held that it sprang from the capacity to perceive future events "as in their causes, sleeping" in the present. The percipient, telepathically aware of all the relevant factors at work, came intuitively to a correct conclusion as to their outcome (rather as a man working on some problem may sleep on it and wake to find his subconscious has brought the solution into focus).
He then projected his conclusion in the form of vision, voice or dream, so that it appeared to come from some external source.
Although the methods employed are entirely different, and the materials available are chosen and manipulated by the reasoning mind, sociological attempts to deduce future developments from present conditions are continually being made, and with some success. Neither in the case of the conscious nor of the subconscious process can it be inferred that there is any implicit or explicit derogation of the principle of individual free will. Thus an expert in demographical statistics will try to predict, by correlating the age of the present population, the birth rate and the infant mortality in a given area, how many children will be passing through its schools in fifteen years' time and what buildings should be planned to accommodate them. He will probably be able to give a reasonably accurate overall estimate, but this estimate will take no account of individual lives and choices, of who will take vows of chastity as priest or nun, of who will marry whom, or of who will live in promiscuity producing illegitimate babies.
It is interesting that Werner Heisenberg[7] should maintain the existence of two types of causality, which seem to operate the one on a large scale, the other on a small. In the former, a strict determinism prevails. In the latter, there is "potentiality", the possibility of unpredictable, spontaneous activity (and even, at the level of nuclear physics, of "time reversal", of a situation in which it is not possible to know which of two events is the cause of the other and which the effect). He contends moreover that "the causality governing Man is of the weaker type, and he embodies both mechanical fate and potentiality". In large-scale matters, sociologists will be justified in basing their plans on the assumption that a number of developments are predetermined, in personal matters the individual can pray for grace to help him make a free and a right choice.
[7] Op. cit
If that individual becomes aware, through hunch or dream or warning "voice", of some disaster to which present causes outside his control are building up, he may be free to choose, ahead of schedule as it were, whether he will be involved in it or trust his intuition, even if this brings him temporarily into ridicule. The odd way in which some trivial veridical detail of the achieved disaster - a newspaper headline, a soldier's uniform - may present itself to him with especial clarity can be paralleled by the common experience of remembering just such details of past events, details charged with some strong emotional significance not always understood.
I do not myself find this attempt to interpret the process involved precognition very satisfying, for precognitive experiences are usually so vividly of something "given", independent, existing in its own right, and containing chunks of objective and, so to speak, irrelevant data, which neither telepathy as to present circumstances nor intuition as to their outcome could be expected to provide. It should, however, be considered as well as the mathematical theories which have been put forward, and perhaps in connexion with them.
There are two other hypotheses in which time and causality are involved. Both are characterized by a careful, painstaking avoidance of what would seem to any theist to be the obvious explanation of the problem involved. One seems to imply that occasional reversals of the temporal process can occur, as if part of a stream were, here and there, to be diverted and pumped at high pressure round a looped channel to flow backwards into the main current. This was first formulated nearly sixty years ago by a French thinker, Gabriel Tarde, in an article entitled "The Effect of Future Events".[8] "Purposiveness," he wrote, "plays a role in the phenomena of life perhaps more important than that of heredity. The embryo is explained by the adult creature. Evolution ... shows changes occurring not at random but apparently in accordance with a directing idea ... when several events converge towards one important event, this future event has exerted an influence" (my italics) on the present.
[8] Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, IX (Paris, 1901).
Perhaps the contemporary blaze of Bergson's thought so dazzled Monsieur Tarde that he did not realize that he was seeing, and reiterating in other words, Aristotle's theory of teleology. Perhaps it was simply such a distaste for the whole concept as, according to Dr Denis Hill,[9] leads medical students who have been conditioned to consider disease in terms of strict physical causation to shy away from psychiatry as "non-scientific". Was it however an emotional reaction against some all too anthropomorphic concept of the Divine, or an assumption that there could be no contact between the disciplines of science and of theology that made him construct a very difficult theory of time rather than accept the fact that "directive ideas" exist not in the void but in a mind; that forced him and his followers to postulate an abstract "purposiveness" working itself out in biological development rather than realize that purposiveness and purposes are not autonomous entities, but can only be conceived, held, and co-ordinated in an Intelligence alive and aware of Itself and of Its own activities?
[9] "Acceptance of Psychiatry by the Medical Student", British Medical Journal (26 March, 1960).
The other hypothesis is that put forward by Jung in the theory of synchronicity which is, as has already been noted, an attempt to reconcile with what he calls the iron law of causality the occurrence not only of psi-phenomena but also of significant coincidences, events in the outer world which suddenly express, symbolize or perfect psychological developments in this or that individual. He instances an occasion on which he was carefully explaining to a worried patient, reluctant to accept what he said, that an insect of which that patient kept dreaming was a scarab, the Egyptian symbol of rebirth and renewal. His remarks were met with a sort of glum resistance until suddenly there flew into the room where they were sitting the nearest European equivalent of the scarab, a glowing green and gold rose beetle. It settled before them, and the arrival of this external image of his own thought in some odd way jolted the patient into realizing its meaning, and set him on the way to recovery.
Where Tarde wrote of purposiveness, directive ideas, and the effect of future events to explain what he had observed, Jung uses the word Tao to indicate the source alike of temporal processes and of synchronicity: Tao, the self-caused, self-existent activity, which cannot be contained in human thought. It is clear from his other work that the Name of God carries for him at best the definition of an archetypal idea at work in the psyche and at worst the sense of a threatening, capricious, and implacable tyrant.
For those who associate that Name with "the unfathomable mystery, the incomprehensible Being" of whom Bede Griffiths writes in The Golden String, and with that passage from St Augustine quoted there which broods upon the Power "most secret, most present, most beautiful, most mighty ... ever in action and ever quiet ... upholding, filling and protecting, creating, nourishing and perfecting all things" there will be no difficulty in accepting that the continuous glory of creation in matter, life and consciousness, and our power of recognizing it by reason and intuition, in time and in eternity, spring all alike from God.
Note:
The article above was taken from Renée Haynes's "The Hidden Springs. An Enquiry into Extra-Sensory Perception" (Hollis & Carter, 1961).
